A Lonely and Beautiful Rural Life
I have been back in the village for eleven days; city life is growing more and more distant.
The countryside at this season is sparsely populated; walking in the fields, I rarely meet anyone. Many returnees might feel sad at this sight, but I do not. I love its bustle of the past, and I love its quietness now. After all, childhood has left me; I no longer need three or five companions to feel happy. Now I prefer solitude. Loneliness is like a filter, slowly straining out the various dregs I have accumulated in life, letting me be reborn and live more purely.
Walking alone on the river embankment, taking in the distant mountains and nearby scenes, I feel profound happiness deep within. Some people love a house full of guests; some love being alone. I do not shun contact with people; when I see acquaintances in the village, I smile and greet them and exchange a few pleasantries. But I prefer being alone.
Although the autumn fields are open, they are rich and varied. Countless unknown birds, golden rice, winding rivers, rolling mountain mist, lush reeds, and stone-arch bridges with a contemporary feel—each has its own language. If you listen with your heart, you can hear what they are saying.
My hometown has healed my heart. When I was far from home, nostalgia would now and then sting me; after returning, all the wounds have healed. My hometown is more beautiful than I imagined it to be while longing for it from afar; the scenery surpasses the past, and the warmth remains.
Although my mother is no longer alive, sitting before her grave I still feel comforted, as warm as when I used to sit at her feet listening to her chatter. I no longer have many words to say to my mother; I just want to sit before her and zone out for a while. The true meaning of sacrifice is "sacrificing as if present"; sitting before my mother's grave as if she were also sitting there—that is the best sacrifice; form no longer matters. A mother is every one of us's last safe harbor; when we are in pain, the person we cry out for involuntarily is our mother; when we grow weary of life outside, the person we most want to return to is our mother.
Here I have forgotten the existence of the pandemic. The plague, like those who love excitement, can spread only in densely populated places; in the sparsely populated countryside it is hard to spread on a large scale. So life here has completely returned to its pre-pandemic state; it is just that the times have forgotten the countryside.
I also like being someone whom others have forgotten. Being remembered by too many people weighs on me; I do not want to live so conspicuously. I prefer to hide in a corner of my own, quietly living my own life, authentically loving what I love, without being overly cautious about guarding my reputation.
On my walk home, I saw a colorful snake. It was already dead, but I thought it was alive. Its gaudy pattern looked like a venomous snake, which gave me a start. I prodded it with a stick; it did not move, and only then did I realize it was dead. I tossed it into the grass so that the next passerby would not be startled by it unexpectedly. Death is just this ordinary: a snake dies like this, and a person dies the same way. If one day I am to die, I will choose to leave quietly, striving not to startle any living being in this world.
Rural life is like water in a hot spring—warm and soaking until, imperceptibly, one feels utterly comfortable. But a one-day or few-day rural trip that merely skims the surface like a dragonfly touching water cannot achieve this effect; one must settle in the countryside and stay for a while before our biological clock can be changed by it. The city remakes people into machines; the countryside can remake machine-ized people back into what they originally were. That is why I love the countryside.