December – Graceful Endings, Gentle Futures
December – Graceful Endings, Gentle Futures
Marking the year’s closing with ritual, intention, and legacy planning.
Review and Remember September, November
In a year of struggle and digging to core values, I felt a need to theme and explore Reflection, Resistance, and Reimagining. I wanted to build community around this.
For September, I planned and worked the series. A face-to-face gathering, an online gathering, and a self-paced sharing space. No one came to the face-to-face gathering. Two friends showed up and supported me and each other in the online space. I softly shared the online space, but no one but myself shared. The theme is a frequent one for me that I explore, sitting between cultures and languages. “Listening to the Margins” was a chance to re-center voices and stories often sidelined in EFL, education, and language policy. We explored silence, discomfort, and memory as they resound in bodies and in objects.
I readjusted November as I could not coordinate a Korean calligraphy facilitator for the workshop. Knowing that my immediate network was already overburdened with busy schedules and feeling the illnesses of the season, I simply shared my materials online. This month, I explored: “Poetics of Pedagogy”. By exploring teaching as an art of timing, attention, and aesthetic resistance, I read some poetry by Kim So-wol and Ko Un as well as read some hooks. I used my crayons and wrote using my own ‘calligraphy’ style, and I sat and watched the mountainside as the trees released their leaves to flutter like snowflakes down upon the ground. I explored my own work and how and when I still attach to colonial voices to regiment my classes, and where I transgress and break those very rules I chose to contain my teaching and our learning.
This month we move to the milestone of the end of the year. A chance to look at 2025 gracefully and gratefully. This honoring of endings then makes space to welcome new energies for 2026, a gentle future of the uncertain and unknown that lies before us.
One of my favorite themes from Korean philosophy that frequently waxes visible in art here in Gwangju is the idea of negative space, 여백 (yeobaek). It is a type of honoring of the margins that do so much work but rarely get named, much less honored. It is something I struggle with. Growing up in a home where every nook and cranny was crammed full of knick-knacks and nostalgia, have open or empty space is very uncomfortable for me physically and psychologically. But, when I go to study or to make something, I am a clear the desk, find the open space kind of person. Nothingness is full to my creative vision. Yet it is ephemeral and uncaught, unnamed, untamed. I love that freedom and the frisson of fear and excitement it elicits in me.
This month as I wind down my work for review and reflection, I look at my year of busy-ness and am in awe. I’ve done so much, yet nothing at all. The negative space of my year is quite dramatic. Missing people from my past who provide frames and balance for my troubles and ideas of the present. As I face the eternal cycle of the expat abroad, making new friends, and saying goodbye to them. Welcoming young adults, both curious and incurious about their future, and getting to know them as they wade through a foreign language. Then letting them go into their future brightly and tenderly. I also am reckoning with my body and its limitations and the negative space that emerges from my mobility challenges. My body especially reminds me that every day is a new day. All I need to focus on is the next moment, the next step, sometimes I can only focus on the next step as I breathe through a pain that seems unending, without the relief of its own negative space.
In Korean philosophy, 여백 (yeobaek) is not simply emptiness but a living pause—an active quiet that holds possibility. Art historians often point to the brush traditions of Seon (Zen)-influenced ink painting and the compositional practices of the Joseon literati as places where yeobaek takes its clearest form: the unpainted space that gives breath to the image, the silence that shapes the sound. Philosophers like Yi Sang-eun and aestheticians writing on traditional calligraphy remind us that what is omitted is as important as what is expressed, that the blankness is its own kind of presence. I’ve always felt this deeply but unevenly; yeobaek unsettles me even as it teaches me. It invites me to trust the unfilled—those stretches of time, energy, and emotion that look like nothing but are actually doing the quiet labor of holding, balancing, and reframing a life. Maybe this is why I keep circling back to it in my work: yeobaek gives me permission to see my own pauses, missteps, and absences not as failures but as part of the composition of a year, a practice, a life between cultures and thresholds.
I’d like to close this reflection with my attachment to my childhood liminality and empty space of Bugs Bunny. This video shares some of the bare and haunting background and yeobaek on which the manic imaginings of Bugs and the Roadrunner take place. I like to stop and look at my own background and yeobaek instead of my self as the center of the story. I like this graceful exit to look back into the room, the space of my life and say ‘Ah. Yes. I see nothing,’ and be OK with that.
For some activities this month, I invite you to write:
a letter to your future teacher-self
answer: “What are you ready to lay down? What will you carry forward?”
A graceful exit doesn’t mean vanishing. It means leaving with presence. It means pausing to honor the arc of what we’ve shared before we step into what comes next. For me, that looks like gratitude for this experiment, for the stories and silences, for the gentle resistance and reimagining practiced.
As we enter this final session, I invite you to reflect:
What has this season of gathering opened in you?
What roles or stories are you ready to lay down as 2025 comes to a close?
How might you practice your own version of a graceful exit?
Perhaps the most graceful exit is one that lingers like silence after poetry — spacious, alive, and waiting for what comes next.
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