THANK YOU
December crept up on us this year, with major moves from Malaysia to the US and Korea. I realize I will be spending Christmas in Korea for the first time since 1976… Here in Korea, December is obvious everywhere. The lushness of summer greens and vibrant fall hues is fading quickly, giving way to shades of grey, soon to be monochromatic wonder or dread (depending on one’s mood). The tall, blue autumn skies are gradually being replaced by duller colors, seeming closer, as if even the skies are huddling together to stay warm and keep us warm. The evergreen pine trees don’t look as green as they used to. Even in Yangpyeong, the red and green of holiday lights and familiar music fill the air, though less commercialized.
This morning, as I walked over to the kitchen and rolled up the screen shade to greet the day, I saw an elegant and fearless white heron far away, gliding at my eye level, and eventually perched on the top of a tree. I stopped rolling the screen and watched. I thought to myself, the effortless wonder is why we are here. As I was driving down our steep hill on route to a café, I saw a family of cats and kittens, all six of them. Once house pets and now wild, they looked like they had not seen any humans and were in guardian mode until I drove by. I remember the cautious and curious eyes on one of them this morning.
By the end of this year, I will have kept this blog alive for six years. What I thought would be a one-year sabbatical practice has turned into a weekly rhythm and discipline of sharing my reflections, musings, and questions. It is a rhythm and discipline that has benefitted me immensely, and I would like to continue. Thank you for reading and interacting with me. It gives me life that someone is reading and resonating with what I am writing. It is also here that I began to discover my passion and desire to write, in line with my whole being.
As is an annual tradition, I will set aside the month of December to highlight some of my favorite poems and a few poems I have written this year. Poetry, to me, serves as a living spring for sapiential seeing and living. As a bastion of human spiritual wisdom, poetry offers yet another layer of wisdom—“to tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” to borrow the words of Emily Dickinson. Mystery can be violated if communicated clearly and directly. As I grow older, I find myself journeying from certainties or the need for certainties to beholding wonder, mystery, contradictions, and even absurdities. Poetry has a knack for preserving mystery, wonder, and contradictions as they are without needing to clarify, categorize, and force certainty. In this vein, nature is poetry in motion, possessing an unmatched capacity to hold contradictions, mystery, and wonder. Let’s lean on Thomas Merton, “The language of mystics, in short, is always poetic and claims plenty of license for paradox in dealing freely with symbols, sweeping them far outside the limits of their own capacity to convey a meaning.”
As roughly one-third of the Bible is poetry, poetry connects our story with the stories of our faith fathers and mothers, without demanding answers. As “conversations” take place between their stories and ours, we feel that we are not alone, affirmed, and inspired. In fact, our lives, too, are living poetry in motion, expressing each of our unique lives in ways that we only can and should. As we celebrate the birth of Christ in our midst, let us also celebrate each of our births, which are given to us to find God and to be in union with God.
