I love you!

At this moment, opening the first door of the year,
I call your name
in the deepest and quietest voice.

I love you!

Your tears, pain, anguish, joy, nakedness, conflict, mistakes…
all of you, just as you are, I love.

What I ask of you this year is only this:
please do not reject
this imperfect love of mine.

When you are inside iron bars,
my own heart is bound tight with chains.

When you wander the streets of Manhattan
searching for a manhole cover,
I tremble in the coldest place of my soul.

When you are despised by the world,
my pride rises like countless raging waves
and looks down upon itself.

My beloved!

Let your blood-bound “han,*”
your deep sorrow,
ache within me
as the fever of love!

In the far future,
when you find the compass
of the years we lost,
please remember this:

that we are all
debtors of a burning love.

– Wan-Hee Yoon, 1996

Note: (Copilot) “Han” is one of the most distinctive and untranslatable emotional concepts in Korean culture. It cannot be reduced to a single English word. Instead, it is a constellation of emotions, layered and enduring.

The Paradox of Han — Sorrow Becoming Awakening

At its deepest level, Han is transformative. It is sorrow that can turn into: compassion, wisdom, artistic expression, spiritual awakening, moral clarity.

Han is the moment when pain becomes insight, when suffering becomes a doorway to deeper humanity.