A Journey of the Mind: From Day to Night, Dream to Reality
Like so many twilight walks, we walked upstream along the river bank. But this time I went the furthest and went to some places I had never been before. The sky is clear, it will darken very late tonight, and there will be a bright full moon, making the night even more strangely clear and moving than the day.
During the day, the space between heaven and earth is filled with air. At night, especially on a clear night with a bright moon, clear liquid fills the space between heaven and earth.
The day is bright, and everything is stimulated to be dazzlingly bright under the strong sunlight, showing its perfection while hiding the details. But during the day, as much light as there is there is an equal amount of huge dark shadows. Therefore, daytime is not trustworthy. Compared with night, it is hidden deeper and may have more unknown aspects. Although the scenes we can see during the day are always more complex than those we see at night, these more complex scenes can easily form a maze, making us get lost in our understanding of the world.
At night – simple and clean. The noise recedes and the world shines with its own light. The brightness of that light is not bright “bright”, but transparent and thorough “bright”… Everything comes to light, quietly and eternally. There is no far or near in the field of vision – because far and near places look equally clear. There is no light or dark, only some deep and shallow colors, which truly spread to the end of the field of vision under the moonlight.
Think again about the difference between sunlight and moonlight: sunlight is reflected by everything, while moonlight is sucked by everything.
And we are sucking the moonlight. Our bodies are light and our minds are wide. We slowly sway and walk on the deep grass beside the river. The sun has completely set, it is still very early, and the world is still daytime. A thin full moon floated over the forest, like a quiet round cloud. The other clouds are excited, fanatical, and as white as fire—when the whiteness reaches the extreme, it really is the color of fire. The sun shines obliquely on them from bottom to top on the other side of the mountain, and their height makes the day they experience longer than ours. They hang high in the air and shine. That kind of light cannot be emitted by a cloud of mist. It should be the light that can be emitted by a solid body.
The further you go, the wider it becomes. The river water gradually gathered into a bunch, running rapidly in the deep river bed. On both sides of the river are deep and thick green grass, draped down like bangs, hanging neatly and tamely on the water. The top of the mountain not far away is covered with white snow.
After walking for a while, there were more swamps, and we discussed crossing the river. The terrain on the other side of the river is higher and seems drier and broader. So we walked along the river for a while and found a place where the river was wider but the water flow was relatively shallow and slow. We rolled up our trousers and held hands in the water. The water was so cold it made people scream. We stumbled through the rapids, and as soon as we landed, we rubbed our legs and feet vigorously with our socks. Then put on shoes on your bare feet and continue walking upstream.
Quietly, the crazy clouds in the sky gradually became gentle as the bright air gradually calmed down. One by one they sighed, and one by one they exuded crimson, orange and golden yellow from the original dazzling white. And it becomes more and more delicate and charming, rippling lonely in the sky in the east.
We just started walking back. The thin cloud-like full moon over the forest, in the calm and clear sky, gradually focused its sight back to the earth (originally, its gaze traveled across the earth to an infinitely distant place…). If it had been a little later, the moon would have turned golden, and finally it would have had an orange-red, honey-like color. At that time, the sky began to darken. And when the sky is completely dark, the moon will be silvery white again, complete and perfect. At that time, compared with this moon, the things under the moon were so hasty and panicked that every line was piled up in a mess, arranged horizontally and vertically. It seems that this world has just been looted, and its essence has been taken away, leaving it in a daze and hesitation. The moon is present in all this, it is the essence of this world, the one that has just been refined. At this point it continued to suck, getting brighter and brighter.
We went home dejected, sat around the lantern for a while, and then went to bed.
I also fell asleep. But in the dream, I was still walking forward by the river, upstream. It’s like leaving the ground and walking, but not reaching the sky. It seemed like he was running to his heart’s content, but he didn’t leave half a step away from the river. Later, from a distance, I finally saw the Wilderness Garden, and I threw myself on the ground and cried bitterly. When I raised my head, I found that I was lying on the top of a mountain, leaning on the edge of the cliff and looking down…
In my dream, I kept thinking like this: the flowers in the wilderness garden are the real flowers in summer. The light and heat they emit only linger in the sky above them, without touching the darkness and cold around them… I keep walking towards them, walking through them in my dreams year after year.
To the northeast of the ranch where we live, the terrain becomes more open as we go. The two rivers meet there, and three huge and gentle slopes tumble down from the mountains, dragging out three broad and deep green grassy beaches. The river flows quietly deep in the grassy beach. At the end of the grassy beach and halfway up the mountain is a vast blue-green forest, covering the entire top of the mountain.
Yellow and white flowers are scattered along the river. Here, there are not too many big flowers like poppies and wild peonies, but one or two will always appear suddenly like ghosts in the deep grass. Poppies have orange-red or bright yellow corollas and slender, elegant long stems, while wild peonies have dense branches and leaves and bright red flowers.
And those thousands of small flowers have small petals, simple shapes, and no fragrance, only a thin light green smell. They look less like flowers and more like plant leaves of different colors. Flowers should not be content with being ordinary like this. Flowers are dazzling, proud, and have beautiful dreams…
But in real life, how far away I am from them… I wander around in these fields every day. There are about a dozen yurts and more than a dozen families of shepherds in this area. The sheep have gone to deeper mountain pastures, leaving only cows and camels. Among them, calves seem to be the most numerous. They always walk together in groups, with small bodies and big eyes. After eating, they would sleep and bask in the sun. They would all lie down in a large area, with their heads pointing in the same direction. I walked past them to the high point of the grassy slope, sat on a big rock in the wind, spread my hair and combed it slowly.
In fact, it was not a garden, just an experimental base for forage cultivation on the summer pasture. However, it is the only large-scale man-made trace in this mountain wilderness. Think about it, a long time ago, a person came here in the spring, planted wooden stakes, pulled up barbed wire, and sown a large amount of seeds. Then he left and got lost. I will never find this place again, and I will never come back… Later, I came, but I didn’t dare to get close. I always looked at the large group of rich and sticky colors on the deep green grass from a distance. It is lonely and refuses to be ordinary. I stood watching from a distance, always watching, and the sky became dark. Does the world work without regard for all the little things? Even if these small things are so beautiful, they are so unwilling to be left behind.
And I kept talking about day and night. Sometimes I also stop the voice in my heart and quietly feel things other than “me”. Then he talked about the sun, the moon, and all the indescribable things. Talking about the wind, talking about clouds, talking about the forest entering the night, talking about the stars shining in the sky more than ten meters high when I look up… As I talk, I want to be quiet and cry silently. The garden in my heart keeps sprouting branches and leaves… I Suppressing one kind of beauty, appreciating another kind of beauty, deeply hiding those things in my heart that are more deliberate, more elaborate, full of dreams and more hopeless… I still have not entered the world now, I am still abrupt The earth only knows one dream.
Day and night, on the one hand, ignore me, and on the other hand, they show their huge differences to me alone. Beyond the wilderness garden, the mountains are vast and the land is vast. I walked over, leaned against the wooden stake holding the barbed wire fence at the edge of the garden, sat on the grass, and looked up at the infinite height of the sky. The mountains and fields were silent, and suddenly the sounds of birds and rivers could no longer be heard.
