Stetson: May you touch the light in the darkness of life

Now I often feel that death is sitting in the hallway outside the door, sitting in the dark, where mortals can't see, waiting patiently for me night after night. I don't know when it will stand up and say to me: Hey, let's go. I think that must be out of words. But no matter what time it is, I think I will probably still feel a little rushed, but I will not hesitate, I will not delay.

"Gently I go, just as I come softly" - I said that Xu Zhimo's poem may not involve life and death, but in my opinion, it is the most appropriate attitude to life and death, and it is really no better as an epitaph.

Death is never done all at once. Chen Cun once said to me: People die little by little, first here, then there, step by step, and finally completed. He spoke calmly, and I casually echoed that we were all living less concerned about dying.

That is to say, I am walking gently, and the soul is leaving this mutilated shell and saying goodbye to the world step by step. At such times, I don't know what others will think, and I especially think of the mystery that comes gently. For example, I think of the changing sunshine in the morning, noon and evening, think of a blue sky, a quiet courtyard, a soft wind that blows in the face, and it seems that there has always been a soft call from my mother and grandmother in the wind... I don't know if others will be as surprised as I am: what about the past? Where did everything go in the past?

The beginning of life is the most mysterious, completely out of nothing. Suddenly you enter a situation, one situation leads to another, and it is logical that it is seamless, connecting a real world when you come and go. It's really like a movie, on a screen of nothingness, for example, suddenly there is a child crouching in the grass playing, and the sun shines on him, shining on a path in the distant mountains, near the trees and grass. Then the child got tired of playing and staggered back along the path, and then led to a house at the end of the path, where his mother was looking at the door, and the father, who was buried in a pipe or newspaper, led to a home, and then a world. The child simply follows this series of situations, some fleeting, some becoming immutable history, and the cause of unchangeable history. In this way, one day the child will remember the mystery of the beginning: for no reason, as the sage said, man was thrown into this world.

In fact, saying "Suddenly you enter a situation without a shadow" and "People are thrown into this world" are both wrong, there is no you before "entering the situation", and it does not matter who is before "being thrown into this world". But this should be the subject of a philosopher.

For me, the beginning was an ordinary courtyard in Beijing. I stood on the kang, holding on to the window sill, looking at it through the glass. The house was a little dim and the sun was shining outside the window. Nearby is a row of green elm trees, beyond the elm wall there are two large jujube trees, jujube trees with withered branches embedded in the blue sky, under the jujube trees are quietly surrounded by window corridors. - The first encounter with the world was like this, simple, but impressive. The complex world is still far away, or it just crouches around that quiet time and snickers, watching a childish life slowly open its eyes and sprout desire.

Grandma and mother both said: You were born there.

He was actually born in a hospital not far from there. When I was born, it snowed heavily. One night there was a rare heavy snow, the road was buried, and Grandma walked to the hospital with the snow in the snow, walked to the window eaves of the delivery room, and stood there for half a night, and only when it was almost dawn did she hear me come softly. My mother saw me coming later. Grandma said that her mother had been sad for a long time for giving birth to such an ugly thing, when her mother was young and beautiful. My mother later shut up about this, saying only that when I came, "a layer of black skin wrapped around the bones", she said this with relief, seeing that I gradually looked like a thing. But is all this true?

I staggered out the door and into the yard, and it was only then that a real world began to provide proof. The smell of flowers and grasses basking in the sun, the smell of masonry in the sun, the sunlight dancing and flowing in the wind. The green brick crossway connects the houses on all four sides, dividing the yard into four equal plots of land, two of which are each covered with a date tree and the other two are planted with lotuses. The lotus blooms huge flowers, and bees burrow in and out of the cascading petals, humming and mining. Butterflies flutter leisurely, flying around, silently like phantoms. The jujube trees are full of moving shadows and small broken jujube flowers. The green and yellow jujube flowers are like a layer of powder, covering the moss on the ground, very slippery, and you should be careful when stepping on them. In the sky, or in the clouds, there are some sounds, some ethereal sounds that do not know where they are--the sound of the wind? Ringtones? Or singing? I can't tell for a long time what it was, but as soon as I walked under the blue sky, I heard him, even in his swaddling. The voice was clear, cheerful, melodious and unhurried, as if it were an inherent call of life, insisting that you should pay attention to him, to seek him, to visit him, or even to run to him.

I stepped over the high threshold and walked out of the courtyard door with difficulty, and in front of me was a quiet street, slender and orderly, and two or three strange figures walked by, walking toward the morning sun in the east and the sunset in the west. Neither the east nor the west know where they lead, they don't know what is connected, but the beautiful sound is not frightened, like the wind...

I'll always see that little street, and I see a child standing on the steps in front of the door looking out. The morning sun or the sunset made his eyes, floating a group of black spots, he closed his eyes, a little afraid, overwhelmed, for a long time, opened his eyes again, ah well, the world is a bright light again... Two monks dressed in black quietly walked under the eaves of the street... A few dragonflies circled smoothly, their wings flashing with light... The whistle of the pigeons appeared from time to time, gentle, long, gradually approaching, purring over the head, and gradually drifting away, like a ball of flying confetti in the sky... It was a strange thing, I saw both my gaze and I was looking.

Where have all those scenes gone today? Where did that moment, that child, that mood, the amazement and obsessive gaze, all the old scenes go? They floated into the universe, yes, fifty years ago. But does this mean that they are just drifting away from the here and now, but they still exist?

What is a dream? Memories, what's going on?

If there had been a telescope fifty light-years away, a telescope large enough by a multiple, an observation point, the scene would have remained the same, the little street, the flock of pigeons above the street, the two nameless monks, the flashes of dragonfly wings and the obsessive child, and the beautiful sounds in the sky, as always. If the telescope continued to follow at the speed of light, the child would always stand on that little street, looking obsessively. If the telescope had stopped, somewhere fifty light-years away, my whole life would have been repeated in turn, and fifty years of history would have been played out from the beginning.

It's magical. Most likely, life and death depend only on observation, on the distance and proximity of observation. For example, when a star hundreds of thousands of light-years away is actually extinguished, it is spending its youth in our field of vision.

Time limits us, habits limit us, rumor-like public opinion traps us in reality, and makes us shut our eyes and listen in the magic of the day. Daylight is a magic, a spell that allows the rules of the dead to flow unhindered and the actual wears away the magic. All people play a tense, dull role under the magic of the day, and all speech and behavior, all thoughts and dreams, seem to be circled by preset procedures.

So I look forward to the night, to the night, to the coming of freedom in silence.

Even hope to stand in death and see life.

My body has long been fixed to the bed, fixed to the wheelchair, but my soul often travels in the night, away from the mutilated shell, out of the magic of the day, out of reality, wandering in the world of the dusty night, listening to all the dreamers, watching all the wandering souls who have given up their earthly roles unveil another kind of drama in the sky and wilderness of the night. The wind, wandering around, strung together the news of the night, from the sleeping window to the sleeping window, to visit the mood that had been ignored by the day. Another world, flourishing, the sound of the night is incomparably vast. All I long for is this free night walk, to the heartfelt place of all souls.