In the Daxing'an Mountains at the border of Inner Mongolia and China, there is a natural landscape called Shitang forest. I have known its beautiful name for a long time, but I haven't been able to "love" it in my hometown for nearly 40 years. On a sunset, I met the stone pond forest I had been in love with for a long time.
Stone pond forest is a wonder of Daxing'an Mountains. Where is it strange? In fact, it is just a piece of ruins, but it is not a fragment of human civilization, but the ruins of nature, a geological relic of the earth's Quaternary volcanic eruption, and the largest recently dead volcanic basalt landform in Asia. The geological structure, soil, vegetation and biological area remain in the original state. This stone pond forest is about 20 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide. It is formed by the flow and condensation of magma after volcanic eruption. The stone forest in the pond is several stories high. The small one is like the small pendant under the lady's earrings. When you look at it, there are a lot of strange rocks with different shapes. Most of them look like the land of Africa. The black waves are raging, and most of them are ugly. They are all images written by the French poet Baudelaire. These cold, solidified underground magma are wanderers from the depths of the earth. They collectively migrate to the surface. From their sharp appearance, we can see their alternative posture.
The ruins excreted from the depths of the earth are the storage of passion within the earth, and human beings cannot stop its spray. We often praise the creation of human civilization. Human beings have created pyramids, built the Great Wall, excavated the Grand Canal, and carved thousands of worlds on ivory. These creations, which rely on years of accumulation and months, are too small to be completed by nature in an instant. Which human art can last for millions of years? But Shitanglin, a masterpiece of nature, can.
The most brilliant place will eventually be a ruin in our human eyes. The Yangshao culture we worship, the Maya civilization we are eager to understand, the Inner Mongolia Hongshan culture we have explored in recent years, the Confucius and Mencius who still worship, and the ancient Greeks Aristotle and Plato who have studied. After we worship them, we criticize and innovate them. The culture and ideas they create can never replace the eruption of human new civilization and new ideas. This is like our blue earth, which will never stop the eruption of underground "flames". People's desire for the natural self and the integration with nature will inevitably begin to receive attention. In this era, it is no longer appropriate to simply talk about transforming and conquering nature. We must make timely adjustments in the relationship between man and nature. Human beings began to put forward a realistic and spiritual demand of returning to nature and living in harmony with nature. This requires human beings to readjust the relationship between man and nature on the basis of "humanization of nature", and change the simple transformation and conquest relationship between man and nature into an emotional and poetic aesthetic relationship, that is, to emphasize the naturalization of man.
The naturalization of man requires man to return to the diversity endowed by nature, to be liberated from the ubiquitous machine world created by man-made survival, to enjoy life freely, and to creatively realize man's different potential talents, abilities and personalities in the emotional contact and communication with nature.
The progress of mankind has started again and again on the ruins of civilization and natural ruins. Just like the stone pond forest with solidified magma, who can imagine that on the bare rock without any soil, there are tens of feet tall larch, and climbing trees such as Yansong, jinlimei, yinlimei, etc. The forest grows on the stone forest and takes on the shape of covering the sky and the earth. No wonder the local "aborigines" call it the stone pond forest.
The warm setting sun has plated the ruins of nature into red copper, as if welding the eternal glory on the stone pond forest. I know that the glory is just a momentary color, and the stone pond forest will soon restore its original state of ferocity, ugliness and coldness.
However, there are forests that take root, plants and trees that bloom and fall, and springs that flow ceaselessly. Our awe is not only the ruins created by the rhythm of nature, but also the lives that survive tenaciously on the ruins. (Ruan Zhi)
