[An Essay from My Heart]

Closed Shop

Living in a quiet rural area, I find myself spending time in an atmosphere quite different from city life. Especially since there aren’t many Koreans around and everyone is busy with their own daily routines, it isn’t always easy to gather together. Personally, I enjoy peaceful, contemplative moments, and whenever I have time, I immerse myself in reading, calligraphy, and wood-engraving. When I come across a novel that interests me, I order it, or I pull out books that have long been hidden like treasures on my shelves and read them again.

As I read, I select passages and sentences that linger in my mind, grind my ink stick, and write them repeatedly with a brush on recycled paper until I am satisfied. When a piece of calligraphy finally feels right, I stamp my art seal on it, photograph it with my phone, and save it as a file. The next step is to take this file to a souvenir-making shop in my town, along with a piece of wood I like. These wood scraps are remnants from a well-known woodworking studio located about thirty minutes from my home—a place I have been visiting out of curiosity for the past five or six years.

Over the years, the shop—using wood from that studio—has helped me create many carved pieces with a laser engraver, and I even built a small cyber-gallery to display them. In this way, I enjoyed a modest but fulfilling hobby that connected book reading → calligraphy → craftsmanship → digital art, enriching my quiet country life.

However, when I visited the shop last week to request a new piece, I noticed from afar that the lights were off. I soon realized the shop had completely closed down. For me, it had been a deeply enjoyable and meaningful place for several years, and discovering its sudden, unannounced closure left me feeling disappointed and engulfed in a sense of loss.

In today’s complicated and chaotic world, I personally find a small measure of peace and simple joy through my hobbies. Transforming a thought from my mind into something tangible and creative has always intrigued me. Yet in life, the loss of spaces or objects to which we have grown attached can be unexpectedly painful. At the same time, such moments give us a chance to recognize the impermanence of life and discover new possibilities within it. Standing before the darkened shop, I paused for a moment and looked back on the time that had passed.

Although the shop is now gone as a physical space, the small works created there—each infused with memories and stories—and the joy I experienced throughout the process still remain vividly alive in my heart and in the subtle memories of my fingertips. Now, I am ready to carry the traces of my former hobby within me and explore new creative opportunities. I realize that the immersion and tranquility I found through reading, calligraphy, and handicraft are no longer confined to a single place or a specific tool; they can be discovered in the small moments scattered throughout life.

In the end, every experience passes, but the joy, accomplishment, and creative energy gained from it continue to live within us. Even in a turbulent world, we learn to shape the meaning of life, bit by bit, through small acts of our own hands. The closing of the shop is a quiet signal of another beginning, and I choose to accept it as part of a journey that will make my life richer.

As Hermann Hesse once expressed, “When one path closes, another one opens,” a truth that allows me to see loss not as a simple ending, but as a herald of a new beginning.

„Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt.
 Wer geboren werden will, muß eine Welt zerstören.“
 “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.
 Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world.”
 —Hermann Hesse, Demian

LEOX: https://www.ktown1st.com/blog/VALover/343748

SMoFA - Engraving Collection: https://www.ktown1st.com/blog/VALover/343797

SMoFA - Drawing Collection: 

https://www.ktown1st.com/blog/VALover/343845

December 6, 2025 

{Solti}