Although written texts are venerated by all major spiritual traditions, literacy itself may be at the bottom of our current ecological crisis. Beginning roughly 5,500 years ago, the movement from oral to written culture led human beings to adopt increasingly abstract, disembodied ways of thinking that reinforced their feelings of separation from nature.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the problem clearly in 1974. In Myth and Meaning, he observed that the difference between societies with writing and those without written language was that the former wrote almost entirely about themselves, while the latter, so-called “primitive” people, had a vast oral lore about plants and animals, landscape and weather, and all other aspects of the natural world.

Preliterate cultures were not anthropocentric. In fact, the earliest cave art—from Lascaux to Chauvet—is almost entirely devoid of human forms. The first “sutras” were not texts at all, but the closely observed, lovingly rendered shapes of mammoths and woolly rhinos, lions, bison, and bears. 

The best-of-season haiku for Winter 2023 invites us to reenter a world in which wisdom, though bypassing the inherently anthropocentric filter of written language, is once more rooted in our direct, sensual experience of the world around us. At home in his native Stockholm, the poet watches snowflakes falling ceaselessly outside his window. The very silence of that falling seems to demand that he enter more deeply into communion with them, listening with the eye rather than the ear.

In some schools of Buddhism, a sutra is seen as more than a sacred text. For instance, the Lotus Sutra is regarded by Nichiren Buddhists as “the Entity of the Mystic Law.” Those who chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of that sutra, unite with a universal life force that animates all things from within. Even the weather.

The poet could have described his snowflakes in terms of writing, given that he compares them to a sutra. But he makes a special point of not doing that. The snowflakes are reciting the sutra. More than that, they are the sutra. 

It is a remarkably simple poem. As the snowflakes fall, covering the city on a winter day, the poet imagines them ceaselessly reciting the sutra of themselves. Or maybe he doesn’t imagine that. Maybe he witnesses it—and, in so doing, unites with the Snowflakes of the Mystic Law.

It is worth noting the poet’s artistry in the second line of the haiku: “it keeps reciting itself.” The season word suggests a feeling of delicate, soundless beauty. And yet, taken as a whole, the poem conveys a feeling of tremendous cumulative power. The “snowflake sutra” is a storm.  

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post The Snowflake Sutra appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It is unlikely that any English language haiku journal would agree to publish this winning poem. It lacks the earmarks of haiku as a form of literature derivative of Japanese poetry. The poet has chosen the haiku form to express her thoughts about life, but in terms of technique, she has thrown her lot in with Emily Dickinson rather than with Basho. This is haiku as American poetry.

The poem breaks some of the most widely observed conventions of the form. The first line offers an abstraction, rather than establishing a concrete image. The second makes broad generalizations about human life. Only in the third line do we find out what the poem is about. Even then, the season word is used metaphorically. There are no actual dragonflies.

When asked to comment on her inspiration, the poet wrote:

I remembered catching dragonflies as a child and marveling at their sleek, shiny bodies, which although somewhat bendable, were also strong as steel. A haiku formed in my mind as I thought about human life, which is also long (about 80 years on average) and narrow (increasingly disconnected from the rest of nature). Like a tiny metal dart that gets thrown, flying in a straight line for almost a century until we reach the end. A dart that gets to fly through an abyss of loneliness.

Her remarks account for the emotional power of the poem, but not for the paradox of its central image. For if a human life is long, a dragonfly is not. Its length seems long only in relation to its width. “A problem of shape,” she calls it. The life of a modern Homo sapiens is too long for its width, too narrow for its length.

What makes the poem not simply a good modern haiku but a masterpiece of short-form English language poetry is how succinctly it expresses one of our deepest frustrations as a species. In doubling the human life expectancy since the turn of the 19th century, we have stretched it thinner. We live longer on average, but the range of our experience as it relates to the natural world is narrower than ever before. The result is an “abyss of loneliness” we must fly through from one end of life to the other.

I wrote that there were no actual dragonflies in the poem. But that is not quite true. As in Dickinson’s poetry, the symbol is sometimes more real than the thing itself.

Dragonflies are elusive creatures. Difficult to follow as they veer unpredictably, they can flash out of nowhere and vanish just as easily, only to reappear where least expected. Dragonflies have been known to cross oceans in their migrations, and they have journeyed over vast expanses of geological time as well. The earliest fossils of dragonfly-like insects are 325 million years old.

And so, hidden in the poet’s use of the season word is a nod, not only to the evanescent beauty of these small creatures, but also to their vitality and extreme durability over time. If “the human life” really is like a dragonfly, the world may not be done with us quite yet.

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post A Problem of Shape appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A friend once asked me to explain the secret of haiku. “There isn’t one,” I said. “Just read the Earth as a love letter and write back in 5-7-5.”

Poets have been doing this for 800 years now and have never exhausted its possibilities. The seasons turn, and the letters keep coming. You could write 20,000 haiku in a lifetime, as the poet Issa did, and still not answer them all.

But nature in the abstract is not the subject of haiku. Each poem must address one specific thing. Working together over the centuries, haiku poets have compiled a detailed almanac of the plants, animals, and meteorological phenomena that change throughout the year. These phenomena, called “season words,” are the subject matter of haiku.

As a rule, haiku poets avoid including more than one season word per poem. It should be clear whom their letter is addressed to, after all. But there are exceptions. In the Best of Season haiku for Summer 2023, “midsummer’s day” contributes to the feeling of ripe fullness at the heart of the poem. But the love letter is meant for the plum.

At first, the poem seems to present a riddle. How can the ocean, the horizon, and midsummer’s day fit inside of a plum? The use of three panoramic images in a single haiku suggests that the poet was in an expansive mood. Why confine them to so small a space?

Standing on the shore, gazing across the ocean at the horizon, the poet bites into a plum. People don’t close their eyes to savor the taste of an apple or an orange. Even when eating a peach, they are likely to keep them open. But a plum?

When the teeth pierce the skin of a plum, the mouth is filled with such sudden sweetness that the other senses naturally retreat into the background as taste comes to the fore. Plums are small, round, and over with before we know it—like the open lips of a lover in a kiss. We close our eyes to focus in such moments so that not one second is lost.

Why? Because seconds are always lost. That’s why we call it a moment. Moments never last.

The feeling of being surrounded by a world in flux is at the bottom of all great haiku. In 1688, the poet Basho wrote in a letter to his friend Ensui:

Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.

Occasionally, in the midst of nature, we experience a moment of transcendent emotion that allows us to feel oneness with something larger than ourselves. Most of us reach for our phones to capture the moment for Instagram. The poet writes a haiku instead.

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post Love Letter to the Earth appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At the turn of the 20th century, haiku seemed on the verge of collapse. A classical art form that did not engage with the realities of modern life, it was thought too rigidly old-fashioned to survive. The poet Takahama Kyoshi seemed to make matters worse. In 1928, he described haiku with the phrase kacho-fuei, “formal composition on birds and flowers,” thus reaffirming its identity as a traditional poem written in 5-7-5 syllables, including a season word.

Did Kyoshi recognize the longing in modern people to preserve a world apart—a small, well-ordered “garden of verse” where they could contemplate their place in nature, even as nature was becoming less and less a part of their lives? Could he see where the world was headed even then?

The winning poem of the Spring 2023 Haiku Challenge relies on a popular expression to refer to a problem so difficult that attempts to solve it result in extreme frustration. In a 2012 article for the international journal Policy Sciences, researchers proposed the term “super wicked problem” to describe overwhelmingly complex global challenges like climate change. Super wicked problems have four features:

1. There is a significant time deadline for finding a solution.
2. Those seeking to solve the problem are also causing it.
3. There is no central authority dedicated to finding a solution.
4. Certain policies irrationally impede future progress.

Unlike “wicked problems”—which policy makers describe as difficult but, in theory, not impossible to solve—super wicked problems defy solution because those attempting to solve them are, effectively, their own worst enemies.

The seeding head of a dandelion is sometimes called a “clock” and sometimes a “globe”—metaphors that add dark dimensions to a poem that at first seems only amusing. The clock is ticking while the globe (i.e., world) waits to see what will happen. But we already know what will happen. The problem with climate change is us. And yet . . .

The taproots of dandelions are usually 6 to 18 inches long. But they can grow to depths of 15 feet under certain conditions. Landscapers who regard dandelions as “nuisance flowers” quickly discover the futility of digging them up. Also, dandelion roots are extremely brittle. If left in the ground, a 1-inch fragment will yield a fourfold increase of flowers in a matter of days.

Is the poet saying that human beings, even if they can’t solve head-exploding problems like climate change, are more resilient and adaptive than they know? Or is the dandelion globe a symbol for the planet’s capacity to reseed itself after an extinction-level event, restoring biodiversity over time? Possibly both meanings are implied.

Whatever his reasons for insisting that the true purpose of haiku was “to sing the beauty of birds and flowers,” Kyoshi’s strategy worked. Haiku became the dandelion of modern poetry, spreading its seeds to all levels of Japanese society and, by century’s end, to other cultures throughout the world. That this happened on the eve of a mass extinction of plant and animal life does not feel coincidental. It feels like a gift.

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post The Taproot of Modern Poetry appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Although haiku poetry is governed by certain time-honored conventions, there is no universally agreed-upon rule about what subject matter can or cannot be addressed within the form. Poets are always testing the limits of haiku, pushing it in new directions to see what can be said using just seventeen syllables.

Japanese haiku took a political turn during the lead-up to World War II. In 1937, the most influential magazine of the day, Hototogisu (“little cuckoo”), created a special section devoted to patriotic haiku—poems that became increasingly militant after 1939. But Japanese fascism was not without its critics. Some poets wrote haiku that opposed the war, and many of these poems are considered masterpieces today.

Saito Sanki (1900–1962) was the nominal leader of the antiwar haiku movement. Here are two famous poems of his:

Machine gun bullets:
right between the eyes a red
blossom blossoming

At Hiroshima,
to swallow a hard-boiled egg
the mouth opens wide

The first haiku is shocking in its nontraditional use of the season word hana, for “cherry blossom.” About the second, written in Hiroshima on a dark night one year after the bombing, it is best to let Sanki speak for himself:

Sitting on a stone by the side of the road, I took out a boiled egg and slowly peeled the shell, unexpectedly shocked by its smooth surface. With a flash of searing incandescence, the skins of human beings had as easily slipped off all over this city. To eat a boiled egg in the wind of that black night, I was forced to open my mouth. In that moment, this haiku came to me.

—The Kobe Hotel, trans. Saito Masaya

Sanki was imprisoned by Japan’s Special Higher Police for writing haiku like the first one. The second was published in a magazine but was omitted from Sanki’s second collection for fear that the book would be censored by American Occupation officials, who suppressed information about the atomic bomb.

Political protest haiku have been written in English, too, but they have rarely succeeded as well as this season’s winning poem. The first two lines offer a panoramic landscape of rural America, its pastures covered with frost. The scope is national, not local, as we would ordinarily expect in a haiku. Only in the last line do we understand the significance of that choice. We are being shown not just a visual landscape but a political one.

A good haiku works through the subtle nuances of spoken language, and this one is no exception. Expressions like “killing frost,” “hard frost,” and “frosty reception” inevitably influence our reading of the final line, making it clear that the spread of white nationalism through the American heartland is the real subject of the poem.

A poem like this is unlikely to be met with censorship in 2022 America. But it still takes courage to write it. The chill I felt when I first read it gets deeper with every day.

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post Poems of Protest and Political Conscience appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Centuries of literary wisdom dictate that the so-called season words of haiku must be used literally rather than figuratively or metaphorically. If an acorn appears in a haiku, it must appear as an acorn. Between the season word and the thing it signifies stands an irrevocable equals sign. An acorn . . . is an acorn . . . is an acorn.

Except when it’s not.

Haiku exploded in popularity as it spread beyond Japan during the latter half of the 20th century. As non-Japanese poets adopted haiku into their native languages, some viewed the 5-7-5 syllable form as an empty vessel to be filled with whatever they could manage to fit inside of it. Others chose to honor the traditional subject matter of haiku. Even so, as time went on, they adapted season words to address a whole new range of subjects.

During her sonogram, the poet heard her baby’s heartbeat for the first time. Later, looking through the photos, she was able to locate the source of that sound. Such a tiny thing. Just one acorn wide.

Never mind that the heart of a fetus in the second trimester is roughly the shape and size of an acorn. All that the child is. All that he or she will become. All they will feel. It’s right there. The turn of thought is breathtakingly simple. That so much could dwell in a space so small is astounding.

But there is more. To compare a baby’s heart to an acorn presumes the presence not only of an individual human mother but also of the Mother of All Mothers, which is the earth—literally, soil. The bodies of those two “mothers” may appear discrete to our ordinary way of thinking, but ecology teaches us that they are inseparable. Advances in microbiology have revealed that there are more “dirt” cells in the human body than there are “human” cells. Life doesn’t begin at conception and end at death. Life is a planet.

Once we have grasped the vast ecological implications of the poem—that birth and death are of one body with the world—we may notice a smaller, more intimate meaning hidden in plain sight. For it is not the heart of the fetus that is being compared to the size of an acorn but the beat of that heart. Its life force.

Photography is a melancholy medium where human subjects are concerned. A photograph may yield a perfect likeness and remain lifeless. In superimposing the image of an acorn over the heart of her unborn child, the poet has captured something that the sonogram could not show.

Worry edges out over wonder, finally, as the dominant mood of the poem. What will become of a thing so small? Will it break? Will it suffer? How will it grow? Worry isn’t the only emotion overflowing from the 17-syllable world of this haiku. Just the strongest one.

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post Life Is a Planet appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When asked why the haiku’s 17-syllable form has endured for so many centuries, the Japanese poet Kaneko Tōta (1919–2018) replied: “A set form used by generations of people yields the beauty of finality in this life where nothing is final.” Tōta’s words are as paradoxical to me now as they were when I first read them in 1976. But I know the beauty of finality when I see it.

The phrasing of certain haiku gives them a feeling of inevitability, as if their words were always destined to fall into a certain order. They become fixed. Immutable. Preserved in 17 syllables of amber. Tricycle’s Best of Summer Poem for 2022 is one of those haiku.

At first glance, there isn’t much there: just the comparison of a summer sky to a page of a book—possibly a novel. The word waiting suggests the approach of nightfall over a span of several hours. And yet we must marvel at the use of figurative language.

The poet has taken a vast cosmological event—the slow rotation of the earth over a summer evening—and reduced it to the flip of a page. The lightness of this is uncanny. Is the sky really as flimsy as a sheet of paper? Can the world be overturned as easily as that? The answer seems to be yes.

In popular idiom, to “turn the page” on something means to put it behind us. Clearly the poet has something like that in mind. But he has given the slightest twist to that familiar expression. The summer sky isn’t turning its page on the day. It isn’t even waiting to be turned over. It is waiting to be “ready” for that moment.

A poem like this offers a good opportunity to think about seasonality in haiku. Sky is sky; but there is an enormous difference between a winter sky and a summer sky. The quality of sunlight is completely different, as is the length of that light. The contiguous United States sees from 14 to 16 hours of sun at the summer solstice. If the year were a book of days, summer would be right in the middle of it.

The languorous tone of the poem makes a perfect match for the season. In the waiting game of life, a summer sky is as patient as they come. But it’s over very quickly once the waiting is done. Even on the longest day of the year, the sun sets below the horizon with a three-minute flip of the page.

Which means everything . . . and nothing. Life drops us in the middle of a story bigger than we are: it just goes on and on. “The beauty of finality in this life where nothing is final,” Tōta called it. In the greatest haiku, heaven and heartbreak can coexist in a single moment of time.

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku.

The post The Beauty of Finality appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As a body of literature, English-language haiku has rarely produced poems with the mythic depth or historical resonance that one expects from the best Western poetry. This will change as our poets learn to use the techniques of Japanese haiku to explore the symbols that inform their own cultural experience.

Cypresses have long been associated with mourning. The Orphic gold tablets found in Greek graves describe a white cypress near the entrance to the underworld. In ancient Rome cypress branches were hung on the doors of homes in mourning. Even today, cupressus sempervirens is the most common tree in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cemeteries.

The poet can leave a lot unsaid because of these associations. She doesn’t have to describe the graveyard, for instance. The words grief, stone, and cypress establish the scene. The light beneath the tree is dim, the space liminal. The stage is set for a magic that only nature can perform.

The transformation of an inanimate object into an animal is one of the oldest tricks in haiku. The most famous example is by Arakida Moritake (1473–1549), a poet who became the head priest of the Inner Shrine at Ise:

A fallen blossom
returned to the branch?
But no…it’s a butterfly!

The poem relies upon a misperception, which is corrected in a delightful way. What is the message? The line separating the living from the dead is largely a matter of perspective.

There is none of Moritake’s lightheartedness in Rees’s haiku (inspired by the season word frog). But the corrected perception is still there. Lost in mourning, she finds a place to rest her eyes in the gloom of the cypress shade. A small stone at her foot seems to express the intractable immobility of her sorrow. Then it moves . . . and her grief moves with it.

It is important to note that the poet’s grief has not been erased . . . only eased. The humor of the poem (and there is humor in every good haiku, however dark or uncanny) lies in the fact that a little frog performs this act of redemption, rather than something grander.

It doesn’t take much to show us that the world is constantly renewing itself, provided we are attentive to the cycles of nature. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is stuck. When something is lost, something is always given.

It’s not over until it’s over—and it’s never over. This is the wisdom of haiku.

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku.

The post A Stone Beneath the Cypress appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The term black swan event originated from the Western belief that all swans were white—an assumption proven false in 1697 when Dutch explorers discovered black swans in Australia. In modern parlance, the term has come to refer to statistically improbable events that “come out of left field”—especially those with a disproportionately powerful effect on history, science, finance, or technology. The winning haiku for the Winter 2021 Haiku Challenge (based on the season word swan) adds Buddhism to the mix with its allusion to the bodhisattva vow.

The “black swans” of the poem are not actual swans but black-robed bodhisattvas—Zen monks at the end of their walking meditation, “gliding to stillness” before their cushions in preparation for another period of seated meditation. In Japanese haiku, season words are rarely used nonliterally. A swan is a swan. In Western poetry, which is deeply rooted in figurative language, such constraints would be too limiting. And so the poet offers us the vision of monks in a meditation hall as swans on a quiet lake.

The style of the haiku is elegant, its image graceful and even dignified. Had the poet meant to undercut the idea that we can save others by sitting on our butts, she easily could have made the scene comedic. But no: the comparison between saving all beings and a black swan event is meant to suggest not the improbability of that event but its nonlinearity—the fact that it disrupts our narrative about ourselves and the significance of our species within the cosmos.

Every organized religion created since the dawn of agriculture has placed a premium on human destiny. Thus every religion in the world today, with the exception of those rare, vanishing outliers among Indigenous peoples, was created to answer a question the very asking of which is a form of ecological delusion: What is the meaning of human life?

The bodhisattva’s vow to save all beings is an attempt to answer that question. But the answer cannot be found through anthropocentric ways of thinking. What does it mean to save all beings in a planetary ecosystem where all matter and energy—indeed, all life—is being endlessly recycled and recirculated? Aren’t we saved already by that system?

To answer that question does not require us to think outside the box of our planet, as if we could solve our problems by migrating to Mars or nirvana (whichever comes first). Rather, it invites us to think ever more deeply from inside that Earth-shaped box, embracing its contours with every cell of our being and submitting to its limits in our actions. This is where haiku come in. Haiku teach us to think inside the box.

Surely this is what the poet’s “black swans” are doing in the lake-like stillness of their meditation hall. If ever there were a koan worth solving, this is it. The vow of the bodhisattva—to be reborn within an ecosystem as that ecosystem—may be the only koan there is.

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The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Our moderator, Clark Strand, selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. See past winners and submit your haiku here.

The post Black Swan Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 1672, Matsuo Basho published an anthology of verse he called Kai oi (“The seashell game”). The title refers to a custom among Japanese children of comparing two shells to determine which was more beautiful. The winners would be collected in a separate pile, and the shells in that pile would also be paired for comparison. This process of elimination would be repeated until only one shell remained.

Following the old custom, Basho applied this same process to selecting the haiku for his anthology. The poems he chose were already good, some of them masterpieces, but Basho paired them anyway in order to refine his understanding of haiku.

There were two possible winners for our haiku challenge on the fall season word “galaxy,” both written by Becka Chester. Choosing between them was difficult but instructive. It is tempting to evaluate a haiku written in English on the basis of how well it imitates a Japanese haiku in style or technique. Following that criterion, the winner would have been obvious.

immense galaxy,
cleaved cleanly down the middle
by a shooting star

The image is immediate, memorable, and devastatingly simple. The language is also restrained. The poet hasn’t said too much . . . or too little. And nothing whatsoever about herself.

That is not unusual. Japanese haiku often avoid direct mention of the poet’s thoughts or feelings, although this is hardly an inflexible rule. Even so, the poem conveys something beyond mere visual wonder. The dispassionate tone of the middle line masks an undertone of horror. Are we witnessing a vivisection? What is about to be revealed?

A haiku like that—edgy, but still traditional—could have been written by a contemporary Japanese poet. But not the one that follows. The American colloquial expression in the final line has no equivalent in Japanese.

star filled galaxy,
dark emptiness unending—
talk me off this ledge.

In the opening line, the poet offers the vision of a cosmos brimming with billions of stars. But she quickly walks back that impression. As many stars as there are in the galaxy, there is a lot more darkness. Infinitely more darkness.

The words “dark emptiness unending” could have come straight from the pages of Paradise Lost, where John Milton describes the flames of hell as emitting not light but its opposite. “Darkness visible” he calls it. That is what the poet has accomplished in her haiku. She has made visible “the abyss.”

That is the setup for the final line. Where is this ledge the poet speaks of? “Where is it not?” she would probably reply. Wherever she goes, there it is. The real precipice is within.

And yet, if the last line is an expression of existential dread, it is also an effort to reach beyond it. We can’t talk ourselves off the double ledge of isolation and loneliness that characterizes so much of life in the 21st century. We can only do that for one another. Increasingly, in English at least, that is what haiku are for.

The post The Precipice Within appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.