Prose: Crescent Moon

No one paid attention to when the crooked moon hung on the black canopy. There are some surprises to see it by chance, living in the city for a long time, the heart is far away from nature, away from the original intention. Just like a crescent moon with a faint shimmer, no one pays attention to it at all, it is just a phenomenon of nature, who will take it to sustenance?

We do not have the romance of Li Bai's "three people on the shadow", the delicacy of Zhang Ruoxuan's "who first saw the moon on the riverbank, and the beginning of the river moon", and even less the state of mind of Bai Juyi's "bright moon and pine light, Qingquan stone upstream". The moon scenery left in the poetry of the ancients and the emotions conveyed through the scenery are already difficult to understand.

When I was a child, the village was relocated to the middle of the mountain because of the construction of a reservoir. The water rose and went straight down to the newly built village. Dozens of families in the village face the water and sleep on the back of the green mountain. At that time, I was young and uncultured, and the beauty of the countryside was external to me, and I had no feelings or experiences. Now all that can be scoured in my mind is a few fragments, or a scene. But there is a picture that has been haunting my mind for a long time. That's the crescent moon hanging over the mountain village.

In the 1980s, there was no electricity in the village, and kerosene lamps were lit to save fuel. Weather permitting, every night we moved benches in front of the house and the family sat together and chatted. What the adults talk about is not our focus, we often pestering grandma to tell stories, from the monthly loss to the monthly profit. What I remember most clearly is that on a crescent night, My grandmother told us the story of Chang'e and Jade Rabbit. The crescent moon was clear and glowed with a faint shimmer, covering the ink-like distant mountains with a light veil. The crescent moon was reflected on the water. Listening to that magical story, we also thought of running to the moon to see the beautiful Chang'e and jade rabbit. Grandma also told me a lot of folk stories of accumulating virtue and doing good, and we listened to them like crazy. In the era when there were no televisions or games, these stories gave us a lot of inspiration. Grandma couldn't read and didn't know how she had learned so many stories. Maybe that's the legacy, where the previous generation passes on the common sense they've learned to the next. Today, this inheritance seems to be broken, and today, with the explosion of technology and knowledge, the younger generation does not need to sit in front of you and listen to some unrealistic and fantasy stories, they have many more ways to obtain knowledge than we do.

It was the Dragon Boat Festival, and I came home a little late. Walking on the road, a crescent moon hangs high in the air, and faint clouds pass by. I haven't seen such a calm, peaceful and warm picture in a long time. I pointed to the sky, wanting my daughter to feel it too. But people don't take it seriously. In her opinion, this is a very ordinary picture. What the moon is like, whether the moon has Chang'e and Jade Rabbit, their generation knows much more than us. In ancient times, people's beautiful imagination of the moon and their emotional sustenance for the moon were shattered by technology. Now to tell these young generations the traditional stories that Grandma told, they feel old-fashioned and not new. How to transform the tradition into something new that young people can accept is a topic that society and schools need to study hard.

These days, I will go to the balcony in the dead of night to see the moon hanging in the sky, which has slowly filled from a crescent moon. In this impetuous society, how many people still go to see the moon that is irrelevant to them? Who asks themselves what they think, not for life, not for money, not for profit, but just pure relaxation, return to nothingness.