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Living in the age of convenience

taiwanese grass jelly herb (3.1/5) (cooling, bitter mint sensation that feels light but has an intense climate. apparently, when steeped with agar agar or gelatin, it can thicken into a jelly. however, i would prefer to drink the herb as is.) "And surely you have seen, in the darkness of the most innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold lead of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness. How in such a dark place, gold draws so much light to itself is a mystery to me. Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold, but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value, for gold in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty." Tanizaki'...
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summer rain PART 2 (Seoul)

FEELING SUMMER RAIN IN SEOUL:

A feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world. Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, will leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain in Seoul washes away dust and brings endless breathing to a person's soul. To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly: that is one of the reasons so many philosophers have balked at considering the essence of rain to be real. I will only ever see the raindrops that are before me, not the essence of beauty. 

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we can gaze at it.

The disposition of the raindrops achieves the universe in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form.

____


The day it rained in Seoul my grandmother gave me a pink envelope. 
A humid summer rain is one that envelopes and suffocates simultaneously 
and that is what I felt when she whispered,

"비오는 날 자금" (rainy day funds)

When the umbrella failed to shield me from feeling insignificant, I cried for my skin,
for my grandmother, for her pine room with a yoga mat bed, for fragility, for summer in Seoul, for the permeance of rain.

I felt grateful for Seoul, for letting me merge my tears in a way so that their disposition could fall again when it rained the day I left.
I felt grateful when I did not cry as my grandmother held my umbrella at the airport bus stop, when she climbed on to simply bid me farewell. 

Instead, as the bus pulled away, I did not cry for the timeless nature of feeling fragile and swollen with insignificance. I did not weep for fallen tears because the day I left,
Seoul cried for me.




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