a zuihitsu to

a zuihitsu to zuihitsu

one

I am searching for a form to carry me — not quite commonplace book, not quite morning pages, though perhaps somewhere in-between. Through hopscotch, I’ve come across zuihitsu: what is fragmented and interconnected, descriptive and evasive, understood and unknown, all at once.

two

Is there a word in Korean for the untold?

three

There have been three occasions when I’ve looked into a stranger’s eyes, for unbroken minutes. As we shared reflections into a circle, my partner offered an observation of me — “I noticed one eye was happy. And one eye was sad.”

How strangers know our truths, before we know them ourselves.

four

I am comforted by Audre Lorde’s explanatory notes to Adrienne Rich, on the progression behind “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” — “They’re part of something that’s not finished yet. I don’t know what the rest of it is, but they’re clear progressions in feeling out something connected with the first piece of prose I ever wrote. One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my perceptions — pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever …”

five

The personal is political.

six

The whistle and the steam transport him back to his childhood, growing up in Ulsan. He has told me before that a station and a river connected through the town; and this is the route he took at age 12, returning home on boats and trains and cash borrowed from a friend, as the war closed and bombs dropped on Tokyo.

He loses himself in fragments of vision and time and space — shakes his head.

“So — my memories are still there.”

I hold my stillness, and see where his mind connects next.

seven

“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

eight

Starting in the mid-1990’s, psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush researched myth, ritual, and emotional resilience in American families. They developed a 20-question measure, called the “Do You Know?” scale.

Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know if illness or something really terrible has ever happened in your family?

Over dozens of conversations with families and kids, they found relationships between knowledge of family history and emotional health, happiness, and self-esteem.

To know where you’ve come from — is to belong to something bigger. They call it the strength of an intergenerational self.

nine

For days after the Atlanta shootings, my body is silt and water in a storm.

And I know, without evidence, that this history is my own.

ten

I learn that Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank share the same birth year. If they were alive today, they would be 92. This is the same age as Haba, though by the Korean calendar, he says he is 93.

eleven

I tear off the bottom square of a receipt, and shape it into an offering. I tuck its wing beside an amber stone, under strings of prayers dancing in the wind.

I still think of Sadako, each time I fold a paper crane.

twelve

We pause on the path, between red rocks and cacti — blowing wishes on my white hairs, in a tradition we made up, today.

thirteen

Zuihitsu is Japanese, but Sino-Japanese — put together in elements borrowed from Chinese. 随筆. In its oldest essence, it means to “follow the brush,” wherever it may lead.

a zuihitsu to zuihitsu follow the brush