Mindful Walking and Haiku
I began writing short poems in the Japanese tradition of haiku during the Covid years, when I was recovering from prostate cancer.
It was a difficult period of my life, but also a strangely reflective one.
Perhaps age had something to do with it. Perhaps illness did too. I found myself thinking more deeply about the life I had lived, the things that had mattered to me and those that were beginning to matter less.
During that period I wrote and published a book, It’s Not About The Wine.
Wine had been a hobby for almost fifty years. I had tasted it, studied it, bought it and collected it. But the book wasn’t really about wine. It was about how something that began through curiosity and personal observation had changed over the years, just as I had.
And something else was changing too.
I was becoming increasingly interested in nature, mindfulness and the spiritual side of my life.
Walking in the early morning
As part of my recovery, I began taking early morning walks through the English countryside.
Gradually those walks became something more than exercise.
I began to notice things.
Birdsong.
The movement of trees.
Changes in the sky.
The smell of damp earth.
Morning light across a field.
The surface of a lake disturbed by something I couldn’t see.
None of these things was particularly extraordinary.
Perhaps that was the point.
I was simply paying attention.
And, as I walked, what I saw, heard and smelled often connected naturally with things I had encountered during many years of Buddhist practice.
Impermanence was no longer simply something I had read about.
It was there in the changing seasons.
Stillness wasn’t an abstract idea.
Sometimes it was there beside the water.
Mindfulness wasn’t something that happened only when I sat down to meditate.
It could happen while I was walking.
Then I started writing things down
When I returned home from these walks, I began keeping a journal.
At first I simply wanted to record what I had experienced. But after a while I noticed something curious.
Some of my entries were becoming shorter.
Much shorter.
A few were almost poetic.
That was when I began reading about haiku.
I discovered senryu, then tanka and eventually tanka prose.
I wasn’t setting out to become a poet. I had simply found a form of writing that seemed remarkably suited to what I was already doing.
Notice something.
Stop.
Pay attention.
Write only what is needed.
There was something about that which felt very familiar.
Poetry and my Buddhist life
Traditional haiku has a deep relationship with nature and the observation of a particular moment.
That immediately appealed to me.
But inevitably my Buddhist life found its way into the poems too.
Some of the poems on this blog are clearly Buddhist.
Some are simply about nature.
And sometimes the two meet without my deliberately bringing them together.
A bird lands beside a lake.
A candle flickers.
A harvested field lies empty.
An old memory appears during a walk and then disappears again.
Nothing very dramatic happens.
Yet occasionally a few words seem capable of holding something that a much longer explanation would disturb.
Perhaps that is what I have come to value most about these little poems.
They don’t always need to explain.
Sometimes they can simply notice.
Stillness
When I began This Buddhist Life after my pilgrimage to Nepal earlier this year, a friend encouraged me to publish some of these poems alongside my longer Buddhist reflections.
I wasn’t sure at first.
But gradually they have become another part of the blog.
And I have now collected enough of them to contemplate something I certainly hadn’t imagined when I began those early morning walks: a small book of poetry, perhaps towards the end of this year.
I already know its title.
Stillness.
It seems appropriate.
Because when I look back, these poems didn’t really begin with poetry.
They began with walking.
Then noticing.
Then stopping.
And occasionally, for just a moment, becoming still.
The poems gathered on this Poetry page come from those moments. Some are Buddhist reflections, some are observations of the natural world, and some sit quietly somewhere between the two.
I hope you will wander through them rather as I wandered through those early morning walks.
There is no particular route.
Just stop occasionally.
And notice.