K-drama: From the Hermitage to the Hermit Country

Well, while I have not been in a hermitage for the past 3 years, I have not been jetting around the way I used to. And Korea is not the "Hermit Country" anymore, by any means. In fact, on the street where I'll be staying are all kinds of businesses representing the whole world, including a Converse store, Italian Optical, and Global Dentist. But in leaving one place and going to another, I do have a bit of uprooting and reconnecting to do. My spiritual director said that monks who move from one monastery to another have a "transfer of vows." One of the reasons travel is so important is that visiting another place creates connection -- new vows of concern -- with that place. We can read this in Michael Kimmelman's beautiful piece on the earthquake in Turkey, which has killed more than 40,000 at this point. He noted, 

You may rightly ask about the logic of rebuilding time and again in these risky places. The notion comes up around a different threat: climate change. Scientists predict large-scale migrations in the coming years from zones where rising seas, floods, droughts and extreme weather will make life increasingly difficult or impossible. Already, climate change has displaced millions of people around the world.

But logic is not the point.

Cities are only nominally bricks and mortar, after all. To residents they are repositories of a hairbrush and a photograph — collective threads of a social fabric that, over time, weave together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, a community. 

Which is to say that I am loosening my connection to my daily life here in New Jersey and settling in Seoul for three months, God willing and the creek don't rise. It will be a lot the same -- morning coffee and reading the Times. But it will also be different in ways that I don't even know yet but am curious to learn. In the heart of catastrophe, we learn how much place means to us, and teaches us both how precious home is and how deeply meaningful it is go to another place and get to meet it as well. At Girl Scout camp, we sang the song, "Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other's gold."