Defining home in South Korea: connecting two countries through nature

What do I know about adventure? That is the question I immediately asked myself when I first considered the idea of writing this series. My childhood dreams of travelling and experiencing life abroad were ignited by the captivating stories of my older brothers. Born a decade before me and our sister, they were out exploring the world - mountaineering, sky-diving, and trekking across unknown lands - while we were still in primary school. The stories they told on visits home for family Christmas and other occasions planted an insatiable curiosity about the world in me. I pictured myself one day like them, exploring the world with nothing but a backpack and a sense of adventure.

In reality, my own adventures have been more domesticated. Living in Seoul and the surrounding metropolises for the last 10 years, my life is saturated in modern convenience, technology and the comforts of city-living. Just the other day, I joked to my brother that I ventured outside my house and traveled to the other side of the world just to find another house to sit in. While I might say I have an adventurous spirit, I am a hermit crab at heart and my enjoyment of new experiences is generally quite satiated by trying new foods, visiting new local areas, and taking different routes on my regular walks.

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Alongside my family I was born and raised on the ancient land of Dartmoor, a place more wild than anywhere I have visited as a tourist or migrant. As children we were given freedom to roam, encouraged to be adventurous and forge our own paths. Comparatively, Seoul is a haven of convenience and safety both physically and emotionally, as the anonymity and otherness of living in both a new country and a large city can at times bring more comfort than loneliness, and the traditionally structured social expectations of Korean culture can in many ways provide a shortcut to social belonging and community. 

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Even so, the long process of learning a language and adapting to a new culture, navigating the emotional intricacies of intercultural marriage, friendships and work, and the reality of living far away from one’s family and home country during formative years and experiences is its own kind of adventure. I didn’t come to Korea with the intention of staying for 10 years, or indeed with much plan at all except to chase that childhood dream I was still so far only able to glimpse from the stories of my brothers and their travels in Colombia and India. Even so, I felt inexplicably at home from the moment I arrived and kept returning. Gradually over time I developed a deep relationship with the place where my feet had landed.

I give many thanks to my upbringing for instilling me with a cultivated connection to nature. I wonder if it’s possible to grow up in a place like Dartmoor and not feel the land in your bones. The granite and peat, the rain and sunshine, the sound of the rivers and feel of the fresh grass. The flora and fauna of my childhood, both the immediate sensual experience of them and the mythological magic of the stories and folklore formed around them are a defining, perhaps the most clearly defined, part of who I am. 

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Nature also defined the lens through which I have experienced the time I’ve spent in Korea. While the possibilities of city life do excite me at times, it is also exhausting for the senses and for the soul, and I almost always try to avoid the most overstimulating areas with their towering concrete buildings, flashing neon signs, constant visual and auditory noise and the overwhelming crowds of people. I find joy in every patch of nature I see. The reflection of a blue sky or golden sunset in glass tower buildings. The chilis and cabbages planted by elderly grandmothers in every empty plot and roadside. The array of brightly coloured flowers that so faithfully mark each stage of the constantly changing seasons. 

Nature is the way that I find belonging in this new home, and it is also a way that I am trying to stay connected to my home of origin. I am exceedingly grateful for the way that the seasons here run parallel to the seasons of home, and my exploration of the ways in which the natural world here both differs from and resembles the natural environment into which I was born is the greatest tool I have for building a sense of belonging in places where I have felt alien. For much of my life I lived lightly and temporarily in the world, barely unpacking my bags as I moved between places, but I am now trying to learn from the trees and the earth how to put down roots. To stand in place and spread out. To hold on and stand strong in my place in the world like the ancient oak trees of Dartmoor. 

This is a series of stories about the local places I have been, the things I am learning about the natural world and land I inhabit, and the ways that they teach me to hold fast to my place in the world.

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