The Moons of Jeju

As spring comes to Jeju and with it a series of stunning moons, I find myself reflecting on a project from grad school that my advisor, Gale Jackson, put into motion a few years ago. It was a time when I thought I’d be leaving Jeju for good, and so I started to say goodbye over the course of the springtime months through poem. 

Gale told me to “look at the moon” and encouraged me to write. I started jotting down a haiku each evening and then compiled my favorites. Haiku should be written fast like brushstrokes, and I slowly painted a picture of spring. It’s interesting to retrace the footsteps – to see the journey from cold to warm as the earth woke up, and to apply meaning to familiar images through a newer lens. 

Last year, I took a trip to Kyoto to see the cherry blossoms. I arrived at peak time when there were fluffy pillows in the gutters. I wandered the streets snapping photos, admiring the silence that the city and the season has to offer. I walked into Nijo castle at night and the illuminated trees took on eerie and mythic personalities with their translucent pinks and whites.

I was supposed to make the same trip this previous weekend. Again, the timing would have been perfect. I had the weekend circled, and as I waded through the day-to-day of work I held that on the horizon. But as events played out in the world, the trip drifted away and I found myself planted on Jeju spending much time at home, wandering the surrounding farm roads with my dog, and running my familiar trails on the weekend. The weekend where I was supposed to be in Kyoto drifted by like an easy petal in the wind. 

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When the global news became serious, at first there was disbelief, and then frustration, and then fear and then acceptance, and now? Now, I find myself wondering what can be done. I think for many it’s been a good chance to reconnect to family and friends, which I’ve been doing, but also it’s been a chance to reconnect to the land. This week a calm has set in as I look around my island. It’s not without the flavor of uncertainty and fear, but my day-to-day has been in stronger contact with the details. I’m trying to take this as a chance to notice, and to see where the past lines up with the present to form a clearer picture.

Reading these poems again, I think about how I felt in that month before leaving Jeju and moving to Shanghai. The mounting electricity of spring that builds and propels you to the full splendor of summer. Trees shake off their delicate scales to show something more verdant and enduring. And it was at that point that I said goodbye to Jeju.

Now that I find myself more or less stuck here on the island, I realize that that electric energy of leaving Jeju might have been that of staying–that my nightly check-ins with the night sky had built an appreciation for something that I have often taken for granted: where I was. When I left Jeju I missed it, and when I came back I forgot that I had. When I wrote the poems or wandered Kyoto I wasn’t enamored by the transitory cherry blossoms of spring, but by the enduring heartbeat of the island or the city. This is an awareness that only honed observation can bring. 

And so tonight as a reminder of that I’ll tilt my head to the sky and pause for a few seconds to look at the moon, knowing that it’s a meeting spot for all of the places where I’ve felt the comfort of place. It’s home to a thousand translucent threads of time, space and memory that it only takes a few moments of pause to connect with. 

Recommended Reading: The Essential Haiku from Bloodaxe Books. An essential collection from haiku masters Basho, Buson and Issa.