the bucket
I am experiencing the world as a menagerie, or a soup. It’s a stew, like the kind that has radishes, potatoes, and carrots, a Korean one, with big chunks, with a strong and rich paste flavoring the savory broth that permeates into every bit and gets better with time to sit over the fire or in the fridge to be eaten the next day, as all of the components meld. As the water-based saltiness of the soup penetrate into the sponge-like bits, seasoning them all the way to their core, and the bits disintegrate, adding body and complexity to the liquid, the soup and the bits come together into one whole.
My mom always called the bits 껀대기, literally, “things you fish out”, but meaning something like “tasty morsel”. The bits you wanted. Pieces of tasty meat, stuff that was the most precious. She would always tell me to fill up on 껀대기 when I was getting full at the end of the meal. As if to say that I had to get my money’s worth, even if we were just eating at home.
Maybe she didn’t realize that the whole soup was just as precious as the bits. Somewhere along the way, the bits had become the soup and the soup had become the bits, even as they maintained a distinctness between them. That’s how I feel like inside of my head. I feel like everything I know and experience is bits and soup that can swirl inside of the cauldron of my being. It would be impossible to experience a soup without first tasting some of the soup, and then some of the bits, and then it all together. But yet the true nature of a Korean soup is never the bits, or the soup, it’s everything all at once. My experience of this reality and this life is never a single moment, or a single piece of knowledge, but it’s in everything and the way that everything is connected together.
Sometimes I feel very alone in that experience, and I wonder if it’s a traumatic response. I wonder if it’s because I can’t dig into one thing too closely or I will implode. It’s a kind of disorganized attachment, but not just for people and relationships, but for things, and concepts, and ideas, and the world in general. If I get to know one thing too closely, at the expense of other things, I will die. Or I will lose that thing.
I remember this feeling ever since I was a small child, maybe I was 4 or 5 years old, it was one of my earliest memories. I was at Laguna Beach with my mom, and she was wearing a black one piece swimsuit. For my entire life, she’s always had a lithe, slender frame. Never looking emaciated or sickly, but effortlessly skinny and petite. I can remember feeling like I was bigger than her. Even if physically I was smaller, it was like my spirit was too big for her small body to handle. My spirit was sensitive, and I felt everything so deeply.
I had brought my precious plastic bucket, which was blue and had a yellow handle, to make sandcastles with. I loved to make sandcastles. I loved how the sand would magically transform from this flowing, warm substance when dry, into a rigid, yet precarious shape when wet, with hard lines that would stay even as you pulled the bucket off. I would carefully smooth out any little irregularities until they were neat and straight. And then as the wave crashes down from behind me and sweeps it away, to be returned to the beach, this sandcastle, so beautiful and perfect and firm, would be revealed to be just sand after all.
But one wave swept away my bucket. It swept away from me into the ocean and I started chasing after it. I ran after it into the water, hoping to find it and bring it back to me. But it was a mere toy against the power of the whole ocean, and as I saw it bobbing away, my mother came and picked me up, carrying me away from my quickly vanishing bucket, so I would not too become lost at sea.
I felt a searing pain, something hot like a white orb of glowing light centered in my chest. The orb contracted and compressed until it had no other way to go except my throat and my vocal chords.
I started screaming to release the pressure. My childhood scream was shrill. It would probably concern me today to hear it coming from a random child on the street, like they were in mortal danger, a severe scream disproportionate to the reality of the situation. I felt like I was dying. I felt like I was dying because I didn’t know the difference between loss and death. I’m not sure if it was because I thought I was the bucket itself. Because I, a small living child, had put a little bit of my own heart into it, and therefore, now the bucket had become me. I had put a little bit of my heart into that inanimate, dead object, a cheap injection molded commodity made from toxic colorants and petroleum byproducts, an object whose raw components were excavated from deep within the earth, transmuted by technological advances of a society that could reverse death, the plastic, polymerized bucket, a Frankenstein’s monster of ancient diatoms and ferns, something that had probably already crossed an ocean to get here, and now it was simply returning back to where it came, adrift, to sink, to be battered by wind and water, to die. And to lose a little bit of my own heart felt like I was dying. It was my first loss and I couldn’t hold it inside of my tiny little body.
Many years later my mom taught me about the Korean concept of jung, which is like a type of love. Korean people say they have jung for people, but also for their pets, and for inanimate objects like their cars and their homes, and buckets. I think that loss, as opposed to animacy, must be more fundamental to the nature of jung, and therefore love. Is it through loss that we even know that we had loved? And so if we are averse to experiencing loss because its pain is too vast, then that must preclude us from the beauty of love.
My friend once told me that to be loved by me is to be like the bucket. Though you drift, further and further, free at last to be on your own grand journey that is nobody else’s but your own, in the Pacific Ocean of life, you are yet watched over by me, filled with my love to the brim, even as I disappear far away to a single point on the beach. And that makes me sad, because it’s true. My love is simple and painful. Each of my loves is a copy of the bucket. I love and then let go and I feel the same pain as the day I lost it. Or I don’t, because I am scared to feel it. Would I even know that I loved if I didn’t feel that pain? Is it that every time I refuse to let go, it’s because I’m scared to cry over the bucket?
What would it feel like if I loved myself as much as I loved the bucket? Would I feel the white orb of burning light persist inside me, yet without the scream? Would I feel a splitting every time I lost myself? Would I watch over the parts of me that bob away over new horizons, mourning the loss properly, with real tears, and yet always holding the bits of my own heart, little grains of sand to keep me safe, to remind me of love as I embark on a grand adventure over the seas?
That is all to say, I feel alone in my experience. I feel as if all of the feeling and the truth that the world has to offer is still too big for my tiny body. I am now something that the world approximates as a 32 year old adult man, yet I feel no bigger than a 5 year old child does on the shores of life. I feel unsettled by the vastness of everything. I feel insecure and unsure on my feet. I feel like my entire experience of living has been my resistance of my smallness. To be small is to be real, and to be big would be to be unreal. Bigness seems unfathomable. To take up space would be an affront to God. How dare I be big in a reality of me being small.
But to become an adult means becoming big, and it means finding a spot for me that fits my bigness, and to accept the new reality of me being big. It’s to realize that though the small boy is still there, so is this big human, who is real. He exists, and he is seen by the world as a big human, and he needs to take up the real space he occupies, if he is to stare truth in the face, and exist in the big world that vastly, really, surrounds me.