This world of dew

Is yes, a world of dew

And yet…

–Issa Kobayashi

I hear so often that we’re all an accident. It is officially taught in schools, media, etc. that we are a product of chance. Evolved from species over millions of years from a primordial soup that randomly sparked into this universe we now know. It is often emphasized that man is nothing more than a “sophisticated ape”, “glorified animal”, and “highly intelligent species”. The insinuated conclusion, therefore, that is often reached: your life is insignificant. It doesn’t matter what you do. Life is fleeting anyway. We are a blip and then gone. In the grand scheme of things, we supposedly would have come into existence at the equivalent of 11:55 pm on the eve of the universe’s destruction. No purpose, no meaning, no hope.

It’s like the dew on the grass—here and gone, hardly an afterthought.

Issa Kobayashi, one of the four great haiku-ist, noted that too in the haiku above. The world is dew, yes…and yet…

This Haiku was written after the sudden death of his 1 yr old daughter. Issa was a Buddhist priest. He knew well and believed that all things were fleeting and passing, and that this existence had little meaning aside from the greater harmony of all things. Thus he pens, “…is yes, a world of dew…”; then the abysmal doubt, “and yet”.

Those two words that no one can escape. If all is meaningless, if none of this matters, if we’re all an accident waiting for another cataclysmic event to revert us back to a primordial soup—or nothingness—then why, “and yet”.

It plagues us. It haunts us. It haunts us like the Holocaust, like the Inquisition, like 9/11, like every war, genocide, natural disaster, and murder in history. Why? Because something inside us screams IT DOES MATTER! Your loved ones matter, you matter, your work matters, your leisure matters, your love matters, the good or evil matters!

This is what plagued Issa Kobayashi, it plagued all writers, and lyrists, and every man woman and child.

So don’t feed us that garbage. The overarching theme of literature, of religion, of lyric, of history says contrary. We even call it “the natural order”. Why? It’s chance, why is there order, why does suicide, murder, war, and genocide matter if evolution and Nihilism and fatalism are correct? It is because they are not!

Deny any religious forms you like, but here is where I have found the satisfying answer. The answer to ‘why’ and ‘why it is’ and ‘why the question is there’.

“What is man that you are mindful of him? And the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings; and crowned him with glory and honor.”—Psalm 8.4-5

Yes, life is but dew, and yet…