In this video and essay about the process of exchanging a haiku a day for a year, a path of discovery and awakening is revealed through a walking meditation with haiku as the focus. In the video version linked below some of the hundreds of illustrated postcards are featured, including drawings, photos, scans, graphic design and sampled images.
The video can be viewed with this link:
From Hermitage a Haiku Journal 2006 Volume III
Postcards from a Path
As a birthday gift to my sister Michelle I agreed to exchange a haiku a day for a year through the mail. As an artist and a newcomer to haiku this was a way back to the poetry I had left behind 20 years ago. Although at first challenged by the commitment, it was a joyful project for us both, and one of the greatest gifts I have ever allowed myself. The exchange took place between my home in the Appalachian mountains of Chattanooga, Tennessee and her suburban condominium in New Jersey.
Our haiku practice was to write from experience, growing in the process of opening to our different surroundings. Now in midlife, our hope was to rediscover with the exchange of haiku some of the joy we had shared years earlier growing up on a Missouri farm. Rain or shine I would visit the same locations every day, writing haiku or gathering images or materials from Chickamauga Creek on the Tennessee River, and Lookout Mountain which overlooks it. There was a 100 year flood in the spring, a wedding in Scotland, gunshots and open windows in summer, and winter rain so hard it poured through our aging roof. What developed was an intimate collection of new experiences and shared memories in postcard form.
The constant quest produced haiku drafts on bank statements, on brake warranties, business cards, ATM receipts, envelopes, and papers washed with the laundry. Among the visual results are photos, drawings, digital renderings, scans, appropriated images, even rubbings from across the Atlantic. There is inkwash made with the morning’s coffee, watercolors with butter stains, tracings, and the occasional portrait of an unwitting sleeper. Over time it became apparent that not every day would be golden. There were periods of high productivity for both of us but for me some days fell short, other days yielding 3 or 4 haiku from every direction. I stockpiled cards that were in progress in a drawer, and mailed a complete haiku and illustration whenever possible.
The daily discipline of writing found me working in different ways than ever before. Haiku alone was not always the result, but poetry in other forms as well: inventories, lists of sounds, familiar poems rewritten as fill-in-the-blanks, quotes overheard, fragments of dreams. Although different from these other forms of self-aware poetry, my first attempts at haiku were still highly conscious attempts to draw connections between things or events. But over the course of the year my awareness and receptivity grew and with time I moved from recording cause and effect anecdotes toward a truer understanding of haiku. I began seeing the essentiality of things, letting down my defenses and being present in each moment. As my work moved away from reflective senryu and closer towards the selflessness of haiku, the turning point of the year’s revelations caught me quite unaware.
While walking across a familiar field, I noticed for the first time a set of bedsprings rusting in the grass. I pulled out my notebook and quickly jotted down two lines. With no feeling for it I pocketed the page and put it away in a drawer of ideas not to be revisited for months. During the holidays I gathered the group of cards from the drawer and included this haiku in a Christmas present to Michelle:
bedsprings in the weeds / scent of sweet spring leaves
Modern Haiku Vol. 34.2
I became attuned to what I had been seeking; nested images of circles, cycles, spirals, and transition, the lonely spirit of wabi and weathered patina of sabi. I was opening to impermanence, and aspiring to the endurance of the spirit. Almost unconsciously I had written my first true haiku. In the course of the year’s writings I moved from seeking inspiration on demand to relinquishing control, and from actively working at seeing connectedness to being connected, to being a vehicle for expression. As my understanding increased, so did my joy. As my compassion grew, so too did my longing to be in it always. My daily focus became more concerned with life as an unfolding process of possibilities and less concerned with what was missing from my life. More aware of my opportunities and dreams, I experienced a new abundance in what was present all along, opening to what I hadn’t noticed before.
Christmas morning / two crows gleaning the field / beneath a gray sky
The greatest reward of this year has been my awakening beyond the poems themselves. The Haiku Year has been a catalyst for this and for a redirection toward acts of service. And in giving I received one of the greatest gifts towards the fulfillment of a lifelong desire. As a result I now teach Art at a wonderful Arts magnet school with the happiest young people I have ever known. There, once a year, I present a week-long haiku workshop with spontaneous photography and art. For most students this is their first experience with haiku. It is my desire to share with them some of the many aspects of experience I feel are possible in haiku as poetry, as an art form, and as a path to knowing.
On a clear morning in the following spring I recorded these notes and put them away in the drawer. Now, two years later I recognize in them my awakening in the Haiku Year;
gnarled limbs of the pine / every branch, every needle / pointing up
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