The Girl Who Cradled Time.

From behind the undulating peaks of InWangSan, the sun would rise and set to no discernible design; fading in and out of the unreliable moon like a half-remembered dream.

Days and nights had yet to be confined. The villagers slept with their hearts. Hunting at dark. Boars and squirrels. Tigers on the odd occasion. Enough to feed the clan for many a moon spell. They slept in daylight under the protection of light.

Sang-Hee, a Mudang with heightened perception was on the edge of her birth rite. She would soon be initiated into the matriarchy. A carer for the youngers until she too would contribute her progeny to the ever growing nursery.

As she contemplated her fate from her perch on an Acer branch, Sang-Hee watched the silver shards of the moon splinter across the forest. It’s steady light to her was like a spell cast by the universe. In that moment, it dawned on her that the moon was not an arbitrary phenomenon. Her mind whizzed and whirred as she ran back to the village. It was a revelation. And she was determined to prove it.

She gathered sticks and stones, using them to construct her first rudimentary time piece. As the light shifted into dark, she charted the shadow's journey. She would call them ‘Sigan’ and ‘nal. In her mind she had named order.

At the next clan meeting, Sang-Hee presented her findings with passionate excitement. “Look! See here” She shouted, pointing to the shadow outlined on the mud, “We can chart it. This, is TIME”

The elders stared at her, dumbfounded. Change was something to be feared and they would not be easily convinced, they eyed the stones with suspicion. No, this was not the way of the ancestral path. Sang-Hee found herself in the eye of a tornado. She was ridiculed and shunned by the men, and the women could barely bring themselves to speak to her. If they did it was only to bark out her latest chore. She could not be trusted into the initiation, so she watched from the side lines as her peers were taken into the fold.

Under the protective guidance of the stars, Sang-Hee tinkered with her creation; aligning each stone and stick meticulously. The villagers whispered in hushed tones, casting suspicious glances at her and her contraption, but their scepticism made her even more determined to find out the truth about the shadow.

One evening, as the moon reached its zenith, an elder named Soo-Min approached her. Instead of the usual stone walled eyes, he was open. She glanced up at him, beckoning for him to join her.

He knelt beside her, “Teach me,” he said softly, “about your ‘Sigan’ and ‘nal.’”

Sang-Hee's heart soared. Soo-Min had given her hope. So it came to pass, she had found an ally of her time. And, night after night, they would chart the moon's journey, and gradually Soo-Min began to grasp the significance of the phases.

As luck might have it, for Sang-Hee at least, the weather of the moment plunged into a heatwave, the sun, cruel and unrelenting parched the earth, evaporating the streams and pools of water that had quenched the thirst of the village. The hunting and gathering patterns of the clan were thrown into disarray. Sang-Hee seized the moment. Taking it as a sign that the sun was an ally too.

With Soo-Min's restrained support, she proposed a plan. Using her undertanding of time, she predicted the optimal moments for planting and harvesting, she practically begged the villages to modify their agricultural practices.

Desperation and thirst are powerful orators. The once fierce resistance succumbed to hope of a solution. Reluctantly, they began to listen to Sang-Hee's guidance.

The season passed, and so too did the shadows in entirely predictable movement should anyone have cared to look. Sang-Hee tracked each shift diligently. To the village's amazement, the harvest was bountiful, saving them from the brink of starvation. The concept of time now had form and purpose. Sang-Hee's method, once scorned, quickly became embedded practice, with each hut constructing their own time piece. Sang Hee’s would remain enshrined in the central square.

In her twilight years, gazing up at the same moon that had once inspired her revelation, Sang-Hee knew that she had created more than just a way to measure time. She had redefined her tribe. They would never again dismiss an idea out of fear. Instead, they would learn from the new and use it to enhance their future, whilst maintaining a reverence for their collective past. Her story would be passed down through generations. She was, afterall, the girl who had cradled time.