backlog 1: April 10, 2009

Sakura season... poetry growing on trees. I’m glad I observed its progression so diligently. Spring at five in the morning was how the first tight fists of blossoms seemed to me on the dwarf cherries in Kyoto. Existence was yawning, shaking off the stiffness of winter and inching out the door before dawn. The earliest moments offered only the faintest suggestion of the riot of color and rebirth to follow... a knot of pink or orange on a gnarled gray-brown branch, the first tentative shoots of green probing their way towards the blue of the brand-new sky.  Set against the slopes of shrine roofs and temple gates the metaphor expanded.

The earth is older and newer in every moment than all the monumental human constructions we erect and admire. We are small, our attempts at creating beauty amateurish. We toil, we pray, we plan and build and die, leaving behind the best of our efforts for those who are to come, for them to marvel at and praise. We labor under the illusion of linear progression.   

Cherry blossoms know the truth. Awakening, ambling gently through a few weeks of splendor and dying before the season is out... they know no anxiety, they will not be rushed if tourists mistakenly arrive at five in the morning expecting something greater. 

There's always next year, after all.

Fresh life mingled with, complemented, and mocked the centuries old wood with silent, steady growth.

I came home to the streets of Seoul just as they burst into parallel clusters of pink and white, beautiful in their own way juxtaposed against the flashing neon of the hofs and noraebongs in Sinchon. My father arrived at the perfect moment, right on time to see the flowers at their high noon.

We walked around 한강 공원 on a Saturday filled with families and couples, cameras always at the ready, hoping to capture some emblematic freeze frame of a time that that would surely pass before we’d even realized (Sakura season, but also the awfully short time we had to spend together before his return home.) 

Barely a week later individual petals started to fall like snowflakes, or autumn leaves (is there  anything that is shed or falls in summer? I guess the rain, during 장마.) More couples, more cameras. 

The trees were casting off their morning-forged crown of blossoms in preparation for the summer afternoon to come.