Poetry for Winter: Haiku Selections
Introduction by Mary Davis
Mythic Passages Editor
In this lovely little volume, The Healing Spirit of Haiku, David Rosen and Joel Weishaus
employ (and obviously enjoy) a conversation between themselves as a literary device which combines
memoir and haiku. These two long time friends use this conversation as a poetic and healing dialogue,
as they mirror, consider, and reflect one another.
The traditional Japanese haiku is a short poem, usually consisting of seventeen syllables
in three lines, five syllables first, then seven, then five in the last line, usually evoking an
aspect of Nature, and also usually relating to one of the seasons. As you may notice here, modern
haiku poets often use even fewer syllables.
Several years ago, David Rosen lectured to
Atlanta's Jung Society, a Mythic Imagination Institute partner,
giving the history of this form of poetry and teaching its potential for healing. The core of what he taught
in Atlanta is contained in these words from his introduction to this volume, "Creative haiku represent a
healing union of intuition and sensation, past and present, self and other, ordinary and extraordinary,
as well as current and ancient memories. Haiku also produces an archetypal and affective image out
of a few words." (p.2) Joel Weishaus adds, "Compounded of wholeness (healing) and emptiness
(non-being/ being), every haiku is a prescription for a larger life." (p.5)
The current issue of
Spring Journal, also a Mythic Imagination Institute partner,
contains an enthusiastic review of this volume, with the reviewer commenting that this is symbolically
the work of Orpheus, shamanic in its nature, capturing a sense of Japanese culture, "inspired,"
and evoking "Jungian active imagination in which an archetypal image blooms into a verse."
So, in this winter season, with written permission, we quote several selections from
this fifty-two chapter volume. This is copyrighted material and it may be reproduced only with
written permission.
The authors initiate this book with a Chinese proverb, which evokes winter feelings,
"You can only go halfway into the darkest forest; then you are coming out the other side."
(p.7)
Selections from The Healing Spirit of Haiku
by David Rosen and Joel Weishaus
with illustrations by Arthur Okamura
Feeling Death
(Chapter 2, pages 12 and 13)
Darkness within darkness
The gateway to all understanding. — Lao Tzu
David: In early 1994, I was by myself, on sabbatical in Zurich, Switzerland, researching
and writing a book on Jung. Soon after arriving in Switzerland, I was suffering from melancholy due
to years of marital strife. I felt like I was dying in my half Asian, half Swiss apartment in the
village of Bassersdorf. Prophetic of a coming transformation, my deadening writer's block ended
when tears started flowing while I walked on a wooded path by a stream. All forms of water, whether
rivers or tides, are healing.
Out of darkness
A flowing brook
Pierces winter's silence
Joel: One Autumn many years ago, I was living in a dilapidated farmhouse in the mountains
northwest of Tokyo, with a small charcoal fire for heat. One night, I felt like I was burning up
with fever, along with having a terrible headache. I believed I was going to die, an unknown Gaijin
in a foreign land. I got through the night scribbling in my notebook what I believed would be the
last words I would ever write, trying to stay awake, convinced that if I fell asleep I wouldn't wake up.
Then, slowly, the sky brightened with bleak light. The fever was gone, the headache too. But by
early afternoon they had returned. I knew I couldn't survive another night, and made quick preparations
to leave. After patiently cleaning the rooms, I walked down the road to the bus stop in town.
Head throbbing,
A thin thread of light
Guides me home
Dark and Light
(Chapter 3, pages 16 and 17)
David: In the late afternoon, I would venture out for my daily wanderweg, a walk in Switzerland's
countryside. I felt like Henry David Thoreau who said that walking in "...Nature, for absolute freedom and
wildness..." involves "...the grace of God..." and preserves one's "...health and spirits..." Thoreau felt
"...equally at home everywhere." For me these walks were creative meditations, which often resulted in healing
haiku. Solidly in springtime, dark yin gave birth to yang light.
Dark evergreen woods —
Blossoming pear trees emerge
In the evening light
Joel: Four A. M. Guard Duty, somewhere in the wilds of Ft. Devens, Massachusetts.
A rifle slung over my shoulder, bitter cold biting through boots, I paced up and back beneath a canopy of
blinking stars, crisp sound of snow crunching underfoot, my eyes were begging to close. With moonlight
framing thin black trees, "What am I guarding?" I thought. "The war's inside myself."
Light and shadow,
Shadow and light,
I cross both paths
Death of the Ego
(Chapter 7, pages 32 and 33)
David: Being alone also shows its dark side as when part of my ego died and became creatively
transformed while in Japan. This is similar to Natsume Soseki's goal of egolessness (muga) and his
ultimate objective of "following heaven, leaving self (sokuten kyoshi)"
Facing death
Cicada and I
Sing the same song
This haiku by Issa gave me comfort:
Live in simple faith
Just as this trusting cherry
Flowers, fades, and falls
Joel: Hayao Kawai wrote that, "It is rather threatening for a Japanese to encounter
the Western ego, which is developed as an independent entity, as if utterly distant from all that is not "I"
(i.e., everything else). The Japanese presuppose a connection — with others, with all else, in the
sense of oneness." This is a barrier that faces many Western students of Zen, as their "independent entity,"
the mind that's been developing over most of their life, is difficult to drop, if only for a moment.
Understanding this is what led many Japanese Zen Masters to refuse to train Westerners. And even though
there is now a cadre of authorized Western Zen Masters, this ego, grounded in one's culture, is still a
problem that, perhaps, never will be satisfactorily resolved.
Sudden storm —
Roots sit
In the air
Notes on authors' citations: The Chinese proverb on p. 7 and Issa poem on p. 32 are credited
to Oman, Maggie, ed. Prayers for Healing, Conari Press, 1997, p.265 and p.80; Lao Tzu quote on p.12
from Tao Te Ching, trans. S. Mitchell, Harper Collins, 1988; Thoreau quote on p.16 from Thoreau,
Walking: A Little Book of Wisdom, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, pp.1,2,5,6; Soseki quote on p.32 from
Shigematsu, Soiku, ed. and trans., Zen Haiku: Poems and Letters of Natsume Soseki, Inklings/Weatherhill,
1994, pp.12 and13; Kawai quote on p.33 from Kawai, Hayao, Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy,
Texas A&M University Press, 1996, p.21. Several of Rosen's haiku have been published previously in
"Psychological Perspectives" and in "Modern Haiku." Rosen also refers to concepts published in his own
works, The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity, Penguin, 1997 and Transforming Depression: Healing
the Soul Through Creativity, 3rd ed., Nicolas-Hays, 2002.
David Rosen is a physician, psychiatrist, and Jungian psychoanalyst who is currently McMillan Professor of Analytical
Psychology, Professor of Humanities in Medicine, and Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science at Texas A&M University.
He is the author of numerous articles and seven other books, which include Medicine as a Human Experience,
The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity, Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul Through Creativity,
and The Tao of Elvis. Website
Joel Weishaus is a writer, artist, and art and literary critic who is currently Visiting Faculty in Portland State University's
Department of English. He is also an author and editor. He has written numerous articles and edited
On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing and Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text. He wrote
the Introduction and Notes for Thomas Merton's Woods, Shore, Desert. Website
The Healing Spirit of Haiku
was published by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, in 2004. This material is copyrighted and may be reproduced only with written permission.
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