Sweet Bean Paste

by Durian Sukegawa

With you around I feel like I have an ally.

There was a time when I’d given up all hope of ever going outside those gates into the world again. But now look at me.

it wasn’t his ability to control his reactions he was unsure of so much as his own deep-seated feelings.

I realized that no matter how much we lost, or however badly we were treated, the fact is we are still human.

While I was alone on that path in the woods, I came face-to-face with the moon. And oh, what a beautiful moon it was! I was enchanted. It made me forget everything I had suffered because of this illness, about being shut up in here and never going out. Then next thing, I thought I heard a voice that sounded very much like the moon whispering to me. It said: I wanted you to see me. That’s why I shine like this. From then on I began to see everything differently. If I were not here, this full moon would not be here. Neither would the trees. Or the wind. If my view of the world disappears, then everything that I see disappears too. It’s as simple as that.

I began to understand that we were born in order to see and listen to the world. And that’s all this world wants of us. It doesn’t matter that I was never a teacher or a member of the workforce, my life had meaning.

I am sure it is for that child to perceive wind, sky, and voices in his or her own unique way. The world that child senses exists because of it, and therefore that child’s life, too, has purpose and meaning.

All experience adds up to a life lived as only you could.

If all you ever see is reality, you just want to die. The only way to get over barriers, she said, is to live in the spirit of already being over them.’

There has to be a reason for being born, irrespective of individual circumstance.

I began with the concept of a greater force that created human beings, rather than examining human society per se; the idea that we have been nurtured by the universe to prove its existence. If there is no single conscious mind capable of doing this, the existence of the universe itself becomes unverifiable. It cannot exist. Over the aeons the universe has nurtured life forms whose very awareness makes them involved in its continued existence. Hence we are all alike in having materialized on this Earth because that was what the universe so desired. The ill, the bed-ridden, and children whose lives are over before they’ve barely begun; all are equal in their relationship to the universe.