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While writing this book, within a single month I became the chief mourner at a funeral and then the host at a wedding. A month after my mother, who lived ninety-three years, departed for heaven, my son's wedding was held. Before that, my father, who suffered from dementia, came home for the first and last time after entering the care hospital. The home where he had lived for twenty-eight years. Seeing my father off as he returned to the hospital by ambulance, I wrote these words.
An outing like a dream, and for my father, a picnic. The saying that our life is a picnic suddenly brushes across my mind.— 2025, Facebook
If life is a picnic, then we are all beings who come for a little while and go. And at the end of the picnic there is a returning. Let us go back to the beginning of this book. I opened its door with a poem by the poet Ham Min-bok.
The blooming of the flower is not the flower
The falling of the flower is not the flower either
The place where the flower blooms and falls—that is the flower — Ham Min-bok, "Flower"
Having passed through thirteen chapters, this poem reads differently. At first I read it as a beautiful metaphor. Now I read it as the summary of my life. Health is neither inside nor outside. It is neither in the blooming nor in the falling. It is in the between, the place, the boundary. The cell lives by the boundary called the membrane, the heart beats at the boundary of contraction and relaxation, and breath sustains life at the boundary of breathing in and breathing out. And a person is born, at last, at the boundary of I and Thou.
Looking back, this book was a journey climbing one boundary, layer upon layer. Beginning at the innermost boundaries of the body—the cell membrane, the intestinal wall, the blood–brain barrier—passing through the boundary of the heart that divides I and Thou, it arrived at last at the boundary of relationship that dwells within one another: mutual indwelling. However the scale and the layer differed, the question was always one. Is your boundary alive? Body or heart or relationship, health always asks the same thing. Standing at the boundary, are you keeping that boundary alive? The title of this book was that question from the very start—to behold, at the boundary, the boundary.
Yet at the last, one paradox remains. The things born at the boundary, in the end, cross beyond that boundary. So it was with the mutual indwelling of Chapter Twelve. To dwell deeply within one another, until at last the boundary that divided them grows transparent within love. Distinction remains, but the wall vanishes. So too the cell membrane. That firm boundary is in truth, at every moment, letting something flow in and out, joining inside and outside into one life. The boundary that seems most obstinate is, in fact, the most diligent place of communication. The completion of a boundary is not a wall but a passage.
From beginning at the boundary, to the place where the boundary falls within love.
The night after my mother departed, she appeared to me in a dream. Wearing the gown she always wore at home. "Mother, did you make it back safely?" I asked, and my mother simply smiled toward me. That smile felt, to me, like a final 安息. At the place of stopping, something is at last born. Even at the place of returning after the picnic is done. I wrote this book in that faith. That we would grow, not swell; that we would rest within relationship rather than burn out alone; that, having given our best, we could say "enough." At the place of stopping, we are at last born. That place is the flower.
References
Ham Min-bok, "Flower"