One of the world's foremost writing teachers invites readers on a joyful journey into the reading and origins of haiku
A haiku is three simple lines. But it is also, as Allen Ginsberg put it, three lines that "make the mind leap." A good one, he said, lets the mind experience "a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God." As many spiritual practices seek to do, the haiku's spare yet acute noticing of the immediate and often ordinary grounds the reader in the pure awareness of now.
Natalie Goldberg is a delightfully companionable tour guide into this world. She highlights the history of the form, dating back to the seventeenth century; shows why masters such as Basho and Issa are so revered; discovers Chiyo-ni, an important woman haiku master; and provides insight into writing and reading haiku. A fellow seeker who travels to Japan to explore the birthplace of haiku, Goldberg revels in everything she encounters, including food and family, painting and fashion, frogs and ponds. She also experiences and allows readers to share in the spontaneous and profound moments of enlightenment and awakening that haiku promises. Natalie Goldberg is the author of fifteen books, including the classic bestseller Writing Down the Bones, which has changed the way writing is taught in the United States; the beloved memoir Long Quiet Highway; the novel Banana Rose; Living Color, about her painting; and her legacy book, The True Secret of Writing. She has taught writing as a practice for the past forty-five years nationally and internationally. She lives in northern New Mexico.
www.nataliegoldberg.com "This jewel of a book represents a dream meeting between subject and author. Natalie Goldberg's trademark prose - wonderfully clear, simple, and deep - takes us into her profound understanding of haiku and makes this story of her search for haiku's origins among beautiful gardens, mountains, modern cities, and ancient temples compelling and gripping. It's also the ideal meeting of verse and prose: The haiku are embedded in a limpid narrative, free-flowing and irresistible as a mountain stream. When they appear now and then as beautiful stepping-stones in a journey of discovery, they come alive in ways that still the mind, expand time, and open the heart. A classic narrative of discovery and homage - and a simple, humble book to fall in love with."
- Henry Shukman, author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart
"So quiet, lovely, and peaceful. . . . [Three Simple Lines] put my soul at rest and allowed me to breathe deeply."
- John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War
"Like haiku itself, Natalie Goldberg's Three Simple Lines is spare, keenly observed, and blessedly light on its feet. This wise and spirited travelogue acquaints us with some of the form's legendary practitioners - and reminds us just how much of life's magic can be packed into a few inspired words."
- Hampton Sides, New York Times–bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and On Desperate Ground
"Natalie Goldberg's writing always offers a respite from the world, which it achieves by diving right into the madness of the moment. Like the haiku she reads, writes, and treasures, Three Simple Lines is a refuge in a chaotic world. Through her travels in Japan to seek the origins of haiku, she reveals the honest struggle of being a writer and, just beneath that, the honest struggle of being human."
- Jenn Shapland, author of the National Book Award finalist My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
"Natalie Goldberg takes haiku, a subject few of us in Western culture richly understand, and unearths the themes of human life we all yearn for and recognize: connection, loss, wandering, arrival. She shows us how to pay great attention to what really matters. This book is the salve our chaotic world needs right now."
- Bill Addison, food critic, Los Angeles Times
