INTRODUCTION
✨ In this reflective writing, Master Woo Myung speaks with deep honesty about the passage of time—how youth fades, regrets linger, and memories often fail to comfort us. He describes the loneliness that arises from unfulfilled dreams, the silent passing of the years, and the unique struggle of immigrants who settle far from their homeland, slowly losing their cultural identity. 🌿
Yet the message is ultimately hopeful: when completion spreads throughout the world, humanity will become one. Just as light appears where there is shade, a day will come when the world is unified in Truth. 🌌
ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG
A Limited Time
The day is getting dark,
and a cold early winter draws near.
Spring, summer and fall have passed, as they always do –
isn’t life colorful?
There was a time when it was hard to get through the cold winter
because of the longings and regrets remaining in my mind;
the difficult life of the past became a jinx, and I was lonely.
My regrets, from the time that passed silently and meaninglessly,
come from the things I could not achieve from countless events.
But that time does not return,
and youth does not return.
While people may long for their old memories,
I do not find them beautiful.
Perhaps it is because of the bitterness that comes from
not having been able to do the things I wanted to do,
or have the things I wanted to have.
Times passes meaninglessly and it passes silently,
but what is for certain,
is that the events from those days of long ago
do not return.
Here in America, where I am currently,
there are many who left their homelands with their memories.
They emigrated in order to find a better life.
There are people here from many countries –
North and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Australia,
New Zealand, China, Russia, Uzbekistan, and so on who left
their home countries, holding onto their memories of them; there
are some who died here on foreign soil without being able to go
back, and there are the third and fourth generations of those who
came during the first wave of immigrants, who are still living on
foreign soil.
The Koreans here have little knowledge of Korea, and cannot speak
Korean;
they have adjusted to living in this one part of Earth.
Regardless of where they live,
we are all compatriots,
but then again, we are not really.
We are neither on the same wavelength,
nor can we communicate with each other.
Since we look alike, we glance at each other as we pass,
and that is all – it is a pity.
They have forgotten Korea, their motherland,
and even their religion is not Korean, but someone else’s.
Naturally over the course of time, their ethnicity is slowly disappearing.
When completion, the great path, spreads all over the world,
the world will become one.
It is for that day,
that I have become a traveler of the world,
roaming,
and roaming again.
Just as there are places of light when there are places of shade,
there will come a day when light comes into the shade.
– Woo Myung
REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION
At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners reflect on the fleeting nature of life and the longing humans carry. 🌠 Through cleansing the mind, one discovers the oneness underlying all beings—where regret dissolves and only the eternal Truth remains.
