The first Monday of August arrives! The Dog days of summer settle in. Perhaps some of you head out on holiday this month. Maybe some of you want to. Whatever your circumstances, August is a time in which many travel. Frank Tassone here, your host for today’s Haibun Monday, where we blend prose and haiku to fashion the poet Basho’s favorite form. Today, let’s talk about journeying!

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, journeying is the present participle of the verb to journey, meaning to travel somewhere. Two historic journeys took place on this date. Christopher Columbus’ fateful voyage across the Atlantic began in 1492. & in 1958, the USS Nautilus became the first submarine to journey beneath the North Pole.

But journeying is not restricted to physical travel. Have we not all experienced metaphysical journeying in our own lives? Are we truly the same person we were twenty years ago, or ten? Psychological/spiritual journeying carries significance all its own.

Some poets have a thing or two about journeying:

pilgrimage

the unknown pathways

within me

Lori Kiefer

London, UK

lingering

in the landscape

of Namatjira and Heysen

Carol Reynolds

Australia

retirement –

all the places yet to see

… online

Natalia Kuznetsova

Russia

courtesy of Haiku Dialogue, October 12, 2022

The moon and sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. From the earliest times there have always been some who perished along the road. Still I have always been drawn by wind-blown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering. Coming home from a year’s walking tour of the coast last autumn, I swept the cobwebs from my hut on the banks of the Sumida just in time for New Year, but by the time spring mists began to rise from the fields, I longed to cross the Shirakawa Barrier into the Northern Interior. Drawn by the wanderer-spirit Dôsojin, I couldn’t concentrate on things. Mending my cotton pants, sewing a new strap on my bamboo hat, I daydreamed. Rubbing moxa into my legs to strengthen them, I dreamed a bright moon rising over Matsushima. So I placed my house in another’s hands and moved to my patron Mr. Sampû’s summer house in preparation for my journey. And I left a verse by my door:

Even this grass hut

may be transformed

into a doll’s house.

Translated by Sam Hamill

(Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings, a.k.a. The Essential Bashô, 1998)

courtesy of Bureau of Public Secrets

Today, let us engage in some journeying of our own–through haibun! Write your own that references journeying as you understand it.

New to haibun? The form consists of one to a few paragraphs of prose—usually written in the present tense—that evoke an experience and are often non-fictional/autobiographical. They may be preceded or followed by one or more haiku—nature-based, using a seasonal image—that complement without directly repeating what the prose stated.

New to dVerse? Here is what you do:

• Write a haibun that alludes to journeying
• Post it on your personal site/blog.
• Include a link back to dVerse in your post.
• Copy your link onto the Mr. Linky.
• Remember to click the small checkbox about data protection.
• Read and comment on some of your fellow poets’ work.
• Like and leave a comment below if you choose to do so.
• Have fun!