Every Boundary Between Me and the World Will Fall

While writing this book I became, within a single month, first a chief mourner and then the father of a groom. One month after my mother departed for heaven, having lived ninety-three years, my son was married. Before that, my father, who has dementia, came home for the first and last time after entering the nursing hospital — to the house he had lived in for twenty-eight years. Seeing him off as the ambulance took him back, I wrote this.

An outing like a dream; for my father, a picnic. The saying that our life is a picnic suddenly crossed my mind.— 2025, Facebook

I did not know it then, but that month was the whole of this book’s final part, lived through. Sending the previous generation out one door and receiving the next generation in the other. Wearing black and, a month later, changing into other clothes. That was the physical substance of what I called succession in Part Five.

If life is a picnic, we are all beings who come briefly and go. And at the end of a picnic there is a going home. Let us return to the beginning of this book. I opened with Ham Min-bok’s poem “Flower” — with the first line, on every boundary, flowers bloom. That poem ends this way.

On the day the tears run dry
and I cannot stand on the boundary of moonlight and shadow,
the flowered barbed wire will wither
and every boundary between me and the world will fall — Ham Min-bok, “Flower”

Having passed through seventeen chapters, this poem reads differently. At first I saw only the opening line — that flowers bloom at the boundary, that the place which divides is the place that blossoms. Now the last stanza stays with me longer. That on the day the tears run dry and I cannot stand on the boundary, it is not the flower that falls but every boundary between me and the world.

Why tears, of all things? To have tears is to be still alive. Whether from sorrow or from being moved, tears flow when something outside has crossed all the way inside me. They are the sign that inside and outside are still connected. So the drying of tears does not mean that sorrow has ended; it means the boundary has ceased to be a passage. Life and death divide right there. A boundary is not alive by itself. It lives only when someone stands there. Health is neither inside nor outside. It is in between — in that place, at that boundary. The cell lives by the boundary called the membrane; the heart beats at the boundary of contraction and relaxation; the breath carries life at the boundary of drawing in and letting out. And a person is born only at the boundary of I and you.

Looking back, this book was a journey climbing one question through five layers. It began by diagnosing an age that only swells, and learned the principle at the body’s boundaries — the cell membrane, the intestinal wall, the blood-brain barrier. It watched that boundary enter time and become the rhythm of advance and withdrawal, and it watched new things being born where a wound becomes a passage and two people dwell within each other. And finally it came as far as handing the boundary so gained to the next person. The layers differed, but the question was always one: is your boundary alive? Body or mind, relationship or community, health always asks the same thing.

And yet two paradoxes remain at the last. One is bright and one is dark.

To speak of the bright one first: things born at the boundary finally go beyond that boundary. So it was with the perichoresis of Chapter Thirteen. Dwelling deeply within one another until at last the boundary that divided them grows transparent within love. Distinction remains; the wall disappears. So it is with the cell membrane. That firm boundary is in fact letting something flow in and out at every moment, joining inside and outside into one life. The boundary that looks most obstinate is in truth the most diligent site of communication. The completion of a boundary is not a wall but a passage.

From the boundary, all the way to where the boundary falls within love.

The dark one was in Chapter Fourteen. Some boundaries never become passages in our generation. Landmines lie buried in a place unhealed for seventy years, and cranes come down over them. Before that place — where a wound is protecting life and treating the wound would endanger it — I knew this book would not close so easily. On the day the bell for reunification was rung at Imjingak, the child’s voice was louder than the bell. At the time I wrote it only because it was funny. Now I think that was this book’s final threshold. A boundary we could not resolve must, in the end, be handed on.

That is why Part Five was necessary. What do we hand on, and how? In Chapter Fifteen I separated love from respect. Love is receiving and respect is letting go, and the closer the relationship, the harder the latter. In Chapter Sixteen I spoke of the bridge. The one who crossed does not remember the bridge, but without the bridge no one crosses. Being forgotten is not the bridge’s failure but its completion. And in Chapter Seventeen I arrived at the sentence this book had deferred longest: I gave my best, and that is enough.

Only after writing all three did I see that they say one thing. Handing on is not passing over what is mine; it is my stepping aside. Respect is yielding a place, the bridge is being trodden upon, and saying enough means I will grip no more. Succession is not a motion of giving but a motion of releasing.

Come to think of it, that one month taught me the same thing. Letting my mother go and letting my son go were both, in the end, the opening of a closed hand. One hand opened in sorrow and the other in joy, but in the opening of the hand the two were the same.

On the night after my mother departed, she appeared in a dream, wearing the housecoat she always wore at home. “Mom, did the journey go well?” I asked, and she only smiled at me. That smile felt to me like a final 安息. Where we stop, there at last something is born — even in the place where we return home from the picnic.

I wrote this book in that faith. That we may grow rather than swell; that we may rest within relationship rather than burn alone; that after giving our best we may say “enough.” And that someday we may quietly step aside. I hope the boundary where you are standing now is not a wall but a membrane, and that the membrane is a little more open for the one who comes after you.

Where we stop, there at last we are born. On every boundary, flowers bloom.

Notes for this piece

Ham Min-bok, “Flower” (On Every Boundary, Flowers Bloom) · The author’s Facebook record (2025)