Morning, rain. Under autumn’s starkness, the drizzle fell in a soft blur, dreamlike in its haze. There is something about this golden season that invites a quiet communion between human beings and the world around them, as if sky and earth draw close and everything settles into a shared tenderness.
To walk beneath the trees and look up at the sky; to stroll by the water and brush a hand against the hanging willow; to follow a small path and feel the chill gathering in the air—whether these are sensations we actively seek or impressions that arrive on their own, they finally become the same thing. There is no clean division between observer and what is observed. Everything merges. No need to force feeling, no need to be crowded by it. Just this immense, boundless world, where forms loosen and the self grows light.
If heaven and earth are a kind of vast arrangement, then we are simply the ones living within it—adults, children, embryos, perhaps nothing more than two currents of yin and yang meeting and separating. In nature, plants and animals move through their cycles again and again. On the surface, everything seems unchanged, yet in truth nothing stays still for even a moment.
A single leaf lets go and drifts down. Would the tree call that a loss, a diminishment? Maybe not. Maybe this, too, is vitality. In the coming and going, strength reveals itself. Human life is no different. We are only one part of the natural world, subject to the same patterns: birth, aging, illness, death; spring, summer, autumn, winter; renewal and decay, over and over.
Catching a falling leaf brought back a thought from a book I had read before. So often, without noticing it, we become automated creatures driven by biological needs and social momentum, carried along by the machinery of modern life. We let ourselves be pushed forward and forget to attend to the beauty of each moment as it arrives.
So much in the real world slips past us unheard, unseen, unsmelled, untasted, untouched. We miss more than we realize. Sometimes we fail to catch even a single falling leaf.
And yet all this life is right here: the golden fan-shaped ginkgo leaves, the upright lotus, the flowers still opening into themselves. Everywhere, a vivid pulse of living things.
Then there was Sichuan. In Peng'an County, a township health center stands with its public health office set between two ancient huangguo trees, and the scene carries an unexpected poetry. It is said that the two trees are more than 300 years old, and that this place was once a temple.
Beneath them sit two stone lions. During a turbulent period in the past, their heads were damaged; the heads seen now were made later. There is also a local tale about them: one morning, people found water plants around the lions’ necks. Looking at the traces left behind, they concluded that the two lions had slipped away in the night to play by the river. The story gives them an almost living presence—playful, spirited, impossible not to smile at.
After saving the draft, I noticed something small but strangely meaningful: November 24 was a date I had never written about before. I am not far from forty-one now, well past the halfway point of life, and it felt right to set down what this day stirred in me.
On the street, a vehicle selling panda tangyuan had stopped. “Guolai, guolai”—come over, come over. One look at the round, guileless panda image was enough to lift the corners of my mouth.
And then, in Yilong County, the east was brightening at sunrise. A red sun was about to break through the thick layers of cloud and bring light and warmth back to the world. Everything seemed to be opening again—everywhere, in every place—with a quiet joy and peace.
Autumn is enough to leave one gently intoxicated. Lightly, simply, almost playfully so; a season to enjoy with an easy heart.