Reading check-in + Day Twenty + Rustling Reed Flowers + reading notes
In front of the academic corridor, a garbage bag was lifted by the wind and soared upward. Did it rise ninety thousand li? I have been thinking about that garbage bag all day today, so in the evening I opened Rustling Reed Flowers and read “Flying Kites.” I went looking for it deliberately; before I looked, I did not even know whether this book contained anything about things flying in the sky. Because what I wanted more to talk about was this garbage bag. This garbage bag moved me deeply.
The garbage bag I saw in the morning was so free, dancing in the wind like ballet, and also like some exquisite martial art. It followed the rhythm of the wind, and dissolved the force of the wind. It borrowed the wind’s strength, and revealed its own grace. It fulfilled its own grace, and did not resent the wind’s coming and going. It rode the wind, unbound by form, transformed into formlessness, taking nature as its law; the Way was within it. It was like taiji, with yin and yang flowing through it.
In the author’s heart, the kites of his hometown are more beautiful and more full of feeling than the kites of Weifang. In my heart, the garbage bag is ten million times more beautiful than the author’s kite. However beautiful the author’s kite may be, it is still a kite; it is not free. The garbage bag in my eyes is simply a garbage bag. It has been discarded by people, yet it delights in itself. When the wind comes, it rises; when the wind surges, it spins; when the wind is swift, it yields; when the wind is gentle, it follows; when the wind departs, it falls. Neither hurried nor slow, hurried and slow by turns.
