half hour of zazen. No time passes, and at the gong my eyes start open to see each thing distinct, luminous, itself.
after meditation
one leaf settles
into the grass
sunrise—
tree trunks
dividing mist
Chanting, we file in, to a silent breakfast. Unfolding the cloth that covers the chopsticks and nested lacquer bowls we carried from the meditation hall, we place chopsticks on our right, tips angled off the table’s edge, separate the bowls, all following last night’s instructions.
just oatmeal in the bowl—
oatmeal glistening
in the bowl68
This passage reveals the process whereby Harter’s consciousness is transformed so by meditation that she begins to see things, in the Zennian phrase, just as they are, without the intervention of subjective consciousness: a leaf simply falls to the grass, trees simply appear out of the mist, oatmeal simply sits in its bowl.
This newly won awareness carries over through a hectic day and night of activity as memory:
I lie quietly, remembering the presence in the corner of the dining hall:
evening meditation
the jade plant sits
next to its reflection69
This entrance into universal subjectivity also registers the Buddhist idea of compassion for all living things when, the next day Harter visits the monastery cemetery:
climbing to the stupa—
not stepping on
the red salamander70
In this encounter while visiting an important monastery teacher’s grave, we also sense a hint of the teacher’s spirit incarnated in this simple creature, a moment just as it is, but resonating all the more deeply with Buddhist reality.
The haibun concludes with Harter’s departure and an expression of her newly found compassion and consciousness:
among the trees
somewhere rain falling
on the doe’s back
coming down
so many more leaves
have turned71
Harter’s compassion for other subjectivities is extended to the doe in the rain. Time has passed since Harter entered the zendō. More autumn leaves have taken on bright color. Nothing much else has changed externally. Yet, for Harter, for her consciousness, everything has changed.
This change remains with Harter into the next year. After a haiku retreat at Spring Lake, New Jersey, Harter returns to her home and begins sitting meditation:
...at once tears rolling down my cheeks, knowing we are only this, only precisely what we are doing at any given moment, no more; we are as transparent as the leaf in sunlight. Nothing matters because nothing exists. Our houses are just paper boxes blown down around us—our bodies are just paper bags blown in around us. Inside we go in and up—we are nothing except everything else. I truly don’t know who, better yet what I am, what we are, all of us peopling, infinite variety, yet all the same, since I (we) don’t exist except in the moment, constantly changing.72
Alluding perhaps to the statement attributed to Basho that haiku is what is happening at a given place at a given moment, Harter here offers the highwater mark for English-language haibun as a revelation of spiritual consciousness.
In a lighter vein, but with a serious underlying motif, is Met on the Road: A Transcontinental Haiku Journey by William J. Higginson and Penny Harter (1993). The work records the authors’ relocation from Scotch Plains, New jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, beginning with a meeting of the Haiku Society of America in New York City and ending with Higginson’s trip to a Haiku North America convention in California just after their arrival in Santa Fe. At both the meeting and the convention, and along the way to Santa Fe, the authors collected haiku from people they visited with. The work thus incidentally becomes an anthology of haiku by some of the strongest contemporary American haiku poets.
The light, but bittersweet, tone of the work is established by the presence of the authors’ pet cat, which becomes an icon of the home they will probably never return to. The mood of nostalgia is introduced the night before they leave:
Finally, around midnight, we begin packing the car—in the garage for the first time since we moved into the house. Don’t forget Purr, the eight-year-old cat.
the neighborhood
silent under streetlamps—
a thin mist73
The pain of nostalgia heats up at a stop in Pennsylvania:
does he even know us
this cat after months
in a cage
purring cat—
how long ago in Paterson
your littermate died
Occasionally blurting out, “What could we do?” we drove to our evening’s stop.... Getting ready for bed, we close the door and turn Purr loose in our room for the night, setting the pattern that we’ll follow for the next several days. From our old house, 320 miles.
the cat stares down
from the second-floor window:
crickets74
Until they reach Santa Fe, the marking of the distance from their home occurs intermittently as a refrain of nostalgia. Purr is obviously a soothing icon of the comfort of domesticity even when he is naughty, as when, for the first time on the trip, Purr causes a minor catastrophe by breaking a host’s ceramic bowl. Lamenting their letting their guard down, the authors only half-seriously scold themselves: “We should have known: Never take your cat for granted.”75
The serious motif concerns the relation of haiku to ecology. The motif is introduced while the authors are visiting with the haiku poet Lee Gurga and his family. During a discussion of Patricia Donegan’s essay “Haiku & the Ecotastrophe,” collected in the anthology Dharma Gaia, Higginson has a flash of recognition and quotes from the essay:
When she writes of her study of season words with the elderly Japanese haiku master Seishi Yamaguchi, Pat goes on to express the very ideal that deepened my own commitment to haiku a decade ago when I was writing The Haiku Handbook:
Stopping the ecocrisis, eliminating the bomb, or spreading the world’s wealth more equitably [are] directly connected to stopping our own greed, aggressive tendencies and overconsumptive habits. The activities and personal habits of human beings... contribute most
