There are many transfers between the person and nature. However, there is not much expression of the Subject. The Chinese poems seem timeless, despite knowing every journey ends, and yet embrace life itself, welcome every moment of it.
The country broken mountains and rivers in, the city the vegetation are spring deep
A poem contains experiences–to feel the poetry by reliving in those experiences from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Bollas (2014) concluded that if we see the oriental psyche as a process of balancing the conflict between self and society, the solution for oriental people is to search for a harmonious point between the inner and outer world. To write a poem is to create a space and inhabit that thinking space. The purpose of this kind of art is the art itself, it is not just the function of Xin, it is itself.
Both Taoism and Winnicott supported this idea, they both referred that one shall simply oneself and connect the self to the inner world, the relationship with others, and to live, to create, to play within. With imagination, Chang-Tuz created a solution for surviving in a chaotic world: when in adversity one shall learn to be the giant fish Kun, and dive deep into the ocean, accumulate energy; when the time comes, one shall learn the enormous bird Peng which flying in favorable circumstances.
The challenges
In my time of traveling and studying abroad, I witnessed an interesting phenomenon: there are many Chinese immigrants plant vegetables in their garden. I was once asked by a local British, how come all Chinese prefer to grow vegetables in the garden than simply plant beautiful flowers.
To answer that question, I feel there is a necessity to understand the earthbound society of China. Clearly, the immigrants are mostly considered as the well-educated, the middle class, they can easily afford a pale of vegetables, or even fancy cars large houses, how come this obsessive passion of being a farm in once little garden had been their center concern? I believe the answer lays in the unconscious of agricultural civilization.
Xiao Tong Fei and his famous book, From the soil: the foundations of Chinese society (2012), had painted this image of a person half grow into the land. When I went to college which is in southern China, my mother sealed a bottle of the soil from my hometown and said this cures acclimatization. In earlier times the people who left their hometown also use this way to treat their homesick. Despite that there is no scientific approval, this bottle of soil became a major element in a person’s life no matter where one goes.
