✨ Introduction
🌿 In this powerful and deeply reflective writing, Master Woo Myung portrays the life of those who wander—chasing dreams, yet often ending in regret, loss, and longing for home.
Many leave their hometowns seeking a better life, driven by ambition or hardship. Yet, over time, they discover that what they truly long for is not wealth, but the place of origin, the warmth of family, and a true refuge for the mind.
🌌 Through this story, Master Woo Myung reveals that wandering in the human world is ultimately rooted in the illusion of desire and separation, and that true peace can only be found when one returns to the true mind and the original place of existence.
✨ This teaching invites us to reflect on the deeper meaning of life, regret, and the path back to Truth.
📖 Original Writing by Master Woo Myung
Wandering
A person who chases floating clouds
knows many things, but he is too lazy to do farm work.
People who chase floating clouds
are arrogant despite the criticisms of those around them,
and they waste away their parents’ fortune.
This is why they are called educated loafers.
With great ambitions but no jobs,
the world does not go according to their will.
They run around town selling the land they have,
but they do not accomplish anything,
so they simply lose the land.
When they return to their hometowns
because there is nowhere else for them to go,
no one welcomes them back.
They go and gamble
in an effort to regain what they had,
but their wealth shrinks further,
and left with nothing
they walk tipsily with a bottle in hand.
During Japanese colonial rule,
our poor neighbors left their homes
to go and earn money in the cities, or to Japan,
and some even went to Bongchun in Manchuria
and became dog traders.
They dreamed of returning when they earned enough money
and worked hard to gain a foothold there,
but by the time they had earned enough to stop worrying,
their hair had already turned grey.
When they do return,
the hometown they dreamed of no longer exists.
All the people they knew have gone somewhere,
with strangers in their places,
and with indescribable regret,
they make their way back.
Those who went North, to Manchuria, to Russia,
or even further abroad, are unable to return
because of their circumstances.
Even if they do return, a time of sorrow awaits them
for their parents and siblings they dreamed of seeing again
are no longer there.
The mind does not age, so they may believe their parents
they saw in the past might still be alive,
but they are not there when they arrive
and they lose the refuge of their minds.
Their hometowns are like a foreign place.
In the human world,
everyone desires to eat and live well,
but we live lives of scrimping and saving,
and raising the children with nothing.
These were our lives.
Those who were disgruntled by this
looked for an easy way out;
they sold the farm and land,
and looked for gold beneath rainbows,
but for certain
their days would have been filled with sighs of regret.
There are so many who left their homes for the cities.
How much must they have suffered,
that so many of them never return.
Now for everyone,
where they currently live are their homes,
but they still hold onto their hometowns in their minds.
It is not people’s human minds, but their true minds
that miss their hometowns.
They miss the time when they lived there
because it is where they came from,
and it is a place of refuge and rest.
Even if it was a time when food was scarce,
it was a time when they lived with their mothers.
A person misses this time even more
when he has no one to lean on.
But more than that, it is the thought of his parents,
unaware of time passing while waiting for him,
weeping every time the cherry blossoms in the yard bloomed
reminding them of him and when he left.
The thought of them makes him blink back tears.
Those who were dragged to the army
unaware of life and death;
those split from us as our nation split into North and South;
this is the sorrow of our nation.
We must unite
so that we can once more live together as one.
We were split because of our own greed,
which is why we have many regrets and sorrows
and lived in such poverty.
This is the reason many left for foreign lands,
leaving behind their wives and children.
When they returned home after growing old,
their hometowns themselves have become a foreign place,
their once young wives, grandmothers,
and their babies, middle-aged adults.
After living abroad,
perhaps with a wife and children,
when one returns to his hometown,
he is disappointed.
Once he returns, he finds
his years of regret and poverty have become sin.
They have become sorrow.
Who is there to blame?
People must live the years of sorrow
with a united will and without sorrows and regrets.
A united world must come
in order for regrets and sorrows to disappear.
– Woo Myung
🌠 Reflect at Santa Clara Meditation
At Santa Clara Meditation, this message is understood at a deeper level.
🌿 Through meditation:
- One realizes that wandering and regret come from the human mind
- Understands why life becomes filled with longing and sorrow
- Returns to the true origin—the place of peace and rest
✨ When one awakens,
there is no longer wandering—only Truth, unity, and completion.
