This might get messy

or:
Superhuman

It's an eight hour drive to Mokpo, the southern coast of Korea. The forest starts right at the yellow line at the edge of the paved road. The canopies make mountains that slope up and down--like giant, mossed elephants lying next to the freeway. It feels like I can run down their green trunks, jumping atop one head to the next. The crisp air pierced my pores and I could breathe again. But I didn't know that I'd been suffocating. And these psycho-social images: money, career, family, time, an inability to provide. Unnatural fear and concern left me, carving off the inhibiting excess that held me back from being human. Not human to err, but to be surpassing with inexhaustible room for growth. And human capacity--innate consciousness over rocks, body over plants, mind and reason over animals.

I wanted the lush sight to sink into my bones, the feeling that I could bound over the mountain edge into the black space. I must have been in a snow globe when the top cracked open, a whole set of capabilities and vigor widening my mind. Like I hit "empty bin" to the trash I didn't know that held me back physically, mentally, psychologically, socially from fitting dreams/goals into a worth life. Sometimes, there are grave mounds on the mountainside, the old generations that sleep with one eye open. I smiled out of ego. The past and their spirits, the precursor staring wearily at the future generation that drives by on bald tires. The feared world they must have left. I wanted to make them proud.

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words: Angela Koh, Korea/California (blog)