So anyway, last week-end I decided not to go out and I even missed the Halloween party at the Blue Agave. Instead, I cruised around the island and spotted amazingly cool and beautiful places.
It felt incredibly good to get out of the city and gaze at cows and horses chilling out in the countryside. I can’t tell you how great I felt as I wandered in some forest (just like back when I was living in France!) and looked at the sun shine on fields, grass and everything that’s beautiful down here on earth.
And then I made it right. Then turned left. And straight up a hill. That’s when I saw this gigantic cemetery – some sort of ancestral memorial park filled with countless graves. It was both impressive and scary. The silence was heavy yet refreshing, and the vastness made me feel dizzy but also incredibly free.
I wandered in the graveyard for a while, captivated by its atmosphere and grandeur. Meanwhile a friend texted me, inviting me to a Korean body-building competition, and I thought that was an amusing coincidence – people investing so much effort and energy on the body that’s merely a way of carrying their soul, when in the end, this body… this “temple”, will end up decomposing somewhere in a cemetery, with worms feeding off it.
That’s when it hit me: the perfect unity of everything that exists! The cycle of water, the cycle of life. How we become mere compost and bug food once we’re dead – which in turn nourishes the earth that grows the food that we eat. We are all connected and that’s beautiful.
Everything else just seemed so irrelevant at the moment; glitziness, materialism and cupidity… I just wanted to be surrounded by nothing but nature for as long as I would remember. Ironically, the view from the mountain was on Jeju city and the light brown skyscrapers never looked so hideous.
I thought about pesticides, GMO, computers, TVs, alcoholics and drug addicts. I thought about plastic bottles, trash and the lead in plastic toys “made in China”. I thought about candy, greed and the horrible smells coming from the exhaust of the cars in front of me when I’m driving my scooter in traffic. I felt nauseous. I felt sick of myself. I felt like we’ve lost sight of what’s important, of what’s GOOD. Long time ago.
I went back home to my mold and couldn’t sleep that night. I spent an hour meditating at a Buddhist temple but it didn’t help. I feel so little. So helpless. So corrupted and so sick of whining in vain.
The next day Doug gave me this book about Greenpeace and I got even more depressed – it related the history of nuclear energy/weapons, including the “gadget” Einstein warned Franklin against, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and too many other nuclear “tests”.
Well you know what? History can be pretty sad but in the end, I really do feel like we are all connected –hurting one of us (humans, animals, plants) is like hurting us all. The illusion of invulnerability is a dangerous one that has corrupted very ambitious men and women who blindly act without thinking about the impact/consequences of their actions. We’re like robots living in a crazy world and when I stop and think about it, it scares me.
Enough with the pain and suffering. What is wrong with us? And enough with the mold in my apartment dammit!
More of my pics: http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/255329
