Haiku does not aim at beauty --

In his Preface to "Haiku", Volume 1, by R.H. Blyth, he says this:

Haiku does not aim at beauty. Like the music of Bach, it aims at significance, and some special kind of beauty is found hovering near. The real nature of each thing, and more so, of all things, is a poetical one.... Hauku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew; it shows us that we are poets in so far as we live at all.

If one is familiar with the book Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought by L. Ron Hubbard that paragraph above sounds very familiar:

Any information is valuable to the degree that you can use it. In other words, any information is valuable to the degree that you can make it yours. Scientology, of all the sciences, does not teach you -- it only reminds you, for the information was yours in the first place. It is not only the science of life, but it is an account of what you were doing before you forgot what you were doing.

Which really resonates with me, and makes me want to know more of what I have forgotten!

That awareness of being aware ("so far as we live at all", as Blyth puts it) is well expressed in this haiku by Buson:

Plum-blossoms here and there,
It is good to go north,
Good to go south.

Blyth explains that one to mean:

There is here a feeling of the newness of spring, and yet of the luxury, the beauty, the universality of the season: in truth, anywhere will do in these days of renewed life and beauty.

That renewed life and beauty is evident here on the ranch -- and so I wrote a haiku today, the first in many years for me:

The tiny spiders huddle.
Sensing my presense
down they drop, silken inches.