A unique American Haiku book, filled with "firsts": 150 refined and aware "Moments of Now", many observed from a private aircraft. These produced as captured "High-Ku" patterns from among the clouds. A Stanford University professor once declared,: "Joy has eagle eyes that distinguish the important from the insignificant."

Written in travel- form by a Haijen, they offer lyrical- digital word pictures of Canada, Mexico, America, plus paths in beloved Ireland. Professor Makoto Ueda wrote: "Basho's journals always make us want to visit the places he visited. This book seems to do the same."

As a "first", this book offers helpful and necessary suggestions- how to become not only a Haiku WRITER, but also a Haiku READER, and if capable, how to self-train to USE Haiku as a HEALER. It has been proven by many this cameo of BALANCE can become a finely-honed tool for COPING.

The writer, now retired, believed to be the FIRST pioneer to use Haiku as a HEALER WITH PATIENTS, commenced this approach over three decades ago within a Mental Health Setting. This required extreme patience with patient- and staff in a Psychiatric setting of a California Hospital.

Since then, Haiku used as a keen instrument has been tested by qualified persons with important results. This book offers samples of Haiku that have healed.

Patient- Haiku is never judged for technique, nor its lack of full rules: rather, ALL Haiku are accepted as previously hidden doorways into a garden of balance. Early in the author's research, healing Haiku was daringly introduced to San Quentin inmates. Surprising acceptance and release of emotions were evident in this toughest of scenes.

The author, along with other therapists, has used Haiku and varied Poetry Therapy tools as white paper islands of balance and peace, tested in other places of confinement- hospices, hospitals, Half-Way Houses for drug abuse, with troubled teens in high schools, with the blind, with "divorced children", divorced adults, in ministries, and most tenderly used with new mothers of babes lost at birth.


178 pages; soft cover; b/w & color photography; poetry-haiku; catalogue #06-0246; ISBN 1-4120-8492-x