Category: meditation

• June 20, 2013

  Basho’s poetic spirit: A mode of radiance

  For Basho (1644-1694), in whose hands the haiku form achieves its essence, the poet must submerge himself within a natural object, to perceive its delicate life and feel its feelings, out of which a poem forms itself. A poem may skillfully delineate an object; but, unless it embodies feelings which have been naturally emerged out…
• June 19, 2013

  Summer morning: Redwood haiku

  A haiku marries sincerity with accuracy, reintroduces simplicity to lightness. There is no time for parody, satire, or irony. One’s poetic concentration is on the thing, on its relations to what is felt or unseen, and on the world’s radiating significance. R.H. Blyth states that a haiku ‘expresses some realm of the human spirit in…
• June 18, 2013

  ‘Why is Tu Fu sad?’ asks the master

  ‘Why is Tu Fu sad?’ asks the master. A Poem About Radiance ‘It is obvious,’ replies the first pupil. ‘It is, as Tu Fu says: the longest bough has been broken.’ A second pupil differs: ‘The world is unjust: the violent and strong will always crack and break the weak and frail. Had we not…
• June 17, 2013

  The quivering haiku

  ‘The brevity of haiku,’ writes R.H. Blyth in Haiku: Volume III–Summer/Autumn, ‘is not something different from, but a part of the poetical life; it is not only a form of expression but a mode of living more immediately, more closely to life.’ Here is Arakida Moritake, a sixteenth century Japanese poet cited in Alan Watts’…
• June 15, 2013

  Alice in Wonderland in northern California

  When Alice opened the front door, she was amazed to see a giant sequoia looking impassively back at her. The tree engulfed her view, so dwarfed her egress that she had to tiptoe and shimmy sideways to get out the door. Outside, she stepped back and back to take more of it in. And as…