Speaker 1: The most elusive part of a high goup is what
Speaker 1: I call the turn of thought. So what the point
Speaker 1: has to do is to add a turn of thought
Speaker 1: to the seventeen syllables with the season word that results
Speaker 1: in more than seventeen syllables of meaning. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Clark Strand. He's an
Speaker 1: American author and lecturer on spirituality and religion. Clark is
Speaker 1: a former Zen Buddhist monk and was the first senior
Speaker 1: editor of Tricycle, The Buddhist Review. He's also the author
Speaker 1: of many books, including The Way of the Rose, The
Speaker 1: Radical Path of the Divine, Hidden in the Rosary, and
Speaker 1: Seeds from a Birch Tree, Writing Haiku, and the Spiritual Journey.
Speaker 1: In this episode, Eric and Clark discussed not only those books,
Speaker 1: but his career in life in general. Hi Clark, welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Hi are glad to be here. I'm
Speaker 1: excited to have you on. We are going to be
Speaker 1: talking about a lot of different things in this conversation,
Speaker 1: one of which will be using haiku sort of as
Speaker 1: a spiritual practice. But before we do that, let's start
Speaker 1: like we always do. At the parable, there's a grandparent
Speaker 1: who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second and looks up with their grandparents says, well,
Speaker 1: which one wins, And the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do well. A couple of things.
Speaker 1: Eric One thing it calls to mind is the teachings
Speaker 1: of a turn of the nineteenth century Ukrainian rabbi named Rev.
Speaker 1: Knockman of Breast Love, who is an important figure in
Speaker 1: my own thinking, especially about ecology and climate change. Rev.
Speaker 1: Knockman advised his disciples to go out in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night, to wake after everyone else have gone
Speaker 1: to bed, and go out into a field where they
Speaker 1: could speak to God in their own language. And he
Speaker 1: believed that if you did this, the trees and grasses
Speaker 1: and flowers and the animals nearby would support your prayer
Speaker 1: and enter into your prayer. Very much believed in outdoor
Speaker 1: sort of plane air prayer and rising in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night. And Reb. Knockman talked about focusing on
Speaker 1: the good points. This was a fundamental aspect of his teaching.
Speaker 1: He believed that in any given moment, you had a
Speaker 1: choice between focusing on what was life affirming and positive
Speaker 1: and generous and loving and those things that weren't. And
Speaker 1: he made it that very very simple idea. The basis
Speaker 1: for much of his teaching. I wrote a book called
Speaker 1: Waking Up to the Dark, who was originally published in
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen and again is coming out in
Speaker 1: paperback just next month, in September or this month, maybe
Speaker 1: by the time this airs. And in that book, the
Speaker 1: whole first section of that book is called the Hour
Speaker 1: of the Wolf, and it refers to that eerie sort
Speaker 1: of time between dark and dawn that so many people
Speaker 1: associate with a sort of predatory fatalism, right, that comes
Speaker 1: to haunt people like their worst nightmares, their most pernicious
Speaker 1: fears and worries come about that time. What reb Knockman
Speaker 1: discovered was that these hours were originally the hour of God, right,
Speaker 1: a time when we could commune with our deepest feelings
Speaker 1: and modern people because you know, we're so light drunk
Speaker 1: and light saturated, our lives are so ruled by screens
Speaker 1: and artificial illumination. We don't give ourselves enough time in
Speaker 1: the dark, enough time for sleep, and so we don't
Speaker 1: naturally wake in the middle of the night for that
Speaker 1: time of prayer or meditation and contemplation. That sort of
Speaker 1: makes sense of our lives. So if you ask me
Speaker 1: what the parable means, to me, it's really very personal
Speaker 1: because it's the choice between the hour of the Wolf
Speaker 1: and the hour of God. You know, one wolf feeds
Speaker 1: on light, information, certainty, power, dominion, right, the belief that
Speaker 1: we can control everything in the world and this human
Speaker 1: being should control everything. And the other wolf is trusting
Speaker 1: of our Mother of the Earth right and as willing
Speaker 1: to be fed off of her bounting. And so that's
Speaker 1: also a choice. So this parable is very personal for
Speaker 1: me in that respect. That's a wonderful response, and I
Speaker 1: want to go deeper into this hour of Wolf versus
Speaker 1: Hour of God. And as I mentioned to you before
Speaker 1: the show started, I didn't prepare with that book because
Speaker 1: I didn't think it was out yet. It's a sleeper
Speaker 1: of that book. Excuse the pod, Yeah, exactly. I'd like
Speaker 1: to dig more into it. But as I was preparing
Speaker 1: for this, there was another section in your writing that
Speaker 1: when I read it, I was like, oh, okay, this
Speaker 1: strikes right at the heart of the parable. Also, and
Speaker 1: you described that you really found in the pure Land
Speaker 1: Buddhism tradition that they believe that there were two forces
Speaker 1: at work in human life, and they weren't good and evil,
Speaker 1: they were self power and other power, right, say more
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, this was very much a formative part
Speaker 1: of my spiritual development. I was a Zen Buddhist monk
Speaker 1: in my twenties, right, and started practicing Zen, went off
Speaker 1: and joining the monastery when I was nineteen, and you know,
Speaker 1: ended up getting married. Ultimately went back to the monastery,
Speaker 1: became a monk and even a Zen teacher for a
Speaker 1: period of time after that, I was the editor of
Speaker 1: Buddhist magazine called Tricycle, the Buddhist Review. You know, after
Speaker 1: I left his Zen, I sort of came unmoored. My
Speaker 1: wife described me as very loyal in marriage but promiscuous
Speaker 1: in religion. Right, I did. I did everything right, I
Speaker 1: was you know, I explored many, many different types of
Speaker 1: spiritual practice and mostly looking for, you know, a kind
Speaker 1: of a spiritual solution to the problems that we were
Speaker 1: facing in the modern world and specifically climate. Jane agent
Speaker 1: species extinction. Wanted to know if any of these traditions
Speaker 1: had the answer to that. And purely in Buddhism, which
Speaker 1: is a very ecologically based form of Buddhism, really inspiring
Speaker 1: to me purely, and Buddhists speak of two basic types
Speaker 1: of agency in the world. One is called self power.
Speaker 1: These are the things we can do for ourselves, ruled
Speaker 1: by ambition, self determination, self confidence. Right, it's the kind
Speaker 1: of things that, with a little help from somebody like yourself,
Speaker 1: you know, your self power can be a guiding force
Speaker 1: in your life and can allow you to make strides
Speaker 1: that you otherwise wouldn't be able to accomplish in life.
Speaker 1: But it isn't everything. And when we think about the
Speaker 1: fact that we all die, we realize that there's a
Speaker 1: limit to it. So purely and Buddhists developed this idea
Speaker 1: of other power, and purely in Buddhism, that other power
Speaker 1: is Amitaba Buddha. And the story is this, it's a
Speaker 1: really interesting story. Purely and Buddhism comes to be about
Speaker 1: five years after the historical Buddhist death. Early Buddhism was
Speaker 1: very elitist, right, It wasn't particularly concerned with women, it
Speaker 1: wasn't concerned with the poor. People who were practicing it
Speaker 1: were mostly educated. But people began to realize that if
Speaker 1: it was going to really last as a spiritual tradition,
Speaker 1: it had to address the needs of ordinary people. And
Speaker 1: so the Majana Buddhist tradition came with this idea of
Speaker 1: the Buddhi softa. This isn't like the buddha who practices
Speaker 1: for many lifetimes and eventually sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: gets squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed
Speaker 1: is no longer you know, really subject to birth and
Speaker 1: death right, but it has escaped all of that right,
Speaker 1: has attained a state of nirvana, of being a completely
Speaker 1: extinguishing desire. Well, the Bodhi Softa was a very different idea.
Speaker 1: Body Softa is reborn countless incarnations in order to save
Speaker 1: all beings. Bolli Softwa refuses to become a Buddha to
Speaker 1: enter nirvana until all beings have been saved. But if
Speaker 1: you know anything about ecology, you know that the world
Speaker 1: doesn't really work that way. And I developed a very
Speaker 1: simple test when I was journeying through all these spiritual
Speaker 1: traditions to see if they held an equalidity like in
Speaker 1: an age of extinction, you know, climate change, in ecological collapse.
Speaker 1: The test was this, there's a three word motto, ecology
Speaker 1: not theology. If a spiritual teaching makes some sense ecologically,
Speaker 1: then I kept it. If it didn't, I literally threw it. Out.
Speaker 1: I had no use for it, no time for that now,
Speaker 1: but not in a world that's on fire and burning
Speaker 1: all around us, both literally and symbolically. And so you know,
Speaker 1: I looked at purely in Buddhism and and disbelief and
Speaker 1: other power in the Meda, and I came up with
Speaker 1: the following sort of understanding of that tradition. Amitaba Buddha
Speaker 1: was originally one of these Buddhi soffice, but the way
Speaker 1: that purely and Buddhists imagine it existed eons and eons ago,
Speaker 1: like if you actually we do the math like in
Speaker 1: the Sutras, this guy would have lived before the creation
Speaker 1: of the known universe. Right, it's like another universe, another
Speaker 1: world system is so ancient and way back then, long
Speaker 1: before the birth of the you know, historical Buddha. He
Speaker 1: decided that he wanted to save all beings and he
Speaker 1: needed to make it very, very easy, because the only
Speaker 1: way to save all beings to make it so easy
Speaker 1: anyone can do it. And so there were no austerities,
Speaker 1: there was no celibacy, there were no precepts to follow,
Speaker 1: no nothing, only calling on his name Namu Amida budd Su. Right,
Speaker 1: I take refuge in Amida Buddha. And so this Buddhi
Speaker 1: softa called Dharmakara, vowed not to become enlightened, not to
Speaker 1: become a Buddha, until all beings who called on his
Speaker 1: name without exception. We're talking nats, microbes, you know, human beings, animals, everything,
Speaker 1: everything in the whole universe is delivered, is saved from suffering,
Speaker 1: evails not to become a Buddha. Okay, here's the weird
Speaker 1: little tautology of the thing. So Dharmakara practice for eons
Speaker 1: and eventually became on Metaba Buddha, which means, well, it
Speaker 1: must have worked. All beings are saved. Anyone who calls
Speaker 1: on Emda, what his name is saved. Amida is the
Speaker 1: quintessential other power. And my belief is that these early
Speaker 1: Buddhists were looking at nature and they were trying to
Speaker 1: come up with something that was more loving and more
Speaker 1: generous than you know, most of the religions that were
Speaker 1: developing during the Axial Age, right, something that really could
Speaker 1: embrace all of nature and everything that they saw and
Speaker 1: redeem all of it. And so they came up with
Speaker 1: this ecological symbol of Amida, who is always saving all
Speaker 1: beings right in the process of saving all beings. Right,
Speaker 1: Amida is like you know what we would call Gaya, Right,
Speaker 1: It's like the Great Mother Amida. It's really more of
Speaker 1: a feminine sort of understanding of a divinity than it
Speaker 1: is a masculine version like a god. Right, there's no dominion.
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't dominate anyone to require anything necessarily,
Speaker 1: just includes all things and balances all things. And so
Speaker 1: we live in this world where everything is eaten, and
Speaker 1: everything is eating. Whatever eats is also eaten, right, and
Speaker 1: this is an endless cycle of life. I think it
Speaker 1: was around nineteen seventy very first world conference to talk
Speaker 1: about the environment was convened, I think in Stockholm, and
Speaker 1: the United Nations came up with this declaration about the
Speaker 1: Rights of the Earth, and as part of it, there
Speaker 1: was this wonderful thing that reads like a kind of
Speaker 1: ecological creed. And I'm going to stop there for a second.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna find it because I've actually got a copy
Speaker 1: of it right here is worth reading. This was the
Speaker 1: official report of the Stockholm Conference. So yeah, it was
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two. So in nineteen seventy two, when the
Speaker 1: environmental movement was still very much its infancy. The United
Speaker 1: Nation's convened the world's first international conference to raise awareness
Speaker 1: about threats to the global ecologing. The official report of
Speaker 1: the Stockholm Conference included a passage that today reads almost
Speaker 1: like an eco spiritual Creed quote. Life holds to one
Speaker 1: central truth, that all matter and energy needed for life
Speaker 1: moves in great, closed circles, from which nothing escapes, and
Speaker 1: to which only the driving fire of the sun is added.
Speaker 1: Life devours itself. Everything that eats is itself eaten. Every
Speaker 1: chemical that is made by life can be broken down
Speaker 1: by life. All the sunlight that can be used is
Speaker 1: used of all there is on earth. Nothing is taken
Speaker 1: away by life. Nothing is added by life, but nearly
Speaker 1: everything is used to buy life, used and reused in
Speaker 1: thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains and plants
Speaker 1: and animals, and back again to the beginning. Beautiful. And
Speaker 1: so this is a circular notion of time, circular notion
Speaker 1: of the spiritual life, rather than an ambition driven sort
Speaker 1: of self power driven linear notion of progress. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's a great place to pivot to your book
Speaker 1: called The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of
Speaker 1: the divine feminine hidden in the rosary. You talk about
Speaker 1: a really interesting thing. The rosary is most people will
Speaker 1: know it's using beads to pray, and we'll get into
Speaker 1: more detailed than that. But you say something in there
Speaker 1: that I think is really interesting. You say, is a
Speaker 1: mystical practice. Meditation has always been primarily a masculine discipline.
Speaker 1: One of the most interesting speculations on its origins suggests
Speaker 1: that it evolved from hunting behaviors, the need for radical
Speaker 1: stillness in silence, for focused awareness, and for the pinpoint
Speaker 1: readiness to act when the moment was precisely right. Bead practices,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, so the rosary is a bead practice,
Speaker 1: or mala beads are is a bead practice seemed to
Speaker 1: evolve from the gathering behaviors of women as they collected
Speaker 1: seeds and nuts and berries. And I thought that was
Speaker 1: really interested in What led me there was you talking
Speaker 1: about the circle, right, Because a bead practice is circular.
Speaker 1: You you end up where you start out exactly now,
Speaker 1: back to the beginning, and you just start over again.
Speaker 1: So it's very much that same sort of thing. Actually,
Speaker 1: I believe that section of the book was written by
Speaker 1: my wife, who was a co offer for the books. So,
Speaker 1: although it's hard at this point to sort of tell
Speaker 1: who wrote what, but we founded UH an international rosary
Speaker 1: fellowship by the same name, the Way of the Rose,
Speaker 1: which people can join on Facebook or visit our website
Speaker 1: to learn more about it. Way of the Rose dot org.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the rosary is UH. It's a circle of
Speaker 1: beads and it a riginated actually in a much older
Speaker 1: tradition which you know, one finds all across the world
Speaker 1: of weaving chaplets of flowers, right, usually as an offering
Speaker 1: to a divind into either Shiva or Kali in India
Speaker 1: or or usually the Virgin Mary or a Nana or
Speaker 1: Isis or Venus in the West. So these flowers were
Speaker 1: sort of a devotional offering, are usually in the spring
Speaker 1: or summertime, and they were a way of basically unifying
Speaker 1: with that circular, sort of maternal inclusive principle in finding
Speaker 1: one's place in the context of the passing seasons, right,
Speaker 1: so that there was this sort of implicit belief at
Speaker 1: the bottom of it is that our lives aren't just
Speaker 1: a straight line right where we come from. We don't
Speaker 1: know we're born we live, we die, who knows what
Speaker 1: comes afterwards? The rosary and the Buddhist mall and all
Speaker 1: of these circular bead practices, the Muslim tesbe right, all
Speaker 1: of the same basic sort of tactile teaching, which is
Speaker 1: that life is a circle, not a line, right, that
Speaker 1: it leads back to the beginning and we start again.
Speaker 1: And so for those who believe in reincarnation, you know,
Speaker 1: this is a very comforting sort of idea. I guess
Speaker 1: I'll only add that most people believed in reincarnation before
Speaker 1: their religions began to divvy up their different beliefs about it. Right,
Speaker 1: If you go back into the upper Paleolithic, you find
Speaker 1: human beings who are basically animous, right. They all believe
Speaker 1: that everything is alive. They believe that their ancestors are
Speaker 1: present to them and continue to speak to them. They
Speaker 1: believe that they joined the ancestral realm and they die,
Speaker 1: and that they return from the ancestral realm and they
Speaker 1: live again. This was a universal human belief across the
Speaker 1: whole spectrum. Today, I think people have different, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of ways of thinking about it. Pure Land Buddhists,
Speaker 1: you know, imagine the pure land of a media that
Speaker 1: they go after death, but that pure land is just
Speaker 1: a great symbol for this world, right, and which all
Speaker 1: things belong and nothing is left out right, and everything
Speaker 1: is endlessly recycled, All of life is recycled. We're part
Speaker 1: of something that's never born and never dies, that goes
Speaker 1: on forever. Given that idea that we're part of something
Speaker 1: that is never born, never dies, goes on forever, and
Speaker 1: that nature sort of just regenerates itself, sort of endlessly,
Speaker 1: tell me why the climate crisis feels so important to you.
Speaker 1: And I'm asking that because when I look at the
Speaker 1: climate crisis, I think of it from a human perspective,
Speaker 1: and I go, oh, God, from humans, we are probably
Speaker 1: well and truly screwed at this point. Right. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying there's nothing we can do, but it's not going
Speaker 1: to be good for humans. I don't worry about the
Speaker 1: earth itself, right, I don't worry about life. I worry
Speaker 1: about the specific forms of it, my son, his children,
Speaker 1: and you know, down forth. But I'm curious. Talk to
Speaker 1: me about how that belief that everything sort of goes
Speaker 1: on also ties to your concern around the climate crisis.
Speaker 1: In our ecological crisis. Well, I began studying climate change
Speaker 1: in the nineties. My younger brother is a field botanist
Speaker 1: and a population geneticist, and I remember sitting down with
Speaker 1: him sometime in the mid nineties and him telling me
Speaker 1: that the large sample studies that he was doing, which
Speaker 1: required at that point the computers at the Pentagon to
Speaker 1: crunch the numbers because the data sample was so large
Speaker 1: across so many different plants species, And he told me
Speaker 1: that the results that were coming in indicated to him
Speaker 1: that we were well into a mass extinction and that
Speaker 1: it was mostly due to pesticides, encroachment into wilderness areas,
Speaker 1: and climate change, right, and uh that at that point
Speaker 1: already we were locked into feedback loop. That would probably
Speaker 1: mean that we were seeing the effects even then of
Speaker 1: things that we had done fifty years earlier. And so
Speaker 1: he was very much of the opinion that, you know,
Speaker 1: the local ship was about to hit the fan, and
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot we could do about it, and
Speaker 1: it was going to be very hard to get out
Speaker 1: of the way, right. So I went on a site
Speaker 1: called climate dot org, which back then mostly just had
Speaker 1: climate scientists on it, and you know, I sort of
Speaker 1: prevailed about people to sort of make it simple and
Speaker 1: explain it to me so I can understand it. That
Speaker 1: was really for me the genesis of turning to all
Speaker 1: of these different spiritual traditions, you know, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity,
Speaker 1: go back to the oldest texts usually try to find
Speaker 1: some little leftover bit of sanity in each one of
Speaker 1: them from the Upper Paleolithic, because people before the invention
Speaker 1: of agriculture lived in scale with the natural world, right.
Speaker 1: You know, occasionally they would deplete the resources in an area,
Speaker 1: but typically they were moving from one place to the next,
Speaker 1: and so they were never really you know, using more
Speaker 1: than the world had to give. And we're not talking
Speaker 1: a lot of people either. And the Upper Paleolith there
Speaker 1: were we're talking about a world population measured in the
Speaker 1: lower millions at certain point, even under a million. And
Speaker 1: so these were people who had no sense of time
Speaker 1: as we understand it today. Right, all time was ancestral time.
Speaker 1: People living in the Upper Paleolithic. Right. If you go
Speaker 1: to the caves, which my wife and I did when
Speaker 1: we were researching the Way of the Roads, go to
Speaker 1: the caves in southern France, you'll see paintings in the
Speaker 1: same cave that we're done thousands of years apart, and
Speaker 1: yet the paintings were almost exactly the same. They were
Speaker 1: painting these animals like this for thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about a remarkably stable human culture and culture.
Speaker 1: We're talking about culture here, not just quote, you know,
Speaker 1: so called primitive people, but people who had art and song,
Speaker 1: people you know, who experienced family and love and all
Speaker 1: the fruits of culture, but none of the perils of civilization.
Speaker 1: I think the problem as people begin to imagine how
Speaker 1: they're going to negotiate climate change is that they conflate
Speaker 1: human culture with human civilization. They're not the same. We've
Speaker 1: had human culture for tens of thousands of years, very
Speaker 1: durable culture at that, and that culture is still encoded
Speaker 1: within us, right the things that really matter in life,
Speaker 1: that are truly value, things that make us content and
Speaker 1: make us happy and keep us healthy and keep us
Speaker 1: at peace with one another. That part of us is
Speaker 1: still inside of us. The external, the human civilization that
Speaker 1: we have created since the rise of agriculture, that does
Speaker 1: not have a very long shelf life. When we consider
Speaker 1: our very long history. It's exploration data is coming up
Speaker 1: and we're going to see I believe, you know, within
Speaker 1: the next hundred years, widespread collapse of the various systems
Speaker 1: that we rely upon to maintain our quote civilized way
Speaker 1: of living. But within us, there's something that endures, and
Speaker 1: I think that it will help us to survive. I
Speaker 1: do not believe it will survive of the numbers that
Speaker 1: we have now. I don't know of any population scientists
Speaker 1: or any credible ecologists who believes that our present level
Speaker 1: of population is even remotely sustainable. But there will be
Speaker 1: a natural contraction as petrochemicals either run out or they
Speaker 1: become untenable to use them. You know, world agricultural production
Speaker 1: is almost entirely dependent upon petrochemicals, petrochemical fertilizers. And when
Speaker 1: people begin to talk about, you know, a genitive agriculture
Speaker 1: and various different alternative ways of farming, right, we're not
Speaker 1: talking about ways of farming that produced the kinds of
Speaker 1: yields that would support you know, eight or nine billion
Speaker 1: people on the face of the planet. It's just not possible.
Speaker 1: When most people hear the Rosary, they think Catholicism, They
Speaker 1: think a lot of guilt, a lot of different things
Speaker 1: that may go with childhood traditions that were not good
Speaker 1: for them. So talk to me about what the Rosary
Speaker 1: brought for you and why it became a practice for
Speaker 1: you as a non Catholic, as somebody who's very spiritually diverse.
Speaker 1: What was it about that particular approach that sang to you. Well,
Speaker 1: they're really two answers. I'll give you the first and
Speaker 1: then the second answer. The first answer literally answered your question.
Speaker 1: But the second answer, I think I'm going to be
Speaker 1: more satisfying because it explains why I'm not only bray
Speaker 1: the Rosary, but you know, devoted a great deal of
Speaker 1: my life. At this point to spreading word about the Rosary.
Speaker 1: I was traveling to Tagas, New Mexico to teach haiku
Speaker 1: with my friend Natalie Goldberg about I want to say,
Speaker 1: at this point, it must be around almost thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: right in the sort of late nineteen nineties, and I
Speaker 1: was on my way there. I was afraid I was gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of miss my plane or whatever. I
Speaker 1: was late. I've been teaching meditation at a convent for
Speaker 1: ten days and Santra Fell, California, and I barely made
Speaker 1: it to the plane, got there, I got off the
Speaker 1: plane in Taras and I had a day to sort
Speaker 1: of kick around before the retreat started, and everywhere I went,
Speaker 1: I kept seeing this picture of this young Mexican girl
Speaker 1: that I couldn't quite place. I wasn't raised Catholic, I
Speaker 1: was raised in a Protestant denomination. Didn't even you know,
Speaker 1: recognize the Virgin Mary is anything other than pretty much
Speaker 1: a galilee and housewife, right, and uh yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: there was no sense. I mean, you know, there were
Speaker 1: cretched scenes and stuff around Christmas time, but that was
Speaker 1: about it. There was no presence of the divine feminine
Speaker 1: anywhere in the religion I was brought up with. So
Speaker 1: I didn't recognize the figure I was looking at. And
Speaker 1: I see her everywhere. She was on calendars, she was
Speaker 1: on a little statue, you know, like on the dashboard
Speaker 1: of the cab that picked me up at the airport.
Speaker 1: You know, I'd go and have lunch and she'd be
Speaker 1: on a poster on the wall. And sort of stupidly,
Speaker 1: I was walking down the street and I looked up
Speaker 1: and there was this little terra cotta statue of this figure.
Speaker 1: And I asked, this woman, who is coming out of building,
Speaker 1: who looks sort of you know, professorial. Perhaps I thought
Speaker 1: at one point maybe she's a real estate agent. She
Speaker 1: had a leather portfolio under arm, and I say, excuse me,
Speaker 1: who is this figure? She's everywhere and she says, ah,
Speaker 1: that's more. Innita, the little brown skinned girl right, says
Speaker 1: she's the indigenous form of the Virgin Mary to this region, right,
Speaker 1: indigenous to this region. Her Aztec name was Qualipe. So
Speaker 1: I know I'm saying it wrong, but she said, if
Speaker 1: you say it fast, it sounds like Guadalupe, which was
Speaker 1: the name they gave to her. So this was the
Speaker 1: figure of our Lady of Guadalupe. So I bought a
Speaker 1: little book that told her story. Right, you know, against
Speaker 1: the backdrop of the Mesoamerican genocide, right, the largest genocide
Speaker 1: in human history. We're talking not ten million people, but
Speaker 1: you know a hundred million people were talking an ecocide
Speaker 1: and the genocide on the scales that like we've never
Speaker 1: seen before. Right, and out of that this figure appears
Speaker 1: this old Aztec mother goddess, you know, sort of transmutes
Speaker 1: into our Lady of Guadaloupe, right, a version of the
Speaker 1: America's So if somehow that was so sort of deeply
Speaker 1: moved by this. So I came back to Woodstock, and
Speaker 1: the first words out of my mouth when Perdita met
Speaker 1: me at the airport with her kids, Sophie and Johnny
Speaker 1: were really small at that point, was I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I feel like I need to start
Speaker 1: praying the Rosary. And her mouth just sort of drops open. Right.
Speaker 1: She was willing to, you know, follow me through all
Speaker 1: of these different spiritual adventures. But suddenly I'm telling her
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start praying the Rosary like her Irish Catholic grandmother. Right.
Speaker 1: But I did start praying it. And here's the damnedest thing.
Speaker 1: I just learned the prayer stick about a day, you know,
Speaker 1: to do it. I mean, any eight year old with
Speaker 1: a diagram and a list of the prayers can learn
Speaker 1: the Rosary and you know, in an hour. So I
Speaker 1: learned the prayers, I memorized them, and I started to
Speaker 1: pray the Rosary, and I found myself getting into a
Speaker 1: place of deep, trusting calm like I used to only experience,
Speaker 1: like after maybe six or seven days of silent meditation
Speaker 1: in a remote Zen monastery. And I didn't trust it.
Speaker 1: I thought, this has got to be like some placebo effect.
Speaker 1: How can it be that the rosary works that well? Right?
Speaker 1: So I said it for about a month or two,
Speaker 1: and then I just dropped it. I said, no, I'm
Speaker 1: just I've just talked myself into this. This can't be happening.
Speaker 1: And so I abandoned him. But I got very, very
Speaker 1: fascinated with bead practices at that point, and I undertook
Speaker 1: a study of bead prayers right like the Joppa mala,
Speaker 1: the muttering garland, right that Hindu jus and the various
Speaker 1: different types of jusu or ninju or malas that Buddhists.
Speaker 1: He is right, And you know, I learned about practice
Speaker 1: and Islam and even sort of Jewish analogs. They don't
Speaker 1: have beads in Judaism, but they have the tallest right,
Speaker 1: the knots on the prayer shawl that are fingered and
Speaker 1: sometimes counted in a part of the prayer. So I
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time studying these, but I didn't
Speaker 1: really come back to the rosary as a practice. And
Speaker 1: then the night of June two thousand and eleven, went
Speaker 1: out to dinner with some friends and I came back
Speaker 1: and I went to bed, and I woke up early
Speaker 1: on the morning of June and I was about to
Speaker 1: go out for my normal walk. I've been walking in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night since I was a child.
Speaker 1: For an hour, right, you know, eventually I took up,
Speaker 1: you know, Red Knockman's practice, and you know, I did
Speaker 1: various other things that did be practices. Sometimes during that time,
Speaker 1: I go out for a walk. I wrote about this
Speaker 1: and waking up to the dark. So I got up
Speaker 1: to leave the house and I had my hand on
Speaker 1: the door knob. It's a full moon night. There had
Speaker 1: just been an eclipse in a few hours earlier. It
Speaker 1: was nice, crisp and cool, with a very dark road,
Speaker 1: you know, in a dark part of the cat skills.
Speaker 1: So it's just a perfect night for walking. And just
Speaker 1: as I'm about to leave, I feel a hand on
Speaker 1: my shoulder and a voice, a male voice, says, don't
Speaker 1: go out tonight. Remain inside and be very very still. Now,
Speaker 1: being still is something I know how to do, you know.
Speaker 1: I spent years doing this, spent years teaching it right
Speaker 1: and then is a very very still discipline, the meditation
Speaker 1: part of it, that is. So I got on the
Speaker 1: couch and I began to meditate, kept my eyes closed.
Speaker 1: After about forty five minutes, I suddenly felt there was
Speaker 1: someone in the room and just that unmistakable sense of
Speaker 1: being stared at, you know, And I opened my eyes
Speaker 1: and they're in front of me. It's like the room
Speaker 1: had disappeared, and I just saw two reed stalks, as
Speaker 1: if blowing in an invisible wind. It's like I was
Speaker 1: in the middle of a marsh perhaps. And then the
Speaker 1: reed stalks disappeared, and I saw the face of a
Speaker 1: young girl, maybe seventeen years old, round, sort of pale,
Speaker 1: moonlike face, hazel eyes, auburn hair cut close and over
Speaker 1: her lips was an ex of black electrical tape. Now
Speaker 1: mis then training had told me that experiences like this
Speaker 1: were called machio or illusion, and the wisdom of the
Speaker 1: zen masters was that if you just sort of stare
Speaker 1: them down and don't pay any attention to them, they'll
Speaker 1: go away. So I've been doing this for years and
Speaker 1: teaching other people to do it, right, So I just
Speaker 1: stared at her for all of about two or three seconds,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly I thought, oh, the zen masters were wrong.
Speaker 1: And that was a huge moment for me. I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: they were wrong. This is not illusion. If anything is
Speaker 1: the illusion here, it's me, not her. It was as
Speaker 1: if she was the only thing in the universe that
Speaker 1: was real. Everything else was unreal, you know, I wrote
Speaker 1: in Waking Up to the Dark, it was like looking
Speaker 1: at the face of God, except it was a girl.
Speaker 1: And so I did the only thing I could do, really,
Speaker 1: because there was such urgency in her eyes. I leaned
Speaker 1: forward and I pulled the electrical tape off of her lips.
Speaker 1: And you know, the sensation was so vivid. I could
Speaker 1: feel the pull of her skin against the tape as
Speaker 1: I pulled it off. And when I did, she gave
Speaker 1: a big gas and I described it once as like
Speaker 1: the sound of air rushing into a crypt that have
Speaker 1: been sealed for thousand years. And I thought that she
Speaker 1: would speak. I was dying to know who she was.
Speaker 1: Had no idea what was going I'd never had an
Speaker 1: experience like this before, no visions, no nothing. This was
Speaker 1: at age fifty four. I've done all kinds of spiritual practices,
Speaker 1: had all kinds of spiritual experiences my whole life, nothing
Speaker 1: approaching this. But she shook her head as if nothing
Speaker 1: could be said. But after that she was always there.
Speaker 1: You know I could always feel her, So anyway, I
Speaker 1: looked at her for a while and I closed my eyes,
Speaker 1: and when I opened them again, about forty minutes later,
Speaker 1: she was gone. Two weeks later I saw her again,
Speaker 1: and this time I asked, who are you? The obvious
Speaker 1: question again. I woke in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: to go out for a walk. Again the same voice,
Speaker 1: Get on the couch, be still. This time she said,
Speaker 1: I am the hour of God. This was a phrase
Speaker 1: that I've been using for a long time to describe
Speaker 1: that luminous quiet period in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: when the prolactin levels rise, and you know, the Psalm
Speaker 1: has described it as you know, I sleep, but my
Speaker 1: heart is awake and deep, deep calm, as if you're
Speaker 1: asleep but your mind is completely lucid. So she didn't
Speaker 1: use those words to describe it. And I said, stupidly,
Speaker 1: I think I know what that is. And she said,
Speaker 1: if you really knew, you would have said who, not what?
Speaker 1: And that was it. I mean, you know, my whole
Speaker 1: life was different after that. You know, I had always
Speaker 1: thought of the world as a what I think, I
Speaker 1: thought of myself as a what. You know, After that
Speaker 1: I realized that, you know, everything I looked at was
Speaker 1: a who. Everything was alive, Everything was sentient, you know,
Speaker 1: every aspect of life, every particle of life. I would
Speaker 1: have been writing haiku poetry, which is a you know,
Speaker 1: seventeen syllable verse that's devoted to nature. I've been writing
Speaker 1: that form and and teaching it, you know, since I
Speaker 1: was a teenager, teaching it since i'd my early thirties.
Speaker 1: And yet I don't think I had really fully understood
Speaker 1: what it was about, right, that when you look at nature,
Speaker 1: you're looking at a who, not a what. That the
Speaker 1: whole universe is filled with his. Everything is alive, right,
Speaker 1: everything looks back. And so you know, I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I guess my fear, my unspoken fear, you know, was
Speaker 1: that it was the Virgin Mary. You know, I always say, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't really know who she was those first few
Speaker 1: weeks or so, first couple of months. Right. My wife says, oh,
Speaker 1: you knew, you did, though, And I guess I did.
Speaker 1: But my prayer was, oh, please don't let it be
Speaker 1: the Virgin Mary. Don't let her be the version Mary,
Speaker 1: because you know, I was done with religion. I was
Speaker 1: even done with Buddhism. At that point, you know, I
Speaker 1: was just so sick of the whole patriarchal mess that
Speaker 1: the last thing I wanted to do if I was
Speaker 1: going to become anything, it certainly wasn't going to be Catholic.
Speaker 1: So I was terrified that this meant I had to
Speaker 1: be a Catholic, right that this is the Virgin Mary.
Speaker 1: Then what is she going to ask of me? I
Speaker 1: asked her. Finally, one time, you know, I was supposed
Speaker 1: to go to the bishop or something like that, and
Speaker 1: she said, no, the editors are the bishops. Now I
Speaker 1: want you to write a book. But in any case,
Speaker 1: I guess. About ten weeks after that, we're vacationing on
Speaker 1: Cape Cod and again she woke me up in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night, and this time she said, if
Speaker 1: you rise to say the Rosary tonight, a column of
Speaker 1: saints will support your prayer. And I realized, I guess
Speaker 1: in that moment, I said, oh, I guess this is
Speaker 1: who we're talking about. Because I wasn't Catholic, but I
Speaker 1: wasn't stupid, because there's only one figure in all the
Speaker 1: world religion who asked you to pray the Rosary and
Speaker 1: makes promises based on whether you do it or not.
Speaker 1: So then I knew, and she quickly made it clear
Speaker 1: that she wasn't the least bit interested in Catholicism. If
Speaker 1: I tried to talk to her about priests or Catholic
Speaker 1: doctrine or anything like that, she would just look bored.
Speaker 1: What she wanted to talk about, again and again, over
Speaker 1: and over was the way human beings live on the
Speaker 1: planet and what are deep past has been, and what
Speaker 1: we carry from the past into the present, and the
Speaker 1: things that we need to know in order to move
Speaker 1: forward and to survive what's coming. So, in the classic
Speaker 1: sort of you know, fashion of marrying apparition, she came
Speaker 1: with a simple message. Times are bad, here's what you
Speaker 1: need to know. I'm there, hold my hand, and I
Speaker 1: will guide you through it. So that's why I pray
Speaker 1: the Rosary. It's the reason why our way of the
Speaker 1: Rose group is post religious, post Catholic. We have such
Speaker 1: a diverse membership, approaching twenty people at this point, spread
Speaker 1: all over the world. And you know, our members are Wickens,
Speaker 1: which is Pagans, Buddhists, Jews. We have Catholics as well,
Speaker 1: but I would exactly call them card carrying Catholics, right,
Speaker 1: We have a lot of people who are devoted to
Speaker 1: folk Catholic witchcraft, right, that's not a term I hear
Speaker 1: very often, and who like the saints. Right. Well, we
Speaker 1: read a book by a woman who talked about her
Speaker 1: Catholic upbringing, and she said the nuns would give her
Speaker 1: all these Saints cards and Catholic school, right, and she
Speaker 1: loved the cards, would take them home and arrange them
Speaker 1: and like say the prayers and pray for things and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. As an adult she had this realization.
Speaker 1: She said, the nuns thought they were teaching me Catholicism,
Speaker 1: but what I learned was magic. That's great, That's wonderful.
Speaker 1: There's so much you said there that we could go
Speaker 1: so deep into. But we only have so much time.
Speaker 1: And I've got a few other topics I want to hit,
Speaker 1: and one of them is I want to talk about
Speaker 1: this hour of God idea, this idea that in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night is a very fertile time for
Speaker 1: spiritual development. I'm paraphrasing, but I think I'm in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Most people's experience of being up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night is not that Most people, if they wake
Speaker 1: up at three in the morning. What happens is the
Speaker 1: worries of life rush in and they are ten times
Speaker 1: magnified and ten times scarier than they are at three
Speaker 1: in the afternoon. That's the hour of the wolf. That's
Speaker 1: it right there. Yeah, So what is a way for
Speaker 1: people who don't sleep well, right, who just for whatever
Speaker 1: various reasons, are up in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: and they find that time to be the hour of
Speaker 1: the wolf. As you're saying, what are some things that
Speaker 1: those people could start to do besides getting your book
Speaker 1: and reading it about starting to transform that time from
Speaker 1: something that is sort of nightmarish to something that's really
Speaker 1: fertile and generative. Yeah, well, you could work it basically
Speaker 1: from both ends. I think to begin with the reason
Speaker 1: why people wake in the middle of the night to
Speaker 1: that eerie, predatory fatalism that has come to be known
Speaker 1: as the hour of the wall. The reason that happens
Speaker 1: is because we no longer go to bed and fall
Speaker 1: asleep two hours after dusk and rise with the dawn.
Speaker 1: Prior to the invention of modern forms of illumination, right,
Speaker 1: human beings would retire across the planet. We were just
Speaker 1: wired this way. Part of the way our endocrine system
Speaker 1: works right, or hormones directed this this pattern, human beings
Speaker 1: would tend to settle down and begin to get still
Speaker 1: sometime within a couple of hours after dusk, and about
Speaker 1: two hours after dusk they would finally fall asleep. They
Speaker 1: would sleep for four hours and then wake for one
Speaker 1: to two hours, depending on the time of year and
Speaker 1: the length of the night, and then sleep for another
Speaker 1: four before waking up in the morning. Now, what's really
Speaker 1: fascinating is that if you do this today, you will
Speaker 1: have the experience that these people had, which is experience
Speaker 1: a very deep, profound calm. If you go back and
Speaker 1: you look at the earliest prayer traditions, and like in
Speaker 1: Judaism and in Islam, and in Buddhism and Hinduism, you
Speaker 1: find that they were all following this schedule. Usually the
Speaker 1: founders of the religion, you know, experience their great awakening,
Speaker 1: like the Buddha. Right, the Buddha is said to have
Speaker 1: attained enlightenment during the hour of Ushi Tara, which is
Speaker 1: between the hours of the tiger and the ox. I
Speaker 1: think that's right, this time period between like two and
Speaker 1: four o'clock in the morning. Right, Jesus would rise in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night to pray and again you
Speaker 1: see over and over again in each tradition Muhammad and
Speaker 1: wake up to pray in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1: Many of his revelations were received at that time. So biochemically,
Speaker 1: what's happening at that time is that prolactin, which is
Speaker 1: the hormone that lets down in mothers when they are
Speaker 1: nursing to keep them calm. It's also the hormone that
Speaker 1: reaches elevated levels and birds that are roosting on their necks.
Speaker 1: Basically that keeps us still while we're sleeping and very calm. Normally,
Speaker 1: when you wake up in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: as a modern person, your prolactin levels fall immediately right
Speaker 1: and you can even begin to feel a little restless
Speaker 1: and anxious at that point because of that. But if
Speaker 1: you give yourself enough darkness, what happens is the prolactin
Speaker 1: levels remain at sleep levels even though you're aware and awake.
Speaker 1: There is a very famous study done by a man
Speaker 1: named Thomas Whare at the National Institutes of Health in
Speaker 1: the nine Thomas where was a guy who discuss bird
Speaker 1: seasonal effective disorder. Basically right, he was the world's leading
Speaker 1: expert on you know, bio rhythms and circadian rhythms. He
Speaker 1: came up with this question. He said, did human beings
Speaker 1: always sleep the way they do now? Right, we've consolidated
Speaker 1: our sleep nights, like our work days, into convenient eight
Speaker 1: hour blocks, but then human beings really do this. So
Speaker 1: he decided to take people off the street, just ordinary people,
Speaker 1: and take them off of all forms of artificial illumination
Speaker 1: for one month to see what would happen. For like
Speaker 1: the first three weeks, what happened was that they slept
Speaker 1: a little longer than usual, repaying what we're called the
Speaker 1: national sleep debt, right, And then at week three, every
Speaker 1: single subject in the study began waking up after four
Speaker 1: hours of sleep to two hours of calm stillness, and
Speaker 1: then going back to bed for another four hours at
Speaker 1: the end of the study. And these were results that
Speaker 1: if you know anything at all about scientific studies, you know,
Speaker 1: are unprecedented. You don't get results like this, you know,
Speaker 1: with every study. I mean, this is ironclad. So clearly
Speaker 1: there was this older pattern at work. So we're asked
Speaker 1: them to self report and they all said the same thing.
Speaker 1: We feel like we've never been awake before in our
Speaker 1: tire lives. Finally we feel like we're awake, and so
Speaker 1: we're decided that what people were doing beginning around a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand years ago is various forms of artificial
Speaker 1: illumination began to creep in and extend our days into
Speaker 1: the night. Is it? Religious practices are an attempt to
Speaker 1: recover what was originally effortless and simply a human birthright.
Speaker 1: It's like one time called it, you know, like a
Speaker 1: worldwide nightly meditation retreat for every Homo sapiens on earth. Right,
Speaker 1: So that's what's at play. So you can work it
Speaker 1: from the darkness side. Okay, you can go to bed earlier,
Speaker 1: give yourself more time. If you do that, you will
Speaker 1: not experience insomnia. You won't experience the hour of the wall.
Speaker 1: If you give yourself a few weeks on that schedule,
Speaker 1: when you wake up in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: you'll feel like a piece that you can't even you know, imagine.
Speaker 1: It will be better than anything you get from mindfulness, right,
Speaker 1: because you know you're working it from the bottom up,
Speaker 1: not from the top down through your head trying to
Speaker 1: do backflips to you know, maintain proper awareness. Right. This
Speaker 1: is something that just wells up from within you as
Speaker 1: a natural state. So that's one thing to do. Or
Speaker 1: you can work it from the other end, which is
Speaker 1: what works for most people, and that is in fact,
Speaker 1: something like saying the rosary right, or mindfulness or some
Speaker 1: practice that gives you that sense of peace and calm.
Speaker 1: I call it the cultivated dark right, not the literal dark,
Speaker 1: but the cultivated dark us right, where you can let
Speaker 1: go of the need to know everything and to have
Speaker 1: your life perfectly ordered. Right. You let go temporarily of
Speaker 1: your ambitions, your anxieties, and your worries and inner a
Speaker 1: state of deep relaxation. The rosary is great for that
Speaker 1: because it's tactile. You have something to hold on too,
Speaker 1: and once you start it, you know you don't even
Speaker 1: have to think, right, You just go from one prayer
Speaker 1: to another, one be to the next, until you complete
Speaker 1: the circle. And quite naturally, what happens is your biochemistry changes.
Speaker 1: You enter into a state of well the way it's
Speaker 1: described in the song of Songs. Right, I sleep, but
Speaker 1: my heart is awake, a deep state of relaxation and
Speaker 1: a heightened state of awareness, place of great fertility and
Speaker 1: peace and creativity. I would be remiss and talking with
Speaker 1: you if we didn't talk about one of your life's
Speaker 1: great works, which is haiku. And the way I came
Speaker 1: across you, the way I found you was my friend
Speaker 1: Chris and I, who's the producer of this show, our
Speaker 1: engineer of this show, started this practice where we would
Speaker 1: write a hiku together. Each day. One of us would
Speaker 1: start with five syllables texted to the other guy. The
Speaker 1: next guy would fill in the seven and then the
Speaker 1: guy who started it would finish it. And so we
Speaker 1: started doing that and I really was enjoying it. And
Speaker 1: so then I was looking at books on haiku and
Speaker 1: I saw your book, which is called Seeds from a
Speaker 1: Birch Tree, Writing Haiku in the Spiritual Journey, and I
Speaker 1: was like, that is the book for me, and I
Speaker 1: grabbed it and I just love this book. There's so
Speaker 1: much in it. And let's start with how to write haiku,
Speaker 1: the basics. We can cover it in two minutes. What's
Speaker 1: the three simple rules of haiku? Yeah, so it's very simple.
Speaker 1: And first of all, you and your friend Chris, you said, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you and Chris figured it out right. Haiku is a
Speaker 1: collaborative art form something we do in groups together. Right.
Speaker 1: In fact, that it evolved out of a collaborative poem
Speaker 1: where people took turns composing versus in a chain. Right,
Speaker 1: So you basically did that one of you would create
Speaker 1: the five syllable opening for the haiku, and the next
Speaker 1: person would come along and complete the poem by adding
Speaker 1: a second line of set than syllables and a third
Speaker 1: line of five. Right. That's the first tradition of hiku,
Speaker 1: which is the form five seven five for a total
Speaker 1: of seventeen syllables. The second is the inclusion of a
Speaker 1: season word or a seasonal reference. Right. This is where
Speaker 1: haiku meets animism. Right. Hiku poets don't see human life
Speaker 1: as the point of everything. Right. Hiker poets experience their
Speaker 1: lives in the context of nature. That their life is
Speaker 1: about relating to nature and relating to one another true nature.
Speaker 1: So hiku poets share this common language, which are these
Speaker 1: words that indicate the season, like dandelion for spring, right,
Speaker 1: or spring rain autumn moon right, crickets for autumn morning,
Speaker 1: glories for early fall, and so forth and so on.
Speaker 1: So you'll take one of these words as the topic
Speaker 1: for hiku, and oftentimes you have to work from a list.
Speaker 1: You can just go outside and find some sign of
Speaker 1: the season and choose that as a topic for your haiku.
Speaker 1: So there's the five seven five syllable form, there is
Speaker 1: the season word. And finally, the most elusive part of
Speaker 1: a haiku is what I call the turn of thought.
Speaker 1: So what the poet has to do is to add
Speaker 1: a turn of thought to the seventeen syllables with the
Speaker 1: season word. That results in more than seventeen syllables of meaning. Right,
Speaker 1: the essence of haiku is compression. The fact that there's
Speaker 1: this very very small poem with sometimes a very big meaning. Right.
Speaker 1: That meaning is collaborative. Right. You can't save everything in haiku,
Speaker 1: so you have to suggest your meaning. You have to
Speaker 1: suggest what you want to say and trust the reader
Speaker 1: right to unpack the poem using their own experience, their
Speaker 1: own imaginations. And so every writer of haiku is also
Speaker 1: a reader of haiku, and every serious reader of haiku
Speaker 1: also writes them what I love about haiku, And you
Speaker 1: know that's what I do for a living. Now. By
Speaker 1: the way, the anniversary edition of Sees from Virtry will
Speaker 1: be coming out from Monk Fish Books next spring. So
Speaker 1: I'm I'm working on the final edits for that this week,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I think I'm probably as far as I know,
Speaker 1: the only full time teacher of haiku outside of Japan.
Speaker 1: Is how I make my money. I write a column
Speaker 1: for Tricycle magazine Tricycle to boost review. I write a
Speaker 1: quarterly print column and a monthly column and quote Haiku
Speaker 1: Challenge on tricycle dot org forward slash Haiku where I
Speaker 1: assigned a season word each month and hundreds, sometimes thousands
Speaker 1: of people will submit their haiku. It's a blind process.
Speaker 1: I don't know who's written them. I just look at
Speaker 1: the poems and I choose one winner and two honorable mentions,
Speaker 1: and then you know, write a commentary on the winning poem.
Speaker 1: It's also a Hiku tip every month. In addition to that,
Speaker 1: I have a group on Facebook called UH Weekly Hiku
Speaker 1: Challenge with with Clark Strand. In that group, we do
Speaker 1: the same thing every week. Every Monday, I signed a
Speaker 1: new season word and UH posts the comments on the
Speaker 1: poems from the week before. And it's a wonderful thing
Speaker 1: because you know, haiku is really a group art, so
Speaker 1: people learn together, they inspire one another. Last a week,
Speaker 1: we wrote on jasmine right as a summer season where
Speaker 1: the flower got very sexy poarms on jasmine. You know,
Speaker 1: if you ever smell the flower, you can see why.
Speaker 1: You know, it's some traditions as a symbol of purity,
Speaker 1: but if you spend much time with that flower, it's
Speaker 1: really quite intoxicating. But but people inspired one another, and
Speaker 1: you know, one person wrote a poem which they post
Speaker 1: in the comments on you know, in our little Facebook group,
Speaker 1: but you know, relating it to time, right, the experience
Speaker 1: of being overwhelmed by this very powerful scent can dislocate
Speaker 1: you as space and time and make you sort of
Speaker 1: confused about even where you are. It's so over powering.
Speaker 1: So four or five other poets thought, I want to
Speaker 1: try that, right, so they came up with their own
Speaker 1: versions of it, and so there's this wonderful sort of
Speaker 1: mutual inspiration society that developed in a hiku community like that. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I really love. But again it goes back
Speaker 1: to the very beginning for me. You know, my first
Speaker 1: book sees from Birstry, you know, opens with talking about
Speaker 1: writing haiku in nature and about the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: nothing can be thrown away, right, everything belongs. That's really
Speaker 1: the lesson of haiku, and the four seasons are just
Speaker 1: like the Rosary, they go into circle. We're talking about
Speaker 1: a circular experience of time and an inclusive relationship to
Speaker 1: the natural world in which we belong. Right, We're not
Speaker 1: in charge of it, we belong to it. There's a
Speaker 1: few other ideas from that book that I would love
Speaker 1: to hit that I think are really important, and one
Speaker 1: of them is you call it the paradox of haiku.
Speaker 1: You say, if we cultivate a strong desire to write
Speaker 1: a haiku, haiku will never come. In Japanese, this quality
Speaker 1: of mind at once fully engaged and detached with concern
Speaker 1: with the result is called furu. Do I have that correct? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that idea that there's actually a word for
Speaker 1: that very important concept that comes up on this show
Speaker 1: very often, which is all through Taoism. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: do your work and step back, right, you know, as
Speaker 1: the popular modern fitness teacher Tony Horton would say, do
Speaker 1: your best and forget the rest. Right. But it's that
Speaker 1: idea of if we're two wrapped up in the result,
Speaker 1: good things don't come out of it. And I love
Speaker 1: the idea that there's a word for this idea. I
Speaker 1: think you said it means sort of wind flow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say. You know, it's variously translated as elegance, refinement,
Speaker 1: wind flow. I think flow for me is the best word.
Speaker 1: But you know, the best word to describe what happens
Speaker 1: in haiku is big surprise. Haiku the word itself because
Speaker 1: it's composed of two Chinese characters, you know, which are
Speaker 1: imported into the Japanese language, high and coup. Coup means verse.
Speaker 1: High means playful, playful verse. Right, And so I often
Speaker 1: say to people when they first join our group and
Speaker 1: they're working really hard to craft their eight poems that
Speaker 1: they wanted to submit for the week, to throw into
Speaker 1: the mix with all the others, right, I often say
Speaker 1: to them, you know, if you're not having fun, you're
Speaker 1: doing it wrong. Right. So the idea is that you
Speaker 1: hiker is so short, you can write a lot of them, right,
Speaker 1: So you don't really get too attached to the result
Speaker 1: of a particular poem. That doesn't mean that our poets,
Speaker 1: some of whom have been you know, writing haiku, you know,
Speaker 1: every week like this for years, don't really put a
Speaker 1: lot of thought and effort into their poems, sometimes working
Speaker 1: on a single poem for an entire day to get
Speaker 1: it just right right. That does happen, but it does
Speaker 1: mean that the way you get it right is by
Speaker 1: relaxing and not you know, sort of putting the judgmental
Speaker 1: mind the down hole and just playing with the words
Speaker 1: and the feelings right until they come out in the
Speaker 1: right form. Every hiku is basically a word puzzle in
Speaker 1: search of a seventeen syllable solution, right, And so it's
Speaker 1: just like world, you know, it's you know, it's a
Speaker 1: very very playful art form, but profound meanings can come
Speaker 1: through when you when you relax like that and enter
Speaker 1: into that sort of childlike sort of place of openness
Speaker 1: and you're working with a very small, very lighthearted sort
Speaker 1: of form, surprising things come through. Yeah, Like I mean,
Speaker 1: we get poems that you know, just make you weep
Speaker 1: they're so beautiful or so sad, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: a mirrored that a mere seventeen syllables can achieve that.
Speaker 1: You know, I read entire novels that don't make me
Speaker 1: feel that way. Sometimes I see a hiku that will
Speaker 1: touch me in a very deep place there was one.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'll be able to remember it.
Speaker 1: I listened to a talk of years at Yupaia and
Speaker 1: I think it was a recent one. And you read
Speaker 1: a haiku about a child on a swing? Are you
Speaker 1: able to recall that one? Because talk about a seventeen
Speaker 1: syllable like wow. Yes. That poem was by Vicky Wilson,
Speaker 1: a participant in our Yupaia retreat this year, Vicky Wilson,
Speaker 1: and it goes like this. The boy on the swing
Speaker 1: surrounded by war rubble does not swing at all. The
Speaker 1: boy on the swing surrounded by war rubble does not
Speaker 1: swing at all. This is a reference, I believe to
Speaker 1: a war in Ukraine. This is what I wrote about
Speaker 1: that poem at the retreat. We created a kind of
Speaker 1: an anthology to distribute to the members afterwards, recording the
Speaker 1: most memorable poems are written by I think the thousand
Speaker 1: plus participants. At that time, I said, this is the
Speaker 1: best of the anti war haiku I have seen in
Speaker 1: the past two weeks, and I have read hundreds. The
Speaker 1: last line, which is heartbreaking, achieves a surplus of emotion
Speaker 1: and meaning that shouldn't be possible in a mere seventeen syllables,
Speaker 1: how the poet has chosen a symbol of transcendent childhood
Speaker 1: joy and given it a devastating twist. I've read a
Speaker 1: lot of empty swing haiku and haiku about swings that
Speaker 1: were still. This was the only one with a child
Speaker 1: in it, and it is all the more sorrowful because
Speaker 1: of that. And of course the assigned season word was
Speaker 1: swing for spring, the spring season word. That's an example
Speaker 1: of what you can pack into seventeen syllables. A couple
Speaker 1: other quick ideas around haiku that I wanted to hit on.
Speaker 1: You say that the way of haiku is to come
Speaker 1: unwrapped and thereby noticing what lies outside this self. And
Speaker 1: you know, I've often said my spiritual journey for me
Speaker 1: has all along felt like exactly that idea, Like how
Speaker 1: do I peel back the self so that I can
Speaker 1: connect with the world more? And I love that idea
Speaker 1: of haiku becoming a way of unwrapping ourselves. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, the hiku tradition, you know, is very broad
Speaker 1: and multifaceted, and so there are very self expressive hiku,
Speaker 1: their poets I think, who focus on, you know, expressing
Speaker 1: themselves rather than quote unwrapping themselves, as it were. And
Speaker 1: yet the basic tradition and the structure of hiku itself
Speaker 1: favors that kind of unwrapping. What happens is as you
Speaker 1: begin to interact with your subjects, right, which are typically
Speaker 1: things related to the season. Sometimes they can be human
Speaker 1: activities for instance, like plowing or you know, seed sewing
Speaker 1: or something like that, but typically they follow the pattern
Speaker 1: of the four seasons moving through time, and so as
Speaker 1: you begin to address your subjects can contemplate them, there's
Speaker 1: a sort of a natural pull, like almost a gravitational pull,
Speaker 1: that draws you out of your own box right into
Speaker 1: the wider world. I'm very struck by the fact that
Speaker 1: of the six different traditional categories for season words, the
Speaker 1: season proper like you know, the names of the months
Speaker 1: and things like that, that's one. Another one is the
Speaker 1: sky and elements, the weather, what's happening in the heavens, right.
Speaker 1: The other's the like the landscape. Then their plants and
Speaker 1: their animals. That's five. The sixth is humanity, and so
Speaker 1: only one of the six categories is humanity. And even then,
Speaker 1: even when human affairs are season words like you know,
Speaker 1: seasonal foods and things like that are celebrations or holidays.
Speaker 1: The focus is not exclusively on humanity, but the way
Speaker 1: that human beings exist within the cycles of nature. And
Speaker 1: so even when you're writing on a subject like I
Speaker 1: don't know, the fourth of July, which is from the
Speaker 1: subcategory observances or holidays within you know, humanity, Even when
Speaker 1: you're writing on something like that, it's not enough just
Speaker 1: to express, uh, you know, sort of the human side
Speaker 1: of that. We assigned that season word this year, and
Speaker 1: but right after roe versus Wade was overturned. And there
Speaker 1: are a lot of women, a lot of feminists and
Speaker 1: by Haiku group, and they tell you what, most of
Speaker 1: the poems were pretty angry, right, So, so they used
Speaker 1: it to express their feelings. But in every case those
Speaker 1: poems were all grounded right in a particular moment in time,
Speaker 1: in a circular pattern of the seasons, and each poet,
Speaker 1: even when they were expressing themselves, felt drawn out of
Speaker 1: their own sort of narrow box into the broader world.
Speaker 1: And I think the most important thing is that because
Speaker 1: haiku is so dependent upon the reader, right, because the
Speaker 1: reader has to supply so much and the poet can
Speaker 1: only suggest a little, there's a natural tendency in hiku
Speaker 1: to sort of have to step beyond ourselves in writing them. Right,
Speaker 1: You're you're writing this very short poem for another person
Speaker 1: that you hope will be able to grasp or into
Speaker 1: it your intent. You're in relationship to your reader in
Speaker 1: a much more intimate way than you are in writing
Speaker 1: a longer poem, right, I mean Western style, you know,
Speaker 1: free verse poets write longer poems, typically work in isolation,
Speaker 1: they don't work in groups. They don't necessarily have readers
Speaker 1: for their poems until they publish them. Usually they don't.
Speaker 1: Haiku poet has on a regular basis weeklier monthly readers
Speaker 1: for their poems that they are writing for, and who
Speaker 1: in turn right poems which they share with the writer.
Speaker 1: And so there's this constant going back and forth. And
Speaker 1: so you know, we're drawn out of our comfort zone
Speaker 1: and as it were, by these seasonal topics, but also
Speaker 1: by the other people, the other poets with whom we
Speaker 1: write into whom we relate in a very intimate way.
Speaker 1: In that respect, it really does help to release those
Speaker 1: strictures that bind us, I think, find the self to
Speaker 1: discomfort and pain, suffering, isolation, loneliness. Yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: those Haiku groups that you're describing could be a wonderful
Speaker 1: way to come out of isolation. They're like twelve step
Speaker 1: groups in a certain way, because you're going around and
Speaker 1: sharing and and you know, the main point is I mean,
Speaker 1: everybody's there to get sober from one thing or another.
Speaker 1: But really that, you know, what makes it work is
Speaker 1: just simply breaking isolation. That's the main thing. Once you
Speaker 1: break the isolation, I know that that you have undergone
Speaker 1: your own journey with these things. But there was a
Speaker 1: man named Ernest Kurtz who wrote a famous book on
Speaker 1: the history of a A. And at the end of
Speaker 1: this very long, you know, very academic history of alcoholics anonymous,
Speaker 1: he finally sums it up, and he says, what makes
Speaker 1: it work? He asked the question, what really makes it work?
Speaker 1: What's at the bottom of a and why has it
Speaker 1: inspired so many other fellowships for so many other behaviors
Speaker 1: or substances that people become addicted to. Finally concluded that
Speaker 1: secretive a A was one alcoholic talking to another. That
Speaker 1: was that at bottom, right, once you get two people
Speaker 1: getting together, breaking their isolation and the overcoming feelings of
Speaker 1: shame or disempowerment and sharing what's in their hearts. That's
Speaker 1: the basis for it. You know, the twelve steps naturally
Speaker 1: flow out of those early relationships. I think the hiku
Speaker 1: is much the same way. You share your hearts with
Speaker 1: other people and learn to express yourself in a way
Speaker 1: that feels life affirming and you know life in the
Speaker 1: context of the natural world, you begin to develop a
Speaker 1: more wholesome relationship to yourself, you know, to other people
Speaker 1: into the world. Well, I think that is a beautiful
Speaker 1: place to wrap up. You and I are going to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more in the post show conversation
Speaker 1: because there's a few more things that I really wanted
Speaker 1: to hit on haiku that we just didn't get to,
Speaker 1: among them being what is a hiku walk? What's a
Speaker 1: good way to read haiku to understand it? So we're
Speaker 1: going to continue that listeners. If you'd like access to
Speaker 1: the post show conversation, ad free episodes, and all kinds
Speaker 1: of other great things as well as the joy of
Speaker 1: supporting a show that you love, go to one you
Speaker 1: feed dot net, slash join and we would be happy
Speaker 1: to have you as part of our membership community. Clark,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on. This has been
Speaker 1: a great conversation and you've just explored so many things
Speaker 1: over the years that I've really enjoyed this. Well. Thanks Eric.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I've ever done a podcast where
Speaker 1: we've took in quite so much of my career. We
Speaker 1: really started at the beginning and came up to where
Speaker 1: things are now. We have covered a lot of ground,
Speaker 1: none of it probably as deeply as either of us
Speaker 1: would like, but that's the nature of the medium. So oh,
Speaker 1: it's it's good to see it all on one page.
Speaker 1: All right, Thank you Clark, Thank you so much. Eric's
Speaker 1: a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you,
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