Daily Sauntering

It was my birthday.

The morning came
as every birthday morning comes—
light entering quietly,
birds rehearsing
their ordinary hymns.

Yet far away,
over Houston,
another morning
lost its way.

Houston—
the city that once
lifted human footprints
toward the moon,
the city that taught children
to look upward
with wonder,
forgot,
for a moment,
the sacredness
of the earth beneath its feet.

A white work van
crossed Magnolia Park.

Nothing remarkable.

Only working men
carrying their lunches,
their tools,
their unfinished dreams.

Among them
rode Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

For thirty-five years
he had lived in Houston.

He built houses
where strangers became families.

He raised three sons
who called America
their own home.

His hands
left no monument,

only roofs against the rain,
walls filled with laughter,
doors opening
to another tomorrow.

Then,

within a few brief moments,

the ordinary morning
was broken.

A stop.

Confusion.

A gunshot.

Dust rising.

Voices trembling.

One father
did not return home.

Somewhere,
a son heard
his father’s desperate cry
through the small window
of a phone.

No child
should inherit
such a memory.

I do not know
every truth
of that morning.

But I know this.

Life
does not belong
to those who carry authority.

Life belongs
to the One
who first bent over dust
and breathed.

Only God
creates life.

Only God
holds its final breath.

Every law
must kneel
before that greater law.

Otherwise,

justice becomes noise,
strength becomes fear,
and power
forgets
its own humanity.

I think
of immigrant hands.

Hands
that harvest fruit,
pour concrete,
hang drywall,
care for the elderly,
prepare our meals,
clean our schools,
build our churches.

Quiet hands.

Faithful hands.

America
stands upon them
more than it knows.

Lorenzo—

your name
is no longer hidden.

It walks
through Houston.

It is carried
by those
who refuse silence.

It is spoken
in prayers,
in marches,
in tears,
and in the quiet hope
that truth
will not remain buried.

Freedom
is not simply
crossing a border.

Freedom
is leaving home
for work
and returning home
to those
who wait at the table.

Justice
is not revenge.

Justice
is truth
walking patiently
until mercy
finds every wounded place.

Even now,

another Voice
echoes across history:

“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”

The cry
from Golgotha
has never disappeared.

It still rises
where innocence suffers.

It still waits
for hearts
willing to listen.

Yet beyond the cross,

morning comes.

The stone moves.

The garden breathes again.

The Resurrected Christ
still walks
through fearful cities,

calling every nation
beyond fear,
beyond hatred,
beyond revenge,
toward love.

Perhaps
that is America’s
unfinished journey.

Perhaps
that is Houston’s
greater moonshot—

not reaching
another world,

but learning
to cherish
every life
in this one.

And may July seventh
be remembered,

not only
as the morning
Houston forgot the moon,

but as the morning
when many hearts
began again
to remember

the image of God
shining
within every human face.

– TaeHun Yoon, July 13, 2026

Thirty-eight thousand feet above the earth, feel like as in the Heaven,

the airplane glides through a white silence.

Clouds drift beneath me like unwritten letters.The wing bends gently west to east, stitching continents together with a silver thread.

Canada fades. Alaska loosens its grip. Russia passes beneath like an old dream half remembered at dawn.

And somewhere ahead—

Korea.

Not merely a country, but a pulse beneath layers of time.

A tiny life crosses decades.

Life continues without asking permission from absence.

My thoughts arrive before I do.

The solemn breathing of Brahms’ Requiem rising through a concert hall.

Ancient palaces standing between memory and glass towers.

The restless trains of Seoul carrying millions of stories through the veins of the city.

Fifty years have passed.

The town of my childhood has vanished into highways, apartments, and names I no longer recognize.

Yet disappearanceis not the same as loss.

My mother’s voice remains.

They live in a country no map can display.

Half a century folds inward like the closing pages of a beloved book.

Below me, mountains gather in silence.

Rivers remember their direction.

Roots wait patiently beneath stone and pavement.

Distance becomes memory.

Memory becomes prayer.

And deep beneath history, beneath nations, beneath the noise of every age,

A voice crossing a thousand years, calling from the shore between myth and homeland.

Soon the wheels will touch earth.

Soon I will step again onto the soil that formed me.

Home is not a Place waiting at the end of a journey.

Home is the light carried within the traveler.

It crosses oceans. It survives years.

It sings through every departure.

And at last,

it brings us back to ourselves.

– TaeHun Yoon, June 1, 2026

세월과 우정이 깊은 골짜기로

깊어질 때 즈음

바다건너 고향 땅에

친구들 만나

백발머리 주름 새로 흐르는

그리움이 구름되여

흐드러지네.

“Flow”

As the years pass

and friendship deepens

into a valley worn by time,

I cross the sea

to meet old friends

upon the soil of my homeland.

There, among white hair

and newly etched lines of age,

longing begins to flow again—

gathering like clouds,

drifting softly,

spreading across the sky.

— TaeHun Yoon, June 6, 2026

The day flowed like a slow river through old friendships and remembered blessings.

At noon,

among the green hills of Ansan,

I shared a table of hanjeongsik with the pastor, now ninety, and his wife—

the two who once stood beside us and blessed our marriage so many years ago.

We spoke of life.

Not of achievements.

Not of regrets.

Only of the years that had come and gone like seasons crossing a mountain.

Their faces carried wrinkles.

Mine did too.

Yet something within us remained young enough to recognize grace.

Then evening came.

The sea waited at Sokcho Harbor.

Fishing boats rested upon the breathing water.

At another tables at a friend and his wife—

a friend I had not seen for fifty years.

Half a century fell away with the first smile.

We spoke of school days, of winding roads, of people we loved who now live only in memory.

The harbor lights shimmered on dark waves.

The sea listened.

Night deepened.

And I gave thanks.

For the pastor who blessed my beginning.

For the friend who returned from my distant youth.

For bread shared.

For stories remembered.

For the long road that brought us here.

A blessed life, I have learned,

is not measured by what we gather,

but by those who still sit with us after the passing of many years.

And by love,

which some how remembers

where to find us again.

– TaeHun Yoon, 6/8/2026

Do you know this place?

Late, perhaps too late,

I walked the tidal flats of Dongmak

in the morning light.

Now, having entered my seventy-seventh year,

I feel the sand receive

what remains of my blood and flesh,

as if the earth itself remembers me.

At last I have returned

to the breathing mudflats,

to the ancient circulation

of sea and sky,

of tide and wind,

and there I find rest.

O vast Ganghwa tidal flats!

One of the great tidal realms of the world,

stretching southward beyond sight,

eighteen million pyeong of living shore,

where the sea withdraws

and reveals four kilometers of shining earth.

I greet you.

I greet the clams hidden beneath your skin on West Sea of Korea,

the crabs writing their small scriptures,

the worms turning darkness into life.

Long before maps,

long before designations and boundaries,

people came here—

to gather shellfish,

to walk,

to wait,

to breathe.

The shore belonged to use,

and use became memory.

The white sand.

The pine trees.

The laughter of families

carried by salt wind.

All of it enters me now.

I stand here,

an old pilgrim of oceans and continents,

and feel my body recognize

what my heart knew long ago:

the earth is not beneath us,

the earth is within us.

Soon I shall leave again.

The roads will call,

the airplanes will rise,

the distances will open.

Yet I say this to the sea,

to the sand,

to the patient breathing flats:

I am only departing for a while.

For one day,

beyond all schedules,

beyond all crossings and returns,

I shall come back.

And this time,

I shall stay.

— TaeHun Yoon, June 13, 2026