Lughnasa and the Korea Moon
Monday gratefuls: The month of Elul. Cheshbon hanefesh. The month for an accounting of the soul. Rosh Hashanah. The New Year begins. Sept. 15, 5784. A day with Murdoch. Golf. My son and Seoah. Black bean noodles. Fried rice. Kimchi. Pickled radish. Fried pork. Back to exercise today. The Ancient Brothers on what it means to be a good person.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The scales of Anubis
One brief shining: The door creaks a bit on its hinges, a crooked tail comes briefly into view, Murdoch slumps down against the wall, ready to spend an hour or so with me while I write.
Yesterday was a travel day, as Kate and I used to name them. After a vigorous Saturday, I stayed home with Murdoch while my son and Seoah went out for another 18 holes. Wrote. Read. Watched some TV. Took a walk. Not a long one.
And yet I remained in Korea. Far away from Shadow Mountain, CBE. Across the wide Pacific, past the international date line, on a skinny part of the easternmost edge of Asia. A peninsula. Not far from Japan and connected by land to the People’s Republic of China. Even Russia is not far away. The Amur River, Vladivostok.
Of course the People’s Republic of North Korea lies between the bottom half of the Korean peninsula and a land route to either China or Russia. So no hopping in the family car for a road trip to see the famous Amur Tigers or maybe a visit to Lake Baikal.
Though. Seoah’s dad did go on a trip just a week ago to the northern edge of North Korea, getting there by flying first to China, then onto the People’s Republic. A Mountain trekker all his life, he wanted to see Mt. Paektu.*
As you can tell by reading the squib from Wikipedia, Paektu or Paektusan in Korean has a key role in Korean early history and in the hearts of all Koreans to this day. It’s one of the lesser known but nonetheless painful results of the Korean War that people from the South can no longer access it easily for pilgrimage purposes.
Korean recycling has a lot more nuance than Shirley Waste offers to me at home. Paper. Plastic. Metal. Trash. Food waste. All different categories and all requiring government sanctioned bags or direct distribution into the appropriate container. Recycling happens on Sunday here at Poco de Sharp which means all of the apartments in this building have to retrieve their waste and carry it down by elevator to the area set aside in the parking lot.
When I helped my son carry out the trash last night, what looked like a large children’s fort of cardboard boxes had a door like opening near the street. Inside it people put their bags of paper recycling. I guess the boxes were also recycling. Don’t know who put the fort together.
Huge recycling bags hung on large metal piping and my son distributed the rest of the recycling to its proper spot, emptying his bags into the plastic or the metal big bags. Which, now that I’m writing this, makes me wonder about the need for government sanctioned bags in the first place. A mystery for now.
Culture has profound implications for every aspect of life. Why I loved anthropology. In a sense culture is a particular people’s answer to the most important questions of life: who can I love? what is justice? what’s for supper? who does what kind of work? how do I get from here to there? how do I communicate with others? Who’s most important, who’s not? how can I tell the difference? And so many other issues big and small.
It’s a privilege and an honor to be here for a month plus taking in the Korean answers to these questions. Or, at least, trying to discern their answers.
Later on I hope to write some of my observations about Korean culture. A culture under a lot of pressure from technology, Western soft culture, geopolitics, and their own recent history.
“The mountain has been considered sacred by Koreans throughout history.[33] According to Korean mythology, it was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of Gojoseon (2333–108 BC), whose parents were said to be Hwanung, the Son of Heaven, and Ungnyeo, a bear who had been transformed into a woman.[34] The Goryeo and Joseon dynasties also worshiped the mountain.”
