How to Write Haiku and Other Spiritual Practices with Clark Strand

or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Clark Strand. He's an American author and lecturer on spirituality and religion. Clark is a former Zen Buddhist monk and was the first senior editor of Tricycle, The Buddhist Review. He's also the author of many books, including The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine, Hidden in the Rosary, and Seeds from a Birch Tree, Writing Haiku, and the Spiritual Journey. In this episode, Eric and Clark discussed not only those books,

but his career in life in general. Hi Clark, welcome to the show. Hi are glad to be here. I'm excited to have you on. We are going to be talking about a lot of different things in this conversation, one of which will be using haiku sort of as a spiritual practice. But before we do that, let's start like we always do. At the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up with their grandparents says, well, which one wins, And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do well. A couple of things.

Eric One thing it calls to mind is the teachings of a turn of the nineteenth century Ukrainian rabbi named Rev. Knockman of Breast Love, who is an important figure in my own thinking, especially about ecology and climate change. Rev. Knockman advised his disciples to go out in the middle of the night, to wake after everyone else have gone to bed, and go out into a field where they

could speak to God in their own language. And he believed that if you did this, the trees and grasses and flowers and the animals nearby would support your prayer and enter into your prayer. Very much believed in outdoor sort of plane air prayer and rising in the middle of the night. And Reb. Knockman talked about focusing on the good points. This was a fundamental aspect of his teaching.

He believed that in any given moment, you had a choice between focusing on what was life affirming and positive and generous and loving and those things that weren't. And he made it that very very simple idea. The basis for much of his teaching. I wrote a book called Waking Up to the Dark, who was originally published in two thousand and fourteen and again is coming out in paperback just next month, in September or this month, maybe

by the time this airs. And in that book, the whole first section of that book is called the Hour of the Wolf, and it refers to that eerie sort of time between dark and dawn that so many people associate with a sort of predatory fatalism, right, that comes to haunt people like their worst nightmares, their most pernicious

fears and worries come about that time. What reb Knockman discovered was that these hours were originally the hour of God, right, a time when we could commune with our deepest feelings and modern people because you know, we're so light drunk and light saturated, our lives are so ruled by screens and artificial illumination. We don't give ourselves enough time in the dark, enough time for sleep, and so we don't naturally wake in the middle of the night for that

time of prayer or meditation and contemplation. That sort of makes sense of our lives. So if you ask me what the parable means, to me, it's really very personal because it's the choice between the hour of the Wolf and the hour of God. You know, one wolf feeds on light, information, certainty, power, dominion, right, the belief that we can control everything in the world and this human being should control everything. And the other wolf is trusting of our Mother of the Earth right and as willing

to be fed off of her bounting. And so that's also a choice. So this parable is very personal for me in that respect. That's a wonderful response, and I want to go deeper into this hour of Wolf versus Hour of God. And as I mentioned to you before the show started, I didn't prepare with that book because I didn't think it was out yet. It's a sleeper of that book. Excuse the pod, Yeah, exactly. I'd like

to dig more into it. But as I was preparing for this, there was another section in your writing that when I read it, I was like, oh, okay, this strikes right at the heart of the parable. Also, and you described that you really found in the pure Land Buddhism tradition that they believe that there were two forces at work in human life, and they weren't good and evil, they were self power and other power, right, say more about that. Yeah, this was very much a formative part

of my spiritual development. I was a Zen Buddhist monk in my twenties, right, and started practicing Zen, went off and joining the monastery when I was nineteen, and you know, ended up getting married. Ultimately went back to the monastery, became a monk and even a Zen teacher for a period of time after that, I was the editor of Buddhist magazine called Tricycle, the Buddhist Review. You know, after

I left his Zen, I sort of came unmoored. My wife described me as very loyal in marriage but promiscuous in religion. Right, I did. I did everything right, I was you know, I explored many, many different types of spiritual practice and mostly looking for, you know, a kind of a spiritual solution to the problems that we were facing in the modern world and specifically climate. Jane agent species extinction. Wanted to know if any of these traditions

had the answer to that. And purely in Buddhism, which is a very ecologically based form of Buddhism, really inspiring to me purely, and Buddhists speak of two basic types of agency in the world. One is called self power. These are the things we can do for ourselves, ruled

by ambition, self determination, self confidence. Right, it's the kind of things that, with a little help from somebody like yourself, you know, your self power can be a guiding force in your life and can allow you to make strides that you otherwise wouldn't be able to accomplish in life. But it isn't everything. And when we think about the fact that we all die, we realize that there's a

limit to it. So purely and Buddhists developed this idea of other power, and purely in Buddhism, that other power is Amitaba Buddha. And the story is this, it's a really interesting story. Purely and Buddhism comes to be about five years after the historical Buddhist death. Early Buddhism was very elitist, right, It wasn't particularly concerned with women, it wasn't concerned with the poor. People who were practicing it

were mostly educated. But people began to realize that if it was going to really last as a spiritual tradition, it had to address the needs of ordinary people. And so the Majana Buddhist tradition came with this idea of

the Buddhi softa. This isn't like the buddha who practices for many lifetimes and eventually sort of like you know, gets squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed is no longer you know, really subject to birth and death right, but it has escaped all of that right, has attained a state of nirvana, of being a completely extinguishing desire. Well, the Bodhi Softa was a very different idea. Body Softa is reborn countless incarnations in order to save

all beings. Bolli Softwa refuses to become a Buddha to enter nirvana until all beings have been saved. But if you know anything about ecology, you know that the world doesn't really work that way. And I developed a very simple test when I was journeying through all these spiritual traditions to see if they held an equalidity like in an age of extinction, you know, climate change, in ecological collapse. The test was this, there's a three word motto, ecology

not theology. If a spiritual teaching makes some sense ecologically, then I kept it. If it didn't, I literally threw it. Out. I had no use for it, no time for that now, but not in a world that's on fire and burning all around us, both literally and symbolically. And so you know, I looked at purely in Buddhism and and disbelief and other power in the Meda, and I came up with

the following sort of understanding of that tradition. Amitaba Buddha was originally one of these Buddhi soffice, but the way that purely and Buddhists imagine it existed eons and eons ago, like if you actually we do the math like in the Sutras, this guy would have lived before the creation of the known universe. Right, it's like another universe, another world system is so ancient and way back then, long

before the birth of the you know, historical Buddha. He decided that he wanted to save all beings and he needed to make it very, very easy, because the only way to save all beings to make it so easy anyone can do it. And so there were no austerities, there was no celibacy, there were no precepts to follow, no nothing, only calling on his name Namu Amida budd Su. Right,

I take refuge in Amida Buddha. And so this Buddhi softa called Dharmakara, vowed not to become enlightened, not to become a Buddha, until all beings who called on his name without exception. We're talking nats, microbes, you know, human beings, animals, everything, everything in the whole universe is delivered, is saved from suffering, evails not to become a Buddha. Okay, here's the weird

little tautology of the thing. So Dharmakara practice for eons and eventually became on Metaba Buddha, which means, well, it must have worked. All beings are saved. Anyone who calls on Emda, what his name is saved. Amida is the

quintessential other power. And my belief is that these early Buddhists were looking at nature and they were trying to come up with something that was more loving and more generous than you know, most of the religions that were developing during the Axial Age, right, something that really could embrace all of nature and everything that they saw and redeem all of it. And so they came up with this ecological symbol of Amida, who is always saving all

beings right in the process of saving all beings. Right, Amida is like you know what we would call Gaya, Right, It's like the Great Mother Amida. It's really more of a feminine sort of understanding of a divinity than it is a masculine version like a god. Right, there's no dominion. I mean, it doesn't dominate anyone to require anything necessarily, just includes all things and balances all things. And so we live in this world where everything is eaten, and

everything is eating. Whatever eats is also eaten, right, and this is an endless cycle of life. I think it was around nineteen seventy very first world conference to talk about the environment was convened, I think in Stockholm, and the United Nations came up with this declaration about the Rights of the Earth, and as part of it, there was this wonderful thing that reads like a kind of ecological creed. And I'm going to stop there for a second. I'm gonna find it because I've actually got a copy

of it right here is worth reading. This was the official report of the Stockholm Conference. So yeah, it was nineteen seventy two. So in nineteen seventy two, when the environmental movement was still very much its infancy. The United Nation's convened the world's first international conference to raise awareness about threats to the global ecologing. The official report of the Stockholm Conference included a passage that today reads almost

like an eco spiritual Creed quote. Life holds to one central truth, that all matter and energy needed for life moves in great, closed circles, from which nothing escapes, and to which only the driving fire of the sun is added. Life devours itself. Everything that eats is itself eaten. Every chemical that is made by life can be broken down by life. All the sunlight that can be used is used of all there is on earth. Nothing is taken

away by life. Nothing is added by life, but nearly everything is used to buy life, used and reused in thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains and plants and animals, and back again to the beginning. Beautiful. And so this is a circular notion of time, circular notion of the spiritual life, rather than an ambition driven sort of self power driven linear notion of progress. Right. Yeah, So that's a great place to pivot to your book called The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of

the divine feminine hidden in the rosary. You talk about a really interesting thing. The rosary is most people will know it's using beads to pray, and we'll get into more detailed than that. But you say something in there that I think is really interesting. You say, is a mystical practice. Meditation has always been primarily a masculine discipline.

One of the most interesting speculations on its origins suggests that it evolved from hunting behaviors, the need for radical stillness in silence, for focused awareness, and for the pinpoint readiness to act when the moment was precisely right. Bead practices, on the other hand, so the rosary is a bead practice, or mala beads are is a bead practice seemed to evolve from the gathering behaviors of women as they collected

seeds and nuts and berries. And I thought that was really interested in What led me there was you talking about the circle, right, Because a bead practice is circular. You you end up where you start out exactly now, back to the beginning, and you just start over again. So it's very much that same sort of thing. Actually, I believe that section of the book was written by

my wife, who was a co offer for the books. So, although it's hard at this point to sort of tell who wrote what, but we founded UH an international rosary fellowship by the same name, the Way of the Rose, which people can join on Facebook or visit our website to learn more about it. Way of the Rose dot org.

But yeah, the rosary is UH. It's a circle of beads and it a riginated actually in a much older tradition which you know, one finds all across the world of weaving chaplets of flowers, right, usually as an offering to a divind into either Shiva or Kali in India or or usually the Virgin Mary or a Nana or

Isis or Venus in the West. So these flowers were sort of a devotional offering, are usually in the spring or summertime, and they were a way of basically unifying with that circular, sort of maternal inclusive principle in finding one's place in the context of the passing seasons, right, so that there was this sort of implicit belief at the bottom of it is that our lives aren't just a straight line right where we come from. We don't know we're born we live, we die, who knows what

comes afterwards? The rosary and the Buddhist mall and all of these circular bead practices, the Muslim tesbe right, all of the same basic sort of tactile teaching, which is that life is a circle, not a line, right, that it leads back to the beginning and we start again. And so for those who believe in reincarnation, you know, this is a very comforting sort of idea. I guess I'll only add that most people believed in reincarnation before

their religions began to divvy up their different beliefs about it. Right, If you go back into the upper Paleolithic, you find human beings who are basically animous, right. They all believe that everything is alive. They believe that their ancestors are present to them and continue to speak to them. They believe that they joined the ancestral realm and they die, and that they return from the ancestral realm and they live again. This was a universal human belief across the

whole spectrum. Today, I think people have different, you know, sort of ways of thinking about it. Pure Land Buddhists, you know, imagine the pure land of a media that they go after death, but that pure land is just a great symbol for this world, right, and which all things belong and nothing is left out right, and everything is endlessly recycled, All of life is recycled. We're part of something that's never born and never dies, that goes

on forever. Given that idea that we're part of something that is never born, never dies, goes on forever, and that nature sort of just regenerates itself, sort of endlessly, tell me why the climate crisis feels so important to you. And I'm asking that because when I look at the climate crisis, I think of it from a human perspective, and I go, oh, God, from humans, we are probably well and truly screwed at this point. Right. I'm not saying there's nothing we can do, but it's not going

to be good for humans. I don't worry about the earth itself, right, I don't worry about life. I worry about the specific forms of it, my son, his children, and you know, down forth. But I'm curious. Talk to me about how that belief that everything sort of goes on also ties to your concern around the climate crisis. In our ecological crisis. Well, I began studying climate change

in the nineties. My younger brother is a field botanist and a population geneticist, and I remember sitting down with him sometime in the mid nineties and him telling me that the large sample studies that he was doing, which required at that point the computers at the Pentagon to crunch the numbers because the data sample was so large across so many different plants species, And he told me that the results that were coming in indicated to him that we were well into a mass extinction and that

it was mostly due to pesticides, encroachment into wilderness areas, and climate change, right, and uh that at that point already we were locked into feedback loop. That would probably mean that we were seeing the effects even then of things that we had done fifty years earlier. And so he was very much of the opinion that, you know, the local ship was about to hit the fan, and there wasn't a lot we could do about it, and it was going to be very hard to get out

of the way, right. So I went on a site called climate dot org, which back then mostly just had climate scientists on it, and you know, I sort of prevailed about people to sort of make it simple and

explain it to me so I can understand it. That was really for me the genesis of turning to all of these different spiritual traditions, you know, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, go back to the oldest texts usually try to find some little leftover bit of sanity in each one of them from the Upper Paleolithic, because people before the invention of agriculture lived in scale with the natural world, right.

You know, occasionally they would deplete the resources in an area, but typically they were moving from one place to the next, and so they were never really you know, using more than the world had to give. And we're not talking a lot of people either. And the Upper Paleolith there were we're talking about a world population measured in the lower millions at certain point, even under a million. And so these were people who had no sense of time

as we understand it today. Right, all time was ancestral time. People living in the Upper Paleolithic. Right. If you go to the caves, which my wife and I did when we were researching the Way of the Roads, go to the caves in southern France, you'll see paintings in the same cave that we're done thousands of years apart, and yet the paintings were almost exactly the same. They were painting these animals like this for thousands and thousands of years.

So we're talking about a remarkably stable human culture and culture. We're talking about culture here, not just quote, you know, so called primitive people, but people who had art and song, people you know, who experienced family and love and all the fruits of culture, but none of the perils of civilization. I think the problem as people begin to imagine how they're going to negotiate climate change is that they conflate

human culture with human civilization. They're not the same. We've had human culture for tens of thousands of years, very durable culture at that, and that culture is still encoded within us, right the things that really matter in life, that are truly value, things that make us content and make us happy and keep us healthy and keep us at peace with one another. That part of us is

still inside of us. The external, the human civilization that we have created since the rise of agriculture, that does not have a very long shelf life. When we consider our very long history. It's exploration data is coming up and we're going to see I believe, you know, within the next hundred years, widespread collapse of the various systems that we rely upon to maintain our quote civilized way of living. But within us, there's something that endures, and

I think that it will help us to survive. I do not believe it will survive of the numbers that we have now. I don't know of any population scientists or any credible ecologists who believes that our present level of population is even remotely sustainable. But there will be a natural contraction as petrochemicals either run out or they become untenable to use them. You know, world agricultural production

is almost entirely dependent upon petrochemicals, petrochemical fertilizers. And when people begin to talk about, you know, a genitive agriculture and various different alternative ways of farming, right, we're not talking about ways of farming that produced the kinds of yields that would support you know, eight or nine billion people on the face of the planet. It's just not possible.

When most people hear the Rosary, they think Catholicism, They think a lot of guilt, a lot of different things that may go with childhood traditions that were not good for them. So talk to me about what the Rosary brought for you and why it became a practice for you as a non Catholic, as somebody who's very spiritually diverse. What was it about that particular approach that sang to you. Well, they're really two answers. I'll give you the first and

then the second answer. The first answer literally answered your question. But the second answer, I think I'm going to be more satisfying because it explains why I'm not only bray the Rosary, but you know, devoted a great deal of my life. At this point to spreading word about the Rosary.

I was traveling to Tagas, New Mexico to teach haiku with my friend Natalie Goldberg about I want to say, at this point, it must be around almost thirty years ago, right in the sort of late nineteen nineties, and I was on my way there. I was afraid I was gonna, you know, sort of miss my plane or whatever. I

was late. I've been teaching meditation at a convent for ten days and Santra Fell, California, and I barely made it to the plane, got there, I got off the plane in Taras and I had a day to sort of kick around before the retreat started, and everywhere I went, I kept seeing this picture of this young Mexican girl that I couldn't quite place. I wasn't raised Catholic, I

was raised in a Protestant denomination. Didn't even you know, recognize the Virgin Mary is anything other than pretty much a galilee and housewife, right, and uh yeah, so you know, there was no sense. I mean, you know, there were cretched scenes and stuff around Christmas time, but that was about it. There was no presence of the divine feminine anywhere in the religion I was brought up with. So I didn't recognize the figure I was looking at. And

I see her everywhere. She was on calendars, she was on a little statue, you know, like on the dashboard of the cab that picked me up at the airport. You know, I'd go and have lunch and she'd be on a poster on the wall. And sort of stupidly, I was walking down the street and I looked up and there was this little terra cotta statue of this figure. And I asked, this woman, who is coming out of building, who looks sort of you know, professorial. Perhaps I thought

at one point maybe she's a real estate agent. She had a leather portfolio under arm, and I say, excuse me, who is this figure? She's everywhere and she says, ah, that's more. Innita, the little brown skinned girl right, says she's the indigenous form of the Virgin Mary to this region, right, indigenous to this region. Her Aztec name was Qualipe. So I know I'm saying it wrong, but she said, if you say it fast, it sounds like Guadalupe, which was the name they gave to her. So this was the

figure of our Lady of Guadalupe. So I bought a little book that told her story. Right, you know, against the backdrop of the Mesoamerican genocide, right, the largest genocide in human history. We're talking not ten million people, but you know a hundred million people were talking an ecocide and the genocide on the scales that like we've never

seen before. Right, and out of that this figure appears this old Aztec mother goddess, you know, sort of transmutes into our Lady of Guadaloupe, right, a version of the America's So if somehow that was so sort of deeply moved by this. So I came back to Woodstock, and the first words out of my mouth when Perdita met me at the airport with her kids, Sophie and Johnny were really small at that point, was I said, you know, I don't know, I feel like I need to start

praying the Rosary. And her mouth just sort of drops open. Right. She was willing to, you know, follow me through all of these different spiritual adventures. But suddenly I'm telling her I'm gonna start praying the Rosary like her Irish Catholic grandmother. Right. But I did start praying it. And here's the damnedest thing. I just learned the prayer stick about a day, you know, to do it. I mean, any eight year old with a diagram and a list of the prayers can learn

the Rosary and you know, in an hour. So I learned the prayers, I memorized them, and I started to pray the Rosary, and I found myself getting into a place of deep, trusting calm like I used to only experience, like after maybe six or seven days of silent meditation in a remote Zen monastery. And I didn't trust it. I thought, this has got to be like some placebo effect. How can it be that the rosary works that well? Right? So I said it for about a month or two,

and then I just dropped it. I said, no, I'm just I've just talked myself into this. This can't be happening. And so I abandoned him. But I got very, very fascinated with bead practices at that point, and I undertook a study of bead prayers right like the Joppa mala, the muttering garland, right that Hindu jus and the various different types of jusu or ninju or malas that Buddhists. He is right, And you know, I learned about practice

and Islam and even sort of Jewish analogs. They don't have beads in Judaism, but they have the tallest right, the knots on the prayer shawl that are fingered and sometimes counted in a part of the prayer. So I spent a lot of time studying these, but I didn't really come back to the rosary as a practice. And then the night of June two thousand and eleven, went out to dinner with some friends and I came back and I went to bed, and I woke up early on the morning of June and I was about to

go out for my normal walk. I've been walking in the middle of the night since I was a child. For an hour, right, you know, eventually I took up, you know, Red Knockman's practice, and you know, I did various other things that did be practices. Sometimes during that time, I go out for a walk. I wrote about this and waking up to the dark. So I got up to leave the house and I had my hand on the door knob. It's a full moon night. There had

just been an eclipse in a few hours earlier. It was nice, crisp and cool, with a very dark road, you know, in a dark part of the cat skills. So it's just a perfect night for walking. And just as I'm about to leave, I feel a hand on my shoulder and a voice, a male voice, says, don't go out tonight. Remain inside and be very very still. Now, being still is something I know how to do, you know.

I spent years doing this, spent years teaching it right and then is a very very still discipline, the meditation part of it, that is. So I got on the couch and I began to meditate, kept my eyes closed. After about forty five minutes, I suddenly felt there was someone in the room and just that unmistakable sense of being stared at, you know, And I opened my eyes and they're in front of me. It's like the room had disappeared, and I just saw two reed stalks, as

if blowing in an invisible wind. It's like I was in the middle of a marsh perhaps. And then the reed stalks disappeared, and I saw the face of a young girl, maybe seventeen years old, round, sort of pale, moonlike face, hazel eyes, auburn hair cut close and over

her lips was an ex of black electrical tape. Now mis then training had told me that experiences like this were called machio or illusion, and the wisdom of the zen masters was that if you just sort of stare them down and don't pay any attention to them, they'll go away. So I've been doing this for years and teaching other people to do it, right, So I just stared at her for all of about two or three seconds, and then suddenly I thought, oh, the zen masters were wrong.

And that was a huge moment for me. I thought, oh, they were wrong. This is not illusion. If anything is the illusion here, it's me, not her. It was as if she was the only thing in the universe that was real. Everything else was unreal, you know, I wrote in Waking Up to the Dark, it was like looking at the face of God, except it was a girl. And so I did the only thing I could do, really, because there was such urgency in her eyes. I leaned forward and I pulled the electrical tape off of her lips.

And you know, the sensation was so vivid. I could feel the pull of her skin against the tape as I pulled it off. And when I did, she gave a big gas and I described it once as like the sound of air rushing into a crypt that have been sealed for thousand years. And I thought that she would speak. I was dying to know who she was. Had no idea what was going I'd never had an experience like this before, no visions, no nothing. This was

at age fifty four. I've done all kinds of spiritual practices, had all kinds of spiritual experiences my whole life, nothing approaching this. But she shook her head as if nothing could be said. But after that she was always there. You know I could always feel her, So anyway, I looked at her for a while and I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, about forty minutes later, she was gone. Two weeks later I saw her again, and this time I asked, who are you? The obvious

question again. I woke in the middle of the night to go out for a walk. Again the same voice, Get on the couch, be still. This time she said, I am the hour of God. This was a phrase that I've been using for a long time to describe that luminous quiet period in the middle of the night when the prolactin levels rise, and you know, the Psalm has described it as you know, I sleep, but my heart is awake and deep, deep calm, as if you're asleep but your mind is completely lucid. So she didn't

use those words to describe it. And I said, stupidly, I think I know what that is. And she said, if you really knew, you would have said who, not what? And that was it. I mean, you know, my whole life was different after that. You know, I had always thought of the world as a what I think, I thought of myself as a what. You know, After that I realized that, you know, everything I looked at was a who. Everything was alive, Everything was sentient, you know,

every aspect of life, every particle of life. I would have been writing haiku poetry, which is a you know, seventeen syllable verse that's devoted to nature. I've been writing that form and and teaching it, you know, since I was a teenager, teaching it since i'd my early thirties. And yet I don't think I had really fully understood what it was about, right, that when you look at nature, you're looking at a who, not a what. That the whole universe is filled with his. Everything is alive, right,

everything looks back. And so you know, I didn't know. I guess my fear, my unspoken fear, you know, was that it was the Virgin Mary. You know, I always say, well, I didn't really know who she was those first few weeks or so, first couple of months. Right. My wife says, oh, you knew, you did, though, And I guess I did. But my prayer was, oh, please don't let it be the Virgin Mary. Don't let her be the version Mary, because you know, I was done with religion. I was

even done with Buddhism. At that point, you know, I was just so sick of the whole patriarchal mess that the last thing I wanted to do if I was going to become anything, it certainly wasn't going to be Catholic. So I was terrified that this meant I had to be a Catholic, right that this is the Virgin Mary. Then what is she going to ask of me? I asked her. Finally, one time, you know, I was supposed to go to the bishop or something like that, and she said, no, the editors are the bishops. Now I

want you to write a book. But in any case, I guess. About ten weeks after that, we're vacationing on Cape Cod and again she woke me up in the middle of the night, and this time she said, if you rise to say the Rosary tonight, a column of saints will support your prayer. And I realized, I guess in that moment, I said, oh, I guess this is

who we're talking about. Because I wasn't Catholic, but I wasn't stupid, because there's only one figure in all the world religion who asked you to pray the Rosary and makes promises based on whether you do it or not. So then I knew, and she quickly made it clear that she wasn't the least bit interested in Catholicism. If I tried to talk to her about priests or Catholic doctrine or anything like that, she would just look bored.

What she wanted to talk about, again and again, over and over was the way human beings live on the planet and what are deep past has been, and what we carry from the past into the present, and the things that we need to know in order to move forward and to survive what's coming. So, in the classic sort of you know, fashion of marrying apparition, she came with a simple message. Times are bad, here's what you need to know. I'm there, hold my hand, and I

will guide you through it. So that's why I pray the Rosary. It's the reason why our way of the Rose group is post religious, post Catholic. We have such a diverse membership, approaching twenty people at this point, spread all over the world. And you know, our members are Wickens,

which is Pagans, Buddhists, Jews. We have Catholics as well, but I would exactly call them card carrying Catholics, right, We have a lot of people who are devoted to folk Catholic witchcraft, right, that's not a term I hear

very often, and who like the saints. Right. Well, we read a book by a woman who talked about her Catholic upbringing, and she said the nuns would give her all these Saints cards and Catholic school, right, and she loved the cards, would take them home and arrange them and like say the prayers and pray for things and stuff like that. As an adult she had this realization. She said, the nuns thought they were teaching me Catholicism, but what I learned was magic. That's great, That's wonderful.

There's so much you said there that we could go so deep into. But we only have so much time. And I've got a few other topics I want to hit, and one of them is I want to talk about this hour of God idea, this idea that in the middle of the night is a very fertile time for spiritual development. I'm paraphrasing, but I think I'm in the neighborhood. Most people's experience of being up in the middle of the night is not that Most people, if they wake

up at three in the morning. What happens is the worries of life rush in and they are ten times magnified and ten times scarier than they are at three in the afternoon. That's the hour of the wolf. That's it right there. Yeah, So what is a way for people who don't sleep well, right, who just for whatever various reasons, are up in the middle of the night and they find that time to be the hour of

the wolf. As you're saying, what are some things that those people could start to do besides getting your book and reading it about starting to transform that time from something that is sort of nightmarish to something that's really fertile and generative. Yeah, well, you could work it basically from both ends. I think to begin with the reason why people wake in the middle of the night to that eerie, predatory fatalism that has come to be known

as the hour of the wall. The reason that happens is because we no longer go to bed and fall asleep two hours after dusk and rise with the dawn. Prior to the invention of modern forms of illumination, right, human beings would retire across the planet. We were just wired this way. Part of the way our endocrine system works right, or hormones directed this this pattern, human beings would tend to settle down and begin to get still sometime within a couple of hours after dusk, and about

two hours after dusk they would finally fall asleep. They would sleep for four hours and then wake for one to two hours, depending on the time of year and the length of the night, and then sleep for another four before waking up in the morning. Now, what's really fascinating is that if you do this today, you will have the experience that these people had, which is experience

a very deep, profound calm. If you go back and you look at the earliest prayer traditions, and like in Judaism and in Islam, and in Buddhism and Hinduism, you find that they were all following this schedule. Usually the founders of the religion, you know, experience their great awakening, like the Buddha. Right, the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment during the hour of Ushi Tara, which is

between the hours of the tiger and the ox. I think that's right, this time period between like two and four o'clock in the morning. Right, Jesus would rise in the middle of the night to pray and again you see over and over again in each tradition Muhammad and wake up to pray in the middle of the night. Many of his revelations were received at that time. So biochemically, what's happening at that time is that prolactin, which is the hormone that lets down in mothers when they are

nursing to keep them calm. It's also the hormone that reaches elevated levels and birds that are roosting on their necks. Basically that keeps us still while we're sleeping and very calm. Normally, when you wake up in the middle of the night as a modern person, your prolactin levels fall immediately right and you can even begin to feel a little restless

and anxious at that point because of that. But if you give yourself enough darkness, what happens is the prolactin levels remain at sleep levels even though you're aware and awake. There is a very famous study done by a man named Thomas Whare at the National Institutes of Health in the nine Thomas where was a guy who discuss bird seasonal effective disorder. Basically right, he was the world's leading expert on you know, bio rhythms and circadian rhythms. He

came up with this question. He said, did human beings always sleep the way they do now? Right, we've consolidated our sleep nights, like our work days, into convenient eight hour blocks, but then human beings really do this. So he decided to take people off the street, just ordinary people, and take them off of all forms of artificial illumination

for one month to see what would happen. For like the first three weeks, what happened was that they slept a little longer than usual, repaying what we're called the national sleep debt, right, And then at week three, every single subject in the study began waking up after four hours of sleep to two hours of calm stillness, and then going back to bed for another four hours at the end of the study. And these were results that if you know anything at all about scientific studies, you know,

are unprecedented. You don't get results like this, you know, with every study. I mean, this is ironclad. So clearly there was this older pattern at work. So we're asked them to self report and they all said the same thing. We feel like we've never been awake before in our

tire lives. Finally we feel like we're awake, and so we're decided that what people were doing beginning around a couple of thousand years ago is various forms of artificial illumination began to creep in and extend our days into the night. Is it? Religious practices are an attempt to recover what was originally effortless and simply a human birthright. It's like one time called it, you know, like a worldwide nightly meditation retreat for every Homo sapiens on earth. Right,

So that's what's at play. So you can work it from the darkness side. Okay, you can go to bed earlier, give yourself more time. If you do that, you will not experience insomnia. You won't experience the hour of the wall. If you give yourself a few weeks on that schedule, when you wake up in the middle of the night, you'll feel like a piece that you can't even you know, imagine.

It will be better than anything you get from mindfulness, right, because you know you're working it from the bottom up, not from the top down through your head trying to do backflips to you know, maintain proper awareness. Right. This is something that just wells up from within you as

a natural state. So that's one thing to do. Or you can work it from the other end, which is what works for most people, and that is in fact, something like saying the rosary right, or mindfulness or some practice that gives you that sense of peace and calm. I call it the cultivated dark right, not the literal dark, but the cultivated dark us right, where you can let go of the need to know everything and to have

your life perfectly ordered. Right. You let go temporarily of your ambitions, your anxieties, and your worries and inner a state of deep relaxation. The rosary is great for that because it's tactile. You have something to hold on too, and once you start it, you know you don't even have to think, right, You just go from one prayer to another, one be to the next, until you complete the circle. And quite naturally, what happens is your biochemistry changes.

You enter into a state of well the way it's described in the song of Songs. Right, I sleep, but my heart is awake, a deep state of relaxation and a heightened state of awareness, place of great fertility and peace and creativity. I would be remiss and talking with you if we didn't talk about one of your life's

great works, which is haiku. And the way I came across you, the way I found you was my friend Chris and I, who's the producer of this show, our engineer of this show, started this practice where we would write a hiku together. Each day. One of us would start with five syllables texted to the other guy. The next guy would fill in the seven and then the guy who started it would finish it. And so we

started doing that and I really was enjoying it. And so then I was looking at books on haiku and I saw your book, which is called Seeds from a Birch Tree, Writing Haiku in the Spiritual Journey, and I was like, that is the book for me, and I grabbed it and I just love this book. There's so much in it. And let's start with how to write haiku, the basics. We can cover it in two minutes. What's the three simple rules of haiku? Yeah, so it's very simple.

And first of all, you and your friend Chris, you said, yeah, yeah, yeah, you and Chris figured it out right. Haiku is a collaborative art form something we do in groups together. Right. In fact, that it evolved out of a collaborative poem

where people took turns composing versus in a chain. Right, So you basically did that one of you would create the five syllable opening for the haiku, and the next person would come along and complete the poem by adding a second line of set than syllables and a third line of five. Right. That's the first tradition of hiku, which is the form five seven five for a total of seventeen syllables. The second is the inclusion of a season word or a seasonal reference. Right. This is where

haiku meets animism. Right. Hiku poets don't see human life as the point of everything. Right. Hiker poets experience their lives in the context of nature. That their life is about relating to nature and relating to one another true nature. So hiku poets share this common language, which are these words that indicate the season, like dandelion for spring, right, or spring rain autumn moon right, crickets for autumn morning, glories for early fall, and so forth and so on.

So you'll take one of these words as the topic for hiku, and oftentimes you have to work from a list. You can just go outside and find some sign of the season and choose that as a topic for your haiku. So there's the five seven five syllable form, there is the season word. And finally, the most elusive part of a haiku is what I call the turn of thought. So what the poet has to do is to add a turn of thought to the seventeen syllables with the

season word. That results in more than seventeen syllables of meaning. Right, the essence of haiku is compression. The fact that there's this very very small poem with sometimes a very big meaning. Right. That meaning is collaborative. Right. You can't save everything in haiku, so you have to suggest your meaning. You have to suggest what you want to say and trust the reader right to unpack the poem using their own experience, their

own imaginations. And so every writer of haiku is also a reader of haiku, and every serious reader of haiku also writes them what I love about haiku, And you know that's what I do for a living. Now. By the way, the anniversary edition of Sees from Virtry will be coming out from Monk Fish Books next spring. So I'm I'm working on the final edits for that this week, but yeah, I think I'm probably as far as I know, the only full time teacher of haiku outside of Japan.

Is how I make my money. I write a column for Tricycle magazine Tricycle to boost review. I write a quarterly print column and a monthly column and quote Haiku Challenge on tricycle dot org forward slash Haiku where I assigned a season word each month and hundreds, sometimes thousands of people will submit their haiku. It's a blind process.

I don't know who's written them. I just look at the poems and I choose one winner and two honorable mentions, and then you know, write a commentary on the winning poem. It's also a Hiku tip every month. In addition to that, I have a group on Facebook called UH Weekly Hiku Challenge with with Clark Strand. In that group, we do the same thing every week. Every Monday, I signed a new season word and UH posts the comments on the

poems from the week before. And it's a wonderful thing because you know, haiku is really a group art, so people learn together, they inspire one another. Last a week, we wrote on jasmine right as a summer season where the flower got very sexy poarms on jasmine. You know, if you ever smell the flower, you can see why. You know, it's some traditions as a symbol of purity, but if you spend much time with that flower, it's

really quite intoxicating. But but people inspired one another, and you know, one person wrote a poem which they post in the comments on you know, in our little Facebook group, but you know, relating it to time, right, the experience of being overwhelmed by this very powerful scent can dislocate you as space and time and make you sort of confused about even where you are. It's so over powering.

So four or five other poets thought, I want to try that, right, so they came up with their own versions of it, and so there's this wonderful sort of mutual inspiration society that developed in a hiku community like that. So, yeah, that's what I really love. But again it goes back to the very beginning for me. You know, my first book sees from Birstry, you know, opens with talking about writing haiku in nature and about the fact that you know,

nothing can be thrown away, right, everything belongs. That's really the lesson of haiku, and the four seasons are just like the Rosary, they go into circle. We're talking about a circular experience of time and an inclusive relationship to the natural world in which we belong. Right, We're not in charge of it, we belong to it. There's a few other ideas from that book that I would love to hit that I think are really important, and one of them is you call it the paradox of haiku.

You say, if we cultivate a strong desire to write a haiku, haiku will never come. In Japanese, this quality of mind at once fully engaged and detached with concern with the result is called furu. Do I have that correct? Yeah? Yeah, I love that idea that there's actually a word for that very important concept that comes up on this show

very often, which is all through Taoism. Right, you know, do your work and step back, right, you know, as the popular modern fitness teacher Tony Horton would say, do your best and forget the rest. Right. But it's that idea of if we're two wrapped up in the result, good things don't come out of it. And I love the idea that there's a word for this idea. I think you said it means sort of wind flow. Yeah, I was gonna say. You know, it's variously translated as elegance, refinement,

wind flow. I think flow for me is the best word. But you know, the best word to describe what happens in haiku is big surprise. Haiku the word itself because it's composed of two Chinese characters, you know, which are imported into the Japanese language, high and coup. Coup means verse.

High means playful, playful verse. Right, And so I often say to people when they first join our group and they're working really hard to craft their eight poems that they wanted to submit for the week, to throw into the mix with all the others, right, I often say to them, you know, if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Right. So the idea is that you hiker is so short, you can write a lot of them, right, So you don't really get too attached to the result

of a particular poem. That doesn't mean that our poets, some of whom have been you know, writing haiku, you know, every week like this for years, don't really put a lot of thought and effort into their poems, sometimes working on a single poem for an entire day to get

it just right right. That does happen, but it does mean that the way you get it right is by relaxing and not you know, sort of putting the judgmental mind the down hole and just playing with the words and the feelings right until they come out in the

right form. Every hiku is basically a word puzzle in search of a seventeen syllable solution, right, And so it's just like world, you know, it's you know, it's a very very playful art form, but profound meanings can come through when you when you relax like that and enter into that sort of childlike sort of place of openness and you're working with a very small, very lighthearted sort

of form, surprising things come through. Yeah, Like I mean, we get poems that you know, just make you weep they're so beautiful or so sad, right, and you know, a mirrored that a mere seventeen syllables can achieve that. You know, I read entire novels that don't make me feel that way. Sometimes I see a hiku that will touch me in a very deep place there was one. I don't know if you'll be able to remember it. I listened to a talk of years at Yupaia and I think it was a recent one. And you read

a haiku about a child on a swing? Are you able to recall that one? Because talk about a seventeen syllable like wow. Yes. That poem was by Vicky Wilson, a participant in our Yupaia retreat this year, Vicky Wilson, and it goes like this. The boy on the swing surrounded by war rubble does not swing at all. The boy on the swing surrounded by war rubble does not swing at all. This is a reference, I believe to a war in Ukraine. This is what I wrote about

that poem at the retreat. We created a kind of an anthology to distribute to the members afterwards, recording the most memorable poems are written by I think the thousand plus participants. At that time, I said, this is the best of the anti war haiku I have seen in

the past two weeks, and I have read hundreds. The last line, which is heartbreaking, achieves a surplus of emotion and meaning that shouldn't be possible in a mere seventeen syllables, how the poet has chosen a symbol of transcendent childhood joy and given it a devastating twist. I've read a lot of empty swing haiku and haiku about swings that were still. This was the only one with a child in it, and it is all the more sorrowful because of that. And of course the assigned season word was

swing for spring, the spring season word. That's an example of what you can pack into seventeen syllables. A couple other quick ideas around haiku that I wanted to hit on. You say that the way of haiku is to come unwrapped and thereby noticing what lies outside this self. And you know, I've often said my spiritual journey for me has all along felt like exactly that idea, Like how do I peel back the self so that I can connect with the world more? And I love that idea

of haiku becoming a way of unwrapping ourselves. Yeah. Well, you know, the hiku tradition, you know, is very broad and multifaceted, and so there are very self expressive hiku, their poets I think, who focus on, you know, expressing themselves rather than quote unwrapping themselves, as it were. And yet the basic tradition and the structure of hiku itself favors that kind of unwrapping. What happens is as you begin to interact with your subjects, right, which are typically

things related to the season. Sometimes they can be human activities for instance, like plowing or you know, seed sewing or something like that, but typically they follow the pattern of the four seasons moving through time, and so as you begin to address your subjects can contemplate them, there's a sort of a natural pull, like almost a gravitational pull, that draws you out of your own box right into

the wider world. I'm very struck by the fact that of the six different traditional categories for season words, the season proper like you know, the names of the months and things like that, that's one. Another one is the sky and elements, the weather, what's happening in the heavens, right. The other's the like the landscape. Then their plants and their animals. That's five. The sixth is humanity, and so

only one of the six categories is humanity. And even then, even when human affairs are season words like you know, seasonal foods and things like that are celebrations or holidays. The focus is not exclusively on humanity, but the way

that human beings exist within the cycles of nature. And so even when you're writing on a subject like I don't know, the fourth of July, which is from the subcategory observances or holidays within you know, humanity, Even when you're writing on something like that, it's not enough just to express, uh, you know, sort of the human side of that. We assigned that season word this year, and

but right after roe versus Wade was overturned. And there are a lot of women, a lot of feminists and by Haiku group, and they tell you what, most of the poems were pretty angry, right, So, so they used it to express their feelings. But in every case those poems were all grounded right in a particular moment in time, in a circular pattern of the seasons, and each poet, even when they were expressing themselves, felt drawn out of their own sort of narrow box into the broader world.

And I think the most important thing is that because haiku is so dependent upon the reader, right, because the reader has to supply so much and the poet can only suggest a little, there's a natural tendency in hiku to sort of have to step beyond ourselves in writing them. Right, You're you're writing this very short poem for another person that you hope will be able to grasp or into

it your intent. You're in relationship to your reader in a much more intimate way than you are in writing a longer poem, right, I mean Western style, you know, free verse poets write longer poems, typically work in isolation, they don't work in groups. They don't necessarily have readers for their poems until they publish them. Usually they don't.

Haiku poet has on a regular basis weeklier monthly readers for their poems that they are writing for, and who in turn right poems which they share with the writer. And so there's this constant going back and forth. And so you know, we're drawn out of our comfort zone and as it were, by these seasonal topics, but also by the other people, the other poets with whom we write into whom we relate in a very intimate way.

In that respect, it really does help to release those strictures that bind us, I think, find the self to discomfort and pain, suffering, isolation, loneliness. Yeah, yeah, I think those Haiku groups that you're describing could be a wonderful way to come out of isolation. They're like twelve step groups in a certain way, because you're going around and sharing and and you know, the main point is I mean, everybody's there to get sober from one thing or another.

But really that, you know, what makes it work is just simply breaking isolation. That's the main thing. Once you break the isolation, I know that that you have undergone your own journey with these things. But there was a man named Ernest Kurtz who wrote a famous book on the history of a A. And at the end of this very long, you know, very academic history of alcoholics anonymous, he finally sums it up, and he says, what makes it work? He asked the question, what really makes it work?

What's at the bottom of a and why has it inspired so many other fellowships for so many other behaviors or substances that people become addicted to. Finally concluded that secretive a A was one alcoholic talking to another. That was that at bottom, right, once you get two people getting together, breaking their isolation and the overcoming feelings of shame or disempowerment and sharing what's in their hearts. That's the basis for it. You know, the twelve steps naturally

flow out of those early relationships. I think the hiku is much the same way. You share your hearts with other people and learn to express yourself in a way that feels life affirming and you know life in the context of the natural world, you begin to develop a more wholesome relationship to yourself, you know, to other people into the world. Well, I think that is a beautiful

place to wrap up. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation because there's a few more things that I really wanted to hit on haiku that we just didn't get to, among them being what is a hiku walk? What's a good way to read haiku to understand it? So we're

going to continue that listeners. If you'd like access to the post show conversation, ad free episodes, and all kinds of other great things as well as the joy of supporting a show that you love, go to one you feed dot net, slash join and we would be happy to have you as part of our membership community. Clark, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a great conversation and you've just explored so many things over the years that I've really enjoyed this. Well. Thanks Eric.

I don't know that I've ever done a podcast where we've took in quite so much of my career. We really started at the beginning and came up to where things are now. We have covered a lot of ground, none of it probably as deeply as either of us would like, but that's the nature of the medium. So oh, it's it's good to see it all on one page. All right, Thank you Clark, Thank you so much. Eric's

a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one You Feed community. Go to when you Feed dot net slash join The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.