one
I will never forget the quiet and peaceful village under the clear mountain shadow. The earthen houses there are very old, the fields there are very flat, the cows there are always leisurely, and the sounds of birds and bamboo sticks are always drifting into the distance at dusk. But every grain of her soil contains bitterness, and the hardships and worries contained in this peaceful scene have been erased by years. The village is always so peacefully covered by the falling flowers in the late spring in the south of the Yangtze River, covered by the dissolved moonlight and the smell of crops. Hongying, who will die in the distant mountains, and the wild songs that want to break and continue, always make people feel nostalgic and sad with a lasting charm.
The hidden water of these years is my dear pastoral dream!
There must be a vein through the village entrance, and at the foot of the mountain is light blue water singing softly in the town. There must be lush evergreen trees on the mountain and a small ancestral temple with black tiles and white walls. This mountain is a treasure trove of geomantic omen in the village and a sad parting place for travelers. She is always associated with the lingering thoughts of traveling and homesickness, which reminds people of those words about the bright moon and hometown.
A long time ago, Mr. Lin Yutang's My Country and My People surprised me with his unique understanding of rural culture in China. He attributed the novel and supernatural vitality of the Chinese nation to the unity of man and nature: "I'd rather live in the wilderness, bask in the sun, watch the afterglow of the sunset, touch the dew in the morning, and suck the fragrance of hay and wet soil ..." I don't know whether it really has something to do with the freshness and broadmindedness of the black land and the richness of business, but I know that the word "pastoral" is in my thoughts and feelings. During my limited reading of China's classical philosophy and poems, I deeply felt how the pastoral complex firmly brought people's emotions, wisdom and ideals into a quiet and peaceful state, thus making people with the same traditional culture fascinated and moved again and again. If this is the power of philosophy and poetry, it is better to say that this is the attraction of the quiet and beautiful countryside. The countryside is a magnetic field, and I have been trekking in gravity all my life. I often think that perhaps only those who are at ease and quiet in their hearts can really have a tacit understanding with the pure countryside, which is undoubtedly a realm related to their inner feelings. Attachment to the countryside, like attachment to anything beautiful in this world, requires a very sincere and simple love.
Entering the village, you will see tile houses and farmland surrounded by green hills, and the hidden water of the years is hidden in the mountains. The story of life and death is like the flowers and trees on the ridge, which always grow or disappear naturally, leaving no trace. Years, like the wind blowing through the treetops, take away the sigh of life and bring back new little hope. Days change in the form of adagio, and so do people and things. The crops on the ridge are ripe one after another, and the land is turned over again and again. Farm tools are like pens in farmers' hands, which repeatedly engrave the meaning and details of life into the soil. People and cattle, land and farm tools make up the scenery in the village, which is as heavy as in the season. This land seems to be like the surging waves in the depths of the sunset. Waves are crops and cauliflower, but blood and sweat sink to the deepest part of the waves. However, there is a strange beauty in this village, whether it is the round bamboo hat and motionless egret moving in the mirror-like rice fields, or the rape flowers slightly raining in the distant mountains arranged in an affectionate agricultural book, which are in bud. As long as you look at the barking Chai Fei from a distance, you will feel a kind of warmth and kindness in your heart.
Standing on the ridge, there is always a kind of vicissitudes. The sounds of pots and pans, villagers talking at night, the dripping of streams and the jointing of crops all came from the dim moonlight, and my hometown was thoughtful. At this time, I remembered those people who died of old age many years ago. They sleep under this black soil, lonely grass roots and bugs. They nourished the soil with the last drop of sweat. The lush crops put dense roots into the bones, bearing countless fruits and emitting fragrance in the sun. This ancient village has a different history. If there is a village history, there must be such a record on it: "In a certain year, it rained heavily, and the moonlit night did not rest. The houses were washed away by flash floods, and there was no fertile land, and hunger floated everywhere." Or "One day, locusts were like clouds and ate up all the crops overnight. Fiona Fang is more than ten miles away and there is no grain harvest. " Wait a minute. The vicissitudes of life, a few strokes written on paper, became a thing of the past and all disappeared in the wilderness. In the early spring, the cuckoo's voice, a misty rain, a plow; Swing a sickle in autumn, and the rice turns over the golden lang; In winter, snowflakes fall on trees, and there is no one on the ridge, only ivory smoke on the tile house. No matter what hardships the hidden water has experienced in the years, there is always a quiet and peaceful scene.
How many years have passed, people living under the tile house not only patiently serve the crops on the ridge, but also hope to find another way of life and travel to the world outside the village one day. As a result, masons and carpenters keep coming out of the village. They are wandering outside with simple tools on their backs to complete another difficult life journey. Women, on the other hand, always complete the migration from one village to another at the expense of youth. It is their story that finally connects all the villages in this land into a seamless whole, and the same anxiety, peace and harmony flow through their veins. Village is a part of land, and land is a part of life. In the stormy years, the rural scenery is still beautiful and quiet.
The moonlight is hazy. Those hills, those fields, those haystacks, those windmills in the fields are all sleeping peacefully, except for the occasional birdsong from the trees. At this time, the countryside seems to be far away from me. That endless hut, in my heart, in the depths of the years, in the local accent, is like rising smoke, which people will always miss.
Whenever I think of hidden water, my mind will naturally present various scenes of small bridges and flowing water, and Shan Ye cattle and sheep in cottages. My life and soul are so closely linked to this land that I always go out of the countryside and want to go back there. No one can express all kinds of life interests contained in that deep attachment. When we are frustrated and wandering, tortured by old diseases, and rich in life and death, words like Guan Shan, Yue Ming and homesickness always come from afar in the deepest part of our emotions, and there is warmth and kindness in regrets. I won't forget the motto that the "national style" in the Book of Songs comes from Tamura, nor will I ignore the "seclusion" and "birth" in Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi's thoughts. This may be my attachment to the ideal rural life. The obsession with the countryside has such profound philosophical and life significance that we didn't expect. At this time, I remembered that people living in the city originally came from a certain field, so we always have an idyllic mood in the noise. After experiencing all kinds of hardships and setbacks in the world outside the countryside, I suddenly remembered that I should go home and put my feelings and thoughts on farmland and mountains and rivers.
It is certainly a wonderful thing to farm, read and drink in the fields where rice and wheat are green and smoke is curling. This reminds me of the simple and natural days in the country many years ago. The house is made of mud, the bridge is a stone arch bridge, and it is exquisite to lie down and listen to the sound of the stream; The criss-crossing buildings are covered with hoofprint, and the fields are filled with the smell of grass. Often after work, put a plate of peanuts, Chili sauce, bacon and a pot of rice wine on the threshing floor, and you can get drunk until midnight. This is the village where I lived. When I think of it today, it's far away and dreamy.
two
This village is so old that no one can tell its age accurately. Walking around the village, you will find that the animals in the village are slowly laid off and there are no cows at all. If you see a dog occasionally, it must be an old dog. Whether strange or close, it will not wag its tail at you, nor will it bark at you. It just raises its eyelids, glances at you lazily, and then continues to bask in its sun and conceive it. The sun came out and set, and no one paid attention. In the village, there are only a few stunned old women guarding the door. They are all guarding a door, nostalgic like old dogs. Plants felt the end of the village prematurely and began to launch large-scale attacks. On the old house, a large piece of green tile pine began to ripple with the wind and the roof began to seep. The old man often sleeps in the middle, and suddenly finds that the quilt is wet, so he has to cut off his sleepiness and start collecting water with large and small wooden pots. Fern spores that have been sleeping on the earth wall for hundreds of years suddenly wake up and grow long spikes overnight, and the earth wall peels off layer by layer between their life and death. There were few pedestrians on the dirt road, and the grass began to spread to the middle of the road bit by bit. Soon, a road that can pull ox carts became a ridge road with wide feet.
Few people come in outside the village. Adults and children who enter the city feel strange as soon as they enter the village. Is this still a prosperous village? It seems that my foot accidentally went to the wrong place and ran away before I could rest my legs. When the old people were buried in watchkeeping and homesickness, no one came in this village. Everything is left to time to deal with.
An uninhabited old house will return to the embrace of the earth in about ten years with the cooperation of Qi Xin of plants and animals. In another ten years, purlins, rafters and rafters will be decomposed into powdered organic matter. It takes about one hundred years for tiles made of clay to return to their original shape. Rammed walls will stand for a long time. After hundreds of years, you can still see some bumps. But time will gradually remove these protrusions and fill some depressions. In the long river of time, anyone, anything and everything will return to the original appearance. The village just disappeared as if it had never existed. Finally, only some broken porcelain pieces or plastic pots are left, floating in the long river of thousands of years, becoming a deep scar. Hundreds of thousands of years later, a group of people came. They will drill a deep pit and analyze the terrain layer by layer. At that time, people had learned to grow grain and raise livestock. As for the names of these animals, they are not very clear.
The crops in the field grow year after year. Sometimes, those dense leaves and tassels will cover the shallow sky near the crops in the east of our village at the end of summer. A brand-new dilapidated house, in the middle of the tall corn forest, gradually disappeared. The foundation of that house is made of stone. Because it is close to the stream, in order to prevent floods, the foundation is more than two or three meters high. It is this high foundation that reduces the stability of the house. The house became a dangerous building when it was first built, and no one dared to live in it.
When I was growing up, my father often told me about his working outside. On mountain roads, canyons, cliffs and pine forests, wearing sandals worn by stones on the road, he walked to a mountain ridge, buried his head in the spring water of a dense chestnut forest, drank the spring water like a cow, sat under a rock as big as a room, took out a cloth bag and suffocated like a tiger and a wolf. At home, our waiting time always passes slowly. When night falls again and again, we sit by the fire one by one and bring our hope for our father into a late-night dream. When my father comes back, he always passes by our dreams illuminated by kerosene lamps without waking us up. By the time we wake up in a quiet dream, he has cast his shadow and eyes on those unknown lands, so that we can continue to miss them in those days.
In fact, the existence of a village does not need much comment. However, every time I communicate casually, I am led by my own emotions and take a deep look at the familiar village.
The hidden water at that time was still a dynamic scene in my memory. Along a weedy tractor-ploughing road, the mud made my steps hesitate countless times. I didn't go far, and the mud stuck to my shoes, making it extremely difficult to walk. Finally, I walked to the mountain ridge and saw the flowing water on those brown, purple, white, pale yellow and blue-gray stones. Clusters of wild flowers are crowded in the roadside stream, and Shan Ye is everywhere, which makes an early autumn blossom unbridled, distant and warm.
The hidden water in autumn is pure and clean, just like a washed white lotus root at the water's edge, wet and shining with warm light. A gentle maternal wind overflows everywhere, making snow-white walls, crimson roof tiles, rich green leaves, restless puppies wandering around and calves looking for food reveal a loose and real feeling under the skylight. A cool breeze is blowing, and the faint sadness is mixed with the faint nostalgia, which comes from those striking things.
In September, everything in the village is new. This fresh light brightens everything around and gives people a fresh breath. It used to be like a downpour in summer, but now it's smaller and continuous, and everything is cleaned. White walls and red tiles look fresher in the sun, as if they had just been painted. The high roof presents a charming curve against the distant sky.
The sky in the village is high and the clouds are light, and the blue background is continuous white clouds, which flow like water and have no shape. Their scattered shapes often attract children to speak out their new discoveries. They often argue about what clouds look like, and such arguments are often fruitless. When you get it from an adult, it often goes away and you will be reprimanded. So most children will commit suicide because of betting, so it is easy to hear children screaming again and again. Several dogs, chickens, ducks and calves who came out with the young master surrounded them and shouted together. The chaotic scene took a long time to calm down, but it soon began again.
At this time, under the broad blue sky, a kind of sadness often comes uninvited and often suddenly becomes inexplicable. This is the most nostalgic and tender season. On the threshing floor, the fresh haystack is tall and big, and the golden haystack is covered with a mud cap that has not been dried thoroughly. The shadow on the yellow mud path is long and deep, and it immediately feels cool when you walk up. At this time, the sunshine is bright and not dazzling, making everything look three-dimensional and clear. Look at their thoughtful appearance, just like children who have just changed their clothes, keeping silent in excitement and hiding their worries in silence.
In autumn, the village becomes gentle and flowing, like a mother humming a nursery rhyme, melodious, fuzzy, gentle and quiet. You can walk around freely and simply in this season. The crops have been cut and watered with grouting water, and a bumper harvest is in sight. Busy things have passed, and busy things haven't arrived yet. Just walking around the field path, the grass on the path is thick and green, and there will always be a frog or cricket jumping out unexpectedly. They don't even care about your appearance. They jump out, stare blankly, as if adjusting their emotions, and then turn around and jump away slowly. The wind has no direction and no purpose. Look up at the sky, look at the clean and elegant blue sky and white clouds, and my heart will be satisfied.
The village in September, like children and women, makes you feel infinite pity and love. The tenderness in my heart, like grass that has absorbed enough water, grows wildly overnight for no reason.
Autumn in the village is quiet and docile, and it becomes more charming when the smoke rises into the blue sky in the evening. The gentle breeze wafted with the aroma of food and the faint spicy taste of kitchen lampblack. At the same time, it is also mixed with the mother's call for playful children to go home for dinner, the satisfaction of cattle and sheep returning to the bar, and the joy of chickens and ducks seeing their owners go home, all of which are distant and clear, gentle and kind. Even today, many years later, I am immersed in this memory unintentionally and don't want to return to reality. In my memory, the village in autumn is always irreplaceable.
Under the eaves of the village, water drops are still dripping. The water dripped under the foot of the wall, and the briefing quietly splashed water droplets that were almost invisible, which made people feel a little cold. Autumn seems to be getting deeper and deeper, and I am eager to see the harvest in the village. But because the fog has been hanging over the whole village, I can only see some dilapidated houses, messy fences, sparse dog barks, the chirping of mountain birds, and the noise made by me walking on the village road and stepping on mud.
three
Houshan is a silent noun. When it is overgrown with weeds and covers up some past events, I will take it as a silver-white pin and don't put it on my chest near my heart. Thinking of my family, the long and short history covered with mud squeezes my dreams, absorbing crawling lizards, slow cows and flying dragonflies. The back hill is hidden behind my village. It turns a blind eye to busy people running around in the sun. Some people who left the village traveled like smoke, leaving no memorial for the bushes in the back hill. However, when the villagers are old, they often stand in the back of the mountain for a long time, staring at the rugged hills and looking for a home. As a result, the back hill is full of graves.
In fact, my childhood, my first memory, all started from the back hill. The high sky covered its blue in the field of the back mountain, and the messy rocks clung to the ancient tomb. The elders stopped breathing for the last time and gathered in the Woods behind the mountain, beside the stream, on both sides of the mountain road, on the flat ground in front of the cliff hole, among the withered vines of pumpkins. Their graves are still guarded by some crops that bloom in spring and bear fruit in autumn. When spring comes, leaves and flowers spread the hills into a distant song, and the souls buried in those lands guard the roots of the family with inscriptions. When I was a child, I clung to the grass in the back hill every day, looking for dragonflies, scale insects, midges and unburned paper money on the lush leaves. The smell of death in Houshan escaped a child's eyes, but it showed Bupleurum and its tiny buds before they became Chinese herbal medicine. The villagers worked in the vast fields around the village all day. They work and sing absently, and the scattered cattle in the fields do not bring them enough food and clothes. Instead, every year during the Spring Festival, they light candles and pray in a low voice on the hill behind the mountain with empty and scarce sacrifices. Guilt is hidden in the silent face.
A group of people carried a dead man and walked slowly in a heavy coffin. The paper money scattered along the road leads to the back hill. I sat high on the hillside, quietly watching their team getting closer and closer, and even saw one of them carrying a coffin. When he was walking among the stones by the river, his feet were mixed with scattered stones, and the slightly undulating coffin was shaking. The cock with crimson feathers tied to the coffin fluttered its wings and screamed in surprise. I saw people working hard. I sat on the high hillside, quietly watching the villagers busy for the final destination of a dead person.
At this time, the smoke rose in the village, and the family members and relatives of the deceased must still be sitting in the mourning hall where the body of the deceased was just stored, weeping with their heads down, telling stories about the past of the deceased. It should be a decent thing for the deceased to live in the back hill. He can stay with his ancestors, accept the warmth of burning paper money and watch the birth and growth of every child in the village. Fresh soil covered his body, and night came. People in the village set up a high homesickness platform to ferry his wandering soul. At this time, I saw the fire in the village flashing. Some words said to him: Come back! There are still some words I want to say to him: go. The grave closed the heavy stone door, and the deceased lived in the back hill from now on. My footsteps disturbed his sleep.
On the back hill, in the dark night, someone said I saw a ghost. So I left the back hill and went back to the village, hiding in the undulating rice waves near the village. My skin is very dark. I don't know who the lonely soul is with in the back hill.
The back hill is covered with trees and weeds, and the rocks hidden between vines and leaves turn dark after years of continuous wind and rain. In the village, some people drive cows or donkeys to the mountains early in the morning to cut grass between graves. Fertile soil always grows some dark green grass, which can be carried back to the village to make a warm bed for livestock, so that they can chew quietly and have a good dream when night comes. Only those graves scattered on the hills behind the mountains face the erosion of dew every day, guarding a lifeless soil. When I returned to the village, the back hill was deserted. The hut where I once lived gradually fell into disrepair in the wind and rain, and finally collapsed. The sunlight exposed the barn behind the hut, so you could smell the cow dung inside. But later, the cattle returned to the village, and they bowed their heads and ate grass on the village road outside the village. When they fall asleep in the sun, dragonflies perch on their thick horns and decorate the village with peace and tranquility. At this moment, the back hill is outside the dream of the cow, and the steaming water vapor is evaporated by the sun. There is no cow dung that exudes grass and absinthe in the stable. Only snakes are entangled in the dense branches of mulberry trees next to the stables. The lizard climbed quickly in the sun and finally disappeared into the cracks in the rocks in the grass.
At this time, the back hill became an image, which made me forget it gradually. I sometimes think of it and make it a river that traces back to the past in my words. I was lying on the ridge of the water field near the village, reading quietly with a book in my hand. On the ridge outside the village, I read many books. They are: Red and Black, Silent Don, Hunter's Notes, Selected Poems of Ai Qing, Southbound and Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain. I often feel sleepy when I read those books in the wild. So I opened the book, covered my face at will, covered the sunshine leaked from the round leaves of persimmon trees by the pond, and had a cool dream intermittently. The pages of the book are blown by the wind, and I can see the hills in the distance and look at me. My eyes casually looked at the back hill, and the whole hillside was as quiet as a silent old woman. On that slope, I can vaguely see the silky mountain road, covering the back hill. The mountain roads in the same strain form a net, and I know their extension in all directions like the back of my hand. When I woke up from my sleep, I saw some mountain roads with sleepy eyes, and I began to recall the past events that happened on those roads in my childhood.
I will also think of some people, most of whom have died, and some even died when I was still in the back hill. When I was in the back hill, I often went to those Woods. Moss dried by the sun covered the handwriting on the tombstone, and the vague words were wet by the dripping water from the tree, sticking to the ants passing by and falling hard. They are neatly arranged in the Woods, and a team can make people recognize the vein of a family. With the decline of the old grave, the tombstone collapsed in the grass, and the vines grew day by day, wrapped with handwriting. No one can see clearly how much bitterness and fatigue those words recorded. In the forest without sunshine, the light is dim. I sat in the depths of the forest, imagining ghosts and fairies flying in the branches, fighting and crying. In children's minds, there is no fear of graves for adults.
There are also some graves that have been washed away by rain, but still stand in time. The moist forest hides their existence, and the dark green moss is slowly extending to the top of the tombstone. The edge of the tombstone is neat, telling a child that a life has just left. I saw crimson candle tears on the stone platform in front of a grave in the Woods. A few drops of wax candle tears stuck to the tomb platform, mixed with fine dust, condensing the thoughts of people living under a certain roof for the dead. Perhaps, the villagers will still think of the deceased and casually talk about his happiness and sadness in the village. In the dark, they will light a wick, a pile of paper money, sprinkle a bowl of water and wine, and talk quietly with the ghost who lives behind the cold tombstone.
I often think of such a scene when I am half asleep and half awake on the edge of a paddy field ridge. In fact, the silence of the back hill didn't make me forget, a special place.
The sun is gradually setting towards the western hills, the moisture in the air is getting heavier and heavier, and the fragrance of flowers is slowly fading. On the petals of the brilliant wild rose, the wings are more vivid because of the imperceptible humidity. The stronger the evening breeze, the wildflowers swaying in the branches, forming a small arc. Some petals rise with the wind and fly in the air, like rouge spilled, striking and pink. In the distance, the clear singing voice of the village girl came, drifting farther and farther in front of the flying flowers, as if it were a string of enduring notes, dotted with her budding feelings. From a distance in Song Dynasty, faint smoke rose from the shadow of peach blossoms on the courtyard wall, and the smell of food gradually floated in the air, spreading towards the outside of the village. The day is coming to an end, and the silence that should have been preserved in the field is about to be restored. I also stood up intoxicated and walked towards the village. In the crowd, I went back, back to the village, back to the city from the village, back to my life and busyness, facing the hurried work and ever-changing people and things.