Northern lights and Korea

This month I visited Iceland for the first time. It's a wonderful place of varied cultures, including the Vikings, and marvelous for viewing nature’s beauty and grandeur across the seasons. My wife and I tasted delicious seafood, lamb and other things. We enjoyed a dip in the Blue Lagoon and another geothermal spa. The people are uniformly welcoming and tolerant of lost foreigners. My wife and I rode horses there. We thought about life, our love and family, and the future.

But our favorite experience was to see the northern lights. I hadn’t realized the lights occur because of pieces of the sun hitting the Earth’s atmosphere and traveling to the poles. Amazing! Eriks Esenvald’s composition, “Northern Lights,” helps me. It’s a song about a ship’s crew seeing the northern lights, thinking “the world’s on fire,” and understanding life in its fullness as a result. That’s how I viewed the experience. To be there on my wife’s birthday was moving. It's a singular moment in my life. I look back to understand better life’s beginning and its end.

My visit to Iceland has parallels to my travels in Korea. In many senses, cultures are distinct, or so say anthropologists and other social scientists. But there were many likenesses to my experience of Korea: appreciation of nature, order and reason, a sense of bitterness and happiness, healthy foods, wonderful spas and horses particular to a place.

I can’t forget the DMZ or Panmunjeom. The starkness of absent harmony across the line stays with me. This monstrosity will one day be no more. I understand why it's there. Recent events with North Korea and Russia signal it's going to be there decades more, even to a century, should events remain the same.

I visited Boseong-gun one summer and toured Daewonsa. Gentle streams run like a brook by the temple. The walk through the grounds prompted life reflection for me. These moments are our friends. They call us to greater intentionality, learning and appreciation for what guides us onward.

The Korean people may look too homogeneous, provincial, in particular about their language and culture, and passive-active. The Confucian behavioral norms and deep-running ferment of feeling below the surface make etiquette important. I don’t think that’s wrong or anything other than good. Korean people are wonderfully friendly if one shows oneself friendly. I’ve enjoyed many good moments and next to no bad ones. Some of the best were with complete strangers, in my broken Korean, and keep me thinking well of the possibilities for humanity. Among the best ambassadors are Korean people in daily life.

I’ve enjoyed several mountain climbs in Korea. Mount Dobong, and Mount Nam near Gyeongju are examples. The challenges of climbing brought relief on reaching the summit, even if it wasn’t “the summit.” Stopping to breathe, drink some water and think about the wonder of a beautiful summer or fall day still lingers in my mind. I enjoyed the experience of hearing Koreans sing at mountaintops. Climbing with friends and sharing conversations about life and dreams remain memories for me.

My best friend’s great-aunt remains a person of particular fondness. She had lived through the Korean War and the ferment following it. When I met her, halmoni was enjoying her old age. A great sense of humor, direct, and possessed of a love for food and family, I considered her like a grandmother or great-aunt. Her urgings to aim for and find love in life were gifts of spirit. She remains an example of how I want to live as an older man.

What events and experiences move us to love and celebrate life, even as they mark passing time and our evanescence? I suspect they are many and varied. That’s another way of interpreting the northern lights, the wonder of Korea, and the chances to learn and grow together.

Bernard Rowan (browan10@yahoo.com) is associate provost for contract administration and academic services and professor of political science at Chicago State University. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and former visiting professor at Hanyang University.