The Heart of Haiku/Jane Hirshfield: it moved me

There's no accounting for how much I loved Jane Hirshfield's Kindle Single, The Heart of Haiku.  Part biography, part exegesis, this beautiful essay took me to a deep and sweltering place.  Yes, it's about the 17th century artist Basho—about his wandering, about his work.  But it is also about living, breathing, seeing, something I'm not convinced that I do enough of.

It's short.  It's the price of a coffee.  It will take two hours of your life to read, and it will change you.  Buy The Heart of Haiku. 

An excerpt:

... Basho's work as a whole awakens us to the necessary permeability of all to all.  Awareness of the mind's movements makes clear that it is the mind's nature to move.  Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all.  First comes the sight of a block of sea slugs frozen while still alive, then the sharp, kinesthetic comprehension of the inseparability of the suffering of one from the suffering of all. First comes hearing the sound of one bird singing, then the recognition that solitude can carry its own form of beauty, able to turn pain into depth.

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Do we seek mastery over things?

"If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace." — Basho, quoted in The Heart of Haiku, by Jane Hirshfield, and essential to me today, who sets back out into the world to teach—not perfection, not mastery, but greater (not absolute) knowing.

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