Yongnuni Oreum, thought to look like a dragon at rest, is a beautiful volcanic crater with soft ridges. This oreum [volcanic cone, in Jeju dialect], 247.8 meters high, is a good place to go trekking up along gentle ridges and takes only half an hour to walk the circumference. While walking along the rolling hills and soft curves of the oreum, you may feel as though you are playing hide-and-seek with other oreums peeking out beyond the opposite ridge. You may walk down to the bottom of the crater from which the oreum is viewed as waves of soft curves. The coziness within it is like being in a mother’s arms.
Yongnuni Oreum is many people’s favorite, for example, the late photographer Younggap Kim who wandered throughout the island’s mid-mountain grasslands with the wind; his works are now permanently installed in his gallery known as DOMOAK which was transformed from an abandoned primary school in a farming village. He lived with a primitive feeling of loneliness and bottomless longing while dedicating himself to capturing every momentary beauty of nature – a combination of light, wind, color, temperature and moisture – and his works present a set of variations on the theme of nature, a full of wonder and mystery.
We meet and are thrilled with such nature of Jeju at Yongnuni Oreum.
Dr. Anne Hilty is a Cultural Health Psychologist with a focus on the interplay of Eastern and Western theories of mental health as well as the mind-body connection. Her grounding is in the fields of cultural, transpersonal, and health psychology; she is additionally influenced by classical Chinese medicine, somatic psychology, and Asian shamanic traditions. Originally from the city of New York, Dr. Hilty lives on bucolic Jeju Island in South Korea, having previously lived in Seoul and Hong Kong.
