Green

The wild roses that are slow to bloom are the daughters and followers of roses. They are the chorus of the rose that heated up the summer of June. The calling of the wild rose is a graceful completion of the song of the rose.

Like all belated things do, wild roses indicate things to come rather than things that have passed. If the rose opens its eyes, the wild rose wakes up from the dream with closed eyes. The wild rose does not endeavor to court the color red. It does not lose its sight over shine. Unlike humans in the latter part of their lives, it does not become obsessed with, as Nietzsche puts it, “the sharp thorn fence of cognition.” The wild rose becomes rich, for it knows when it gives up its desire by itself.

At the moment it withers, it lets go its silk smooth beauty, and when the sweet scent disappears, the wild rose says farewell and lights a small and red light: a shy, tiny fruit.

Then out of somewhere, a hungry bird flies and picks up this light and flies away to the clouds of the twilight.

Czech Poet Jan Skacel once wrote:

Long time ago next to a dandelion

As I promised looking to the yellow eyes of a thrush

This book digs up the secrets of the soul and mystery of life that are imbued in mundane things and in nature inside the garden of our hearts. Countless poets and mystics are used to convey the “Green Language” created by smart love and mild patience.

The author, who claims to be an urban “greenist,” tells that we should keep our senses wide open and feel that every aspect of being alive is a miracle. “Find the rose garden inside your soul. The rose is quiet, and the deep silence will extract the thorn in your heart.”

When there was a tulip speculation craze in the Netherlands in 1936, people forgot what was really precious in their lives. “People were forgetting where God’s wealth was fully blooming. When quietly observing the beauty of the tulip, you will know on which parts of the tulip God invested in.”

There is a myth in Germany, saying, when holding a forget-me-not, one can find a hidden treasure. But at the moment that one drops the forget-me-not to grab that treasure, the magic disappears. We lose the true treasures of our lives.

The author says that his heart opens unconsciously when he is watching an apple flower turned against the light. He carefully tells us to listen to the blooming lilac confess its love to spring. He tells us to read the graceful, lovely letter carved by the night fairy on the white bark of the birch tree that glitters like a heavenly mirror. He advises us to submerge ourselves into the playfulness of the fairy that lets itself float on the soft wind and helps out creation and chaos with wit and wisdom.

The author asks if you feel God’s grace while touching the slender daisy. “The daisy is the flower of children, the teacher of small movements. That perfect humility is a pure sign that means small power. This small life can give such a great comfort to us.”

While following the trail of clouds, the author falls into meditation. “The clouds gain their true shape when they disband their existing shape. Even when it becomes an immensely large ship full of noble silence with its anchor on the sky seemingly lasting forever, the cloud is more finite than a single flower petal and more meaningless than the moment itself. Existing things do not exist. What appears is itself, but it is not itself,” wrote Goethe.

In ancient Egyptian pictographs, green meant happiness. Happiness is green like a green plant, so no green life in our gardens is poor.

The butterfly represents the joy and happiness of this life. Where the butterfly flaps its wings, a piece of paradise is created. The butterfly refuses a set firm point; it rather considers the endless large space, the empty space, as its home, with its tranquil, lively grace. The butterfly, from its innermost nature, is a turbulent empty space. An empty space full of flowering colors that is.

Gi-U Lee keywoo@donga.com