Once, in another forest,
I walked beside the quiet pond
with Henry David Thoreau—
learning how little a life requires,
how pine and water
write their patient lessons.

Once, beneath a wider sky,
I listened with Wilhelm Reich
for the hidden pulse
moving between breath and cloud—
body and sky
held within one unseen field.

All things are rooted.
All things share the same breath.

Another root appeared—
older, buried in exile:
Gao Xianzhi,
child of a fallen land,
driven west when Goguryeo
collapsed into history.

In the year 747
he crossed the high ice—
Darkot and the Pamirs—
a thousand riders moving upward,
each man leading two horses
where even air grows uncertain.

Centuries later
Aurel Stein
named that vast wilderness
Innermost Asia.
Others remembered the general
as the King of the Mountains.

History moves beneath the ground.
It does not travel with trumpets.
It remains in the roots—
silent, patient,
waiting for the thaw.

Sometimes a single life
seems no more than ash.
Sometimes a single life
becomes the still point
around which an age turns.

— TaeHun Yoon, 3/5/2026