◆ People are also part of nature A remote house located on the side of Mangyeongdae Mountain in Yeongwol, 800 meters above sea level. This is the home of poet Seungdo Yoo (63), who is buried in the mountain and has become a part of it. The poet came to the remote mountain village of Yeongwol, Gangwon-do 25 years ago with his 100-day-old son and his wife Misook Kim. The romantic poet and the diligent wife, slow and fast... their paces of life are different, but their daily philosophy is the same. “Let’s do it as much as we can without getting tired, at our own pace!” Living buried in the mountain, the poet has no boundaries between humans and wild animals. He says that he competes for food with wild animals that prey on crops and chickens. In the poet’s poetry, written in the language of nature, even insignificant bugs and birds are just close neighbors who share nature fairly. ◆ ‘My bird’ that called me out of the world Twenty-year-old Seungdo Yoo was particularly tormented by life. After graduating from the Department of Korean Literature, he failed the New Year’s Literary Contest every time and moved from day labor to mining village to make a living, even working on a coastal fishing boat catching sea bream. The tall buildings of the city center seemed to be closing in on him every day, and the whole world approached him like a gangster. So the abandoned mining village of Gujeol-ri in Jeongseon, where he ran away from the world, was a prison for the young Yu Seung-do and himself. He put black paper on every window and lived like a loser without any light. After about a month, one day, he heard the sound of a bird. He wanted to see the bird that had been chirping for several days, so he tore off the black paper and opened the window. Then, with the poem he drew about the bird he met that day, “My Bird,” he won the Munye Joongang New Year’s Literary Contest in 1995 and debuted as a poet. Even now, a pair of woodpeckers and a water magpie have built a nest and are laying eggs in the poet’s barn and yard. 'My Bird', which brought the poet trapped in the darkness back out into the world, and the bird that helped him start the second act of his life in the valley of Yeongwol, are still the poet's most precious and close friends. ◆ If I can't do it today, I'll do it tomorrow 'Wow~Wow~' The sound of a plow echoes through the valley. However, the plow is pulled by his wife, Kim Mi-sook, instead of an ox. The morning wife and the evening husband, the only field work that the couple with different lifestyles do together is plowing and planting seedlings. They are self-sufficient in most things. The wife has no particular complaints about her poet husband, who says he doesn't do two things a day. They just do what they do best, and they can do what each other can't do. Since they live at their own pace, they tend to plant crops later than their neighbors. And that's not all! Dinner time in the season when the days get longer is later than others. That's because for his wife, Kim Mi-sook, the meal time is right! When the sun sets and it gets dark, that's meal time. In the long summer, it is 8~9 o'clock, and in the short winter, it is 4~5 o'clock. The night when wild animals and birds return to their nests in the darkness, the night of the couple who resemble them is also considered a part of nature. ◆ People also flow The poet who climbs the mountain behind the house for a walk always climbs only halfway up the mountain. This is because standing there, he can feel both the arrogance of looking down and the humility of looking up. All things are equal in front of nature, but when he sometimes feels the desire to be arrogant, he can correct the level of his tilted heart by standing here. Also, the clear valley where he can quietly look into himself is a place for self-reflection for the poet. The place where a kind neighbor leaves is filled again by his descendants, and people also flow like water. "It's okay to just live without any particular meaning, life seems to be like that..." This is the consolation that the poet, who lives buried in the mountain and becomes a part of the mountain, throws to the busy world. Natural Human Documentary Philosophers of Nature - Today, too, leisurely [悠悠自適] #Philosophers of Nature #Natural Person #Poet