15 things to do in your hometown
Zhou Huacheng
Rice worker/writer/independent publisher
-
A lot of things need to be re-examined. When you hurry past, a tree is like this, and when you sit down and look at it slowly, it changes. Sometimes you are so close to the tree that you can only see its thick trunk standing still, and when you are far away and look at it again, it begins to sway.
And sometimes you look at something with your eyes wide open, and it's like this. When you close your eyes and look at something, it looks a different way.
When did I start discovering this secret?
- After I left my hometown.
When I left the wilderness, I smelled the verdant air in the forest after the showers, and the faint aroma of grass and trees in the air.
As I tossed and turned on a summer night in the city, I heard a distant frog chirping. Using the frog as a background sound can help me fall asleep, it is better if there is a sound of wind or rain; and the sound of cicadas is slightly noisy; at this time, let the snow fall into the mountains, let the bamboo forest, let the snow on the pine branches crash to the ground.
In my hometown in western Zhejiang, in the place called Changshan County, Wulian Village, where I grew up, has a large field and mountain forest, a small stream (I named it "Peach Blossom Creek") slowly winding around the village, and there is a quaint wooden bridge on the former creek. When the water is strong, peach blossom creek floods, and the water of the ocean floods the roads and rice fields. You can't imagine where all that rain came from overnight, and what kind of mission you carry when you hurry away.
Until I was thirty years old, I was trying to get away from the village. Far away from it, I would occasionally look at our village from the perspective of a bystander, in the study, or on paper. I think of my father and mother in the village, of those who work in the fields and in the mountains. I suddenly realized that the way they spent their time fascinated me.
After that, I tried to go back to the familiar and precious things. I am dusty and frosty, but I am clear in my heart, determined in my steps, and want to return to those things.
I'll go back there, and then, there will be a hundred slow things waiting for us to do together. Just list a few of them:
First, find a potato grower to drink. The potato grower is usually the same person who grows peppers, cucumbers, and rice, and the same person who plants chrysanthemums in the east hedge. Look for him to drink, we can drink a bowl of wine out of the level of the Eastern Jin Dynasty.
Second, make an appointment with a bridge keeper and take a walk after dinner. At this time, the sky was blue, the seedlings in the rice fields were turning green, and when the fireflies were flying around, we could just borrow the light to see the road under our feet.
3. Sit on the field and watch the red dragonflies fly. At this time, the sunset will be very beautiful, if you look down, you can see the foot of the rice, and the water reflects a sunset, which will be more magnificent than the one on the edge of the sky.
When the autumn wind rises, listen carefully to the sound of the chestnuts falling in the forest, and count at the same time, from one to a hundred, and then from one hundred to one.
When the rice in the rice field is harvested, you will find that the grasshoppers in the field are suddenly more, and we should go to the autumn tour. Just go by bike. Along the road in front of the house, all the way forward, through the harvest field, past the reddened oak trees, through a large forest of grapefruit, perhaps someone will invite the thirsty us to stop and taste a grapefruit. Then continue the ride until you reach the end of the creek, where you can rest on your feet and then turn back.
Go see the Golden Nail, which is a geopark, and yes, if you've been there before, you'll find it unchanged when you go this year. It doesn't matter, for a long, long time, say tens of thousands of years, they haven't changed. When you go there, you will find that slowness is actually very valuable.
7. Go to Shibei Temple and Wanshou Temple, if it is winter, you can drink a bowl of hot tea in the temple. Maybe you will meet two or three strangers, such as Zhao Ding, Yang Wanli, Zeng Ji, or Wang Er dog, Zhou Mai, some of them write poems, some write articles or pick herbs, we will definitely have a good chat.
I'm going to take you to a place where the cucumbers are yellow, like the cucumbers I saw when I was a kid (not blue and blue), which is novel, right? But it's a little far away, Longtan, and you know it's far away as soon as you hear the name. Walk to go. Walk a long mountain road. If you're lucky, you might encounter "August Frying" (a fruit that ripens and cracks in the fall and has a sweet, fragrant aroma) on the way.
9. In the spring, you can go digging bamboo shoots together, and I will pass on my lifelong learning (the art of seeing bamboo shoots under the mud) to you.
In October and April, you can move a small bench, sit in front of the window, close your eyes, and smell the fragrance of grapefruit flowers. You can also wrap the fine black tea in paper at three o'clock in the morning and put it between the branches of the grapefruit forest, so that the tea leaves smoke the fragrance of the grapefruit flowers. Someone plucks the flowers of the grapefruit and mixes them with the tea leaves, I do not recommend this practice, I prefer that the floral fragrance is alive.
11. Make wine together. There is a time requirement to make wine. When the peach blossoms are in bloom, ask the master bartender to steam the grain and buckwheat, steam it on a wood-fired stove, spread the rice buckwheat together on the ground, cover it with straw, cover it with a coat, or cover it with something else, and wait for the participation of time to let the grain and buckwheat and time and the song change wonderfully. In the summer and autumn, set up the stove and steam the wine. This nectar on earth, we cellar it together, year after year, and then open it year after year. When the wine is served, please sit across from me, and we drink bowl by bowl at the bar. Work in the fields in the early morning and drink wine and watch the flowers in the evening. Drink from the evening until the middle of the moon, then get up and go to bed. I was drunk and went to sleep, and the Ming Dynasty deliberately came with the piano.
Go, go for a walk in a mountain, and if the spring there is good, come back with a bucket of water. If the flowers are good, bring a tree of flowers back. Place the flowers in front of the window and then boil tea with spring water.
When the trumpet of the oil mill rings in my ears, I feel as if I have returned to my childhood. The trumpet had disappeared for forty years. Let me think about it quietly, and the sound of the trumpet still seems to echo in my ears.
The friend laid out a pot of wine and two plates of melon seeds on the mountain. Do you want to sit down—my friend said he was going to go to the bomb shelter with him for a drink. The bomb shelter tunnel was long, hot in the summer, but it was very cool. There is a way that a day in the mountains is a thousand years in the world. I would love to live in a mountain like this. If everyday life is also a mountain, I am willing to dig a long, long tunnel in that ordinary daily life to the light of the heart.
Fifteen, you can also do a lot of things together, Gao Lian lives in the West Lake, and spends the good time of his life on beautiful things. He turned the life by the lake into an aesthetic activity of art, and thus compiled a "Four O'Clock Appreciation Record", spring, summer, autumn and winter, each with twelve things that can be done slowly. In the spring, for example, Tiger Running Spring tries new tea, Xixi Lou simmers bamboo shoots; in summer, such as Sanshengshi talking about the moon, Huxin Pavilion picking; in autumn, such as Shengguo Temple Moon Rock Looking at the Moon, taking a boat to listen to the wind and rain; in winter, such as mountain windows listening to snow knocking bamboo, snow sweeping and cooking tea and painting. The beauty of life is endless, and the difficult thing is to have a heart that understands. The West Lake in Gao Lian's eyes is also the West Lake in his heart, which is the ideal life of his life. There are many, many such things, waiting for those who understand to do it together, to slowly discover a hometown of their own, the hometown of their hearts.
——This article is the self-prologue of "Sit with the Flowers for a While"
Sharon waited slowly
About the Sharon
At 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday (December 29), writer Zhou Huacheng visited the Slow Study Room Yunshang Salon to share his new book "Sit with the Flowers for a While", so stay tuned.
▼
Welcome to the video number Slow Study
Watch the Salon on the Cloud
This issue is the 95th salon
Share guests
The honored guests
Zhou Huacheng, a native of Changshan, Zhejiang. Rice field worker, writer, independent publisher, founder of "Father's Rice Field". His published works include "Spring Mountain Slow", "Flower Hunting", "Twenty-four Sounds", "Empty Mountain Hidden", "One Day Without Doing, One Day Without Eating", "Vegetarian Past", "Taste of Grass and Trees", "One Meal and One World", "Shimoda: Rice Book for the City" and more than 20 kinds. Some of his works have won awards such as the Sanmao Prose Award and the Grassland Literature Award. Some works have been translated into Korean, English, Arabic, etc. His prose works have been selected for a variety of annual anthologies. He is the chief editor of many best-selling book series such as "Yahuo Book Series", "Rural Literature Series", "Our Daily Beauty" and so on.
Book recommendations
Book Recommendation