By Clark Strand
Two decades ago, at a colloquium on haiku poetry, I found myself sitting next to a Japanese poet during a lecture by a psychologist on “Haiku and the Practice of Mindfulness.” In chatting with him beforehand, I noticed that he understood English perfectly well but struggled a bit to speak it.
During the lecture, I glanced to the side a few times to see how it was sitting with him. Mindfulness wasn’t a thing in Japanese society, although in principle it infused every aspect of the culture—a paradox that confused both parties whenever Westerners tried to talk with them about it.
His face remained impassive throughout the presentation. But when it was over he turned to me and asked, “Kigo? Was it mentioned?”
It took a moment to understand the question.
“Oh! Season words? No, I don’t think so.”
Twenty years later, I realize how surprised he must have been to hear a lecture on mindfulness and haiku that failed to mention the very things that a haiku poet might be expected to be mindful of—birds, flowers, and other natural phenomena that make their presence felt throughout the four seasons of the year.
As practiced in Japan, haiku is form of animism: the belief that all things—plants, animals, stones, even the weather—are sentient and alive. The purpose of haiku is to acknowledge these other, nonhuman beings (each of which is its own kigo, or “season word”) as having a reality as real as our own, even those things we don’t ordinarily think of as being “alive.”
In haiku, that acknowledgment is described as son-mon, or “greeting.” We may greet mountains, clouds, rivers—or anything else, for that matter—as long as we are willing to meet them on an equal footing. “Greeting is meeting!” is a haiku motto that applies to everything from a pebble to a star.
Below is a haiku written by Takahama Kyoshi in 1947. Kyoshi was the most influential haiku master of the 20th century and the one whose poetry was most deeply rooted in son-mon.
The rice plants ripen,
dragonflies mate, and babies
are carried on backs.
The poem describes a day in autumn when mothers have taken to the fields to harvest rice with their babies strapped to their backs. The mating dragonflies on the rice stalks all around them add a touch of haiku humor to the scene. But that is not all there is to the poem.
Dragonflies feed on pests that would otherwise infest the rice stalks, spoiling the harvest. Kyoshi would have known this. A keen observer of the natural landscape, he would also have known that over half of the wetlands in Japan were being lost to human encroachment during his lifetime, making rice fields one of the few remaining habitats suitable for dragonflies.
And so, even though the poem consists of three very short statements of fact, Kyoshi is “greeting” the rice, the dragonflies, and the mothers and their babies, too, as they collaborate to maintain a complex ecology in which each plays an essential part.
Today, over 95% of Japan’s rice is harvested by combine machines, and so the scene that Kyoshi described now exists only in the cultural memory of Japan. But son-mon remains. It is rooted in an experience that is very close to mindfulness practice but is different in one crucial respect.
Son-mon includes human experience, but it is not centered in human experience. The things we greet and acknowledge on an equal footing lie in the world around us, rather than in our heads. The mindfulness of “greeting” is meeting these other beings and standing side by side with them, sharing equally in this borderless everything we call LIFE.
Clark Strand, former senior editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, will be guiding A Way of Belonging weekend retreat at Garrison Institute from July 10-12, which invites participants to slow down, observe deeply, and experience haiku as a practice of belonging to the natural world. Participants will explore the roots of haiku in ancestral ways of knowing, learn from classical and modern poets, and experiment with writing small poems that carry profound meaning.
