I Am the Owner of My Own Life

I am the owner of my own life.

This is not a sentence that lifts me up.
People are weak. So am I.
Looking back, I did not choose the path. The path led me. I call that the way of Heaven.

To be the owner means to follow that way, and not to hand to someone else the step that has come to me.
In Korean the word is ju-in. It does not mean the one who possesses. It means the one who answers for the house: the one who receives the guest and sets the table.

There is a Korean saying: the crooked pine keeps the ancestral hill.
The owner is not the one who rose to a high seat, but the one who stayed to the end in a low one.

Some paths are decided by someone else. This path each person walks on their own feet.

On November 11, 2022, my mother died. The world did not stop.
That day I discovered a path.

In Jeonui, Sejong, Korea, there is a 700-meter path.
It begins at the Tree of Love, crosses a railway, and ends at the burial mound of Yi Do, the founding ancestor of the Jeonui Yi family.
A person is born in love and returns to earth.
This path is a stage of life: you walk it looking back on the life of Yi Do and on your own, and picturing the future.
Our life is a path whose end is in sight. Yet what is precious is what cannot be seen.

The one who walks it is me, and no one else.
You may walk it with others, or you may walk it alone. That is each person's own share.

I call this Cinematic Architecture.
It does not see a building as a single photograph. It sees the time a person spends moving through it.
Every life is a film, and everyone has the leading role.

A geomancer, Mr. Park Gwang-seo, called this land “the ground of a sovereign, in the form of a black eagle.”
I read his words this way: it is a place anyone can rise to.
Whoever becomes the owner of their own life stands in that place.
The eagle is not a symbol of dominance. It is a guardian of perspective.
The black eagle that rises at the end of the path is the person who walked it.

In the middle of the path there is a railway. The railway is speed.
We stop before it, look, and cross slowly.
Stop when it is not right. Walk together. This is RESETOM.

After stopping, we set a standard.
Before it plays, an orchestra tunes every instrument to one note, A. In Korean that note is called “ra.”
Only when the standard is set does harmony come, and with it a beautiful resonance, “ul.” This is RAUL.

In 1910 Ahn Jung-geun began writing On Peace in the East and could not finish it.
I look for the answer to that empty place on this path.
War begins where responsibility is abstract. Peace begins where judgment pauses.
If each of us stands as the owner of our own life, knows how to stop, and knows how to tune to one note, I believe the people of this earth can live together as one family.

I call this path and this thought K-OMPHALOS. Omphalos means the navel, the center of the world.
The Omphalos stone at Delphi did not rule. It listened.
The center of the world is not something we inherit. It is something each of us chooses, again and again.
The name grew from Simjungmaewon, “the plum garden of the heart,” which I named in Naju in 2008.
In 2022 that name came to Sejong.

Walk the path. And civilization walks with you.

Architecture Where Every Life Is a Film

Further reading