Pine and Bamboo

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. In doing so, you must leave your preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one – when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there.*

-Basho





*As retreived from http://www.haiku.insouthsea.co.uk/teachbasho_self2.htm on September 24, 2007