A Refuge

There is a place I like to go to sit and think. Since I was a child I had a habit of staying away from crowds and loud noises. Somehow I manage to find some semblance of sanity even in this overcrowded city of Seoul.

The stream you see in the picture was once filled with raw sewage and covered with cement. If you look in the distance you can see a bridge and on both sides you can see cement walls. This is because the stream is under the street level. In the past the stream was more like a sewer and above the stream was a parking lot.

I'm glad someone had sense in the city to tear down the parking lot and renew the stream about fifteen years ago. It has taken some time but now the native species have come back. I see fish happily swimming down stream. Asian water birds and ducks hang out here. The water is now clean enough that I'm not afraid to take my shoes and socks off and wade in the middle.

As I close my eyes and hear the waters flow my mind drifts off beyond the business of the city and cars noises. I hear the tweeting of the birds and the splashing of a happy catfish. My mind drifts beyond the concrete and human history until I can feel only the stream and its story.

She whispers in her splashing voice,

"I am the water flow
Nature's refuge for all who go
Chain me in shekels
I burst out in laughter
Cover me with cement
A flood will come after"

Following the stream

This is her story. Beyond that it just makes me feel good to be in a place I can rest and feel the warm sunshine of a Spring day. There is a bicycle path on the side of the stream and the city used to give out free bikes to whoever wanted them. Now they turned that place into a 7-11 convenience story. It's a lot harder to find bicycles around there now and it is not easy to ride there from our house because our house is on the other side of the mountain.

If I had a lot of extra money I would buy some good quality mountain bikes to ride over the mountain but it is a lot easier to just walk there. When we follow the stream down toward the river we find more people and more open areas. We never have to leave the city to find some places of nature preserved. The difference is that nature in the city is not exactly natural. It is very planned and people have to take a conscious effort to maintain it. Still I'm glad someone took the effort to keep some nature in a place that was used to park cars.

I'm not the only person in Korea who recognized the River Flows in You.

This post has been in response to the weekend engagement prompt from Galenkp's The Weekend engagement post here.