I love the ZEN spirit of Basho's haiku and his notion that the haiku lives in the moment of finding those 17 syllables and placing them in a three line poem of 5-7-5 syllables. That is the epiphany experience of the Haiku for Basho and he is the Master of the Haiku form.The strictness and the one-off character of the form engaged me.
Sorry to say no one said yes to my invitation. I must remind myself that they are still working and I am retired. I did not do the full 30 days alone; instead I imported a Christian pious practice from my childhood to shape my journey.
Some of you may remember the idea of a NOVENA That is when you pray in the same way to a certain saint for nine days. My mother was always making Novenas to Saint Jude because his feast day was on her birthday OCTOBER 28. And he is the Patron of Impossible or Helpless Causes. I guess my mother often felt that she was seeking help with Helpless Causes in dealing with the poverty, chaos and social bias in raising me and my two sisters with Down Syndrome at home without the help of her husband and depending on the goodness of her live-in sister Anna and her devout Christian Brother Joe-- known in religious life as Brother Cajetan Cyril.
So I began the HAIKU NOVENA, a nine day event and wrote a haiku each day. Funny thing I discovered about Haiku they are a little like peanuts or Lay's Wavy Potato chips. Who can stop with just one?
So I now have produced quite a few haiku. I am not sure that they work as haiku--yes, they conform to the 5-7-5 rule but do they express an epiphany?
Can an epiphany be conveyed? Is it all in the mind and soul of the poet and does not convey directly to the mind and soul of the reader. When I read a lot of Basho's haiku, I do get into a state of mind that is receptive to them and suddenly one of them will strike me as a revelation. But it hard to re-create those moments. Reading the same haiku the next day is no longer provocative in the same way.
There is such a momentary flow to haiku and that is how it reflects Buddhist meditative experience. That encourages us to watch our minds as if we were sitting on the banks of a a stream and watching the flotsam rush by--so we can watch the flood of thoughts and feeling in our own mind's flow. And we can see the changeableness of all things and also we can detach slightly and see that the ideas, feelings, notions flooding through us are not our core self. They are fleeting expressions of ego. They will pass if we let them go.
Of course, we often don't let them go; we rehearse them and clutch them as if they were pieces of our identity.
And sadly when we do that long enough; then those moments of rage, of shame, of greed and of lust become hours of our days and nights and star as the main players in our life drama.
Haiku can give us a kind of meditative intermission.
Here are a handful of Haiku written by Basho, I copied from a recent collection of translations. They each struck me in some way. You must open your mind to them and see if they speak to you
Why so scrawny, cat?
starving for fat fish or mice . . .
Or backyard love?
Dewdrop, let me cleanse
in your brief sweet waters . . .
These dark hands of life
Glorious the moon . . .
therefore our thanks dark clouds
Come to rest our necks
Under cherry-trees
soup, the salad, fish and all . . .
Seasoned with petals
Too curious flower
watching us pass, met death . . .
Our hungry donkey
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