The Past
Is a Boiled Silk Cocoon Guo Cuihua
We have sunk deeper and deeper
into reality.
In reality, no one would chase
after the sun over immensely long distances like kuafu, the sun chaser in
Chinese mythology. Therefore, darkness always quietly swallows all the wonders
of light.
Is it that not the more something
is unobtainable, the more we want it, or once we have obtained one thing, we
want another?
Our childhood is gone forever.
What remains is a broken dream.
What we cannot forget is that
when spring arrives, we will still fly that ancient, beautiful kite, and when
autumn comes, that broken-winged kite suddenly slams to pieces.
Why don’t you come to the south?
Why don’t you start a new life? My friend has been enticing me over the phone
in a sweet tone.
She is a well-off, single woman,
comfortably living a life that she believes is the best for her. But things
would be different if she were living in an inland town.
I often wake up in the dark night
and then think about what I have just dreamt, but not about the following day,
for all tomorrows are the same, and you cannot change much in them. A piece of
news can travel in five minutes from the east of the town to the west—on a bus!
I cannot forget that the flying I
once did has now turned into a deep-blue memory. Because I have once
flown—flown with the transcendental feeling of crossing the blue sky and the
clouds, I have carefully treasured my pair of broken wings.
What I do not want to think about
is the sorrow that we cannot go beyond ourselves—that deep, hidden sorrow.
When we are in pain or confusion,
we are not moving forward, but back to the past, instead. And the past is boiled silk
cocoon.
We have to learn to continuously
temper ourselves in this age and learn to swim across the sea of cold reality.
In this way, we will be able to enter tomorrow with a smile.
Time and again, I have visited
Mount Hua, and time and again I have visited churches, in search of pure land
in which my heart can be at peace.
I told one of my friends: The
true transcendental realm is not to avoid reality but to keep a peaceful heart
in the turbulent terrestrial world.
Life is a flight of step. We have
to climb it step by step.
And this climbing may be
time-consuming, exhausting, and filled with emotion, but it is all for the
purpose of pacifying your heart.
It is like what happened the
other day when a friend came over. He sat in front of me, taking his time to
talk, while a scene rose from behind me: A blue sky projected white clouds; the
white clouds rode the breeze; the breeze swung a tree full of golden-colored,
withered leaves by the window. The quiet, light, and water-like flow unfolded
my heart into a morning mist.
If I knew my friend was standing
on a mountaintop invisible to me, watching his past. He was not counting those
trivialities, but instead, he counted how many steps he had scaled, measuring
the height he had ascended. This took me into a realm where I saw a broader
world.
I understand now that an ideal
day’s activity in my heart would be just to pick up a cup of light tea from an
unclothed wooden table, sip at it bit by bit and taste it little by little. The
nature of a true life is nothing more than that. What is plain is real.
（徐英才 译） |
/1 
