Yard, everyday, travel
Zelkova trees in the yard started to sprout. I was waiting for the cherry blossoms to bloom, but I was looking at them every day. The zelkova tree is growing at a fierce pace when the pink moss-like moss fades away. I look at this change every year with admiration. After the rain that is falling now stops, the green will spread quickly. We will meet summer soon. Standing in the yard where the smell of soil rises and looking down at the scenery of the mountain village.
When you open the map of Korea and pinch the middle of the South Korean land with your finger, you will find the village where I live. Standing in place wherever you go and turning around, your gaze is blocked at the foot of the mountain. It’s as if the mountains are doing ganggangsullae in the middle of me.
He came down to this village at the same time he got married and has two daughters and has been living for 12 years. I wasn’t interested in marriage. A tough and sensitive city beast has been living in a village for more than ten years as a rural ajumma caring for two children. The driving force that made this life possible was the Himalayan travel.
The snowy mountains shining silver in the deep blue sky came to me as a mysterious world. The stories of the lives and deaths of climbers against the immense ice walls were very secret and fascinating, and remembering the name of the legendary climber who spent his youth on the mountain thrilled his heart.
‘The time has come to leave.’
The time when I felt my presence and admitted myself as beautiful, the time of travel, which strengthened the muscles of my heart and took care of me to the fullest.
At the end of her twenties working as a designer for an advertising agency, she suffered an uncontrollable meeting. For whom are you working day and night like this? What do I really want to do? Questions that changed my life from the very beginning came biting my tail, but I spent years trapped inside a sturdy fence, leaving these questions behind like normal people. The desire to jump out of the fence several times a day came up sharply. Every time I did that, I recalled the memories of my last trip. The memories of wandering through Australia’s national parks and forests, caring for trees and picking vegetables and fruits on rural farms made it possible to endure the hellish crowded subways of rush hour. I imagined leaving when I was soaked in the body and the nape of my neck as heavy as a cotton pad in the water, and when I felt depressed by someone’s snot. It had to be a place where the wild nature lived and breathed. It had to be out of reach of a huge capital. People who seek food with their own hands, build their own houses, and make and use necessary items themselves. I wanted to meet people who weren’t bound by time and money, who could prove that the way we live is not everything, who have the leisure and generosity to show kindness to strangers even if they have nothing. Then, the Himalayas came to me.
When I turned 30, I quit my company and left for Nepal. The trip was longer than expected, and after half a year, I returned to Nepal and other countries adjacent to the Himalayas. The Himalayas I met at the end of my dark twenties were like salvation to me. The realization that travel gave me was the awareness that I was a creature with five senses. My sense of drowsiness awoke and eagerly communed with everything I met on the road. Like clothes fluttering freely on a long clothesline in a rural yard, I wanted to live with my five senses wide open to the sky and sunlight.
‘I have to leave the city and live doing what I like.’
After returning from the trip, I met my current husband, and we got an old mansion in a mountain village. Another trip of mine began in a quiet mountain village between the foot of Songnisan Mountain and the Pass of Baekdudaegan, and I am still living a life where daily life and travel overlap.