val·ue
/ˈvalyo͞o/
a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.
浅草：
I don’t remember a lot from church. What I do remember is how it made me feel. I never fully understood why “my church” was so different from “my friend’s church”. Seven-year-old me would talk about the things that we did at church, and I would get the strangest looks of confusion from my friends of the same age just because it was different from their church that they grew up with. I always felt insecure whenever I would have to explain that I had lessons for this traditional Japanese style of drumming that would take up my Tuesday and Thursday nights. Even me writing out that sentence alone was my insecurity shining through because it’s easier to say I had drumming lessons instead of explaining how it was a traditional form of drumming practiced at specific traditional festivals in Japan.
ojuzu:
I grew up with my family being very involved with our local Buddhist temple. My Grandmother being the main forefront of it all, she knew almost all the members of church and all the hot gossip that would travel around. That being said it was pretty eminent that the grandchildren would be expected to be pretty involved with church too. That was not the case. We all did our part, getting up early Sunday morning, dressing our best, walking into the temple, the smell of incense lingering in the air, finding our row to sit down in and listen to the reverend speak for an hour in a language that we didn’t understand. Although church was interesting and something that was incredibly important to my Grandmother, my thought process was “why can’t I go and do ‘normal’ things like the other kids in my class?” I had this plaguing sense of embarrassment because I didn’t have the same experiences as my other white friends in school. To this day, I don’t know much about the Buddhist religion. And yet, I still wear my prayer beads.
描画
We had a lot of Buddhas laying around like any other Buddhist Japanese families would. But I always wondered if it was more for decoration, or if it was for its actual purpose as a religious symbol?
