While walking through Boramae Park before dawn, I happened to notice a withered flower.

Out of all the flowers and trees in Boramae Park, this particular one caught my eye.

I took a picture and was on my way home, thinking, “It’s beautiful.” Then, all of a sudden, a question popped into my head.

Are withered flowers beautiful?

I wonder if there are people who look at a wilting flower and feel a sense of beauty. A withered flower is a flower that is dying.

That question soon led me to another one:

Is death beautiful?

There are phrases like “an honorable death” or “a beautiful death,” but I’ve never heard anyone simply say that death itself is beautiful.

I don’t think death itself is beautiful. And yet, I looked at a wilting flower and felt that it was beautiful.

So what was it that I found beautiful?

Boramae Park is one of my favorite places. Even by a rough estimate, I’ve probably been here at least 400 times, maybe even 500.

I’ve experienced all four seasons here. Of them, spring is the season when the park gets the most crowded, and when people most often say how beautiful it is as they take pictures.

Before spring comes winter. It’s also the season when the year comes to an end.

Spring brings warmth to the cold winter that leaves nothing behind but bare branches and empty ground, filling the landscape once again with green leaves and new sprouts.

Nature repeats the cycle of disappearance and birth. In nature, an ending does not exist simply as an ending; it leads to another beginning.

The change from winter to spring feels like the transition from disappearance to birth.

We don’t cry and grieve when winter comes, because we know that spring will come once winter has passed.

The fallen leaves of a maple tree return to the soil, only to sprout as new leaves the following spring. Even the croaks of the narrow-mouthed frogs I heard last summer return the following summer.

Maybe this is where I found beauty—in the cycle of nature.

Because I know that birth comes after disappearance, I look forward to the flowers blooming again.

That anticipation is hope. And perhaps beauty exists not only in flowers that have already bloomed, but also in the hope held by flowers that have yet to bloom.

This thought made me think about human life once again.

What is it that makes life beautiful?

A life that is lived while slowly moving toward death.

If you live your life with nothing but death in sight, everything can start to feel meaningless. Thinking, “I’m going to die anyway,” takes away your motivation and makes life feel fleeting and pointless.

One unfortunate thing is that we cannot be born again.

In fact, nothing in nature is ever truly born again. The flowers that seem to be the same flowers growing in the same place each year are actually new lives born with the changing seasons. They simply take the same form.

Nature welcomes spring every year, but spring never comes twice in a human life.

From a withered flower, I learned that what makes life beautiful is hope—the hope that looks beyond the end and toward what comes next, within the limited span of one person’s life that will someday end and never return.

Looking forward to something and living while waiting for what has yet to come can bring energy into our everyday lives. It makes us feel alive.

Just as we find beauty in nature by looking forward to flowers blooming again, perhaps what makes our lives beautiful is not the end itself, but the ability to look toward what comes after it.

Just as nature repeats the cycle of disappearance and birth, hope also comes and goes. So perhaps, like a maple tree growing new leaves every year, we need to keep finding new hope for ourselves.

And I came to realize that a life without hope is not all that different from living while staring only at death.

August at Boramae

Before sunrise, on a summer morning in Boramae Park, it’s not uncommon to see people already starting their day.

People out for a light jog, people on their way to work, groups of people gathering together to stretch.

Someone young like me, wandering around at this early hour in a pair of flip-flops, is probably a rare sight.

I looked up at the sky and saw the clouds taking on a pink hue as the sun began to rise.

I stood there for quite a while, staring at the strange, dreamlike atmosphere spread across the wide sky.

As the sun rose, the clouds gradually turned orange, and that atmosphere slowly faded away.

This is what Central Track Plaza looks like as the day slowly begins to brighten.

I sat down for a moment and watched the people passing by.

The Seoul International Garden Fair was held here last year, and there’s still a beehive that was built for the event.

According to the sign, it’s a hotel for bees.

If you wait around long enough, you can sometimes catch the bees staying at the hotel.

A while later, I looked up at the sky again and saw two huge fallen leaves floating up there.

Where did those leaves fall from? Or… did they float up there?

A Few Photos from August

Photo 1

A little shop inside a subway station that I photographed on my way to an exhibition at Culture Station Seoul 284, held to commemorate Seoul Station turning 100 years old.

Normally, I would have just walked past it, but that day I had some time to kill while waiting for the train, so I stopped to take a look.

Photo 2

Someone is playing Joe Hisaishi’s Summer on a piano at Seoul Station 7017.

I wonder if this is how they welcome summer.

Photo 3

An entrance to a building somewhere in Jungnim-dong.

The garden was decorated so beautifully that I had to take a picture.

Photo 4

I went to see an exhibition called House of Taste 2 at D Museum.

There, I came across a sentence that felt like a question striking me hard over the head with a heavy stone.

What am I collecting as I go through life?

It made me think about what I have now and what I want to collect in the future.

Photo 5

This sentence can be found on the second-floor rooftop of Seoseoul Museum of Art.

No matter what the weather is like, I feel like coming up here would somehow make it seem like a beautiful day.

Photo 6

On a day when the rain was pouring down, a couple of dolls had gotten on the bus to escape the rain.

There’s something romantic about the bus driver’s little dolls.

Chun-jang’s Summer Nights

August 8 is International Cat Day.

To celebrate, I bought Chun-jang some Churu treats.

While I was taking out the Churu, he stood proudly on top of the fence on all four paws. That bright-eyed look of his.

Chun-jang doesn’t simply lick his Churu when he eats it. He has his own way of doing things.

First, he bites through the packaging with his teeth, then meticulously licks up whatever squeezes out.

For such an aggressive way of eating, his two front paws are surprisingly proper and well-behaved.

After finishing every last bit of his Churu, he saunters back to his usual spot.

Maybe the sugar rush hit him, because Chun-jang curled up into a loaf and promptly fell asleep.

After making my way around Boramae Park, I went to see what Chun-jang was up to.

He had completely stretched himself out and was fast asleep.