Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku

With koans a creative leap is more like one, two, three, four . . . rhinoceros. What if happiness were a creative activity, like writing a poem? You cannot know where the next line of a poem will come from and you can’t force it, yet there is a discipline that helps. When you attend in the right way, the poem’s next line really does arrive out of n

Haiku is precise. It conforms to an exact syllabic count: the first line has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third has five. Within that container the poet’s wings expand in all directions, touching the ordinary and rendering it extraordinary. There is freedom in form.

As in the tea ceremony, the way of elegance in haiku involves highly focused attention to detail as revealed through Zen practice. This constantly attentive state, and the discipline of writing, becomes for the poet a means of self-cultivation and a source of enlightenment.