Good and Bad

Good and Bad

Master Hyong

4/4/12

In 2009, I purchased eight acres of land. I wanted to start a farm. I thought it was a good time to get out from the academy. I’d been teaching over 1000 students per week, over 30 years, so I was ready to get some time away from people and to spend time in nature. I learned how to farm from my mother. She was a farmer, and I would watch her when I was growing up in Korea. After we moved to the United States, if there was any small patch of land by the house, she always ploughed up the grass and planted seeds, and I would help her. I thought this was a very healthy activity. So I bought eight acres of land, and the following year I bought five more, for a total of thirteen. I planned to build a house sometime soon.

In 2010, my first year of farming, I farmed approximately an acre—that was more than enough for me to handle. I had pumpkin, watermelon, green leaves, jalapeno, Korean hot pepper, all kinds of things. There were also quite a few weeds growing. My wife wanted to make sprouts at home so I decided to have black beans, instead of purchasing them from the market, but regular beans from the United States wouldn’t sprout, so when I went to Korea, I brought black beans, and I seeded them in the ground. They were very strong plants, but there were too many weeds. To my mind, the weeds were very bad, and I wanted to pull them out. A visting scholar, Professor Roh from Korea helped me. That whole summer we fought against the weeds. And always, we were thinking, this weed is really, really bad.

Then, one day, after I had been weeding on my land, a strong wind approached. It must have been around forty to fifty knots an hour. It was extremely fast and blew up a lot of dust. But through the dust, the sky was clear. I didn’t understand what was happening. I walked over to a nearby street which runs East and West Then I looked to the west, and saw a cloud coming very low and very fast, and I realized there was a storm coming straight for my farm.

I started to pick up all my farming equipment, threw it into my jeep, and began to drive toward the west. I wanted to see if Tonato touch down. I had a nice Cannon Camera next to me. It started to rain so heavily that I couldn’t drive anymore. I stopped the jeep at the crossroads—1100 N and Race Street—and I picked up my camera and looked to the west once more. It did not seems like any Tonato, so I drove to North toward my home.

The next day, I went back to my small farm, and I saw that in all the rows I’d weeded, the beanstalks were bent down to the ground. But in the rows I’d left alone, where the black beans grew with the weeds, none of them had fallen down. And I sat down and felt my whole thought system changing in that moment. The weeds I had thought were so bad had actually protected my plants in the storm. I saw that good and bad exist together, side by side.