Red Lighthouse
Written by Kim Myung Seok from South Korea
The book cover looks rather too heavy and gloomy to be one for a kid’s storybook, with the dark contrasting colors of black, red and yellow.
From the very first page, a page without words, just simply a depressing picture, the book portrays the desperation and pain of the world.
Pictured in the photo are people – all of them – crouched in pain and struggling to conquer darkness, coldness and solitude, in their own ways. The void, isolation, despair, and loneliness we feel from looking at that picture grips at our souls, terrifying us.
In the story, there are people who, one day, see the light shining from the red lighthouse beyond the distance. They believe the lighthouse is lighting something special and so they make their way to where the light is pointing. They embark on this journey full of hope. After overcoming adversity tougher than the life they are living, the people finally get to their destination: a big tree that the lighthouse illuminates.
They climb up to the top and try to find the missing something, which they hope for, but there’s nothing.
At the moment they are about to give up, they feel the light of the lighthouse.
Then, they realize
that the hope is in their mind,
not somewhere far away from them.
‘this warm, bright hope is in us.’
Although you may feel as if you are lost in the dark forest, you may feel as if you are alone on the boat floating on the ocean, you roam around in yourself not knowing the reason for living or the path towards meaning, and even though you are suffering from desperation and solitude and would rather just give up everything, a ray of hope is present in such things, in your mind.
From Despair to Hope (When you click this link, you will be directed to the poem “From Despair to Hope”)
There must be a reason why we live in this world.
