Momomi's road from agriculture, this time the content has nothing to do with farming

“Now, looking back, I understand that my whole life has been deeply influenced by this desire to work magic;

because of its influence, these magical desires changed with time,

and because of its influence, I gradually escaped the outer world and devoted myself entirely to my own self....”

– <The Song of the Lonely One, Hesse>

On a cloudy day, hanging from the iron window grille of the second-floor rental were ear after ear of amber-colored, rather malnourished-looking corn; that was the harvest from my first attempt at growing corn. On the large floor tiles of the outer corridor were spread soybeans and peanuts harvested a while ago and still air-drying. This half-sandy field clearly favored soybeans and peanuts and did not welcome corn. I did not plan to keep trying to grow corn, nor to defy the temper of the land. Call it following nature, or call it a lack of ambition, I just wanted to drift along like this.

The presence of the brown dog GABEE clearly had only a very limited deterrent effect on mice. In the hidden spot in the corner of the outer corridor where the lumber was piled, one could glimpse broken soybean and peanut shells as well as corn stalks gnawed completely bare. I looked at that pile of empty shells and sighed, while the brown dog beside me just wagged its tail vigorously. I crouched down and stroked its dog face, the kind that outsiders feared three parts out of ten, and said, "GABEE, you are so lucky, you do not have to worry about anything..."

Looking down from the balcony was a front yard so spacious it seemed a bit exaggerated. A 30-foot blue-and-white canvas tarp was only enough to occupy a small corner of the front yard in a square. On the tarp was spread a thin layer of yellow grain, raked into neat straight lines one after another, like the dry landscape of a Japanese garden. That was my entire harvest for this season, the only harvest I had. For the first time since I began farming, I looked at the result of half a year of hard work and felt bitterness, vexation, even a bit of shame. When the rice combine raised high its grain-pouring pipe but no longer let out a single grain, the grain could not fill the bed of the grain cart at all, and what piled into a small hill in the cart bed looked so empty. A bleak cold wind blew, and the friends around me all wore expressionless faces, looking at the rice field, gazing into the distance. People's eyes had no particular focus and looked somewhat blank. Watching the chopped rice straw scattered all around, everything was left in a withered yellow. The people standing by the field ridge looked as if they were mourning the quiet end of this year's farming.

The harvest was even worse than expected, and only then did I realize that the two words "solar term" could not be defied. Some things have only one chance, and once missed they cannot be repeated. Missing the sowing solar term is like a fishing boat missing the Kuroshio current, unable to catch squid in the vast ocean. In the first season, because of re-raising seedlings, I transplanted the rice more than a month later than the solar term (Start of Spring). By the time the first-season rice was harvested, the grain was dried, and seedlings were raised again, the transplanting time for the second season (Start of Autumn) had long passed. Add to that the irrigation canal stopping its water and weeds growing thickly, and just like that, one link after another, my age of thirty looked so stumbling.

During these cloudy days of drying grain (strictly speaking, air-drying would be more appropriate), as I raked the grain every day, I also tried to rake through the thoughts in my heart. When I tried to describe that gray mood and write it out, I recalled all kinds of similar gray emotions over the course of my life, and found that setbacks had in fact followed me all along.

At 14, I was chosen to represent my school in a marathon. Because I heard the discipline director encourage me by saying I was a child with great willpower, I told myself that no matter what, I could not give up. On the day of the race, I ran until my stomach cramped and my legs went weak. The loose cotton socks had long since bunched from my ankles all the way to the toes of my shoes not long after the start. I kept urging and spurring myself on to fulfill the promise I had made to myself before setting out, yet in the end I still stopped not far from the finish line because I could no longer bear the load. At 17, in order to express my devotion to love, I swore to a girl I had pursued for seven years that we would get into our first-choice school together and enter the same university. For the sake of this hazy yet real feeling, I studied with fierce determination, thinking that persistent pursuit would finally bear fruit. But later, when the joint entrance exam results were posted, my name was not on the list for the first-choice school. The youthful love I had chased for seven years ultimately became a dreamlike illusion. At 28, I stayed up late for a job that did not suit me. I tried to simulate the experimental data, working overtime for several days in an office building where all the lights around me had already gone out. Complex grid models, curve graphs, and code kept appearing on the computer screen, flickering ceaselessly as they reflected in my tired pupils. I warned myself that I had to bear the trials and responsibilities society gave me. Although I endured sleeplessly like this in the company, gritting my teeth, in the end I still could not obtain an answer that satisfied my supervisor and myself, and I left the job.

All kinds of past events emerged one by one along with the process of raking the grain. I suddenly wondered and asked myself why I had forced myself to be strong for so long. What exactly made me so willingly, under repeated setbacks, still carry on, pursuing and dressing up the so-called "competitive" external persona, even though such a personality was obviously not my innate nature (otherwise I would not feel the need to pretend)? But something was so strong and dense, like a black hole attracting and dominating me. I continued to chew over myself and came to understand more and more my repulsion toward this black hole. I like being with people who are easygoing and content with their lot, who take things as they come. When I am with them, I feel calm and at ease, and I often unconsciously regard such people as spiritual mentors to learn from. On the contrary, once someone very competitive appears beside me, my heart unconsciously arms itself and regards that person as a threat (even if the person has not offended me at all), and even if I do not show it, I feel full of resistance inside. This is a completely paradoxical and contradictory place: I am pulled by an unnamed force and take the competitive external persona as my standard, yet by nature I want to leave that gravitational pull and long to be free from contention with the world.

When I thought of this, I was in the field putting seedling soil into seedling trays, preparing the land, and getting ready for next year's seedling work. Being alone in the field is very good. That feeling is like escape, yet it also feels very solid. What I escape is the competition and whispering outside, and what feels solid is that a new year is about to begin again from this piece of land. What happened in the past cannot be returned to, just like this year's Momo Rice and my fruitless past, but Momo Rice's own seed selection and seedling raising is about to reach its fourth generation. In a few more days, seedling raising will begin, with a promise to transplant the rice at the Start of Spring. These grains one by one, representing hope, will sprout again in the field, symbolizing enduring nature, and this has become what I most earnestly look forward to.