Haiku on the Mind Early in the AM

This morning, for some reason, I felt the need to remember Basho Matsuo, a Japanese monk who way back in the day (probably the day of yore but who's really counting) wrote some very remarkable haiku while on a very remarkable journey. I studied him at UNC while doing a paper on pilgrimage.

His "pilgrimage" was not to any one location, but the act of traveling around itself. He, in essence, sought enlightenment through travel and observation. That's what I got from his writings during that period in his life anyway. I like that idea, enlightenment through travel and observation; it suits me.

The first sentence from his manuscript has been translated some 15-20 different ways, but the jist of it is that we are all travelers, life is travel, but for those that choose to do it on say a boat or a horse, travel is life literally. It gets pretty thoughtful right off the bat obviously, but it's a good read if you are in that sort of mood.

There are a lot of fantastic haiku in the book from what I remember. I rather enjoyed this one:

How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.

I remembered that my brother, who's fantastic in any type of written word, wrote a great haiku, as did a friend of mine from school. Here are theirs:

Horace ask me not
what has become of our world
I have been asleep

Walking through my life
I stop to ask directions
I am answered by Greece.

Michael, my brother, also wrote a series of wonderfully funny haiku that could be deep and meaningful if you are really ridiculous and trying to find deep truths in everything:

A wizard would know
more of life than you or I
but he cannot rap