The place where we stayed is called "People on the Cliff". Outside the door is a vertical cliff with a height of 1-2 meters, opposite to the wall-hanging highway in Guo Liang. On the provincial road from Xinxiang, we once met a village. From a distance, it looked like a huge cemetery group. We found that the housing style in that village is unified, and every household has a yard. The shape of the gate really resembles the tomb here, especially the wide horizontal plaque with a few words written on it. Generally, the horizontal plaque on the gate reads "home and everything" and "rich wealth", while the graves here are often "long history" and "beautiful mountains and rivers". Guo Liang's old house also maintained this style, which may have aroused my colleague Xiong's question. However, at that time, I only wanted to capture light and shadow, but I didn't delve into his problem.
Fortunately, soon after, another tourist completely solved his question. It turned out that there was a grave in the corner of a cornfield on the roadside where we were walking. It is made of stone pieces one or two inches thick and 7 to 8 centimeters square, one on top of the other, with vertical sides, and the stone pieces on the top are flat like tiles. I thought it was a chicken pit or something, because there were people nearby, and there were a lot of native chickens digging in the corn field. After the eldest brother told me, I didn't think it was square and really like a coffin, but it was too simple compared with our new and old graves with hardcover everywhere. It's easy to understand. The rocks in Guo Liang are generally layered, and the materials are very convenient. Therefore, the houses of the living, the graves of the dead and the pens of animals are all built with stones. As for the burial place, there are probably geomantic considerations. Anyway, no matter how remote it is, the psychology and life logic of Chinese people are the same.
I wrote a poem in the space the day before yesterday, which recorded some of my thoughts in the past ten days. The last sentence mentioned "burial", which may seem inexplicable, but it is actually related to the above situation. I said, "My pain can make a difference. It bathes me with the memory of you every day and buries those shameful tricks." In my opinion, every trip is an effort to escape the shackles of normal life, just like escaping fate. Why do we feel pain? Because of the injury, the wind knife and frost sword of life, the viciousness of people's hearts and the ruthlessness of fate, these things have an impact on individuals. In fact, just like the uncanny workmanship of nature has shaped the scenery that we specially came here to enjoy, I can't refuse it; The appearance that a person presents to others is the result of his inner quality being complicated by the outside world. Whether it is magnificent or exquisite or deep, it comes from the tempering of the world. In the face of these beautiful scenery of nature, my heart is too small and ugly, and I feel ashamed, so I am determined to "bury" my pursuit of fame and profit and all kinds of disputes arising therefrom. Although it is impossible to avoid injury, I have been able to get rid of myself. Therefore, the meaning of pain is very different now from the past.
This is the inspiration that travel has given me. In fact, every trip has made my heart more stable. I may forget what I have seen, but its influence on me has gone deep into the bone marrow and melted into my blood. I have stronger confidence now, and I am less and less afraid of the future situation. The question is, what I said is "burial". I buried the heart of pursuing fame and profit, just like someone said that the Chiang family dynasty was buried. Will it really disappear and be solved once and for all? Is there at least one grave? Maybe there are ghosts, and they are more likely to combine with new evils, so I have to take a bath, continue to clean the dirt and wash my heart. Because there is a grave, I have to pay homage to it. I have to be awed, evaded, abandoned, and know what to cherish, keep and miss. Just as we bury an old friend, others will continue to enter our lives, and other old friends will continue to leave, and there will still be people who need us to bury them. As long as we have breath, there is always desire, unless we are buried by others.
For some people, it is inconceivable that the living and the dead live next to each other, while I grew up in a grave. The village in my hometown is surrounded by graves, and the back window of my home is less than 1 meters away from the grave. Except for the way out of the village on the front, there are layers of old graves on the hills on both sides of the village, so that the old people who died later have to find another place to be buried. I also witnessed the process of burying many of them. When I was a child, I played hide-and-seek with my friends, fought by two factions, mowed pigs, herded cattle and collected firewood. These graves were our playground, not because we were not afraid, but because we were used to them and forgot them, and often just regarded them as ordinary clods. And when we suddenly realize that they used to be the homes of the dead, we may be even more frightened. After taking part in the work, I lived next to a row of graves in a remote school for seven years. I had leisure during the day and basked in the sun on the back of the graves. At night, I am bored alone, and I will play erhu and flute to make noise to my quiet neighbors, but they have never disturbed my dream. It seems that they are still willing to be kind to others.
I have seen all kinds of graves. Except for their size and liveliness, they are really not much different from the living quarters. Most of the graves in our country still have earthen bags, but in some places in Shandong, the graves I saw only have a tombstone. When I was a child, I went to see my grandmother. Next to her house, there was only a deep hole in an ancient tomb, with bones and pottery bowls scattered inside. This hole later naturally became a pigsty. When I went to the Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery in Hong 'an, I saw that some famous generals in history only occupied a mountain forest as big as half a room, and many other lives lost in the war became blurred reliefs on the towering monuments in Tiananmen Square and cemeteries in other parts of the country. When I went to Xi 'an, I also visited the underground palace of Qin Shihuang's mausoleum and the Terracotta Warriors and Horses. When I went to the Ming Tombs in Beijing, I also walked into the tomb of the real emperor. Apart from the wealth and authority of the emperor and the gloomy tomb, I didn't feel anything else. In a word, the grave of the dead only shows that the dead himself or his relatives hope to continue their original life after his death and add icing on the cake to their family.
coldly, what's the difference between a gate and a grave? The grave actually shows that people might as well live with a dead attitude and meet natural death with eternal confidence. Some graves, like some people, exist only in the hearts of individuals. They are not afraid of robbing tombs or the erosion of time. They are a mirror and eternal silence, and only stay with the life of the memory.