This book has been such a wonderful balm. Absolutely adore it, and it's legitimately made me appreciate red bean. I actually looked up how to make red bean, and I found a couple of dorayaki options to try out from Chateraise. There was one with cream cheese and adzuki (totally bull-dozing through my dairy restrictions) that was soooo delicious.
I don't want to disappoint you, but Toku herself said at the time that she couldn't actually hear the voice of beans. But if you live in the belief that they can be heard, then someday you might be able to hear them. She said that was the only way for us to live, to be like the poets. That's what she said. 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.
💜
I cried ridiculously at several points. And some parts really stunned me, because it emphasised again this whole... witnessing thing, that is life. When I was small, I used to wonder what the big deal was about witnessing -- because our syahadah, the declaration of belief in Islam, translates literally to, "I bear witness that there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Like why does it have to be a testimony, you know? The first time I got struck by a thought on this, was when we were learning about electrons (haha) in a basic physics module at university, and realising that electrons decided to present as a particle or wave depending on the observer, which is a mind boggling concept by itself. But I was like, wait, one of the most basic units of matter requires a witness and observer to come into practical existence? What. My tiny brain could not make the full connection between things, but just contemplating the possibility of it blew my mind sufficiently.
This story about Sweet Bean Paste, while fully from a secular philosophical perspective, demonstrated how the essence of life is in witnessing the present moment, and that in itself is sufficient. Life does not require some sort of length and successful trajectory to have meaning. It does not need to be lauded or even to be necessarily loved by others. It just needs to be, and to witness.
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.
