Zen Buddhist teacher Katsuki Sekida has been a source of great inspiration for me, most poignantly when he writes about “see[ing] things as they truly are.” According to Sekida, what we see is shaped by our mood, the latter serving as the “keynote” or central theme of our existence. Human beings, he asserts, live in their mood for as long as they live. Mood, a result of embodiment, moves beyond the workings of our physical body and the mental activity of the brain as we “mind” or relate to our environment. Sekida thinks that the life of a child is defined rather simply by “two different worlds of mood, one warm, the other cold; one soft, the other hard.” These worlds multiply, become vaster as we move with an increasingly deluded consciousness into adulthood. If I understand Sekida rightly, our deluded consciousness, which develops as we mature, springs from an intellectual awareness of oppositions and discriminations. This kind of intellectual awareness separates our existence from that of other existing things. Desert hills and stars and planets, all of which pass beyond and above, are mere recipients of our conceptual understanding. We are now, as Sekida puts it in an allusion to Heidegger, “being-in-the-world”, which detrimentally alters the mood of existence. What happens to an adult upon their “being-in-the-world?” Sekida’s answer: “vividness of sense and mood has died out, replaced by a conceptual way of thinking. [They are] an intellectual being and [have] killed the precious sense and mood of childhood.” We needn’t despair about his disquieting statement because Sekida reminds us that the mood of a child has never been lost since it’s “preserved” within us. In this mixed media piece, I seek to portray such a preservation of mood. The wandering figure–curious, awe-struck, and open– finds the purified wisdom of his flexible mind, thereby seeings things as they truly are.