Shrine to a Dragon

Korea is mostly mountains--short, steep ones. This makes for lots of compact and cozy valleys. Sometimes, where the mountains narrow together, there are ravines. 

There had been a heat wave last week. Yesterday, it broke. This morning the air was fresh and breezy. While hiking in the afternoon, I followed a path to a mineral spring, a place inside a ravine with natural rock walls. You could look up from this shady spot and see the sun shining on the trees well above you. 

Later, I followed a road--a tree-lined road--from the shoreline up a cozy valley. All was intense blue and intense green. I remembered why I love summer. There were sunflowers along the way, some with their heads bowed under their own weight. Others still small, perky, and upright. There were terraced rice fields, with almost fluorescent green rice plants of uniform height in uniform rows. By afternoon, the temperature had risen enough to create shimmery mist which added to the perfect summeriness of the experience. 

There, walking up the road, I encountered a shrine to a mountain god. You had to walk back from the road, across a neatly-maintained lawn, and up a series of stone steps. The shrine was for a dragon who protected the coast in past times from marauding invaders. There was a bowl of sand in which you could stick sticks of incense as offerings. You could see the burnt remains of a few sticks in the sand. There was a small stack of paper bills that people had left as monetary offerings. I bowed and went back down to the road, where there was a bus stop.

I thought I would take the bus back home. The shrine is a long way from my house. But the bus stop was for a single rural bus that only came at long intervals. I waited and waited. The longer I waited, the more I wanted to go back to the shrine one more time before going home, but if I did so, the bus might come while I was up the hill. Finally, I decided to walk back home. Walking and exercise were after all, my main purposes for being out there in the first place. So, I went back to the shrine, gave the dragon my bus fare as an offering, bowed again, this time much more formally and properly, then started off for home on foot. I just got back about an hour ago. 

I don't have any pictures, unfortunately. I was lazy and didn't charge my phone last night. 

I hope this summer day or night in July 2014 finds you safe, happy, and well. 

Lots of love from Korea,

T.