In the place where the guarding side and the cherishing gaze shine

But here, there was someone who had been quietly watching over him.
From the moment the thorny girl began to isolate herself, the boy has been silently by her side, though invisible.
The boy, who had been waiting for the girl who was in no hurry and enduring her pain, finally approached the girl's lush, blooming thornbush.
He doesn't even care if he gets stabbed.
The boy, with his delicate hands, fearlessly makes a small gap between the thorns.
Finally, light shines through that small gap.
I don't know how long it has been since I've seen such a warm light in the forest of a girl who had forgotten and lost both the world and herself.
In the place where light touches the round eyes, flowers bloom miraculously.
The silent boy's 'side' and his 'gaze' that soothed her wounds opened the way for the girl to blossom on her own.
Just as a drop of water falling on a thorn tree growing in barren land finally causes a flower that has been dormant for a long time to bloom.
As the thornbush that had been in the lonely, dark darkness began to blossom, the girl was finally freed from the island of suffering.

A seed that nothing in the world can destroy

What does the flower the girl bloomed mean? It could be anything: my true self, shattered and lost amidst the barbed words of others, the me I knew, my dreams, my hope for the world, my hope for humanity, courage, and faith.
No matter what storms may come from the cruel outside world that pierce and shake my fragile body and mind, there is a seed within me that I can never lose.
I just forgot.
But it is never easy to remember such feelings in the midst of unbearable pain.
But, 'nevertheless,' to those who remember the seed within me and make a flower bloom from that seed, an unbreakable power is once again given to both hands.
It is the strongest force in the world.
What the boy gave the girl, and what the girl can now give to the world, is the strength: 'the courage to reach out to those who are hurting', and further, 'the courage to resonate alongside the fragile trembling of being alive'.


Hands stained with scars
A flower offered to a bleeding wound

Salvation is not found in the lofty eyes looking down from afar, but in the warmth of a small, wounded hand reaching out from right beside us.
Its warmth opens our eyes, which were tightly shut in fear, and allows us to see the sparkling lights within us that we had not been able to see while buried in barbed words.
The world we face, holding hands and blooming with that light, will never be the same again.
Because now we have in our hands the gentle power to create a tiny crack in the thorny forest.
It is the power to remember the light within without being consumed by thorns and to pass that light on to others.
When that power gathers, a world as small and yet as large as that single flower opens up, the flower held in the hand of the boy who followed the girl covered in thorns, the flower offered to the boy by the girl who opened her eyes in the darkness.
‘Walk only on flower paths’, people often say, but is that ever easy?
But even if today's path is thorny, if the flowers that have passionately pushed through the thorns gather one by one, then tomorrow we will be able to walk together on a painfully dazzling flower path.

Prayer for the Thorn Forest

Someone opening this book for the first time might be a little puzzled.
Words that seem insignificant at first glance seem to have an overwhelming influence on the girl.
The intense visual images expressed in the painting penetrate the paper and even make the viewer feel pain.
But the author is talking about the violence hidden behind such everyday words.
This story is for those who have been wounded, or have experienced an island of isolation, by the thorns hidden in ordinary words, in the wild words, but above all, in those very words that have a direct and clear power.
Anyone who has felt the sharpness of thorns piercing the heart and the isolation in the darkness of a thorny forest will feel infinitely humbled and humbled by the power of 'words.'
Furthermore, even if the pain in the thorny bushes that grow where 'words' have pricked us may seem like an inescapable prison, if there is even one hand that knows the wound as if it were its own and reaches out, the word 'salvation' will no longer be a prayer with no hope.
Every inch of the line carved using the copperplate technique seems to contain the artist's earnest prayer for the thorn forests on this earth.