A beautiful date that lasts through the ages
1
Crossing time and space, I come to keep a rendezvous of timeless beauty.
Standing at the highest point of a sandstone peak forest landscape covering a total area of 280 square kilometers, I seem to hear the rustling of a long skirt sweeping the ground between heaven and earth. Moonlight pours like water, the sky glows faintly dark blue, and mirage-like mist spreads boundlessly. The summits of numerous rock peaks emerging above the clouds are like islands surfacing from the sea hundreds of millions of years ago. Under the wild caress and tender beating of wave after wave, the moon splashes with a silvery, glittering sound...
The distant mountains, gently kneaded by mist and clouds, curl upward like the antennae of a quietly crouching insect. The far-off Milky Way sinks into the depths of the universe, into the depths of time.
A fierce wind comes howling from the distant Devonian period. Bearing ardent passion in my heart, I wander along the shores of the beginning of the world and the beginning of life, my lips stained with the coolness of the universe, licking at the echoes of the sea that have spread surging from ancient times...
2
The clear radiance brings no chill.
The beach is a silver sponge, hissing as it absorbs the crisp night air, giving off thin mist and faint light. A poet who was particularly enamored with this extraordinary landscape once, on a sudden impulse, named it "Tianzi Sea." Gazing at layer upon layer of seawater sedimentary lines and one after another wave-eroded marks on the sandstone peaks, treading upon slabs of graptolite fossils and coral fossils fused into thick rock strata, picking up scattered fragments of life from hundreds of millions of years ago strewn across the entire beach, one cannot help but fall into endless reverie over each nautilus fossil and each shellfish fossil clinging to Cambrian rocks and gleaming with a pearly luster. On this moonlit, wind-crisp night amid the lush reeds, my feet tread upon the splashing sound of water. I imagine that after life had just completed the evolution of single cells, algae, and fish, certain primitive lungfish at the end of the Devonian period in the late Paleozoic might have crawled ashore from the seawater right where I now stand, poking their heads about, using four stubby feet evolved from fins to begin the earliest journey from ocean to land...
The enormous black clam gasps and opens.
Sunset clouds chase after vast flocks of seabirds crying out loudly.
A restless pleasure stretches in emerald waves for ten thousand li.
In the depths of the sea, coral reefs send forth strings of fairy tales steaming with ancient breath, blooming profusely into flowers...
3
The sandstone peak forest landform that integrates the three major scenic areas of Zhangjiajie, Tianzi Mountain, and Suoxiyu has one of its highest points on Tianzi Mountain. The ridges and peaks of Tianzi Mountain are both enclosed within the great peak forest and suspended above it. At the same elevation as the tops of hundreds of sandstone peaks, there is a ring-shaped mountainside marked by a fifty-kilometer-long cliff-edge road. This cliff-edge line, in the geological era 380 million years ago, was the true coastline of this area that was once an ancient ocean. During the fifty million years of the Devonian period, this place underwent tremendous transformations time and again: the rise and fall of the land, the alternating replacement of sea and land, the exchange of cold and hot climates, the succession of life and death among creatures—everything was undergoing earth-shaking changes—
Erosion. Dissolution. Collapse. Whirlpools. Jets. Crystal. Lava. Glaciers. Monsoon forests. Sedimentary layers. Radiation. Tides. Thunderstorms. Avalanches. Flash floods. Swamps. Shadows. Battles among unicorn rhinos, Oriental stegodons, dinosaurs, and ancient whales...
Time stands still.
The paleontological clock strikes.
Fossils with various growth patterns that can serve as chronological markers—paleontological clocks fallen into the deep blue ocean basin—do they emit a distant, moving, heavy toll when struck by deep-sea whirlpools? Will the chime of the clock convey my most ardent longing and my most beautiful promise?
The birds have fallen asleep. The murmuring of the waves gently rocks me. The Milky Way shines in mutual reflection, stars flickering into specks of light, like duckweed, like pebbles. Between sea and sky fills the amniotic fluid of the cosmic womb.
Wave clusters with wave.
Dream piles upon dream.
The deep resonance of the paleontological clock awakens my wandering journey that has stretched across a thousand ages...
4
I imagine I was once a drifting bottle.
As the primordial ocean retreated from here, replaced by a quartz sandstone basin deposited to a thickness of five hundred meters; as the continental plates shifted and changed, the ancient ocean once again covered this basin; as the quartz sandstone plateau uplifted, the ancient ocean once again withdrew from here: a drifting bottle in a fable, with the several displacements of the ancient ocean, drifted boundlessly and endlessly in the never-ceasing tossing between sea and land, drifted without rest through the vicissitudes of wind and clouds that have forever flowed and changed since ancient times.
Drifting is both an accident and a necessity.
I have no intention of guessing at fate, nor of ruminating over various encounters.
Using as my language the musical notes the sea has engraved upon my body, I murmur affectionately with the bubbles exhaled by aquatic creatures century after century, and converse beautifully with the cloud patterns exhaled by the firmament century after century, about harmonious blending, about symbiosis and shared prosperity, about the Dao that transforms nature, and so on.
A fable may be far longer than human history. One day, humans were born on Earth. The drifting bottle in the fable, when stranded on the beach, was picked up by a child. No one knew that it contained all of humanity's desires. When the cork was pulled out, desires rushed forth one after another, spreading across the human world.
The sea of time henceforth swelled with the tide of desire.
In my drifting, I gradually came to understand that the waters on Earth are all interconnected.
By chance, I discovered that humanity was holding its breath to listen to a dialogue between two philosophers from the Eastern and Western Hemispheres on the theme of "Prospects for the Twenty-First Century." The two philosophers, spanning ancient and modern times and crossing the globe, explored nearly all the most urgent issues of human society and the contemporary world—from cosmic celestial bodies, the origin of life, religion and philosophy, morality and ethics, science and technology, culture and education, environmental protection, national economy, political systems, peace and war, all the way to the future Great Harmony of the world—and offered predictions and prospects for the future world. Their discourse on humanity and nature is truly eye-opening and thought-provoking!
The philosophers said that the greediness of humans is the same as that of other living beings. The difference is that humans possess consciousness; if devoted to greed, it will become greatly destructive and turn into evil. Since our ancestors began to live as human beings, humanity has constantly been changing the natural environment to make it more conformable to human demands. Until about two or three hundred years ago, limited by the technological capacity of the time, humanity had not yet developed to the point of destroying nature and forcibly creating an artificial environment. With the development of modern and contemporary science and technology, the situation has become increasingly severe. Modern civilization does have the merit of preventing natural disasters through science, but because its starting point is to conquer nature for human benefit, even at the cost of destroying nature, and because it treats the relationship between humanity and nature as one of opposition, nature, having been harmed, has begun to retaliate against humanity. What is terrifying is that human power has already reached the degree sufficient to cause humanity's self-destruction. If humanity continues to abuse these powers to satisfy its greed, it will inevitably lead humanity to ruin...
I am shocked. I am indignant. I am on pins and needles.
Looking around at the starry sky and gazing down at the Earth, this most beautiful and most enchanting planet in the universe—blue as crystal, floating and soaring—this "birth mother" who has nurtured humanity for millions of years, should under no circumstances be emotionally abandoned and harmed!
Humans have only loved themselves and been infatuated with themselves for far too long. This is a true betrayal of the profound meaning of nature! The Earth is undoubtedly humanity's mother, and nature is undoubtedly humanity's beloved. Based on human conscience, we ought to re-understand nature, admire nature, and cherish nature. An American scholar attributed humanity's longing for nature to the mentality of seeking a "second lover"; a Chinese scholar even believes that humanity's conversion to and love of nature is an emotional construction of foundational significance for elevating the quality of human civilization!
And so, to keep this timeless rendezvous, I chose a dark night, a moment when water and sky merge in one color and all is primordial chaos, to set out.
I come bearing the impulse of homesickness, seeking my homeland.
I come bearing the heart of a wanderer, returning to my homeland.
The dusty world rolls on; I brush away all sorts of laments about losing my homeland. Across the vast sky, great rivers, mountains, lakes and marshes, and even the desolation of all ages, a melody resounds unceasingly:
Don't ask me where I come from,
My hometown is far away...
5
This is a love story once described by Zhuangzi:
A young man arranged to meet his sweetheart beneath a bridge. He waited and waited, but his beloved did not come as promised. The water level gradually rose—up to his knees, flooding his abdomen, inching up to his throat, until only his two eyes floated above the river surface, still gazing brightly and fixedly at that flagstone path, his ears listening for the rustling sound of a skirt brushing through thistles. The faithless young woman never appeared, yet the young man, who died embracing the bridge pillar, still kept his promise, refusing to let go, letting the years soak his body until it swelled and deformed, letting his hair tangle in the torrent like a nest of water snakes, letting oysters grow all over his arms—a thousand fathoms deep, foolishly waiting for a hopeless rendezvous...
I marvel at how the inventive American woman writer Susan Griffin, starting from the similarities between woman and nature, brilliantly demonstrated the solemn proposition that nature is female and female is nature, thereby praising both woman and nature as beautiful incarnations created by the Creator. Based on human conscience's renewed understanding of natural ecology and spiritual homeland, when I, in the name of humanity, with a devotion overflowing with shame and a deep, long-standing impulse of love, return to and approach the embrace of nature, this beloved; when I pierce through time and space, cross ancient and modern, and arrive before this "village girl" known for her rare sandstone peak forest landform, "kept deep in her boudoir": I am ardently impatient, I am anxious and restless, I am incoherent, my face streams with tears, knowing only how, like a poet, to use the lightest, lightest voice in the world to gently, gently, gently, gently call your name—your name that shines like the moon, like stars, like diamonds, like lightning, like brilliant sparks, like the blazing of primeval forests! Knowing only how to let this soul, returning home with bowed head, tremble with tears in your radiance...
My beloved! I am still I—still the I who thousands of years ago, tens of thousands of years ago, was intimate with you skin to skin; still the I who thousands of years hence, tens of thousands of years hence, will still weather the vicissitudes together with you! You need only—as a great poet and elder whom I deeply revere once reminded—you need only press my temple, and you will know how much clamorous surging of waves is condensed in my icy blood; you need only sense the breathing on my chest, where the muscles swell and rise and fall like wave-eroded marks, and you will call back the long memories of the Paleozoic era—trilobites, blue-green algae, coelacanths, nautiluses, and the like.
—My beloved!
6
I stand in waist-deep waiting.
Soaked into the vastness spread by mirage mist and night haze, I cannot help but roam in spirit between heaven and earth across this expanse of deep blue, letting my imagination stretch its long arms into the air to trace graceful arcs, letting my imagination creep between three thousand peaks and eight hundred waters. Leaping into the empty valley, I suddenly feel a pleasure akin to a flying fox swooping down on an obstacle. Pausing at the cliff edge, moss creeps up along my toes and fingers to my Adam's apple. One sandstone peak after another twists its waist and begins to dance; caves stretch into bellowing ox-horn trumpets. Fallen leaves of hundreds of millions of years pile up into fermented emotions, and the whole sky overflows with the fragrance of corn liquor. A rutting musk deer runs ceaselessly in my vision and sensation, its beautiful hoofprints instantly bursting open on the cliff into intense desire...
Little monkeys swinging back and forth between precipice and precipice, between wildness and desolate beauty—hello to you! Giant salamanders that climb onto rocks with pleasant tearful cries, pouring out their lives to the starlight everywhere—hello to you! Fairy tales that emerge flickering and shimmering from the gorge under the waxing and waning moon—hello to you! Dove trees that welcome my arrival with exuberant flowering branches and drooping shade that cradles empty nests—hello to you!
The sea has already died, yet the flowers still bloom. These flowers refer to lobster flowers. Following the lobster flowers'
trail of delicate fragrance, following the winding sound of the Golden Whip Stream's waters, I arrive before a giant cliff at a scenic spot named "Meeting After a Thousand Miles." On the vast curtain of night, the silhouettes of a pair of lovers are distinctly outlined. Fate brings people together from a thousand miles away; through ten thousand waters and a thousand mountains, love endures. A faint smile, a lingering gaze, a cry of surprise charged with electricity, a flash of feigned coquettish shyness... all reveal a myriad of charms. Yet for lovers as passionately in love as those before my eyes, who would not hesitate to sacrifice life itself rather than fail to hold fast to the love that belongs to them—how could this be expressed by the single word "love"?
Before "Meeting After a Thousand Miles" stands a Reunion Tree. My beloved, I swear I will beg you to agree: let our rendezvous be beneath the Reunion Tree! I will go at once to gather vines, fragrant herbs, and five-colored flowers to adorn you with care; I will spread for you a marriage bed as beautiful as clouds, as resilient as waves, as dreamily romantic as Debussy's music. Then, I will beg you to agree—to agree to be my bride!
My beloved, sunk neck-deep in anticipation, I am earnestly calling for you to turn and look back.
The long night is like a song. I wait for you in the water...
1994