Journey to the Interior. Bruce Ross

is obviously a soothing icon of the comfort of domesticity even when he is naughty, as when, for the first time on the trip, Purr causes a minor catastrophe by breaking a host’s ceramic bowl. Lamenting their letting their guard down, the authors only half-seriously scold themselves: “We should have known: Never take your cat for granted.”⁷⁵

      The serious motif concerns the relation of haiku to ecology. The motif is introduced while the authors are visiting with the haiku poet Lee Gurga and his family. During a discussion of Patricia Donegan’s essay “Haiku & the Ecotastrophe,” collected in the anthology Dharma Gaia, Higginson has a flash of recognition and quotes from the essay:

      When she writes of her study of season words with the elderly Japanese haiku master Seishi Yamaguchi, Pat goes on to express the very ideal that deepened my own commitment to haiku a decade ago when I was writing The Haiku Handbook:

      Stopping the ecocrisis, eliminating the bomb, or spreading the world’s wealth more equitably [are] directly connected to stopping our own greed, aggressive tendencies and overconsumptive habits. The activities and personal habits of human beings... contribute most powerfully to the ecological imbalance and destruction of nature’s ecosystems. Even the writing of one haiku, and therefore some recognition of our interconnectedness, is a small positive step beyond self-interest.⁷⁶

      The motif enters again on Higginson’s trip to Haiku North America where part of his talk at the convention will discuss the relation of haiku to the environment. During a visit with James W Hackett, author of The Zen Haiku and other Zen Poems of J. W. Hackett, Higginson again recognizes his own ideas when Hackett “expresses his concern for the environment, saying that he hopes haiku will help us recognize the equality of all species. ”⁷⁷

      Higginson’s major insight into this motif occurs while he is thinking about a senryu from The Gulf Within, an anthology of haiku and sen-on the Gulf War that was published by the Haiku Poets of Northern California. He meditates on the internal nature of war, which might be conceived of as violent thought and emotion, and quotes from one of Marianne Moore’s poems on this theme: “never was a war that was/not inward.” Finally, he relates these lines of poetry to his thinking on the connection of haiku to our relation to the nonhuman world and ourselves to produce one of our most profound expressions of haiku poetics.

      If we could but bring this kind of insight, each day, to ourselves and our fellow human creatures, perhaps there would be fewer occasions for wars without. The haiku to face, unblinking, the natural world we must each make peace with and live within; the senryu to face, unblinking, the inner lives we must each somehow make more human, more natural.⁷⁸