about haiku

Since haiku has become the watermark of the Traveling Neighborhood, I thought I'd share a passage I read tonight:

To write haiku, to become this intimate with the moment, the poet must completely disengage, if only for an instant, all of his or her interpretive faculties. The mind must become one with the world, a detail of the world—the splash, a peach blossom, a neon sign flashing along the highway, the sound of a mountain stream. The poet's craft has to slip through the intellectual filters and instinctively record the image that has been perceived. As Basho said, "In writing, do not let a hair's breath separate you from the subject. Speak your mind directly; go to it without wandering thoughts." For an instant, the artist opens to the ineffable truth of Zen. With the self out of the way, the world advances a step.

—John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity