Welcome back, my friend.
It's so good to sit with you again
I've been thinking about that house in Liverpool---the one with the carpet brushed smooth and the quiet shoes by the door. Abdullah Quilliam's voice was the beginning of something the world hadn't yet made room for. A moment too early, and still, it mattered.
Today's memory begins just as boldly, though it moves in the opposite direction.
This woman didn't build a mosque. She didn't gather a community or print a paper. She walked away from all of it---from fame, from love, from the movement she helped ignite. And she chose silence.
But not the kind that disappears.
The kind that listens.
You may not believe this but I loved the music in the Korean cafés in the 1920's. Seriously, it was the best place to hear gramophone Jazz in all of Asia
Yes I said, "Jazz from a gramophone". And it seemed like there was always someone reciting Byron in Korean, slowly, like it meant something. Girls with short hair and long scarves quoting Nietzsche while their tea went cold.
Seoul was called Gyeongseong back then. A colonial capital under Japan---gridded, patrolled, renamed. But still alive in its corners.
You could walk from a Confucian shrine to a Christian mission school in ten minutes. Newspapers sold faster than rice cakes. Young men debated revolution under streetlamps. Young women wrote poems no one expected them to write.
And she was there---shoes clicking on stone, notebook in hand.
Kim Iryŏp. A daughter of a Christian pastor. A published poet at twenty. Editor of Korea's first women's literary journal. Unapologetic, and unafraid. A thoroughly modern woman in a modernizing world.
She asked questions no one else was asking out loud. About love. About the soul. About whether freedom was even possible in a world like this.
She made people uncomfortable. That was part of the point.
But I remember something else. The day when she folded her coat over her arm, left her pen on the desk, and stepped off the city's stage.
She boarded a train bound for the mountains. She didn't say much---only that she was going to think. That she'd had enough of ideas that never touched the ground.
She climbed toward Sudeoksa Temple. The road narrowed. The voices thinned. Pine needles softened her steps.
And there, in a silence not imposed but chosen, she began again.
Not as a writer.
Not as a symbol. Not as a woman defined by resistance.
As a seeker.
No one understood it at first.
But I did.
Sometimes, the most radical act isn't to speak.
It's to stop.
Kim Iryŏp was born in 1896, just as the old Korean kingdom was crumbling.
The country she entered was already under pressure---from modernity, from missionaries, from empires. By the time she was a teenager, Japan had fully annexed the peninsula. Flags changed. Street names changed. The language of power changed.
And yet---inside that pressure, something strange happened. Korea began to speak in new ways.
I saw it in the schools. Missionaries built them first---mostly Protestants, mostly American. They taught girls to read and reason. Some, like Iryŏp, were daughters of Christian pastors. The Bible was their first text. But it wasn't the last.
There were newspapers everywhere. Pamphlets. Debates in borrowed halls. The March First uprising in 1919 lit a fire that didn't go out, even when the Japanese cracked down again. You could feel it in the air---this restless energy, this searching.
Iryŏp was at the center of it. A poet by twenty. A columnist, an editor, a public voice. She wasn't shy.
She published essays on love, sex, motherhood, independence. She criticized the patriarchy embedded in both Korean tradition and foreign religion. She challenged men---gently, sharply. She called women into thought.
Some admired her brilliance. Others found her dangerous.
She didn't care.
She founded New Woman magazine---the first of its kind in Korea---and gathered a circle of writers who were asking big questions: What does it mean to be free? To choose love? To believe in something when your country is not your own?
But the answers began to thin out.
Christianity had opened a door---but now it felt like another structure. The feminist movement had raised her voice---but it couldn't quiet her mind. Romance had left her restless. Politics felt like performance. Faith, the kind that touched the root, was still waiting somewhere out of sight.
In 1933, she walked away from the city. Left behind her fame, her pen, her elegant Seoul apartment.
She entered the mountain monastery at Sudeoksa, shaved her head, and became a Buddhist nun.
Not to disappear.
To become whole.
There were so many banners raised in that era---and every one of them claimed the soul.
The Japanese empire said loyalty was sacred. It wrapped obedience in ceremony and called it divine. Children bowed toward Tokyo each morning and were told it was prayer.
The Christian missions said truth was in the Word. They taught that Korea could be saved---not just spiritually, but socially---through Protestant discipline and moral clarity. And to be fair, they did build schools. They taught girls to read. They named dignity where others had not.
The Confucian order still lingered, too---quiet and stubborn. Ancestor rites, family honor, the virtues of silence and deference. It wasn't gone, just buried under new languages.
And Buddhism---once the heart of Korea's inner life---was dismissed by almost everyone as backward. Too quiet. Too Korean. Too full of monks and metaphors and things that couldn't be counted or claimed.
Even the new feminists, the ones with bobbed hair and steel in their spines, came with their own sacred scripts: autonomy, education, the righteous future that could be built if only enough rules were broken.
It was dazzling. It was loud.
And I'll be honest, my friend---I struggled to find myself in it.
There was no stillness in Gyeongseong then.
No place to set down your thoughts without someone else picking them up and turning them into a slogan. Harmony cannot exist where everything is pulling at once.
And that's when I saw her.
Kim Iryŏp, standing still in the middle of it all---not lost, but listening.
She didn't choose one side. She stepped out of the argument entirely. Not because she didn't care, but because she cared too deeply to let her soul be divided.
When she turned toward the mountains, it wasn't escape.
It was repair.
It would have been easy for her to vanish.
A woman steps into a monastery, gives up her name, her pen, her past. History is full of people like that---blurred at the edges, forgotten between footnotes.
But Iryŏp didn't vanish.
She just changed the angle of her voice.
She wrote---still. Not for applause, not for revolution, but from the stillness she had found. Essays, memoirs, short reflections that held the weight of questions too old to solve. She didn't pretend to have answers. She didn't need to. What she offered was rarer than clarity---she offered presence.
Her words turned inward and downward. Into impermanence. Into ego and emptiness.
Into what it means to be fully human when every identity has been stripped away. She wrote about suffering without decoration. About desire without shame. About the space between personhood and soul.
And slowly, something began to shift.
She wasn't the first woman to enter Buddhist life. But she was the first of her kind---modern, educated, disillusioned by ideology, and unafraid to say so. She showed that renunciation wasn't rejection. It was transformation. That silence wasn't submission---it was sovereignty.
You can feel her trace even now.
In the women who sit on meditation cushions across Korea, not as guests in someone else's lineage, but as inheritors. In the essays that thread together feminism and dharma with no need to apologize. In the understanding that spiritual practice can come after protest, after disappointment, after the noise has passed.
Her life wasn't a model to imitate. It was a reminder.
That even in modernity---even in a fractured, colonized world---it's still possible to choose truth over performance.
To be free, not by taking power, but by letting go of everything that isn't yours to carry.
The world hasn't quieted since then.
In some ways, it's only grown louder. What flickered through pamphlets and editorials in Iryŏp's day now pours through every screen, every second. Everyone has a banner now. A brand. A belief system with a share button.
One moment you're asked to define yourself politically. The next, spiritually. Then ethically. Then aesthetically. There are hashtags for your convictions and comment threads for your grief. Whole industries have formed around the question of who you are---and whether you're doing it right.
And all of it, somehow, feels urgent.
I remember that feeling. I saw it in Gyeongseong---the same relentless pressure to have a position, to keep pace, to pick a side. Only now, it's global. And constant.
We're not short on ideas. Or identity. Or passion. But harmony? That's harder to find.
You don't have to live under empire to feel colonized.
You just have to forget that your soul is not an argument.
Most of us won't go to the mountains.
Not because we're unwilling---but because we can't. Children need breakfast. Emails arrive. The city keeps moving. There are aging parents, neighbors in need, broken systems still standing. And someone has to show up.
And maybe that's exactly right.
Because spiritual clarity isn't meant to be sealed off from the world. It's meant to live inside it. To shine through the ordinary things---work, justice, kindness, grief.
Iryŏp went to the monastery. But she didn't do it to escape. She went because she needed a space strong enough to hold the truth she had uncovered.
You may not need a mountain temple. But you still need a threshold to cross. Somewhere---inside you---where the noise stops. Where you are not performing. Not reacting. Just being.
Even now, that silence is still possible. But it won't find you. You'll have to make it.
Iryŏp didn't go quiet because she was tired.
She went quiet because the world kept trying to speak for her.
Every movement wanted her allegiance. Every ideology wanted her voice. Even the ones she once believed in began to feel like new kinds of confinement.
So she chose silence. Not to vanish---but to listen. Not to separate---but to see clearly. Not to become pure---but to become whole.
And that, I think, is what we still need.
Because the pressure hasn't stopped. It's just changed shape.
Today, the world doesn't silence us with law---it drowns us in noise.
In opinion. In demand. In identity so rigid it forgets to breathe.
Stillness isn't withdrawal. It's resistance.
It's the refusal to let your soul be measured by your timeline or your output or your hashtags. It's not disengagement. It's anchoring.
It's a quiet No---to anything that pulls you away from the deeper Yes that's already living inside you.
You don't need to create truth.
It's already here.
Justice isn't a trend. Unity isn't a theory. The dignity of every soul---yours included---is not something that has to be earned. These aren't ideals we strive toward. They are realities we keep forgetting.
And when the noise dies down---even for a moment---they return.
You've known them, haven't you? Not as arguments. As recognition. That breath you took after grief. That glance of compassion you didn't explain. That moment you walked away from something false, not because someone told you to, but because your spirit quietly said: No more.
That was truth, already in motion.
Iryŏp didn't invent it. She just stopped long enough to feel it.
And so can you.
You don't need to disappear to be whole.
You don't need to move to the mountains, shave your head, or light incense at dawn---though you can, if that's where you're led.
But the real invitation is quieter than that.
It's to find a threshold inside yourself. To make space---not outside the world, but within it---where your spirit can breathe without being named, measured, or sold.
The silence Iryŏp found isn't reserved for the rare or the holy.
It's yours, too.
You may have to fight for it.
But when you do---when you stop just long enough to remember---you may find that nothing has been lost after all.
Only waiting.
I know how tempting it is to drift.
To piece together little fragments of meaning from books and podcasts, from quotes that sound wise, from rituals that feel good enough for now. To tell yourself it's all personal. All relative. That belief is just a matter of taste.
But I've been watching this for a long time, my friend---and I've seen how that story ends.
People are not lost because they're lazy. They're lost because they've been told that nothing is truly sacred unless they invent it themselves.
That's the weight we've placed on the soul: to build a mountain with no tools, no trail, no voice calling from the peak.
And yet---deep down, I think we all know that's not enough.
We don't just want freedom. We want formation. We don't just want to feel better. We want to become something more. And for that, we need more than inspiration.
We need a faith that speaks back. A community that expects something of us. A truth that is not ours---but is still waiting to be recognized, and lived.
Kim Iryŏp didn't find her peace by wandering further into autonomy. She had tried that already. The modern world gave her every license to be free---but none to be whole.
So she walked into a place with rules, and silence, and spiritual boundaries older than her own questions.
She didn't disappear. She found her shape.
That's not everyone's path. But it is everyone's calling---to find a spiritual home that doesn't just comfort us, but challenges us. That says: this is sacred, and this is not. That holds us when we're tired, and still expects us to rise.
And yes---it takes effort.
Not belief, always. Not certainty.
But intention.
Because a life of purpose doesn't happen by accident.
And if the truth really does live within you, it deserves more than casual visitation.
It deserves your time. Your discipline. Your trust.
So I'll ask, gently---because I care:
Have you found your faith home?
Not your aesthetic. Not your coping strategy. Your home. Where your soul is both safe and accountable. Where you're not just accepted---but transformed.
If not---don't panic.
But don't wait, either.
The mountain isn't going to move.
But maybe you are ready to climb...
Next time, we'll meet a woman who didn't choose silence at all.
Jarena Lee was a free Black woman in 19th-century America who stood up in a church, said she was called to preach---and refused to sit back down. She had no pulpit, no title, and no permission. Just a voice, a vision, and the unshakable sense that God wasn't done speaking through her yet.
But that's a story for another time.
For now, wherever you are, I hope you've found a moment of stillness---however small.
And if the world gets noisy again tomorrow, don't worry. The silence you need is never far. It's always waiting. It always remembers you.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.