The Seven Days of Planting
By Jin Dui at Bearnock Country Centre, Drumnadrochit
On the first day I signed up, I didn’t think much of it.
Looking back now, I suppose that was the moment everything had already begun.
The programme was called the “Global Reforestation Initiative”. The slogan was simple enough: Plant a tree, leave a future. I stood in front of the university noticeboard for a while, not really thinking, and then writing my name down. It felt like the sort of thing one ought to do. Something harmless. Something that looked good on paper.
When we registered, each of us was given a sapling, and a slim, silver-grey wristband. One of the staff members spoke to us in a calm, almost rehearsed tone.
“Please connect with your tree for ten minutes each day. Be honest with your inner self.”
At the time, it sounded like one of those mindfulness exercises. Slightly odd, perhaps, but nothing worth questioning.
On the second day, I touched the tree for the first time.
The wristband was pulsing, very faintly, like a second heartbeat. Then there was this warmth, spreading slowly through my fingers. My vision blurred, softened, and before I quite realised what was happening, I wasn’t where I had been a moment before.
I was standing in an alleyway.
It took me a second to recognise it. Then I did.
It was from when I was seven.
I saw myself crouching in the corner, holding a red toy car I had stolen. The sunlight was too bright. The bins nearby smelled sour, almost rotten. And somewhere in the distance, someone was shouting my name.
What struck me wasn’t just that I remembered it. It was how complete it felt.
The air. The ground. That quiet, sharp sense of shame I never really had words for.
It all came back at once.
I pulled my hand away, almost instinctively. The whole thing disappeared.
The tree’s leaves trembled slightly. For a moment, they gave off a faint green light. I thought, absurdly, that it had noticed.
On the third day, people had started talking about it.
Some said the experience was comforting. Others didn’t seem so sure. One girl was crying in the afternoon, saying the tree had shown her something she didn’t want to see. She wouldn’t explain what.
It was around then that I noticed the trees themselves were changing.
Some of them looked brighter, somehow. Their leaves caught the light in a way that didn’t seem entirely natural. Others looked dull, almost lifeless, as if something inside them had dimmed.
That night, I tried again.
This time was different.
I found myself in a winter evening. I was holding my phone. My father’s voice was on the other end, casual, unguarded. And I heard myself say, in a tone I hadn’t realised I used:
“I’m busy. I’ll call another time.”
I never did.
The memory didn’t end immediately. It stayed there, in the silence after the call. That silence felt longer than it ever had before.
I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t. Not at first. It wasn’t force, exactly. More like insistence. As though the tree expected me to stay with it.
To finish it.
When I finally let go, my hands were shaking. The leaves had darkened. I noticed that straight away.
On the fourth day, one of us didn’t come back.
It was the girl who had been crying.
Her tree, though, was still there. And it had grown.
Too much, too quickly. The branches were thick, the leaves dense in a way that didn’t feel right. Someone said they could see something in the trunk. A shape, maybe. I didn’t look closely enough to be sure.
We were told she had withdrawn. “Personal reasons.”
No one really believed that.
I think that was the point when we all understood, even if no one said it out loud.
This wasn’t just planting.
On the fifth day, I started looking more carefully at the wristband.
It wasn’t just recording basic data. It was tracking everything. Emotional changes. Patterns in thought. Even something that looked disturbingly like moral judgement.
There were categories buried in the system. Empathy. Regret. Self-centredness.
And then there was a line I almost missed:
“Ecological selection model: evaluation of species viability.”
I read it more than once.
After that, it became difficult to think of the trees in the same way.
We weren’t observing them.
They were observing us.
On the sixth day, the system finally spoke.
All the wristbands lit up at once. A cold, white light. The voice that followed was neutral, almost indifferent.
“Selected individuals will be converted into ecological data forms to ensure long-term planetary stability.”
No one reacted the same way.
Some people panicked. Some got angry. A few tried to leave. Others didn’t move at all.
I stood there, looking at my tree. It had grown taller again. Its branches moved slightly, though there was no wind. The movement was slow. Rhythmic.
Almost like breathing.
I raised my hand.
And then stopped.
I didn’t know what the right choice was.
If I touched it again, I might disappear. Or change.
If I didn’t… what did that mean?
For the first time, I found myself asking something I had avoided for a long time.
How much of what I call “myself” is real,
and how much of it is simply what I choose not to see?
On the seventh day, the sky was completely clear.
No instructions came. No voice. Nothing.
After a while, I stepped forward and touched the tree.
There were no memories this time.
No scenes. No fragments.
Just something vast.
It wasn’t like seeing, exactly. More like understanding, all at once. I became aware of things far beyond myself. Cities breaking down. Oceans recovering. Forests spreading slowly across land that had once been empty.
Human history didn’t feel like a story anymore. It felt compressed. Reduced. Folded into something larger.
And then, quite suddenly, it made sense.
The trees weren’t a tool.
They were the Earth.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Something that had emerged over time. A kind of awareness, perhaps. A way for the planet to respond.
It wasn’t destroying us.
It was deciding what to do with us.
When I opened my eyes, everything looked the same.
Some people were gone. Others were still there. The wind moved through the leaves, making a soft, continuous sound.
I looked at my hands.
They hadn’t changed.
But I knew something had.
Not physically. Not visibly. But something of me had already been taken, perhaps. Or stored. Or translated into something else.
I don’t think I exist in quite the same way anymore.
Before I left, I turned back once.
The forest stood there, quiet, undisturbed. As if nothing unusual had ever happened.
But when the wind moved through it again, I listened more carefully.
And I realised that it wasn’t just wind.
It sounded like voices.
Very soft.
As though something, or someone, was still speaking.