A Night Shining with Stars

19. 별이 빛나는 밤에

19. A Night Shining with Stars

Yu Hui Jung

I remember one summer night of shooting stars back when I was a six-year-old boy in Uncheon. My father stretched out a cot in the courtyard by the officers’ residence, and I lay down on it as we looked at the stars together. The sounds of the insects tickled my ears, and as I listened to them and felt the cool breeze, my head began to droop.

The next time my eyes dove into that sea of stars was in December 1997, when I was at boot camp in Hwacheon, Gangwon-do. After impatiently waiting in the frigid cold, I began our nighttime shooting exercises. Some of my bullets seemed to hit the human-shaped target, and I imagined one more star appearing in the night sky, soaring up on the flash coming from my muzzle.

At the barracks library, I picked out a copy of A Fun Constellation Journey by Lee Taehyung. I set it aside in a corner of the equipment locker, where I would quickly glance through it as I headed out to the guard post on days when I was on duty late at night. I had the butt of a rifle in the bandolier around my waist and my left hand clutching the barrel cove—but at some point, my eyes always began reading the stars.

In the sky to the north, Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper shone to the left and right of Polaris, located in the tail of Ursa Minor. Bearing names like Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Auriga, and Lepus, constellations in the winter sky sang of different deities.

The seven daughters of Atlas had become doves who soared up to form the Pleiades; I focused my eyes in an attempt to pick out all seven of the stars, which were said to only be visible to the especially sharp-eyed.

For some time after leaving the military, I would tell stories about constellations as a way of piquing people’s curiosity. Stars became a kind of sport for me. Eventually, I forgot all about them. Part of that was due to the yellow dust floating in across the sea from deserts to the west; part of it was the artificial lighting, which had become too bright for me to make out the slender points of light arriving from their long journey through the universe. Most of all, I had too much to focus on with all the stresses of life in the city.

After I left home and became a bell ringer at the Mandeoksan Mountain training center, I would see fireflies fluttering along the path through the deep, deserted darkness to the belfry. In the distance, countless stars sparkled in the sky. I once saw one of them streak down behind the mountains, dragging a long tail behind it.

At the time, I was with Rev. Jeon, who asked me what I had wished for. My struggles with disappointment and the still-painful scars of past failure had left me with none of the romanticism that would have had me wishing on falling stars. When I did not reply, Rev. Jeon asked me whether I knew the reason wishes come true when we make them on falling stars.

He then quietly answered: because only the person who consistently harbors a vow that pierces deep into their core can draw forth that single thought at the moment that star falls. It is not the meteor, he said, but the sincerity of that mindset that makes it happen. It is like cultivation, he added.

When we, over a long period of time, intently tend to and release our minds—with the same dedication as a mother hen hatching her egg—all the problems of life and death and the principle of cause and effect are released, and the day will surely come when all the specks of dirt upon the true mind melt away.