In the sink, broken glass
We each pick up the pieces
No one cuts a finger
Mindfulness Writing Day 27, Writing Our Way Home
Today I read poet Jane Hirshfield’s The Heart of Haiku. In this wonderful essay, Hirshfield explains some of Basho’s life story, traces the history of haiku, and then offers translations and interpretations of some of Basho’s poignant and deeply mindful verse. A practicing Buddhist, Jane Hirshfield has insight that allows her to shed light on Basho’s poetry for those who are unfamiliar with Japanese culture and Eastern philosophy.
Another short article well worth the time is Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “More than the Birds, Bees, and Trees: A Closer Look at Writing Haibun.” She emphasizes the importance of cultivating aware, “the quality of certain objects to evoke longing, sadness, or immediate sympathy.”
Jane Hirshfield also mentions this important aspect of haiku and how it was Basho who encouraged his students “to feel sabi.” She goes on to explain that “to feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence.”
Daily mindfulness writing and writing small stones are a beautiful way to feel sabi and to cultivate aware in poetry and in life.
Balanced On the Edge 
I loved The Heart of Haiku. I’m now reading Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and in a chapter on translation she talks about the kigo in haiku: “The kilo brings into a haiku both the concrete here-and-now and also awareness of passing time. Passing, because seasons exist only by differentiation: to contemplate the particular blossoms and winds and beings by which we know autumn or winter, summer or spring, is to remember that each exists within continual change.” Thanks for sharing your haiku.
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