I am headed to South Korea in a few short days, and all I can think about is hiking. I plan to do about six trails in Seoul, Daegu, and Jeju Island, the last of which is Mount Hallasan, a dormant volcano and the highest peak in the country.
The hike is about twelve miles long and gains nearly 4,000 feet in elevation. To summit it, you need to walk up a soul-crushing number of stairs—rock stairs, wooden stairs, metal stairs—every type of stairs you can imagine. One AllTrails hiker described it as “Beautiful, but death by stairs.”
It sounds absolutely terrible to me and yet … and yet, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Two trails lead to the summit, and you can either go up and down the same trail or hike up one and down the other. I’ll start from Seongpanak (성판악 탐방로) on the east side of the mountain and then descend on Gwaneumsa (관음사 탐방로) on the north face. Seongpanak is supposed to be slightly easier, but I’ve watched several YouTube videos, and everyone seems to be trudging their way through it from either side. One Irish woman complained to her partner, “This is supposed to be the easy part?!”
Mount Hallansan means “mountain high enough to pull the galaxy.” Doesn’t that make you want to get to the top and reach toward the sky? Doesn’t it illicit something bigger than just a trek up a mountain? It’s such a romantic notion. To be high enough to grab ahold of a cloud and somehow pull the Milky Way toward you.
This is what my imagination is made for. It’s made for dreaming, for pulling those dreams so close I can touch them. My imagination compels me to believe this hike is not a hike. It is a rite of passage. It’s about carrying all of my regrets, failures, and sad stories from the past fifty years and throwing them into the wind from the top of a volcano.
Can’t you see me? Standing at the edge of the crater and shouting, “Thank you, heartbreak. You’ve cracked open my heart, and I release you! Thank you, Mom and Dad, for this painful childhood that made me so strong! I love you! Thank you, uterus, for making me sick so I can appreciate being well. Thank you, body, whom I always criticize, for carrying me to the top of this mountain!”
And so it will go on until I have acknowledged and released all of it, and all that’s left is an empty vessel ready to be filled again.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting with friends and was telling them about my hiking plans.
“It will be interesting to see which one you like the best,” one of them remarked.
“I already know,” I replied without thinking. “The one I will like the most will be the hardest one.”
I’ve thought about this response a lot this past week. I don’t know why that is the way my brain works—to always feel compelled to seek out hard things, to keep trying to best myself at one thing or another. I don’t know if it’s something I like about myself or something that needs to be worked on. Will there ever be a part of me that says, “You’ve done enough?” It’s hard to believe that day will ever come.
I feel afraid to do this hike. It will be the hardest trek I’ve been on since being diagnosed with anemia in 2022. I am not in the shape I should be. I am nursing a cold and missed a week and a half of training. But I am going for it anyway. It’s just one step at a time, I keep telling myself.
Of course, I feel exactly the same nervousness about turning fifty. It scares me—not a lot, but a little. It’s not the aging part, mind you. I love getting older. It’s knowing the passage of time speeds up each year that scares me. Much like how it takes forever to get to the top of a mountain, but the descent flies by, and before you know it, you’re at the end.
I’ve thought a lot about what I’ll write in next week’s birthday post—Chapter 50. I feel filled with hope and redemption and new beginnings, but there’s no real meat to that belief. It’s just something I feel inside. It’s like knowing you can walk up a mountain in the motherland and release your sorrows into the wind because it’s what you came to do. I believe it’s possible, just like I believe it’s possible to reach up into the sky and pull the galaxy toward me.
Love,
Giyen
PS. I will be traveling for a few weeks and will be posting when I can. Sending all my love and lots of photos soon.
