We came from our mothers’ wombs exactly the way new life enters the world in nature; naturally. That is why our breath carries those delicate fragrances of life, the very scents that once taught us how the first drops of rain smell when they fall on dry soil. We did not arrive after being cut open, filling our lungs with the smell of blood; we arrived with the fragrance of a mother.
That fragrance of human creation is something you will never be able to distill in scientific laboratories. We drank milk from our mothers’ breasts, clinging to our mothers’ laps like creeping vines, feeling ourselves to be complete beings of the universe even before we knew how vast the universe truly is.
We were given our mothers’ laps, the way a river merges into the sea and dissolves its existence into boundless vastness.
We were given our mothers’ lullabies; perhaps not from a cradle tied to a bed’s arms, but from the gentle rocking of a cot moved by our mothers’ hands or feet as they sang softly. And those lullabies reached our ears in the very language our mothers spoke.
We played in the soil. We ate soil, and we wiped soil from our faces; despite a thousand scoldings. When our mothers bathed us, scrubbing the dirt from our bodies, within moments we would again be covered in soil. The soil that, after our mother, held our very existence in its lap. We were naked, yet the soil covered our nakedness with its own handful, and thus we grew up.
So, my friend! In our breath lives the fragrance of mother and land; in our minds lives our mother’s language; in our eyes lives the romance of nature; and in every vein of ours, nature is so deeply kneaded that no force in the universe can extract it now. If anyone tried, their own nature would shatter into pieces.
And; still you ask why we love our land?
Why we love our language? Why we are so deeply intertwined with life that even if someone speaks of death in the name of sacred slogans, claiming even angelic authority; we see them as nothing but a false, hollow unbeliever.
My friend! You are a Caesarean-born child, raised on Meiji milk; instead of a mother’s lap, you were given a baby cart; instead of a mother, you were given nannies. That is why you abandon this life and speak of houris, servants, rivers of milk and honey, and some otherworldly existence. You are a hybrid child, written on the paper of nature-smart, agile, a lover of weapons; one who was given the smell of blood to breathe from the very moment of birth.