The Thorn Tree

Within me, there’s too much of myself
It leaves no place for you to find rest

Within me, there are futile wishes

It leaves no place for you to find comfort

Within me, helpless darkness lies

It snatches away your resting seat

Within me, insurmountable sadness

Is poised like a dense forest of thorn trees

Whenever  the wind blows

The dry branchlets chafing against one another, weep

To seek out a resting place, the exhausted little birds

  Hurt by the thorns they fly away.

Within me, there’s too much of myself

It leaves no place for you to find rest.

- 시인과 촌장-

Avoiding U

I simply cant write.
I haven't been in the space where I wanted to write.
Writing makes me think and I don't want to think.
I really desire simplicity.
Wish I could scoop my brain out for a minute and take a break from myself.

So I have been painting, drawing, taking pictures.
Watching comedy shows on youtube while eating on bed.
Doing yoga.
And sleep
Lots and lots of sleep.

And simply just being...
alive,
being my role.
being myself.


A picture paints a thousand words.

Today I've discovered Henri Cartier-Bresson's great photography...
Simply breathtaking.

I dont know if you have the minute to listen to my thousand words.
Lots to share but little the words.
Instead I'll let these speak for me.
To me, they are somewhat comforting.






“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work and the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never dream up if you were just sitting around looking for a great art idea. And that a belief in that the process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel everyday. Today you know what you will do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday and tomorrow you are going to do what you did today and at least for a certain period of time if you can just work to hang in there, you will get somewhere.” – Chuck Close 

Boasting in weakness

The real training for service asks for a hard and often painful process of self-emptying. Training for service is not a training to become rich but to become voluntarily poor, not to fulfill ourselves but to empty ourselves, not to conquer God but to surrender to his saving power. If there is anything to boast about in this world, we should boast of our weakness. Our fulfilment is in offering emptiness, our usefulness in becoming useless, our power in becoming powerless. The movement of the Spirit that Christ has shown us is the movement in which we become less and less fearful and defensive and more and more open to the other and his world, even when it leads to suffering and death. This show that spirituality of the Christian is not only rooted in the reality of everyday life, but also transcends it by relying on the gift of God. We perceive life as a gift not to possess but to share. 

- Henry Nouwen - 

Running away from loneliness

Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into a fruitful solitude. We must have persistent effort to enter into desert of our loneliness. It is possible to move from restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play. We may start to sense that in midst of our sadness there is joy, that in the midst of our fears there is peace, that in the midst of our greediness there is possibility of compassion and that indeed in the midst of our irking loneliness we can find the beginnings of a quiet solitude. 

Reactionary approach to life to the external stimuli of the world makes us very busy and usually very tired as a result. The loneliness of solitude leads to quick, often spastic, reactions which make us prisoners of our constantly changing world. But in solitude of heart we can listen to the events of the hour, the day and the year and slowly “formulate”, give form to, a response that is really our own. 

The solitude of the heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner center. Thus it is not dependent on physical isolation.

-Henry Nouwen-

Facing the empty space

Occupation and not empty space is what most of us are looking for. When we are not occupied we become restless. The preoccupation is in fact a greater stumbling block than occupation. We are so afraid of open spaces and empty places that we occupy them with our minds even before we are there. 

Our worries and concerns are expressions of our inability to leave unresolved questions unresolved and open-ended situations open-ended. They make us grab any possible solution and answer that seems to fit the occasion. Our preoccupation prevent our having new experiences and keep us hanging on to the familiar ways, It often seems that we prefer a bad certainty to a good uncertainty. If we would stop telling ourselves that the world is such and so, it would cease to be so! 

We cannot change the world by a new plan, project or idea. We cannot even change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, to lay aside their occupations and preoccupations and to listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own centre. 

We cannot be filled unless we become first an empty cup. 

- Henry Nouwen-

Letters to a young poet

“be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,,,Do not now seeks answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer... take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon youself and hate nothing”.  


“What is going on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love”

-Rilke-