We played "quotations" haiku in my meditation group today, and it was so fun to see people completely engaged with the haiku (as also last week).  The quotation deck I used consisted of quotes from Gil Fronsdal's lovely book of essays, The Issue at Hand (free online thanks to the generosity of the author). The book is about insight meditation, so not a haiku-specific book at all, but people still found some really nice connections between the haiku and the quotations. The reason I did quotations from that book was because we are about to start on a new Fronsdal book so, totally aside from the haiku connections, it was a nice way to review Fronsdal's words of wisdom for us as meditators. 

The way we played was that I gave each person a small stack of haiku cards (I continue to be amazed at the variety of haiku I can use from the CC-licensed Living Haiku Anthology) along with a small stack of quote cards (the quote cards were on colored index cards, so it will be easy for me to separate out the decks later). People studied their haiku (they got sooooo into the haiku, which was great to see), and as they found a quote-haiku connection, they would read the quote out loud to the group along with the haiku, and sometimes people had haiku from their own stacks that also connected to the quote. It's a game of exploration — no winners, no losers — just using our collective reflections to find our way through the quotations and poetry, taking what we learn with us.

I'll now put the Fronsdal quote cards in my "Big Box of Buddha Quotes" so that I can continue to use them in conjunction with my own meditation practice (it's a box of quote cards where I just pick one out each day to be my reflection theme for that day). In terms of game-play, the quote cards really work best for solitaire I think; that's how I started making the quote cards originally, for my own solitaire play. But after today, I am inspired to make some Buddhist phrase cards — instead of long-ish quotes, just a phrase or a short aphorism. That's what I found myself doing during the game today, paraphrasing each Fronsdal quotation card that people connected with as just a phrase or very short sentence, capturing the essence of what Fronsdal said. With some very very short phrase/quote cards I think I could play this version of the "Know-Your-Haiku" game with any audience; I'll have some people to play with on my trip to Berkeley next week, so I will report back about how that goes!

Here is a photo of people immersed in their haiku and quote cards