Writing a poem
is not writing.
It is waiting
without waiting.
Let thought fall away.
Let yourself fall away.
Enter emptiness.
Noise becomes rhythm.
Rhythm becomes seeing.
One thing.
Only one.
The world gathers
into a single word—
flies, returns,
becomes meaning.
In the stillness,
I lose myself.
Then finally,
I am myself.
The poem flows out.
I simply follow.
No more in or out
Beyond the boundary—
her words let me flow outward,
then return as myself.
– After listening to the message of Pastor, Misti Dawn McCreary
Last night,
sleep came to me
in three small rivers.
An hour and a half.
Perhaps two.
Then waking.
Then returning again
to the dark
between one breath
and another.
Outside,
summer had become
an Indian summer—
ninety-eight degrees,
the air feeling
like one hundred five.
My wife said,
“Do not go outside.”
She knew
what the heat could do
to an old body.
She knew
that the fence
could wait,
that the weeds
could wait,
that the work
would still be there tomorrow.
But there is another knowing
inside the body—
a knowledge
that cannot always
be explained.
I know my body.
I know that
after two or three hours
of honest labor,
after sweat has washed
the dust from my skin,
after my back has spoken
its language of pain,
sleep sometimes
finds me.
Three hours.
Four.
A long, uninterrupted
journey through the night.
So I dressed myself
for the furnace.
Heavy boots.
Long work jeans.
Sleeve protectors.
Work gloves.
Tools in my hands.
And I stepped outside
into ninety-five degrees
of living fire.
Not bravely.
Not foolishly.
Simply
as one who has learned
that life sometimes asks
to be entered
rather than observed.
Every twenty minutes
I stopped.
Water.
Shade.
Breath.
Silence.
Then again—
rise.
Work.
Sweat.
Breathe.
There came a moment
when thought disappeared.
No yesterday.
No tomorrow.
No age.
No name.
Only the tool
moving through the earth,
the breath entering,
the breath leaving,
the heart beating,
the sun burning,
the sweat falling.
One drop.
Then another.
Then another.
I watched them
without watching.
And suddenly
the falling water
became a teaching.
Everything falls.
Rain falls.
Leaves fall.
Night falls.
Years fall.
The body falls
toward the earth.
And yet—
inside the falling—
something rises.
Water descends.
Consciousness ascends.
Perhaps this
is the secret
hidden in old age.
The body remembers
gravity.
The spirit remembers
light.
My knees tremble.
My back aches
as though a rope
were being pulled
through the bones.
My breath becomes
short and uneven.
My shirt grows heavy
with sweat.
Then another shirt.
Then another.
The weight of a day
can sometimes
be measured
in wet cotton.
And still,
beneath all this,
something whispers:
Not yet.
Not yet.
Do not mistake
the weakening of the body
for the death
of the spirit.
Do not confuse
rest
with surrender.
Do not allow
the wisdom of age
to become
the excuse of age.
For there is
a thin line—
almost invisible—
between caution
and fear,
between acceptance
and resignation,
between knowing
one’s limits
and making those limits
one’s home.
“I am old.”
“It is too hot.”
“I might fall.”
“I should stay inside.”
All may be true.
And yet
a life can disappear
one small permission
at a time.
A little less walking.
A little less reaching.
A little less lifting.
A little less wonder.
Until one day
we are practicing
the eternal sleep
before death
has even called our name.
So I go outside.
Not to defeat
the summer.
Not to prove
that I am still young.
But to remember
that I am alive.
I move
until the boundary
between myself
and nature
becomes thin.
The tree beside me
does not ask its age.
The wind does not count
how many summers
it has crossed.
The earth does not say,
“I am too old
to receive another seed.”
Everything simply
continues.
The falling water
returns as cloud.
The cloud becomes rain.
The rain becomes river.
The river enters
the sea.
Nothing is lost.
Everything changes form.
Perhaps I am changing too.
Perhaps aging
is not simply
the descent
of the body.
Perhaps it is
the widening
of consciousness—
a deeper seeing,
a quieter listening,
a surrender
to what cannot be held.
I am seventy-seven.
I know the road
of physical strength
is going downhill.
I do not deny it.
I do not fight it.
But I will not
walk downhill
in consciousness.
Let the body
grow older.
Let the hair
turn white.
Let the knees
become slower.
Let sleep
come in broken pieces.
But let the heart
remain awake.
Let the spirit
keep moving.
Let consciousness
find its way upward—
against gravity,
against heat,
against fear,
against the quiet temptation
to stop.
Perhaps this
is what it means
to grow old:
not to become
less alive,
but to discover
a different kind
of youth.
A youth
without muscles.
A youth
without speed.
A youth
without the illusion
of permanence.
A youth
made only
of wonder,
courage,
gratitude,
and the willingness
to begin again.
Tonight,
perhaps sleep
will come once.
Perhaps three times.
Perhaps only
for a little while.
It does not matter.
I have listened
to the falling water.
I have felt
the sweat become prayer.
I have heard
my old body
speaking to the earth.
And somewhere
between the downward pull
of gravity
and the upward movement
of consciousness,
I heard
the smallest voice—
almost nothing,
almost silence:
You are still here.
Rise.
Begin.
So let the water fall.
Let the years fall.
Let the body fall
gently toward the earth.
But let consciousness
rise—
slowly,
quietly,
like a single drop
climbing back
toward the cloud.
And perhaps,
in the great mystery
of aging,
this is enough:
to fall
without surrendering,
to bend
without breaking,
to rest
without giving up,
and to keep flowing
against the falling water
until the last light
finds its way home.
(the voice of Sehyung Lee)
At the bottom of the abyss,
where all names fall silent
and life leans toward death,
I saw two hands—
one descending
like a leaf released by autumn,
the other rising
like a small flame
searching for the dawn.
Between them
was almost nothing—
only a trembling space
where grief became prayer,
where sorrow,
having nowhere else to go,
began to open
into blessing.
My friend, JongSu,
has gone beyond us.
And suddenly
the world is changed.
The birds still cross the morning.
The river still carries the sky.
The wind still moves
through the trees.
Yet something has become quieter—
as though one voice
has entered
the great silence.
He walked among us
with a clear mind,
a humble spirit,
and an honesty
that needed no witness.
He did not measure his life
by the height of achievement
but by the depth
of a faithful heart.
We studied together.
We laughed.
We traveled through long nights,
with river wind against the windows
and hope somewhere ahead of us.
Those years remain—
not as photographs,
but as light
held quietly
inside the soul.
His spirit was like hammered silver—
shaped by fire,
made luminous by endurance,
simple enough
to reflect the face of God.
Then illness came.
But suffering
did not diminish him.
It seemed instead
to uncover something
that had always been there—
a deeper courage,
a gentler light,
like a candle
that burns more faithfully
when it knows
the night is near its end.
Now
the two hands meet.
The hand we release
is not falling
into emptiness.
It is falling
into the Hand
that has been reaching for it
from the beginning.
Perhaps death
is not the closing
of a door,
but the moment
when we discover
that the distance
between heaven and earth
was never as wide
as we imagined.
Rest, dear JongSu,
in the country without pain,
where no body grows weary,
where no goodbye
needs to be spoken,
where the soul
returns to the music
it heard
before it knew its own name.
And when, one day,
my own hand
rises toward
the final horizon,
if there is a place
where the living
and the departed
can still recognize one another,
may you be there—
smiling,
your hand extended,
waiting for mine.
And perhaps
we will say nothing.
Perhaps
our hands will speak
what words could never say:
You were here.
I was here.
We walked together.
And love did not end.
Amor fati.
To love even this—
the leaving,
the silence,
the unknown.
To trust
that the hand we must release
is already held
by the Hand
that never lets go.
And to believe,
at the very edge
of the horizon,
that no beloved soul
ever truly disappears—
it only passes
from our hands
into God’s.
Note: Rev. Dr. Sehyoung Lee created this image of two hands upon hearing that his dearest friend, the late Rev. Dr. JongSu Park, had passed away on August 18, 2026
– 이 세형 박사의 백두 천지 기행을 보고
한라의 백록담
백두의 천지
아,
그리운 나의 강산
그렇지
아무렴 구름과 바람이 되어
우리의 소원 어디에 있든
마침내 자유되리
오가는 단군의 얼
모두 사물로 어우러져
사당패의 장단처럼
한마당으로 살아가리
얼쑤
(- voice of Esq. Kyung-ho Kim)
I call the names of those who rose—
from furrows, from hunger, from the dust of the earth—
the people who learned that a human being is heaven
and stood upright with that sky in their chests.
I call Suun,
who split the world with one sentence
and made the lowly tall.
I call the farmers of 1894,
burning the chains,
lifting bamboo spears like lightning,
walking into the iron storm
with nothing but equality for armor.
I call Ugeumchi—
the great falling,
the red field,
the thunder of thirty thousand souls
whose breath rose again
in 3·1,
in 4·19,
in 5·18,
in the candles that lit the night,
in every cry that says
the people are the root of the nation.
I call the forgotten ones,
the mislabeled ones,
the descendants who carried shame
that was never theirs.
I call the reckoning—
the day the nation will say:
We remember you.
We honor you.
We rise because you rose.
동학 is not past.
동학 is the fire under our Constitution,
the sky inside our breath,
the thunder still walking the land.
I widen the self—
a river growing through silence,
even as the world tries to erase silence
with noise, machines,
endless invitations to become something else.
Still, I seek the quiet:
the breath before dawn,
the small interior room
where the soul remembers how to listen.
Rituals once shaped us—
a cup passed,
a gesture repeated,
a meal shared,
a song held for remembrance.
They taught us to pause,
to gather,
to bless,
to belong.
Now they fade.
Habit becomes optimization.
Identity becomes a project.
Relationship becomes an upgrade.
The heart becomes something to manage.
So I deepen the individual—
not as a fortress,
but as a field wide enough
for others to walk through.
I am memory and possibility,
silence and song,
faith and doubt—
a river carrying many waters.
We call productivity’s frantic rhythm, freedom..
We call exhaustion achievement.
We turn the self into a brand
and the heart into a task.
But I resist.
I want to breathe without producing,
sit without performing,
listen without calculating,
love without measuring.
My old creature still lives in me—
survival, pleasure, power, desire.
I teach desire toward compassion,
power toward responsibility,
survival toward care.
Even the animal of Imperial Christianity*in me
longs for a ritual
to bow,
to bless,
to belong.
I heard beyond Golgotha Hill,
“The good heart is deeper than religion.”
Kindness becomes ritual.
The human face becomes temple.
Shared breath becomes scripture.
I do not abandon faith.
I deepen it—
from possession to participation,
from certainty to wonder,
from doctrine to compassion,
from belonging to one group
toward belonging to humanity.
I am not a single note,
but a chord—
animal and spirit,
solitary and communal,
wounded and hopeful,
remembering and becoming.
And you—
walking this trembling earth—
you contain multitudes.
You are a river.
You carry forgotten songs beneath the noise.
Perhaps your silence is waiting to become prayer.
Perhaps your kindness is waiting to become ritual.
Perhaps your wound is waiting to become a doorway.
O world, rest.
O capitalism, yield.
O rituals, return as living gestures.
O heart, refuse to become a machine.
Let us remember how to gather,
how to listen,
how to bless,
how to belong.
I deepen.
I widen.
I become.
And in becoming myself,
I discover—
I am never only myself.
* Imperial Christianity (How Constantine Created the Christian Right) by Wayne Lavender, Market Square Books
– TaeHun Yoon, 8/20/2026
I took this picture on my iPhone
on August 20, 2026, at 9:47 p.m.
The crows came
into my backyard this morning—
black wings
against a pale and trembling sky,
singing their ancient song:
Caw.
Caw.
Caw.
Their voices were rough,
almost sorrowful,
and somehow
they stirred a fragile place
inside my heart.
For inside our house
SaRang was trembling—
five pounds of fur,
a small body,
a little heart
suddenly too weak
for the morning.
And I watched my wife
lift her into her arms.
Then something became clear.
She had not simply
cared for SaRang.
She had become attached to her.
She had woven SaRang
into the fabric of her days—
into her mornings,
her walks,
her quiet rooms,
her ordinary routines,
until this little dog
had quietly become
part of her own life.
Perhaps we don’t know
how deeply we love
until we fear losing.
Like roots beneath the earth,
love grows silently—
until the storm comes
and reveals
how deep the roots have gone.
Through the night
my wife held SaRang,
whispering prayers
into the darkness.
I watched her
and realized:
SaRang was no longer simply
a dog she loved.
SaRang had become
a member of her heart.
At the veterinarian’s office,
fear sat beside her.
Then she waited all day long
for the blood test.
Then came the message:
Normal.
One ordinary word—
but it opened
the gates of heaven.
My wife wept.
Not only because
SaRang was safe,
but because she suddenly understood
how much of herself
had become bound
to this little life.
She had carried SaRang
in her arms,
but in some mysterious way,
SaRang had been carrying
her heart all along.
When SaRang came home,
she walked—
slowly,
carefully,
but without trembling.
My wife watched
every little step.
She slipped once,
then rose again.
And my wife whispered:
“It is a miracle.”
Then she followed SaRang
from room to room,
a little dog
following her mother,
a mother
following the movement
of her own heart.
“My angel,”
she whispered.
Again.
And again.
Now I understood
that the words were not merely
a name of affection.
They were a confession:
“I didn’t know
how much I loved you
until I almost lost you.”
I returned to the backyard.
The crows were still there.
Caw.
Caw.
Caw.
Their dark voices
no longer sounded frightening.
They sounded like
the rough music of awakening—
the music that reminds us:
Life is fragile.
Love is deeper
than we know.
And sometimes
we discover ourselves
through the fear
of losing another.
Where is Hell?
Perhaps Hell is the trembling
of someone we love
in our arms.
Where is Heaven?
Perhaps Heaven is a little dog
walking safely across the floor,
and a wife
crying tears of relief,
finally conscious
of the enormous love
she had carried
without even knowing its size.
The crows rise
into the morning sky.
Caw.
Caw.
Caw.
And I stand beneath them,
grateful for this strange lesson:
Sometimes fear
reveals love.
Sometimes love
reveals ourselves.
And sometimes
a little dog named SaRang
becomes the mirror
in which a mother
finally sees
the depth of her own heart.
– TaeHun Yoon
August 17, 2026
— Song of My Soul, Song of My Tenelach
I do not write
to follow rules
or to walk the tidy paths
someone else laid down.
I write
because something inside me
has begun to speak—
a small trembling voice
that feels less like my own
and more like a visitor
sent by God.
For years
I kept my inner life hidden.
Grief folded quietly
into the corners of the heart.
Joy guarded like a fragile flame.
Regret carried behind a practiced smile.
I learned to appear whole
even when something inside me
was quietly breaking.
But a heart
cannot hold everything forever.
One day the silence cracks,
and truth rises—
slowly, then suddenly—
like a long‑sleeping mountain
finding its fire again.
So I write.
Not because I am wise,
but because poetry lets me say
what I could never say aloud:
I was hurt.
I was grateful.
I feared.
I hoped.
I failed.
I loved.
I am learning.
Sometimes my poems
feel like small apologies—
to those I misunderstood,
to those I wounded,
and to the younger self
who waited so long
to be spoken for.
Writing gives regret
a place to breathe.
It gives gratitude
a voice.
It gives sorrow
a shape.
It gives joy
a room to dance.
And I write
because I am an introvert
walking quietly
through a loud world.
Conversation hesitates.
Words tangle.
But a poem—
a poem travels freely,
crossing the distance
between two hearts
without knocking.
Somewhere,
a stranger may read my lines
and whisper,
“I have felt this.”
And suddenly
we are no longer strangers.
Two quiet souls
meet inside a single moment.
This is tenelach—
the soul‑friendship
that happens without introduction,
without biography,
without explanation.
A meeting of hearts
in the quiet space
where God often speaks.
I write also
to touch the unseen consciousness
moving through the world—
someone in Korea,
someone in America,
someone I will never meet.
Yet for one breath
our souls lean together
over the same flame.
And perhaps
there is a deeper reason still.
I want to enter
a timeless place—
a place where clocks
cannot reach me,
where my aging body
does not have the final word,
where imagination
is free,
where beauty
does not die.
Perhaps I want
to live beyond myself—
not in monuments,
not in stone,
not even in memory,
but in the breath of a poem.
A line may travel farther
than the life that made it.
A heart may stop,
but a poem may continue breathing.
And then—
I am still there.
Not as a body,
but as a presence.
Not as a name,
but as a feeling.
Not bound by time,
but released into it.
So I write.
I write when I am joyful.
I write when I am grieving.
I write when regret knocks.
I write when silence grows heavy.
I write when beauty surprises me.
I write when memory rises like smoke.
I write when a new thought
opens like a flower in the dark.
I write because
my heart has finally learned
that it does not need
to remain silent.
Let the poem come
as it wishes—
like rain,
like fire,
like a wandering bird
crossing the evening sky.
Let it tremble.
Let it wander.
Let it breathe.
Because poetry
is not something I force.
It is something that happens
when my inner life
meets the presence of God
and begins to speak.
This is the song of my soul.
This is my way
of being with God—
as a tenelach,
a quiet companion
walking beside the Eternal
with trembling hands
and an open heart.
And when my hands grow still,
when my voice becomes quiet,
perhaps somewhere
a stranger will open a poem
and find me there—
still breathing,
still wondering,
still loving,
still becoming.
This is why I write poems.
Not to obey rules,
but to free the heart.
Not to escape life,
but to enter it more deeply.
Not to live forever in the body,
but to remain alive
in imagination
and in the hearts
of those I may never know.
I write—
and therefore,
I continue to live.
— TaeHun Yoon, August, 2026
I used not to ask anything.
All my life, I did the work myself.
Do it alone — never ask — that was my rule.
And yet, there I was again
on the bathroom floor,
learning that nothing about making something better
is ever easy.
The old toilet was gone.
The new one waited.
Two stubborn screws
refused to stay still.
I tried to align them —
left, right, again —
the familiar rhythm
of a man who has spent decades
solving problems with his own hands.
Then came the greater challenge:
the weight of ceramic
in my seventy‑seven‑year‑old arms.
I lifted.
I steadied my back.
I searched beneath the bowl
for the wandering screws,
like an old man hunting treasure
in a dim attic.
Left—
right—
again.
And then—
Ah.
It settled.
For a moment, I felt the old pride:
I can still do this alone.
But the truth rose quietly beside me.
My son stepped in —
not because I asked,
but because he saw the weight
and came close.
He lifted the heavy toilet with me,
guiding it gently
over the two screws.
Together,
what was almost impossible
became possible.
And I understood something
I had resisted for a lifetime:
Even a man who has done everything alone
can be strengthened
by another pair of hands.
Cooperation is not weakness.
It is wisdom.
One pair of hands can struggle.
Two pairs of hands
can accomplish what one cannot.
Then came the water connector —
too short,
the stubborn seven‑eighths‑inch fitting
refusing to cooperate.
I breathed deeply.
Patience —
gathered through seventy‑seven years —
returned to me.
I adjusted.
I tried again.
I kept going.
Slowly,
the impossible
became possible.
This is meliorism —
not believing things get better by themselves,
but believing they get better
when effort meets companionship.
Not perfection —
but improvement.
Not finishing everything —
but making one small corner of the world
better than we found it.
One toilet.
One project.
One lesson.
One son beside his father.
One generation helping another.
And I see clearly now:
Hope works with its sleeves rolled up.
Faith sometimes holds a wrench.
And cooperation —
even for a man who used to ask nothing —
turns struggle into accomplishment.
Nothing is free.
Nothing is merely boring.
Everything teaches.
I used to do it alone.
But today,
over the two screws,
I learned again:
Together, we lift.
Together, we align.
Together, we finish.
Together, we become.
*My two screws were ‘pride and prejudice.’
— TaeHun Yoon, August 13, 2026
Daily Sauntering 
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