EVERYDAY VIDEO POETICS

so…here i sit, in incheon international airport. a few hours yet until boarding the flight which will land me back in the country i came from – a place that has felt so very far away for these past ten months. it’s quite hard to believe. the journey has been a bit on the intense side, and i’ve yet to process much of it…

we’ll say that i am relieved it’s over.

and that it has been a completely life changing expanse of time. and further, that i am so grateful to have been granted this experience, to connect with the land, the people, my family… and to have found my spiritual path as a Bahá’í, in the land where my mother’s father and their family served their faith and the people of Korea in the most inspiring of ways.

and that i now feel i understand and know the mind and heart of the Korean people with an intimacy and depth i would never have been able to access before, in my life.

and that i could be here to know my father’s sister, my 고모, and have my heartstrings pulled by her, in what would unexpectedly be the last year of her life.

that all of these things happened i can only mention a gratitude for at this moment. surely, in the months to come, as i settle back into some kind of ‘normal’ life back in the familiar terrain of the u.s. ~ yet beginning again in such new and unfamiliar ways ~ i will process these transitions a bit more, implementing and giving shape to the transformations, and the lessons still nascent and forming in my heart and soul.

❝ As once the winged energy of delight

carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,

now beyond your own life build the great

arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed

in passing through the harshest danger;

but only in bright and purely granted

achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable

relationship is not too hard for us;

the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,

and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

until they span the chasm between two

contradictions…For the god

wants to know himself in you. ❞

~ Rilke

click on image to play.

Link to video.

North Insa-dong

on the train….

Things are slowly progressing. Language courses begin next week, thank God. And I will begin attending a course taught by Aeju Lee (이애주) at Seoul National:

Last week I met with Dr. Choong Soon Kim, a former professor of anthropology and now President of Korea Digital University. A man with an interesting experience of migration and cultural border crossing. He left Korea in ‘65 for the US, subsequently raised a family, received his Masters & PhD, then began teaching and conducting fieldwork in Tennessee and other parts of the US South. He worked with the Choctaw Indians as well as with poor pulpwood workers. He did not return to Korea until ‘81, and describes this journey back to his native land as one of profound alienation – the country had changed so drastically in during all of that time, and some family members were very ambivalent about how to receive him. In the years to follow he did end up returning to do fieldwork in Korea as a Fulbright scholar, writing an ethnography on Korean family dispersal and the televised reunions on KBS. In 2001 he came back to Korea ‘for good’, accepting the Presidential position at KDU. His books are published in the US, and I highly recommend them.

They say I should learn one Korean song for the 노래방 (no rae bang = song room = Korean Karaoke). Maybe I’ll try this one.

After some feedback from a very important person, I have changed the look of this vlog.

Enjoy the squeaky clean-ness!

From National Geographic News.

what you do in berkeley with whiskey and fireworks.

(click on image to play)