Our Bones

　　We all have bones, and because we have bones, we are alive and well in this world.

　　When I say we, I mean a big "we", and the big "we" of course does not just mean people who are related to me, nor does it just mean people who are related to me or not. By we, I mean "all" that exist in this world, human beings, animals, plants, and many more that we cannot easily see. All of these existences exist in their way and show their gestures. This is what I call "we".

　　We all have bones, and bones allow us to survive and live with strength. In my hometown, many people smoke a kind of tobacco called "water pipe", and their tool is none other than a sheep bone, which people call a "sheep gun". The "sheep gun" is made from the sheep's calves, people kill the sheep, pick the meat off the top of the sheep's calves and eat it. Then the bones are polished, with a red-hot thin wire from the middle of a long hole, dig a slightly larger hole in a large end horizontally, pick up a used bullet casing, open the eye, on, when smoking tobacco with thumb and forefinger finger rub, pressed to the bullet casing, lit with fire, and then the mouth with the other end tasty smoke, sucked a hard, the bullet casing on the ash will fly The bullet case was shot out in the same way. That kind of "gun" without killing power has existed in my hometown for many years, and I always feel that that kind of bone contains more about some interpretation of bones and that habit itself is also a kind of bone-like fossil.

　　The bones of sheep in the culture of "sheep gun" shows the eternity and permanence of bones.

　　There are many times, I prefer to stand in the wilderness to appreciate a dead tree, no leaves, no green, no life chasing insects and birds, only the bare branches standing there, despite the absence of some of the things they once had when they were alive, but they stand there, but more of a return to the quiet and natural beauty. They speak and think in the way of bones, and exist in the way of bones. And bones are more likely to make people think of strength, strength, and a topsy-turvy spirit. In my hometown in the countryside, I have had the privilege of going down to the graves and seeing the bones of my dead ancestors and approaching them with my eyes. They were lying there quietly, and at some time in the past, they were lying in with the flesh, but the flesh no longer existed, the flesh flowed away like water in the river of time, and only the bones remained, lying quietly. Facing them, I wondered why they didn't disappear.

　　But then I asked myself: How could they disappear? "The bones will "never" disappear.

　　I have always understood fossils to the bone too. I think fossil is a kind of bone cast by history, a kind of bone hardened by time. This kind of bone allows us to understand a spirit through history, a kind of existence that once existed, with a kind of undoubted insistence, waiting for the arrival of people who are willing to dig in the depths of the earth, waiting for an eternal dialogue with those who come after. Fossils of dinosaurs, fossils of trees, fossils of some kind of humans, these special bones signify in some unique way a once-existence and a permanent existence. I have never actually seen any fossils, but I have seen archaeologists digging them up on television. Once I watched their backs as they clung to the land, digging earnestly, and was deeply moved. I felt in that moment something of the longing of a living bone to be close to another living bone, the kind of thing that makes the world alive and desirable. And desire is sometimes really the only reason for people and whatever else to survive.

　　I don't think fossils are dead bones, I think they are alive, they are living on another level of life. There is something we can see in the veins of fossils, and that is living history.

　　We, humans, have many artifacts, natural and human. The natural artifacts are the bones of natural evolution, recording the past that existed among nature; the artifacts on the human side are the bones of human history, the bones of the finished history, the bones of culture, and although there is no longer any living flesh attached to them, the whole structure, the whole outline leaves behind the spirit of the past times, leaving behind a life that later generations cannot see with their eyes. Therefore, the process of human beings approaching cultural relics, is the process of deep thinking about history, the process of going to cultural relics; in fact, it is also the process of recalling the past. And in this process of approaching and moving toward, human beings themselves are becoming artifacts, becoming the bones of history.

　　We should not expect that flesh and blood will cling to our bodies forever, only bones, which will bring us closer to a possible eternity, the kind of eternity that is abstract in concept. Flesh allows our bones to speak and think, to say what we want to say, to think what we want to think. And bones allow us to exist resoundingly.

　　I have always thought that although there are no eternal bones in the world, the world is only sadder and closer to something in the way that bones exist, and the name of that something is called the ideal.