Childhood the kind of boy I was

Father speaks on his childhood

Sun Myung Moon

September 2007

When I was young, I thought, "What's the name of that mountain? What might be on that mountain?" When I started thinking this way, I actually had to go there and find out. I always clearly knew what was within twenty li of where I lived. At that time, I knew everything above and below ground. If there was a mountain in front of me, I just had to go and find out what was beyond it. That's the kind of boy I was.

I was involved in a broad range of activity. There was nowhere within the field of my sight that I had not gone. If there were mountains, there was no peak I had not climbed. I even had to go beyond that point. If I hadn't gone there, I wouldn't even have felt like looking at it.

Therefore, I never stayed in one place. All those natural places in my hometown -- with water and trees, land and spring breezes -- were where I cultivated my emotional sentiment for faith. All of my past is still vividly alive inside me.

A hometown is a place that provides abundant materials for us to grow internally. As a Korean, I used all the natural elements in my Korean hometown. For example, I used all the animals and the plants as a textbook for internal growth. This is why I always miss the mountains, fields and streams of my hometown. I truly love nature.

Observing the plants and climbing trees

When I was young, there was no flower in the mountains I had not touched. There was no flower that I wasn't aware of.

Because nature is so great, when I went to a field I always spent time out in nature until sunset, without going home. When I became tired, I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night. There were many times when my parents came looking for me and took me home. I loved nature that much.

I collected several hundred different kinds of plants and studied them hard to find out which were poisonous and which medicinal. I studied their structure as well. I therefore know all the edible wild greens growing in those mountains. When I went to pick wild greens with my older sister or with neighborhood mothers, I always went ahead of them and picked the edible wild greens first.

When I was young, there was always some tree close to my house, for example, a chestnut tree or an acacia tree... When an acacia tree's flowers bloom, their fragrance is so delicate, isn't it? I did not merely stand there viewing even that tree. I had to climb that tree, stepping on each of the branches. When there was a tree so high in my village that no one had ever climbed it, I just had to climb it. Even if it meant going without sleep at night, I had to climb it.

Near my house, there was a large chestnut tree. It was about two hundred years old, and it was very beautiful. Because I was born in the year of the monkey, I used to climb and step on every branch of the trees. Whenever there were chestnuts [Father laughs], I made a cane out of a branch and knocked them down with that. It was a lot of fun. I knocked down hundreds of chestnuts like that because those chestnut trees were very large.

I also loved Korean white pine trees. Trees should bear fruit, shouldn't they? Korean pine trees yield fruit. In order for the seed to sprout, it first freezes and bursts. A leaf of that tree has five parts. Centering on the east-west-south-north, there is one centerline. In this sense, I love those trees. Also, they grow very well. They grow straight up and the root grows straight as well. The buds grow straight up, too.

Observing the life of birds

When I was young, I was very interested in seeing beautiful birds. What does that bird eat? Where does it build its nest and hatch its eggs? Even if it took several days, I had to find those things out by quietly observing the birds.

Everything I could see in the mountains, all the birds that came within my sight, were all still able to fly after going through my inspection. Once, I remember seeing cute migrating birds for the first time. I wanted to find out what the male bird among them looked like and what the female looked like. Was there a textbook I could study to find that out? I had no choice but to go to those migrating birds and study them myself. I waited there a whole week without eating. [Father laughs]

One time, a magpie laid an egg, and I was so curious about it day after day. I couldn't sleep at night without finding out how it was doing. [Laughter] I went up to have a look during the night, and again early the next morning I had to sneak up to look before the magpie came. Because I went up to look day after day, I became friendly with the magpie. At first the magpie scolded me, but since no harm was done each time I approached, the magpie later stayed calm even when I came near. [Laughter] In that way, I was able to observe what the magpie fed its youngsters and everything it did for them.

Oh yes! The maternal and paternal love of animals toward their youngsters is great. At times when I think of this, I feel they are greater than I.

I could study many aspects of nature. For example, with a bird, I could study its life in relation to all other birds, by comparing them each to that particular one. Take the nest of a nightingale, for example. It hangs down from a branch like this. It's very odd when you look at it. Where do they get that silky thread? Nightingales don't build nests on ordinary branches. Their nests are very high in the tree, in dense areas found usually on older trees. The insect nightingales most like to eat is the pine caterpillar.

When a lark builds a nest, it builds it this big and sits ten meters in front of it. Since larks build nests in fields, you'd think they'd be easily found, but larks build them between fields, on perimeters. Ordinarily people cannot find them easily. You would not notice one even if you stood beside it. They are triangular; they make one side like this with two entrances, like this.

If you look at sparrows you wonder who taught them -- the male and female meet and make their nest and rear their young. The mother doesn't eat what she brings, but gives it all to her baby birds. Who was it who taught her to feed them? Who could have explained that to her?

Hunting and fishing

Since I lived in a rural area, I caught many insects. I caught so many that I think there isn't a type that I haven't caught. There also aren't any animals I haven't captured. Oh, no, that's not right; I've never caught a tiger. I've caught everything from wild cats to rabbits and raccoons. Interestingly, I thought that these animals lived all alone, but they all had partners. They were all in pairs.

In those days, when it snowed, we went out even at night to a field, several tens of li wide, to hunt weasels with canes. During the day, I often hunted rabbits. When there didn't seem to be any rabbits, I used village dogs as hunting dogs. I made them bark and track and hunt rabbits, while I shouted, "Hit the rabbit from behind!" [Laughter]

The meat of a sparrow is very tasty. There isn't any type of meat I haven't tried. Do you know water rails [a marsh bird]? From water rails to pheasants and snakes -- I caught everything. I caught every kind of snake I ever saw, whether it was poisonous or not. When a poisonous snake bit me, I bit it back. [Laughter]

There are indeed many different kinds of bird egg. When I wanted to try to eat a certain egg, I took one home, cooked it and ate it. [Laughter] I treated chicken eggs and all other bird eggs the same. No matter what eggs they were, they got the same treatment.

If you go to a rural area, you will find a large green frog. Children there sometimes caught the measles and became skinny, being unable to eat because of a high fever. I would catch several of those frogs and... The legs of those frogs are very fat. You peel the skin off, wrap it in a pumpkin leaf and cook it. If you wrap it with three or four leaves and cook it, not more than two leaves will burn. It's almost as if you had steamed it. You can't imagine how tender the meat is. It tastes superb. You do not know how good it feels to catch a frog and eat it when you're hungry. There are so many things you can eat. If you live alone, you need to prepare food.

Chongju is my hometown. If you walked about ten li from my village, you could see the Yellow Sea. [An inlet of the East China Sea between China and the Korean peninsula, less commonly known as the West Sea.] If you climbed up a high mountain, you could see everything. In between, there were ponds and brooks. [One Korean li equals 393 meters, or about a quarter of a mile.] The fish in that area changed every season. If you want to learn about the sea, during a vacation period, go out to the sea every day as though you were going to work each morning. I went to ponds near the sea that were smelly with mud and did many things -- from catching eels in sacks to searching for crabs inside holes. Once you clearly understand these kinds of things, you could go out fishing. I was the champion at catching things like eels.

When a customer came and said he wanted to eat steamed eel, I was able to prepare it in thirty minutes or an hour. I was very fast at running as well. I ran a long way, and within about fifteen minutes, I might catch five eels in a pond.

Farm life as it was then

In those days, we had to feed our cow, which I really hated doing; so, I used to tie the cow up in a field on the other side of my village. After several hours, the cow would moo because the person who was supposed to feed it had not come. A cow does not attack its master even if he doesn't come out to feed it. Even if I went to it very late, the cow welcomed me happily. Having witnessed that behavior, I felt that is how I should behave when carrying out the providence.

You should go and see a slaughterhouse. When I was still young, I visited a slaughterhouse many times. It's very interesting. There was a slaughterhouse about four kilometers from my village. When I heard a rumor that someone was going out to catch a cow for butchering, I went to the slaughterhouse and waited there from morning. A butcher came with an iron hammer this big. As soon as a cow came in, he killed it in an instant. When I looked at the cow, it was already dead. The cow was sacrificed. It was so miserable.

There was also a dog I always loved. You can't imagine how clever this dog was. He knew when I was coming home from school. He was very smart. He was better than a person. Thirty minutes before I came home, he came out and waited for me. Sometimes, when I would be coming home late, he understood that beforehand and waited until late to come out. He always followed me and ran circles around me. Looking at the dog, I felt, "Wow; what's love? Do I love anyone that much?"

I was interested in seeing when a pig delivers her piglets, so I went to watch. When the pig pushed once, a piglet came sliding out easily and after another push, another came. [Laughter] It's true! You don't know how interested I was in this. I've also seen cats having kittens and dogs having puppies. It's because I love them all.

We kept bees, too. Honey is indeed delicious. The honey of bees that feed on the flower of the acacia tree is so good. Bees sit on acacia flowers, stick their heads into the flowers and suck out the nectar. They support their body and legs like this. When a bee is sucking the nectar out, if you were to pull the hind end of the bee with tweezers, the hind end would come off, but the bee would keep on sucking! Do you realize how terrible that is? Anyone who pulls on the hind end of a bee until it separates from the rest of the body is terrible, but a bee that enjoys the taste of nectar and does not stop sucking is more fearsome. [Laughter] I told the bee, "I learned from you. I should be like that, too." [Laughter]

Around a farm, there is nothing I'm not good at. I'm good at tilling paddy fields; I'm good at plowing; I'm good at rice planting, and I'm also good at weeding the fields. The most difficult place to weed is a millet field. Usually the field is weeded three times. When it is weeded the third time, the big weeds are taken out. After millet fields, the most difficult to weed are cotton fields. I know very well how I should weed in order to make good peas, good rice or good corn. When I see sweet potatoes that have been dug up, I know whether they were grown in mud, or not, simply by looking at them. It is not good to grow sweet potatoes in mud. Sweet potatoes grown in a mixture of two-thirds sand and one-third mud are very sweet.

I'm also very good at rice planting. Usually rice is planted in rows here, right? [Yes.] Farms in places like Pyong-an Province, North Korea were very developed, more so than in South Korea. This is because the Christian civilization arrived there first.

I eat anything easily, even uncooked cucumbers. I have trained myself to eat uncooked corn and potatoes. I'm a person who has even trained himself to eat uncooked peas. Uncooked peas are actually delicious.

When I was young, while playing around at my mother's family's house, there was a vine stretching out. When I asked what it was, they told me that it was from a sweet potato. I asked, "What's a sweet potato?" I had never heard of it. "How do you eat it?" They told me you dig it out of the ground and steam it. After hearing that, I tried a steamed sweet potato for the first time. Oh, what a taste that sweet potato had! How tasty it was! I said I would eat them all by myself, and I took the entire basket of sweet potatoes and ate them. From the next year after that, as soon as sweet potato season came, I often said to my mother, "Mom, I'll be back soon," and I went on a twenty-ii marathon to eat sweet potatoes...

I always wore socks and other clothes I had knitted myself. When it became cold, I even knitted hats in a flash. I taught my older sisters how to knit. I made Korean socks for my mother. My mother said, "I thought you were just trying to make them as a joke. How did you get them into the shape of a sock? It fits just right."

Also, at times, I went to use the toilet in a rural Buddhist temple. When I used their toilet, I kept quiet and listened to the sound of my feces dropping; it sounded poetic. Combined with the sound of the wind chimes in the temple, it was very poetic. There were times when I sat for thirty minutes, an hour, or even two hours. It was very interesting.

A suffering environment

When winter came, I brought food to birds and dug wells for them. I worked sincerely to dig out spring water. I said to the birds, "Birds! You should come here and drink this water." They actually responded, came and drank it. They ate what I brought for them and did not fly away even when they saw me come and go. They naturally came to like people.

Another time, I dug a small muddy pool. I thought fish survived wherever there was water. I left some fish in the pool, but the next morning when I came to look, they were all dead and lying outside the water. I did not feel good when I saw the dead fish. I thought, "Why did you die? I did my best to keep you alive, so why did you die?" That was what I thought without knowing why the fish had died. When I remember this, it occurs to me that I'm indeed a person with a lot of heart. Even about a fish I thought, "Oh, I'm sure your mother will cry." I cried looking at those fish. I told them, "I will cry for you," and I cried all by myself.

When I was young, what my father hated most was the hunting of dogs. Nevertheless, some neighbors caught the dog of ours that I loved the most. When I came home from school, they had caught my dog and were hanging it upside down. Although it was almost dead, my dog looked at me and still looked so happy to see me. I hugged the hung dog and burst into tears. When I think of this, I feel people cannot be trusted, but dogs can.

I'm not an insensitive person. I'm a very soulful person. I'm filled with tears. I'm a very sympathetic person. When I was young, even when I fought with an annoying boy who was harassing a friend of mine, when that boy's clothes ripped, I took mine off and gave them to him. I'm a person with that kind of heart.

Maybe it was because of my nature, but after seeing a freezing beggar pass by; I couldn't eat or sleep that night. My personality was like that. I asked my mother and father to take that beggar into our room and to feed him well. Don't you think God loved me because of this characteristic?

When I heard a rumor that someone in the neighborhood was starving, I couldn't sleep at night. How could I help that person? I asked my mother about it. My mother and my father asked me, "Are you going to feed all the people in our village?" I took rice out of our box anyway and gave it to the starving person without my parents' approval.

In March, when spring comes, village people prepare for a feast. Can poor people afford to eat rice cakes? They have nothing. I took meat and rice to make rice cakes and took them to those people.

When I learned of the difficult situation of the people in the village, I brought food to the poor people or sometimes to women who had given birth but who could not eat because they had no rice or seaweed. [For some weeks after giving birth, a Korean mother traditionally eats seaweed soup to recover her strength.]