The Prairie Zen School of Haiku
People often imagine Zen arriving from somewhere else. A mountain monastery. A bamboo grove. A stone garden where every pebble has been raked into perfect order. We inherit those images so completely that we forget the practice itself has never belonged to a landscape. It belongs to attention.
For more than thirty years I have been writing from a different landscape.
Not because I set out to invent anything new, but because I never had another place to stand.
My teachers have been red-winged blackbirds balancing on roadside cattails. Wind passing through abandoned farm fields. Hall Creek after spring rain. Snow drifting across forgotten county roads. Oaks that have watched generations of people arrive believing they were important and leave proving otherwise.
The prairie has always been enough.
Long before I ever thought of using the words Prairie Zen, the work had already begun. My earliest poems searched for moments that escaped notice. Later, my haiku abandoned explanation almost entirely. Instead of telling readers what to think, I learned to trust what remained after language became quiet.
A dead leaf blowing into my mouth while trying to speak the truth.
An old dog faithfully guarding nothing.
A bare tree still capable of holding the sky.
These are not symbols to decode. They are complete experiences. The prairie has no interest in becoming metaphor simply because a writer arrived carrying one.
That understanding did not come from philosophy alone. It came from years of walking. Through Rockford parks and railroad margins. Along river trails. Through restored prairie and oak savanna. Through Severson Dells, where glaciers, dolomite, Hall Creek, birds, fungi, prairie grass and deep geological time quietly refuse to separate themselves into subjects. They exist together because the world exists together.
The prairie teaches scale.
Stand in tall grass and you discover you are neither insignificant nor central. You are simply present.
That may be the most difficult lesson modern life offers.
Our culture rewards performance. The prairie rewards observation. Our devices demand reaction. The prairie asks only that you notice. Every season strips away another unnecessary layer until attention itself becomes enough.
I have watched this happen in my own work. Books like Small Songs for Weary Travelers and Vanished Roads were never attempts to imitate Japanese aesthetics. They were attempts to discover what contemplation sounds like when spoken with a Midwestern accent. They belong to gravel roads instead of temple paths, grain elevators instead of pagodas, meadowlarks instead of cranes.
That does not make them less Zen.
It makes them honestly rooted.
Prairie Zen is not a school. It has no robes, no membership, no doctrine waiting to be defended. It is simply the realization that awakening is no less available beside a rusted fencepost than beneath a cherry tree.
The prairie does not ask us to become someone else before it reveals itself.
It only asks us to look.
For decades, that has been the work.
Everything else has merely been writing it down.
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