Attentiveness in three simple lines

The first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and its built entirely out of attentiveness. Mary Oliver

How is your attention going recently? Mine went wild during the US election and its aftermath, bolting into the thickets of distractions, tumbling into chasms of anxieties and lingering along the foreshores of forgetfulness. Then at night, there were hours of not sleeping, attempting to track my body sensations or breath, mindlessly bored. Too much of my life was disappearing into scrolling news feeds and commentaries, hoping for hope, sinking into despair. Something had to change. And thankfully it has.

Some changes like putting away digital devices after 8pm have come via will power. Others have been serendipity like the demise of our television. After a few lacklustre conversations about whether to repair or buy, I simply disconnected from Netflix and asked Jon to choose an entertaining novel from his overflowing library for us to read aloud. After reading for half an hour, I yawn and go to bed early and sleep well. Such a relief!

Just as helpful has been making more time in the morning for my tai chi practice in the park, something I started last spring. The slower I move, the more I notice. Birds especially. Summer has been vibrant with the calls of kookaburras, magpies, butcher birds, little corellas, rosellas, ibis and the ubiquitous noisy miners. And then there was the drama of the channel-billed cuckoo fledglings who harassed their currawong foster parents incessantly, as I wrote about here. Feeling the need to capture and celebrate all of this, I found myself starting to compose haiku in my mind.

I love haiku. Their brevity , surprises, earthiness and elegance all captured in three lines. A good haiku is the essence of attentiveness to outer and inner worlds. Like this one from the Haiku Master Shiki:

Stifling heat –

Tangled in confusion

I listen to thunder

Such simplicity, yet so demanding to write! My own untutored efforts fall far short, but what I am learning to value is the state of mind this breeds rather than the product.

Back in Jan 2017, prompted by who knows what, my new year began with a resolution to compose a daily haiku. Like all resolutions this one was short lived with my haiku writing petering out over the next nine months. I tossed my beautiful journal with its deep blue fabric cover embroidered with gold thread into the back of my cupboard, and focused on finishing my book Climate Crisis and Consciousness.

But now haiku has crept back. First I found Natalie Goldberg’s book Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku in my library. After reading about her travels in the footsteps of the old masters, I retrieved my haiku journal from its exile, and reread what I wrote eight years ago. My haiku were no better than I remembered but what moved me was the vividness of the memories they held. Place, time and emotions all intact in those three short lines. The memories so much fresher than those of any photo.

Some haiku were from mundane and routine moments like taking an evening walk or sitting on my balcony.

Two flying foxes

The sound of four wings

Flapping

An ant

Crawls up my arm

Breaking news!

Others took me back to momentous events. Like traveling back to my homeland Aotearoa New Zealand after an absence of 5 years:

Ferry trip

Wets my face

I am home.

Mother’s country

River, bush, paddocks

Still here

Each haiku delivers me to that exact place and time. The first came on the way to my cousin Robin’s harbourside home after getting off the plane, the second from staying at my cousin Brigid’s family property where our great grandparents had farmed, a place I had never visited before. Yes, there are photos, but it’s the haiku which holds the experience much more than any two dimensional image can.

Most poignant and precious of all were the few haiku I wrote in June that year. My father had died suddenly and I spent a month caring for my mother, while packing up their Gold Coast home of 30 years. Re-reading these haiku, this time rushes back to me vividly. Not the shock and busy-ness of it all but those moments when I stopped and allowed what had happened to sink in, sitting on a rusting garden chair under the umbrella of the majestic poinciana that overlooked the canal at the bottom of their garden:

Falling leaves

On ebbing tide

Dad

This poinciana tree

Above

All else

Mum and Dad under their beloved poinciana tree

I remember sitting there grieving and sad, held by the steadiness of the canal’s flow and the poinciana’s calm being. Giving my full attention to this place I would soon be leaving, stunned by the suddenness and finality of it all. Reading back over the haiku now, I wonder if I meant waning not ebbing, then I realised it didn’t matter. Ebbing or waning, the tides move on.

Beth Kempton

writes beautifully about haiku, describing it as

a kind of poetry that can root us to the moment whilst somehow stitching us into the tapestry of time as we witness something in the natural world that has been witnessed over and over throughout the centuries….

When we look at the world through haiku eyes we see it just as it is – in all its complexity and simplicity, harshness and beauty, ordinariness and wonder.

Haiku eyes, attentive and soul nourishing. It’s an irresistible invitation, but not always an easy one. Once again, I started daily haiku writing, and once again daily has become more intermittent. Trying to conjure a daily haiku feels too forced. Instead I practice opening up my attention to when the expected turns unexpected, and I can put aside what has been playing on my mind for the genuinely playful.

It happened to me this morning, after gazing out my bedroom window at a cloudy grey sky feeling nothing but the familiarity of it all. No haiku here, I concluded. But then:

Stepping into the shower

Nothing

Becomes something.

Any moment

like any other

Not!

(One thing I learnt from Goldberg’s book was how often exclamation marks feature in haiku, I have been liberal with mine ever since!)

Have you noticed that when you play in the world, the world plays back? Recently

Marisol Muñoz-Kiehne

has begun to respond to my posts with haiku, something she does for a number of nature writers on Substack. I love the attentiveness Marisol brings to what I write, distilling what she reads into three simple lines. Her haiku completes the circle, the germ of my idea havng grown into a post is pared back to its essence as she makes poetry out of my fortnight’s work of pondering, writing and re-writing. Like this magical one on my post Hope: The question I am most often asked:

Hope-carrying seeds.

Plant them, and they’ll sprout

seed-carrying hope

Haiku loves the paradoxical. Although formally bound by conventions of syllable counting and nature referencing, the essence of haiku is infinitely pliable in practice, well able to accommodate rebellion, different eras and changes of culture. While the three line form (generally) holds steady, the dance between world and writer is what defines it. In a time, like the one we are now in, when so many outer forms are disintegrating and dissolving, haiku anchors us in the paradox that all that is enduring is fabricated by change. Seas and seasons, valleys and volcanos, life and death, confusion and clarity. Embedded in this flux, soul’s roots reach into attentiveness, her head up singing through those simple lines.

Try it now! What are you noticing, hearing, smelling, sensing, tasting or touching? Linger in this moment, welcome what surprises and delights. Let mind play, let words flower, let feelings flow. Be direct! And if haiku doesn’t come now, perhaps she will sneak up on you later, her three simple lines celebrating what’s right here in the world and you. Hoping for a haiku or two in the comments!

Did you catch Hope in Times of Climate Crisis the live video conversation between Catriona Knapman and myself based on her compilation Hope - A Scrapbook. Would love you to listen in when you have time and join our conversation.