Flower Mind / #FireHaiku

A few weeks ago I was slowly, diligently reading the book Linguistic Disobedience: On Restoring Power to Civic Language, by Yuliya Komska, Michelle Moyd, and David Gramling. I ordered the book after a brief Facebook exchange with Michelle, a fellow historian, who shared with me part of the one poem found in the entire text:
Make a decision
to care for language
as it is used
in human and nonhuman interaction
in complex, multilayered ways
in times of great need
and spaces of great suffering
This was enough for me, although in the book, the poem goes on:
whether this language
is an act of labor, work,
leisure, pleasure,
Or something else.
Care for this language
Always in recursive relation
To reality.
I needed this book, as I am presently, persistently trying to work out the way I want to use language in this ravaged, exquisite, turbulent world. Our relationship to language, to truth, seems so perilously unstable right now. I practice in a Zen lineage that acknowledges, and sometimes even praises, instability.
Take a step from the top of a hundred-foot pole….
And I intuit that this feels frightening now, to many people. But there is more to the koan:
… and the world in all directions will be your body.
So there is a landing place. And it is the very world, your very body.
So as a sort of anchor, a way to put one foot in front of the other with attention, and as a sort of act of faith that this landing place is around me (and inside me) all the time, I began to read about and write haiku.
“According to Takahama Kyoshi, the proper subject of haiku is to sing the beauty of birds and flowers,” writes Clark Strand in Seeds from a Birch Tree, his account of writing haiku as a spiritual practice. “However, few people in this life encounter circumstances which allow them to realize this flower mind. So haiku is a gentle discipline to help the world along the road to its realization. It does not matter if it is sometimes regarded as a second-class art. It does not matter if that mind sees buildings, cooling-towers, or a rose.”
Reading this passage was extremely good timing.
When fire moved across the hot, dry autumn Sonoma County hills again, haiku offered me a way to encounter the emergency unfolding. This small, precise form offered small containers of the real, in the face of disruption.
I was not the only one with this thought. My neighbor e sent me a note proposing a Red Flag Warning haiku tradition. I said yes! That haiku actually emerged from a collective writing experience, called renga, in which a chain of linked verses is created in a group. But by the end of that day, our community was scattered. We could not sit in a circle and chew on words. We slept on air mattresses, on floors, and in friends’ beds. The fire was spreading intensely across the mountains north of us, and we were in survival mode. Still, haiku offered us a gentle chain to link ourselves to one another, to our experience, and to our home (which, in the end, did not burn).

Here is the great Japanese haiku poet Basho:
Harvest moon —
the tide rises
almost to my door.
And here are small offerings from my friends e and Thea, and from me, in our own distinct voices. The syllables are sometimes clumsy. The season not pre-eminent. The stretch toward metaphor perhaps too strenuous, for haiku. Maybe we did not entirely realize “flower mind.” But here is what matters: across the distance that fire created in our lives, we made space for intimate moments of fear and noticing. We found small landing places, over and over again. We reached towards the real, even as the dragon tide called fire rose towards our door.
May it always be like that.
Holy shit the wind
Blew, wailing out with the old
I need something new
—
Help me remember
During heart pounding and wind
Pulse and breeze exist
—
air tanker above
goats get hungry too you know
this stolen sunset
—
Ma Earth said LISTEN
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Don’t soil your nest
—
Big pile of Fox shit
in the middle of the road
welcoming me home.
— e harris
leaky air mattress
slow descent to wake again
nighttime is hardest
#firehaiku
— Thea Maria Carlson
I.
October windstorm —
the crickets won’t stop chirping.
Their song is too old.
Salmon-colored sky.
On most mornings I would smile.
But this gift is fire.
II.
The freeways are packed.
Dry rats from a burning ship,
skating on pavement.
Two sleeping kids, and
a pounding, jittery heart:
why did he stay back?
Winds from the northeast,
clear skies above the city.
Bird faces the smoke.
III.
Golden sun slants down
on its wilted yellow leaves:
fall hasta lily.
Driving kids to school,
my heart veers between sadness,
dread, exaltation.
One white egret sails
above our inland mountain —
confused post-fire guest.
— Amy Elizabeth Robinson
Sonoma County
October / November 2019

