Chapter 20 CULTURE

When the seeds were planted, when the buds sprouted, when the flowers bloomed...the past is vivid in my memory.Bugs nearly ate the sprouts and made you anxious.A heavy rain relieved the drought in time, which made you happy.In a blink of an eye, a few melons suddenly swell several times, and the fat doll hides in the depths of the green leaves like a fat baby, messing up the house rules, crying, laughing and yelling, which will definitely surprise you. Sometimes, melons and vines with long sleeves flutter and become immortals. In the blink of an eye, they climb up to the high blue sky along a telegraph pole, bloom and bear fruit in the sun or the moon, let you move a chair and a ladder, and still look at the sky and sigh.You see a crooked loofah hanging on the wire, like a microphone hanging from a telecommunications bureau, as if someone was talking here just now.Are so many telephone receivers hanging from melon vines and scattered from the ground trying to tell us ancient secrets, but no one ever answers?

You imagine the roots growling under the dark soil, and if you really listen, they hold their breath and become silent.You imagine that the branches and leaves are quietly stretching their waists, kicking their legs and winking, and when you look back suddenly, they are all in their places, as if nothing had happened.You never dare to point your fingers at melons and fruits, for fear that they will thank you with one finger as the neighbor peasant woman said, for fear that they will be shy and timid.In short, they have expressions and words, they are part of your life, and finally come to the dining table, enter your mouth, and become a part of your body.This is hardly a meal, but a wanderer returning home, a reunion between you and yourself after a long absence, and the end of an exchange between you and the land.

You will suddenly think of the melons and vegetables you bought in the urban vegetable market before. They are clean, tidy, rigid and strange, just like the banknotes they were exchanged for.They are also melons and vegetables, but for those who enjoy them, they are the result of no process, like marriage without love, graduation without study, so they can fill your stomach but cannot enter your brain, and cannot fill your heart empty. It's no wonder that many children in the city don't know how to eat vegetables. Eggs seem to be grown in refrigerators, and cabbages seem to grow in supermarkets.When they saw a pine tree they said it was a "Christmas tree".When they saw a duck they called it "Donald Duck".In an era of industrialization and commodification, people are moving farther and farther away from the land.It's a pity.

What is life?What is a person?People can't eat steel and cement, let alone banknotes, but can only exchange and exchange energy with nature through food made of plants and animals, and only through planting and breeding on the land.This is basic survival, this is what farming means, and this is why people can only have the land as their mother at all times.In English, culture refers to culture and civilization, and also refers to planting and breeding, which shows the supreme status and core position of agriculture in the past.People at that time were actually more enlightened than us. One day, in the place where the tide of industrialization and commercialization is turbulent, people will finally wake up and understand that the green land all over the sky is still the source of our life, far more important than anything else.

That is another great resurrection of human culture.