buddhafrog is...

Buddhafrog? I don't know what it means either. I took this handle before moving to Korea, before being curious in buddhism. It does, however, fit nicely into my view of the world — that all is equally divine and ignoble.

I first came to Korea in the spring of ‘95, looking for escape: escape from the known and the expected. Escape from predestination. Escape from traditional American values and all those things that make conservative, white grandmothers proud of their county.

My planned one year adventure in Korea turned into five. After an educational but challenging year teaching at a private institute, I got a much better job teaching English at Seoul’s Chung’Ang University. That job gave me four months (paid) vacation a year, so I was able to do a healthy bit of world travelling. It made me understand the world as both incredibly small and unreachably large. This idea coupled with this Apollo 17 experience gave the name for the website. If I don’t always see the world as tiny, at least I am trying to live a life that attempts to make it smaller.

There is no place like the USA, and no hometown like Ann Arbor (unfortunately I’m from Ypsi). So I returned in 2000. This time with a wife and soon enough two sons. Life took its crazy turns and we started thinking about going back to Korea, but this time as a family adventure. We departed in 2008. So far, so good.

I do love America, but sometimes I get lost there. For me, it’s sometimes too saturatingly numb (at least I know what I mean). I often feel restless unless I'm moving. I often feel idle unless I'm confronted with something that makes me question what I've been taught. My life feels much more actualized and my senses much more aware on a remote Indonesian beach, hanging with sea turtles. Or even here, in the used-to-be-strange land of Korea.

It’s all good, most of the time,

Joel Eckel
joeleckel@yahoo.com

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