Haiku, and the Art of Disappearing
Gabriel Rosenstock April 6th, 2008
Would you like to disappear? Haiku can show you the way!
‘How painful it is to see people all wrapped up in themselves,’ commented Ryokan. Well, it’s unwrapping time, for all of us now, time to let go. How? Let’s see!
Haiku is an ardent, inspired and inspiring engagement with everyday life, an intercourse with nature-centred events, mainly, events that are happening around us all the time but which we perceive more keenly on the haiku path. Read true haiku with reverence, write true haiku - do it right and you can disappear, happily, now — and over and over again in the course of your life.
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There’s a professor in Chicago who has been studying happiness. What is happiness? It’s all about flow, maintains Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life: ‘The metaphor of ‘flow’ is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives …’
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Catechism… Sometimes it appears that the cat knows more than we do, learning from experience, fitting into the world, and disappearing from it, more gracefully than we can:
the cat
walks into the autumn wind -
extended whiskers
Murayama Kokyō
(Version: GR)
nothing
she doesn’t know –
the cat on the stove
Fusei
(Version: GR)
![]() / Photo by fazen / |
from darkness and back into the dark the affairs of the cat! Issa (Version: GR) |
