Walking through an ancient forest in twilight, the cross-section of the mossy tree stumps glimmers with amber sheen. My fingers brush over the uneven concentric circles, suddenly touching a certain flawed gap—this is the scar struck by lightning thirty years ago, now gently wrapped by the newly formed annual rings, solidifying into a badge of time.
The wild cherry blossoms in the mountains always bloom the fiercest on the cliffs. They root themselves in the rock crevices, much like a writer's ink seeping into the folds of rice paper. When the spring wind tries to push down the tilted branches, the twisted roots delve deeper into the rubble. At the steepest cliffs, one often sees vines embracing the broken brick walls, the dewdrops in the morning mist are evidence of their tears from last night, while the noon sunlight is refining the tear drops into diamonds.
On a summer night of pouring rain, the old pine in the courtyard makes a sound like the tide. It is not a painful moan, but the aged warrior singing aloud amidst the wind and rain. Each pine needle bears the heavy blows of raindrops, and the cracks in the bark seep amber-colored resin, like a golden ointment brewed by the passage of time. When the clouds break and the moon rises, the water droplets hanging on the tree reflect starlight, as if the galaxy is blooming from the wounds.
The empty shells shed by autumn cicadas still cling to the maple tree, yet the maple leaves have already soaked through with October's frost. Those falling red leaves seem to be plummeting into an abyss, but in reality, they trace a spiral path in the wind—each leaf adjusts its posture as it falls, until the moment it touches the ground, clearing a path for the seeds buried in the soil. Life never hesitates between gain and loss; it only cares about how to convert the potential energy of the fall into the kinetic energy of rebirth.
Tagore said the world kisses me with pain, yet little does he know that those scabbed scars are brewing new buds beneath the skin. Just like the ancient trees struck by lightning that bloom with reishi at their wounds, seeds that have endured the harsh winter always encode the password for spring deep within the frozen soil. When we no longer resist the chisel of fate, life will naturally guide the wounded roots toward richer soil, allowing all pain to eventually settle into the calcium that supports the spine.