Haiku as nature poetry and mindfulness

Why I've started writing a haiku a day

I’ve been writing a haiku a day since 1 January this year. In October to November last year, I wrote a haiku a day for about 40 days and I felt inspired to start it again as a daily practice. I write the haiku as a I walk. I find that it provides another focus for my noticing along with taking my daily picture.

In damp winter mist
I stop to hear robin sing -
Moss quietly grows

Haiku is one of the original forms of nature-inspired poetry. The traditional Japanese form includes a season word. The season word can be a straightforward mention of winter, spring, summer or autumn - or it might be an aspect of the natural world that is associated with a particular season, whether a weather phenomenon such as snow or a flower such as cherry blossom. Examples of season words can be found at links from the Haiku Foundation website.

The most well-known defining characteristic of the haiku is its form - three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line and five lines in the third. I find that I enjoy the constraints of the form, seeking to find alternative words or taking words away to fit the syllable count. I also find that there is something about walking that fits with counting out the syllables, each syllable a step, each syllable a breath.

Like many people, I was introduced to haiku to school. I have written them occasionally since then but, to be honest, I never really connected with the form. I read haiku and found them to be too simplistic, I didn’t really get them. It was one of my ecotherapy training classes that opened my eyes to looking at them in a different way. It was in a Tariki Trust class with Caroline Brazier on Buddhist Psychology, and the topic at hand was Mindfulness. Caroline spoke about the link between haiku, nature poetry and mindfulness, and how haiku sought to capture the spiritual truth in nature. We were invited to go out outside, to observe, to write a list of what we noticed and then to shape them into a haiku or a tanka, which is a haiku plus two additional lines of seven syllables.

I wrote the following list in my notebook (this was in October last year):

• Birdsong

• Airplane

• Feather

• Dew on grass

• Lone bird

• Car

• Crow caw

• Overgrown raspberry bush

• Last white rose

• Reddening leaves

• Spider in web.

From this list, I wrote the tanka:

A single white rose
Spider hanging in its web
Dew pooled on brown leaf -
Surrender to the season
The lone bird calls to passers-by

In this example, brown leaf could count as the season word, indicating that it is autumn (although strictly speaking it doesn’t appear on the season word list - I think a little poetic license is allowed). The third aspect of the haiku (or tanka) form, along with the line and syllable count, and the season word, is having a ‘turn’ in it, which can offer a juxtaposition to the images that have preceded it, or a reflection or moment of insight. This is often indicated with a dash, and at the haiku might appear at the end of the second line. In this example, there is a shift from the natural imagery of the first three lines to the insight of ‘surrender to the season’, which the writer (me) hears in the birdsong and from observing the rose, the spider, the dew on the fallen leaf.

This class sparked an interest in me, which led me to starting to write haiku daily. I read Clark Strand’s book Seeds from a Birch Tree, which has the sub-title Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. In the introduction, he writes about how he went on a 20-year-journey looking to bring together ecology and spirituality, in response to the climate crisis. This journey led him back to haiku. He writes:

Haiku is, after all, the only form of poetry in world literature that takes plant and animals, weather and the very landscape itself as its primary subject matter. Over the centuries, haiku poets have developed a spiritual approach to living in the natural world and joining with its cycles and rhythms. More than that, they have found a way to build community around that approach to life.

Reading these words helped to clarify for me why I had become so drawn to haiku. Writing haiku daily was a practice to help connect with the natural world, join ‘with its cycles and rhythms.’ I was then also fortunate to find a haiku community online. I participated in a class led by John McQuade, on Haiku and Deep Ecology. When I saw the title, it seemed a perfect fit, exploring further haiku and this connection with the natural world. John also brings a Buddhist perspective. One of the practices that I enjoyed from the course was that we would share haiku in advance, and then take turns to read them out loud, twice. John explained that reading and listening to haiku is an important part of the practice. As with other forms of poetry, haiku benefit from being read out in loud, in community.

Given my practice of combining walking and writing haiku, I was excited when I stumbled across the practice of the ginko. The ginko is a Japanese practice of a group of people going for a walk together and writing haiku, particularly on a ‘special’ seasonal day, such as an equinox. I am preparing to run a a ginko with my writing group on the Spring Equinox and walked the route recently. I was planning for this post to be a sharing of some of those haiku and photographs, but this turned into a longer explanation than I anticipated of my interest in haiku. So look out for that post up next!

If you’d like to see my daily haiku posts they are on Instagram.

If you’re moved to, try writing a haiku (or tanka) next time you go for a walk - or look out of the window. Notice what you observe, write a list and see what haiku shapes itself. And please share if you would like.

The narrow chalk road
Does not lead to ‘aha’ moment -
Only the walking