The Haiku Foundation Forums

Over a decade into a haiku practice, I have come to acknowledge that it is not necessarily the individual haiku I write as a haiku poet that "matter," but rather the real value lies in the process of relating and quality of perception that haiku engenders.  It becomes a path of empowerment.

I forget sometimes how much haiku has brought to my life. I just stumbled upon an older somewhat ecstatic journal entry that addresses just this topic:

The haiku themselves are relevant, but they are perhaps not as relevant as the life you are leading while living into these haiku: A life of communion, meaning, attention, mindfulness, an awake life where everything is communicating, everything is intelligent, where monotony and the mundane have been replaced with resonance and mystery and meaning, where your field of being has expanded exponentially to include the plants, animals, stones, stars, wind, water, earth, and fire as intelligent, communicating companions. Through these tiny little exercises in consciousness your life can become very large and infused with spirit, for haiku illuminate the animating spirit within the phenomenal world.

This is a relationship to haiku I have been blessed with at rare moments, and they are moments that change everything. They keep me going.  It is a relationship I continue to aspire to.

What is your relationship to haiku now? How has it changed?


The writing itself has changed, as modern and contemporary Japanese haiku in translation and experimental haiku in English have broadened my scope of what haiku can be. In terms of technique, I am, as are many, experimenting with variations of the traditional form and language of haiku. I am also increasingly comfortable with ambiguity and with less direct associations, and I have a greater appreciation of the role of symbolism in haiku. Perhaps most significantly, I have directed renewed attention toward inner landscapes of experience and am cultivating a more heart-based relationship to the world.  Many of my more recent haiku have developed directly or indirectly through heart-centered / consciousness-shifting avenues such as meditation and breath work and other practices that encourage non-ordinary, non-egoic (transpersonal) perception.

As haiku poets we can explore nature and self-nature simultaneously, recognizing how each informs the other, and how they are, in a more refined quality of perception, deeply linked. I have enjoyed the expansiveness of the new haiku available to us in the West and have embraced the openings it has engendered in my own work. I am especially grateful for the blurring of separation between my spiritual life and haiku practice, as I feel that through this union my relationship to haiku can only deepen.