The magnolia in the empty valley

Wang Wei wrote twenty short poems about the small scenes around his estate at Wang River, each one about a place. This is five lines long.

On the branch tips of the magnolia, the red flowers stand in the mountain hollow. Waiting in the quiet vast emptiness, they open and fall, on their own.

That's it. No observer, no judgement, no lesson. In a tradition that loved to end with a moral, he refuses.

Read it after a day of Instagram and it's almost offensive in its indifference. Nothing is validated. The flowers don't know they're beautiful, and the emptiness doesn't appreciate them, and they still open and fall.

I think Wang Wei was after the thing that most of us are missing, which is the ability to be real without an audience. The magnolia is a picture of a life that continues when nobody is watching.

Try this. Name one thing you do that no one knows about and that you would do anyway. Not a hobby you'd post about. The thing with no documentation.

If the answer is nothing, that's worth knowing, and worth changing a little. Not because the world should be closed off, but because a life entirely made of things that need witnesses will bend toward whoever's looking.

MOJOWAY is a place to write down the undramatic things, for no audience, which is how a real record gets made.