Heartbeat

Stroke One - 木

Blood enters the system after a period of relaxation, emptiness suddenly filled, veins fattening after prior desiccation with fresh life. Limbs are moved for the first time, cherry blossoms opening with pink snowfall of sakura leaves hitting the ground, flowers bursting open as grass overtakes dead the rust-brown dead Earth of November. Someone chirps to call it in, flitting lightly between the newly thrumming branches, as roots awaken from dormancy to send out invisible messages deep through the Earth. After the first rain, mycelium sprouts fruiting bodies, the whole network coming alive to give burst to a new show of force in the newly livened wood. The last of the snow melts away, creeks overfilling, trickling into mammalian mouths as they lap up, shedding off their excess fat and fur.

Stroke Two - 火 

Agent Orange never killed by explosion or simple ending, it killed by growth. The plants were sent into wild excitation upon contact, each part tearing apart its neighbors, every system overextending each other in a pursuit to reach the greatest possible heights. The plant died in an attempt to become infinite, an insatiable hunger for more until it expanded terminally - explosion. No wonder it caused defects then, children exposed left to grow in all manner of strange directions, this growth chemical seeping in god-knows-how, its effects almost random chance, where its mechanism would be carried out. Such orgies happen in cycles. An excess of undergrowth in certain arid forests leads to sweeping blazes, critical mass cleansing itself after the tipping point.

Stroke Zero - 土

Through its changes, the thing in itself remains stable. The river is different each passing moment, more and more different as the timescale is increased, yet it always retains its Being through this. Being emerges, the property of changes below its solidity. In this way, Being is more stable than if taken for granted as the thing in itself. Being emerges, thus its nature depends on whether it truly is or not - are the processes on which it rests real? Then the Being will continue to emerge. The river can never be killed. It can be diverted and renamed, it can dry up or still into a lake - but these are disappearances, not deaths. Beings suffer deaths by our clinging to their stability past any stability that exists. When Becomings cease, then Beings vanish, but nothing is ever killed.

Stroke Three - 金 

Aristocrats begin to stalk the streets, still smelling of the haze from which they emerged, a putrid fog of perfume, opium, and sex, their eyes wild in purple ecstasies, Slaanesh Sings Through Us! and the batons rain down. The sans-culottes flee, the weakest falling victim. A later reprisal occurs, a white banker, no relation, is found dead in her home, an islamic crescent carved on the wall. The critical point of the growth-orgy is long gone and now, the slow decline as the corpus eats itself. Overweight bureaucrats realize it first, swooping in with their flocks of the selfish and hedonistic to strip the bones and fly off with the meat, gorged with a needle in the arm in some distant fortress. 

Stroke Four - 水 

The last leaves fall as the ground dies to dirt, the whole land beginning to resemble the bones before the disintegration. The last weeks are falling sorrow, the sky grey, the frozen mud and dead trees putting on the air of a plague year even when no miasma permeates the air. The snow falling is almost a relief. Bone white, the blanket of death imprisons the world in a graceful end, a terminal elegance to the emptiness of it. Plains roll on forever, white sky and whiter snow, one track of footprints, if any. The wind is real, as are the dunes it makes - the basic matter of water and air and its motions is all that remains.  Entropy has finished, things returned to the zero they always were. Soon the lights go out and the last breath shivers out, until all is without form and void once again.