Today, I’ll tell the story of our hope card, featuring the azalea.
This drawing has a bit of a darker origin. But when you really think about it, doesn’t it make sense that hope would arise out of a place of despair?
There are several drawings in the Gratitude Blooming deck that were inspired by my family. As an example, I asked my mom and dad, who both are avid gardeners, what flowers they remember when they were growing up. Now my parents are special (aren’t they all?!). They were born in what is now North Korea. And they were both separated from their families during the Korean War. They both hoped for reunification with their families and for their country - a hope that to this day is not fulfilled. So when I asked them about remembering flowers from their childhood, they potentially could have been overwhelmed by sad or traumatic memories.
But their answers did not come from despair and in many ways, their entire life journeys are an example of hope. Hope to start a new life as immigrants in the US, hope to continue studying in their fields of interest, hope to meet a spouse and start a family, hope in having two (often troublemaking) kids… I feel grateful for the life they made possible and I am aware how much hope they had to have, how many leaps
of faith they had to take.
The azalea was one of the flowers my dad mentioned he remembers from the village where he grew up. When I did an internet search of azaleas+Korea, I found a famous poem by a North Korean poet, named Sowol Kim. He wrote a very sad poem - like folksong kind of sad! - about azaleas from mountains not far away from where my dad grew up. So now back to the darker side of this drawing. In reading more about
the life of this poet who had such a beautiful sensitivity of the world and nature around him, I learned that he committed suicide when he was just 32 years old. All I could wonder while drawing these flowers was why did the beauty that’s so evident in the poetry he wrote overwhelm instead of empowering him to live?
I know there can be a fine line between hope and despair. My hope in naming this drawing “hope” was to create a reminder that if we are able to slow our minds and speed up time in a way, taking us beyond the intensity of life that we may experience at any moment or the intense moments that seem to keep coming back to us, the healing beauty of the azaleas, and of this life we live, can be less overwhelming so that we are able to create the spaces we need where we can choose hope and to take the leaps of faith we need to. My hope is the azalea will help each of us see the hope that is possible in our lives no matter how hard it can feel at times.
- December 12, 2020
