• Home
  • About
  • The Minotaur Myth

  • Zen Fits
  • It’s Martini Time
  • Reflections on Eckhart Tolle
  • Buddhas in your Landfill
You are here: Home / Archives for haiku

But for the woodpecker

March 17, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

But for the woodpecker
tapping at a post, no sound
at all in the house. (Basho)
_________________

We all have heard the woodpecker tapping, tapping…and the house must be very quiet to hear that tapping outside. But what is the house here? No thoughts in the house either. Thought are sound. Sound is movement. Thoughts are mind sounds. So now we are really quiet. All that exists is the woodpecker’s tapping. And even that is not a woodpecker, not something with a name because that naming is also a sound in the house. There is no “Oh, that’s a woodpecker.” There is not even the poet in the house, because the idea that I’m in the house is also a sound in the house. But for the tapping, tapping…there is nothing or no one there. This is Zen.

There is a shift from awareness-of the wood pecker as an object to awareness-as the woodpecker. There is a shift from awareness of the woodpecker to awareness-as the sound of the tapping. Awareness has shifted from objective to subjective, and subjective awareness has no boundary, a house without an IT. Only Now exists.

Filed Under: Hai on Ku Tagged With: Basho, haiku, Zen

Village songs more lovely

March 16, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Singing, planting rice,
village songs more lovely
than famous city poems  (Basho)
_______________________

Why are village songs more lovely than city poems? Why are country people different than city people? What is the ground of each? Is city life artificial? Is the village in the body while the city is in the mind? Are family networks stronger in the village? Is city life fragmented while village life is whole. Does fame and fortune matter in the simple village. Is the village timeless? Is the city future orientated?

Filed Under: Hai on Ku Tagged With: Basho, haiku, Zen

The silence of stone

March 15, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Lonely silence,
a single cicada’s cry
sinking into stone   (Basho)

__________________

 

How unusual to associate sound with stone. The poets creates an intermediate zone where sense data is mixed in unfathomed ways to come up with a new sense that no single sense can be conscious of. The poet plays with sense portals like a child running through the house opening and shutting doors. A sound sinks into stone. Or is it silence that is stone. What is more lonely than stone. What is more still than stone. We listen to cicada’s cry and it does sink into stillness…it is the cry that creates the stillness. Without the cry you would not know stillness. The poet describes silence with sound. A noise with stone.

Filed Under: Hai on Ku Tagged With: Basho, cicada, haiku, Zen

From all these trees

March 14, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

From all these trees—
in salads, soups, everywhere—
cherry blossoms fall  (Basho)
___________________

This haiku just gives me a sense, a feeling that is hard to pin down with words, and I guess that is the point of the haiku, to go where words cannot go. Beauty is falling here, everywhere, in salads and soups, everywhere. Beauty everywhere falling like cherry blossoms. All is One, yet Two. The poet sees the two (or many) yet there is one cherry blossom falling everywhere.

Filed Under: Hai on Ku Tagged With: Basho, haiku, Zen

Summer grass

March 13, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams  (Basho)

_____________

This haiku moves me in two directions, one from a burial field where soldiers lie, the other to my own imperial dreams. Summer grasses…..is just this fact of summer grass the burial ground of my dreams. Summer grasses, just this fact ground one’s imperial dreams, the dreams of conquest of the future.

Summer grasses…are always just now…and now is all that remains of our dreams that pop like bubbles on their sharp blades. All of Basho’s haiku have this contradiction of two frames of references; one to the mind and the other references the present moment of direct experience. Time and dreams lie in rest in the concrete moment of “summer grasses.” Imperial soldiers are our little minds with big ideas, but where are they now, always now. Think of all the dreams of man and all there is left is summer grasses. How still the grass is; how noisy the dreams were.

Filed Under: Hai on Ku Tagged With: Basho, haiku, Zen

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 6
  • Next Page »

Ed is a Zen Writer and story teller who finds insights in the truth of his life in everyday mind and events. Learn more

Live without future

Search

Connect to my Facebook Pages

Archives

Top Posts & Pages

  • The Minotaur Myth
  • Pride and Joy
  • The Unbearable Heaviness of My Self
  • Walk off the Pirates Plank
  • Vertigo, a metaphor to awakening
  • The Scent of Baba Muktananda

Subscribe to My Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 65 other subscribers

Awaken Insight Meditation

AIM is a website where I share my Dharma Insights in my everyday mind. My daily experiences are metaphors that point to the Truth that is One. Paths are many, but the Dharma is One. I invite you to walk with me on my journey. I also invite you to enter into creative dialogue with the post, for then we push it forward and get some traction in our life.

The Minotaur Myth

Copyright © 2021 · Lifestyle Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in