A Rendezvous of Timeless Beauty

Published：2018-03-19 Source：Zhangjiajie Tour Guide Network

A Rendezvous of Timeless Beauty
Luo Changjiang
1
Crossing through time and space, I have come to keep a rendezvous of timeless beauty.
Standing at the highest point of the 280-square-kilometer Wulingyuan sandstone peak forest landscape, one seems to hear between heaven and earth the rustling of a long skirt trailing on the ground. Moonlight is like water, the sky a pale blue, and mirage-like mist spreads out in boundless vastness. The summits of thousands of rock peaks emerging above the clouds are like islands rising from the sea hundreds of millions of years ago. Under the gentle lapping of the wild, billowing waves, the moon splashes with a silvery, glittering sound...
The distant mountains, softly kneaded by mist and clouds, curl 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. Carrying a heart full of eagerness, I wander along the shore of the sea at the beginning of the world's creation, my lips tinged with the chill of the cosmos, licking the echo of the great sea that has drifted down from ancient times...
2
The clear radiance does not feel cold.
The beach is a silver sponge, hissing as it absorbs the chilly night air, giving off faint smoke and glimmers of light. A poet with a special fondness for this landscape once, on a sudden impulse, named it "Tianzi Sea." Gazing at the layer upon layer of seawater sedimentary lines and one after another wave-eroded ripple marks on the sandstone peaks, treading on thick layers of graptolite fossils and coral fossils, picking up the scattered fragments of life from hundreds of millions of years ago strewn all over the beach, one cannot help but fall into endless reverie over each nautilus fossil and each shell fossil clinging to Cambrian rocks and glinting with pearly luster. On this moonlit, breezy night amid the lush reeds, my feet tread upon the gurgling sound of water; I imagine that after life had just completed the evolution of single cells, algae, and fish, certain primitive lungfish of the late Paleozoic Devonian period perhaps crawled ashore from the seawater right where I now stand, poking their heads about, using four short, stubby feet evolved from fins to begin the first journey from ocean to land...
The enormous black clam pants as it opens.
Fiery 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, blossoming into flowers one after another...
3
The Wulingyuan sandstone peak forest landform, which integrates the three major scenic areas of Zhangjiajie, Tianzi Mountain, and Suoxiyu, has its highest point on Tianzi Mountain. The ridges and peaks of Tianzi Mountain are both enclosed within the great peak forest and suspended above it. At a ring-shaped mountainside level with the tops of hundreds of sandstone peaks runs a line marked by a 50-kilometer-long cliff-edge road. In the geological era 380 million years ago, this cliff-edge line was the true coastline of this area that was once an ancient ocean zone. During the fifty million years of the Devonian, this place underwent several tremendous transformations of sea and land; the rise and fall of the earth's crust, the alternating replacement of sea and land, the exchange of cold and heat in climate, the succession of life and death among creatures—everything was undergoing soul-stirring changes—erosion. Dissolution. Collapse. Whirlpools. Jets. Crystals. Lava. Glaciers. Monsoon forests. Sedimentary layers. Radiation. Tides. Thunderstorms. Avalanches. Flash floods. Swamps. Shadows. The tearing and killing among unicorn rhinos, Oriental stegodons, dinosaurs, and ancient whales. ...Time stands still.
The ancient biological clock rings.
Fossils that can serve as chronological markers with various growth patterns—O ancient species that fell into the deep blue sea basin, do you emit a distant, moving, deep resonance under the impact of deep-sea whirlpools? Will the sound of the bracelet convey my most eager longing and my most beautiful promise?
The birds have fallen asleep. The whispering of the waves gently rocks me. The stars of the Milky Way, shining in mutual reflection, become specks of starlight like duckweed, like pebbles. Between sea and sky fills the amniotic fluid of the cosmic palace.
Wave embraces wave.
Dream piles upon dream.
The deep resonance of the ancient biological bracelet 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, it was replaced by a quartz sandstone basin deposited to a thickness of five hundred meters; as the continental plates shifted and transformed, the ancient ocean once again covered this basin; as the quartz sandstone plateau rose, the ancient ocean once again withdrew from here: a drifting bottle in a fable, with the several shifts 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 since ancient times.
Drifting is both an accident and a necessity.
I have no intention of guessing at fate, nor of chewing over various encounters.
Using as my language the musical notes the sea has engraved upon me, 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 follows nature, and so on.
A fable may be far longer than human history. One day, humans were born on Earth. In the fable, the drifting bottle, when stranded on the beach, was picked up by a child. No one knew that it contained all human desires. When the cork was pulled out, desires rushed out one after another, spreading throughout the human world.
The sea of years henceforth swelled with the tide of desire.
In drifting, I gradually came to know that the waters on Earth are all interconnected.
By an accidental cause, I discovered that humankind was holding its breath to listen to a dialogue between philosophers from the Eastern and Western hemispheres on the theme "Prospects for the 21st Century." The two philosophers, spanning ancient and modern times and crossing the globe, discussed almost all the most pressing issues of human society and the contemporary world—from cosmic celestial bodies, the origin of life, religious philosophy, moral ethics, science and technology, culture and education, environmental protection, national economy, political systems, peace and war, all the way to the future world—and made predictions and prospects for the future world. Among them, their discussion of humanity and nature can truly awaken the deaf and enlighten the blind!
The philosophers said that the greediness of humans is the same as that of other living beings. The difference is that humans have consciousness; if they devote themselves to greed, they will become extremely destructive and become evil. Since our ancestors began to live as humans, humankind has continuously altered the natural environment in order to make it more conformable to human demands. Until two or three hundred years ago, limited by the technological capacity of the time, humans 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 indeed have the merit of preventing natural disasters through science, but because its starting point lies in conquering nature for human benefit and even at the expense of destroying nature, it treats the relationship between humans and nature as one of opposition. Therefore, nature, having been wounded, has already begun to inflict punishment on humankind. If humans continue to abuse these forces to satisfy greed, they will inevitably lead humanity to destruction...
I am shocked. I am indignant. I feel as if sitting on pins and needles.
Looking around at the starry sky and down at the Earth, this most beautiful and enchanting planet in the universe, blue as crystal, floating and winged—this "birth mother" who has nurtured humankind for millions of years—should by no means suffer emotional abandonment and harm!
Humankind has only loved itself and been infatuated with itself for far too long. This is a true betrayal of the great meaning of nature! The Earth is undoubtedly the mother of humankind, and nature is undoubtedly the lover of humankind. Out of human conscience, we ought to reunderstand nature's complex and return to seeking the mentality of a "second lover"; a Chinese scholar even believes that humankind's conversion to and passionate love for nature is an emotional construction of foundational significance for elevating the quality of human civilization!
Therefore, to keep this timeless rendezvous, I chose a dark night, a moment when water and sky merge in one color, chaotic as at the beginning, to set out.
I come with the impulse of homesickness to seek my homeland.
I come with the mood of a wanderer to return to my homeland.
The dust of the world rolls on; I brush away all sorts of sighs over the loss of homeland. Above the vast sky, great rivers, mountains, lakes and marshes, and even the desolation of all ages, a piece of music reverberates endlessly:
Don't ask me where I come from, my hometown is far away...
5
This is a love story once depicted by Zhuangzi: a young man arranged to meet his sweetheart under 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 belly, inch by inch up to his throat, until only his two eyes floated on the surface of the river, still gazing bright and infatuatedly at that bluestone path, his ears listening for the rustling sound of a skirt brushing through thistles. The faithless young woman finally did not appear, yet the young man who clung to the bridge pillar unto death still kept his promise and refused to let go, letting the years soak him swollen and deformed, letting his hair tangle in the torrent like a nest of water snakes, letting oysters grow all over his arms, waiting foolishly a thousand fathoms deep for a hopeless rendezvous...
I marvel at how the ingenious 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 the reunderstanding of woman and the spiritual homeland. When I, in the name of humankind, with devoutness full of shame and deep, long-standing impulses of love, return to and approach the embrace of nature, this lover; when I pierce through time and space, cross ancient and modern times, and come before this "village girl" "kept in the deep boudoir," famous for her rare sandstone peak forest landform: I am eagerly impatient, I am uneasy, I am incoherent, my face is covered with tears, and I only know that, like a poet, I use the lightest, lightest voice in the world to gently, gently, gently, gently call your name—your name shining like the moon, like stars, like lamps, like diamonds, like lightning, like brilliant sparks, like the burning of a primeval forest! I only know to let this soul, returning home and bowing its head, tremble with tears in your radiance...
My beloved! I am still I, still the I who a thousand or ten thousand years ago was intimate with your skin, and who a thousand or ten thousand years later will still share the vicissitudes with you! I only need you—as an elder once reminded—I only need you to press my temple, and you will know how much clamorous surf has congealed in my icy blood; I only need you to sense the breathing on my chest, where the muscles bulge and rise and fall like wave-eroded ripple marks, and you will call back the long memories of the Paleozoic era concerning trilobites, blue-green algae, coelacanths, nautiluses, and the like.
—My beloved!
6
I stand in waiting waist-deep.
I long for the touch of water, and I long that when water touches me, I also touch water.
Soaked into the vastness spread by mirage mist and night haze, I cannot help but roam in spirit through this expanse of deep blue, letting hallucination stretch out long arms and trace graceful arcs in the air, letting hallucination glide among three thousand peaks and three hundred waters. Leaping into the empty valley, I suddenly feel a pleasure like that of a flying fox suddenly attacking an obstacle. Pausing at a cliff, moss climbs up my Adam's apple along my toes and fingers. One sandstone peak after another twists its waist and begins to dance; caves stretch out into mooing 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 vision and sensation, and beautiful hoofprints instantly bloom with intense desire on the cliffs...
Little monkeys swinging back and forth between precipice and precipice, between wildness and desolate beauty, hello! Giant salamanders that, with pleasant crying tones, climb onto rocks and pour out their lives to the starlight everywhere, hello! Fairy tales that emerge flickering and shimmering from the canyon under moonlit and moonless skies, hello! Dove flowers that welcome my arrival with passionate branches and the hanging shade of empty nests, hello!
The sea has died, yet the flowers still bloom. These flowers refer to lobster flowers. Following the clear fragrance of lobster flowers all the way, following the winding sound of the Golden Whip Stream, I come to a huge cliff at the scenic spot called "Meeting After a Thousand Miles." On the vast curtain of night, the silhouettes of a pair of lovers are distinctly outlined. If fate brings people together, they will meet though a thousand miles apart; through ten thousand rivers and a thousand mountains, love is always there. A trace of a smile, a fixed gaze, a cry of surprise charged with electricity, a coquettish shyness full of reproach... all reveal a thousand kinds of charm. Yet for a man and woman so deeply in love as those before my eyes, life may be disregarded, but that feeling which belongs to oneself must not be abandoned—how could it be summed up 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 under the Reunion Tree! I will go now to gather vines, fragrant herbs, and five-colored flowers to adorn you with care; I will spread for you a bridal bed as soft and lovely as clouds, as elastic as waves, as full of dreamy sentiment as Debussy's music. Next I will beg you to agree—to agree to be my bride!
My beloved, come quickly; soaked in waiting up to my neck, I earnestly call for your backward glance.
The long night is like a song. I wait for you in the water...

Source & reference

Source：Zhangjiajie Tour Guide Network