Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

With roots in Zen, haiku invites us into momentary encounters with the mysterious essence of reality.

This poetic form has always been entwined with the seasons,

delivering an unfiltered meeting between self and earth

through the use of what is known in Japan as Kigo, or seasonal words.

In this week's essay, Australian writer and Zen Roshi, Susan Murphy,

asks what becomes of haiku when the recognizable seasonal moments they rely on, begin to falter?

How can haiku continue to help us bridge inner and outer worlds? When the language they use no longer reflects our ecological realities?

How will it bear witness to the ferocity of change, reshaping the seasons?

Woveen with poetry from Basho, Bousson, Issa, and fellow Volume 6 contributor Ron C. Moss.

This story contemplates whether haiku may, in fact, be a vessel for holding the paradox of the seasons in this moment,

allowing us to move ceaselessly with change, and to both mourn and love a rapidly evolving earth.

The haiku form, long after having come to the west from Japan,

continues to reflect and refract its zen-inflicted origins.

Now, its radically open form of responding to the world,

must encounter the ravages of planetary climate crisis. How will it meet this inhospitable reality?

That original Japanese poetic impulse moves freely through the world with a natural sense of relaxed emptiness. Inhabiting impermanence without opinion or resistance, the poet disappearing into what is being observed.

Haiku deliver a sentient world undivided from the experience of it,

the sense of self, lying low. If an eye should break the surface, it's in wryly self-aware

and low-key form, firmly ordinary and decidedly unself-important.

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