After writing about beautiful children's books (Hi, Koo! and My First Book of Haiku Poems), I wanted to write something today about my haiku game and how it is evolving. I started the game after doing a how-to-create-educational-games workshop, with the idea of creating a game for haiku beginners, helping them to learn about the basic features of haiku poetry. I came up with a card-deck-based game first, and then morphed that into a bingo-based game that we can play in a Zoom workshop I am doing next month. I am feeling really happy about all that! The basic idea is to explore the features of haiku poetry with examples, and then to look at haiku poetry together to see what features we can find in those poems. I'll report back next month how that goes; all the materials are here: Zoom-based Know Your Haiku.

But now I am trying to think about how to morph the game again to make it educational for me. I've gotten pretty good at recognizing the features of haiku, but there is so much more I want to learn. My interest in haiku is not so much in the poetic form (although don't get me wrong: I do love the forms of poetry; teaching Greek and Latin meters to my students is one of my absolute favorite things about teaching tGreek and Latin) ... what really interests me about haiku is the way it resonates with Zen thought and practice. I have never studied an art form before that was so essentially connected with an art of living, if you see what I mean. So as I was thinking about the "matching" dynamic of the game, I realized that I could maybe morph the game to turn it into a meditative exploration of Zen and haiku together.

And... I think it is going to work! Instead of having colored index cards with features (as in the game I designed for haiku beginners), I am writing quotations on colored index cards from books about haiku and books about Zen, quotations that make me think. Then, just like in the Know-Your-Haiku game, I am writing out haiku poems on white index cards. On the back of each index card, I have information about the source (bibliography, context if needed; romanization of the Japanese haiku if available, etc.) ... but on the unlined face of the card, just the quote and just the poem. Pure quote, pure poem.

There's nothing special about the card colors; it's just that having the white and colored cards (any color but white) makes it easy to separate the different kinds of cards after a session of the game is over.

So, to "play the game," I shuffle the colored quote cards and put them in a stack, and then I shuffle the white poem cards and put them in a stack. Then I draw two poem cards and two quote cards and put them side by side. I read the quotes out loud and I read the poem cards out loud. Then I think about whether there is a strong resonance between a pairing of one of the quote cards with one of the poem cards. If there is a resonance, I read those two cards out loud again and set them aside and draw two more cards to replace them.

If there is not a pairing, I put one quote card OR one poem card back at the bottom of the deck and draw another card to replace the card I put back.

And so on, repeatedly, until I have spent whatever time I want to spend on the game. There's no winning or losing, although it is fun to watch the stack of paired cards piling up.

And here's that view again: my big grey cat is guarding the index card box while I play.

So, I can tell already that this is going to be very useful for me as a form of study. I have good retention when I read, and normally I don't even take notes when I read. Sometimes I do take notes, but then I rarely re-use the notes; they are just there as a potential reference if I want to revisit the book later. That system works just fine for me as a reader... but with these books of haiku poetry and with these books about Zen, I want something deeper.

I don't want to memorize the quotes or the poems; that's not the goal. Although I have to admit that is probably why I gravitated to this card-based approach; for all the languages I've studied in my life, I've made thousands upon thousands of flashcards. I like studying with cards.

But the goal here is not memorizing.

The goal is ... thinking ... reflecting ... opening my heart and mind to something different.

All the steps in this process are helping me to do that: making the cards, reading the cards, matching the cards. And then matching them again in different ways next time. And again. And again.

Of course, I don't want to be like the monks who were so obsessed with their Buddhist books that their teacher finally burned the books... because instead of looking at the moon, they were looking at the finger pointing at the moon. 

This is not my whole practice; just part of it, and I hope that by deepening my reading and study practice this way, I can deepen my meditation as well. And maybe even write some haiku of my own, although that's less of a goal. It's more about deepening my meditation if possible. 

I'll report back later on how this practice stays with me and how I stay with it. I am... optimistic! And I've got heaps of index cards on hand and ready to write. Office supplies for enlightenment! Yay!