New Home, New Experiances

I am a farmer's son. We recently had to give up our home due to a monsoon that destroyed our land. My father   is now searching for a new land, and prospecting many different villages. I never expected to travel so far, nor have I had any experience with larger, more urban villages. Five images in particular have impressed themselves upon me along the way. 


The first was just this creek bend, a little while away from my old home.

I never knew it existed, because we were on the other side of that mountain, to the right. And I was shocked to see that the land was untouched by the heavy rainfall; my father explained that the valley almost functioned like a drain so it was equally spread. It makes the mountain look so big, with this meek river snaking through. It is very different, looking up at the mountain and across the river, rather than down from the mountain and at eye level with gushing water. I realized how hills work. They are beautiful and dangerous, like the river. I admired the man I saw, crouched down to the left. First he is insignificant, but it is his insignificance that then makes him bold. 


But I knew nature. I had known it, sown it- since I was born. What we came across a few days later, I had never before experienced. 



It took me by surprise, suddenly coming out of the woods to a neat fence, guiding our way down, and hosting a splendid view of tidy fields and organized houses. The crowded village gives way to the sea, in a clash that fascinated me. How could so many people reap the benefits of the sea? Were there enough fish? I had only ever seen few fishermen share a wharf, and never anyone who chose to live nestled up to the temperamental sea. I could not believe how neatly planned the town was. Nature here was so manipulated, from the fence cut into the rock, to the houses along the shore, with the closely-plotted fields taking up every ounce of land in between. It was a groomed nature, and I didn't know if I liked it, but I was certainly impressed with how the villagers had tamed it. 


Then, of course, came the villagers themselves. 



She looked at me curiously. Casually. I shouldn't have been peeking in the window anyway, but I suppose her mind was wondering as the shampooer performed his massage and she caught my eye. I didn't know you could pay someone to rub your muscles. I thought that's what mothers were for. It seemed kind of silly to me, all the tools and pampering, when you could just stretch out on a mat and do it yourself. I guess we didn't have the luxury of having people to do it for you, so it struck me as kind of a silly, lazy thing. But I wondered if I wasn't a little jealous. She seems so calm, all the tools splayed out on the floor, the man easy with his work and the second women, ever attentive. The main woman just looks like a queen, spoilt in this pretty room. She wasn't particularly well-dressed, I thought, but I didn't know much about women's clothing, I didn't know that it was the lowly entertainers who showed off, and that it was the posh women who wore their modesty proudly.


And then I fell in love.



It may have only been for a second, but I'm sure that's what love feels like. I still wish I had got her name. She was practicing a dance, not yet in dance clothes, but caught off guard when she saw me, she was clearly in her element. Poised. She was so young! I couldn't believe someone so young was already employed. I only found out later that it wasn't much of a choice, and that her profession was a constraining one. She must have been poorer than I was, to have been so quickly 'bought' and 'sold.' But at that moment, she was just a girl, in common clothing. Just a kettle at her side, a fan carefully in her arm. Natural, in an unnatural stance, and it makes you wonder about her, what she was thinking. What her life must be like. 


We grew tired of the villages. My father did not like them. Nor did my younger siblings, who were used to open spaces and unaccustomed to the formalities required in the cities. We hiked a little more, and then stumbled upon this view.


Here. Here is where we now live. 

It is beautiful. It is is not too hilly like home, but it is wide, bountiful and green, with just a trace of a mountain in the distance. There are no crowded villages, no fields to compete with. The simplicity, straightness of the horizon is becoming to me, even after it seems that we have come so far just to be back at some place like we started. I can't imagine living anywhere else. Maybe farming is in my blood, because I know this image might be nothing but boring to the boys from the village. But trees, soil- they're all you need, and they're beautiful unto themselves. You don't need a sea, a village, a people- anything to frame it. It just is; raw. And it's better that way.