In the evening, I walked up the embankment of the Bahe River. On the embankment is the withered grass that has been soaked in rain and snow and turned black.

The yolk-like sun that sank to the top of the slope of the western plains was weak. The poplar forests on the other side still do not lose their solemnity and solemnity in the gray mist.

The water is so clear that you can't help but can't bear to touch it with your hands. A snow-white heron floated leisurely from the downstream to the shallow water in front of me.

I stumbled upon a man carrying two wire cages full of stones out of a huge sand pit on the sand on the opposite bank, poured the stones from the cages on the stone stacks, and then picked up the empty cage and walked back to the low sand pit.

There is a wire basket sieve propped up on a tripod. He threw the sand and gravel he had cut down to the sieve, making a continuous and uniform sound, and the stones and sand were diverted on both sides of the sieve.

I stood on the embankment for a long time, watching the man walk out of the bunker and back again. It is less than 30 kilometers from Xi'an.

The neon in the city should be colorful at this moment. All kinds of leisure and entertainment occasions began to enter a period of excitement. On the beach, where the twilight was fading, the man was still going back and forth between the sand pit and the stone stacks.

This man exists in this corner of the world in such a posture. I suddenly thought that the manuscript paper printed in a frame was like that sieve.

He sifted out a grain of stone on his sieve. I'm in mine

What is sifted out on the "basket sieve" is a square of Chinese characters. No matter how high or low, expensive or cheap, the current standard of remuneration must be incomparable with that peasant man's stones.

I feel that I am not so bored as to be pretentious, but I am more thoroughly aware of this pole that constitutes the overall coordinates of society.

The difference in the thickness and strength of one pole and the other. It was the first early spring of the new century. It was the evening of the second day when I returned to my ancestral home.

This is the beach of the Bahe River in my hometown that has provided willow branches for countless poets and artists, but I always can't think about it to my heart's content.

At this moment, the neon lights in the city of Xi'an, 30 kilometers away, and the glimmering windows in large or small villages on both sides of the Ba River, the streets crowded with luxury or ordinary cars, and the frame cars moving leisurely on the field paths, the handsome men and women in and out of the big hotels and bars, the waxed hair and red (or purple) lips, and the village men and women dragging the reins of cattle and sheep and carrying firewood, the fully automatic or semi-automatic production line, and the man who challenges poverty in front of the sand pit and the basket sifting...... It constitutes the general coordinates of contemporary society.

I knew that I would not go back to the pole of digging sand and sieving stones, but I found the fulcrum of mental balance in this coordinate, and I couldn't take my eyes off it.