How Japan's Oldest Poems Still Inspire Beauty Today | Summer Poem's of Wellness

[00:00:00]For more than a thousand years, Japanese poets did something we've almost forgotten how to do.

[00:00:05]They sat still in the heat of summer and listened. And in just a few lines written centuries before air conditioning, [music] before notifications, before the endless scroll, they captured truths about living well that we're still struggling to relearn today. In the next few minutes, you'll discover how three classical Japanese poems turned the cicada's cry, a short summer night, and the first cool rain into timeless wisdom. About presence, impermanence, simple joy, and what it really means to live fully in the time we're given. Welcome to Shizen Style. I'm Josh, and here we explore Japanese aesthetics, photography, and the art of living in flow with nature.

[00:00:53]I'll go deep on these and similar topics in my free newsletter, Shizen Style Weekly. By the end of this video, you'll have a handful of practical life lessons you can use today. Each drawn from the way these poets paid attention to the natural world. In Japan, summer, natsu, isn't just a season of heat. It's a season of intensity and impermanence [music] held in the same hand. Now, you see a lot of news about how the [music] oppressive heat in Tokyo is ruining people's lives, and the cicadas roar for a few short weeks and then fall silent.

[00:01:30]The rains gather and it rush to the sea.

[00:01:33]The nights are so brief they seem to end before they've begun.

[00:01:37]The Japanese have a word for the bittersweet awareness that nothing lasts, mono no aware.

[00:01:44]And nowhere is it felt more sharply than in summer, when everything is most alive precisely because it's about to pass.

[00:01:53]So, let's sit with a few poems from [music] haiku masters like Basho to court poets writing more than a thousand years ago.

[00:02:02]Each one is a doorway. Let's walk through it.

[00:02:06]Poem one, Empress Jitō, the art of [music] noticing.

[00:02:16]>> [music] >> Spring has passed and summer seems to have come.

[00:02:25]For they say the white robes are spread to dry on heavenly Mount Kagu.

[00:02:31]This is one of the oldest poems we'll look at today, written by Empress Jitō, who reigned in the late 600s.

[00:02:39]A version appears in Japan's very first poetry collection, the Man'yōshū, and the form you just heard was later chosen to open the famous 100 Poets Anthology. [music] Notice what she doesn't say. She doesn't say summer is here.

[00:02:57]She says summer seems to have come, kinekashi, a quiet guess.

[00:03:04]And how does she know?

[00:03:06]Not from a calendar, from a detail.

[00:03:09]Pale summer robes laid out to air against the green of a distant mountain.

[00:03:14]The whole turning of the year caught in a single [music] observed image. The life lesson, we have lost the art of noticing.

[00:03:23]>> [music] >> We're told what season it is by an app or a morning news person.

[00:03:29]What to feel by a feed.

[00:03:31]But Empress Jitō marks the change of an entire season through one small real thing she saw with her own eyes.

[00:03:38]>> [music] >> This is presence as a practice, letting the world tell you what time it is.

[00:03:44]So, how do you apply this today?

[00:03:47]This week, find your own version of the white robes on the mountain. One small sign that the season is turning where you live.

[00:03:55]The first cicada, the smell of cut grass, the light arriving earlier.

[00:04:01]Don't photograph it yet, just register it. Name it to yourself and let it land.

[00:04:07]In Japan, there's a long tradition of living by shun, eating, moving, and resting in step with what each season offers.

[00:04:17]This is the foundation of it. You can't live in rhythm with nature until you first learn to notice nature.

[00:04:25]Chito is showing us where wellness actually begins, not with a tracker or a smart watch, but with mere attention.

[00:04:36]Poem two, Basho. What remains of our striving?

[00:04:42]Natsu kusaya tsuwamono-domo ga yume no ato Summer grasses, all that remains of the warriors' dreams.

[00:04:54]Matsuo Basho wrote this in 1689, standing on an old battlefield at Hiraizumi, in the far north of Japan.

[00:05:04]500 years earlier, a clan of legendary warriors had risen, dreamed of glory, and been destroyed there.

[00:05:13]Basho came to see the ruins and found nothing but a field of summer grass waving in the heat.

[00:05:20]He said to have wept.

[00:05:22]Think about that contrast. All that ambition, all that bloodshed, all those plans for power and legacy, and what's left is grass. Not a monument, just grass. [music] So, the lesson here is this is mono no aware at its most powerful. The ache of knowing that even our grandest striving fades.

[00:05:47]But Basho isn't telling us our dreams are worthless. He's asking us to hold them a little more lightly.

[00:05:54]The grass [music] isn't mocking the warriors. It's quietly outliving them.

[00:05:58]Green, ordinary, and alive.

[00:06:04]So, let's think about how we can apply this.

[00:06:06]>> [music] >> Here's a practice I call grass field perspective.

[00:06:10]The next time you're consumed by a goal, the promotion, the launch, [music] the thing you're sure you need. Zoom out the way Basho did. Picture this same place 500 years from now.

[00:06:24]The pressure loosens.

[00:06:26]Not into despair, but into clarity.

[00:06:30]Because here's the longevity insight hidden in this haiku.

[00:06:34]A long life isn't measured by how much you conquered. [music] It's measured by how present you were while the grass was still green.

[00:06:43]Strive, but don't let the striving cost you the [music] summer you're actually living in.

[00:06:49]Poem three, Basho.

[00:06:52]Stillness inside the noise.

[00:06:56]Shizukesa ya iwa ni shimi-iru semi no koe.

[00:07:01]>> [music] >> Such stillness, the cicada's cry is sink into the rocks.

[00:07:07]>> [music] >> Same journey, same summer.

[00:07:11]Basho climbs more than a thousand stone steps to a mountain temple called Rishakuji. It's hot.

[00:07:18]The cicadas are deafening. Anyone who's spent a Japanese summer knows that sound. A wall of noise that seems to vibrate the air itself. And what does Basho call it? Stillness.

[00:07:31]This is the paradox at the heart of the poem.

[00:07:34]The cicadas are screaming, yet he writes shizukesa, quiet tranquility. The sound is so total that it stops feeling like noise and starts feeling like silence.

[00:07:47]It sinks into the rocks. It sinks into him.

[00:07:51]So, the lesson here is we treat stillness as the absence of sound.

[00:07:57]Basho shows us it's something deeper, a quality of attention.

[00:08:02]You don't find peace by escaping to a silent room. You find it by giving yourself so completely to the present moment that the noise stops being something happening to you [music] and becomes something you're simply inside of.

[00:08:17]That's flow.

[00:08:19]That's a state where the self quiets down and you merge with what you're doing.

[00:08:24]>> [music] >> So, let's see how we can apply this today.

[00:08:28]Try this the next time summer feels loud and overwhelming.

[00:08:32]Traffic, heat, just a [music] racing mind.

[00:08:37]Don't fight the sound. Don't put in earbuds to cover it. [music] Instead, do what Basho did. Turn toward it. Listen so closely to one continuous sound.

[00:08:49]>> [music] >> Cicadas, rain, a fan, a city.

[00:08:54]That it fills your whole awareness.

[00:08:56][music] Then a minute, something settles.

[00:09:00]The noise becomes a kind of stillness.

[00:09:03]This is also quietly nervous system regulation.

[00:09:07]By anchoring your full attention on a [music] single steady input, you pull yourself out of the anxious future and into the only moment [music] that's real.

[00:09:16]The cicadas were Basho's meditation bell. Yours are all around you. Three poems, three lessons. [music] From the art of noticing a single season turning detail to holding our ambitions lightly [music] to finding stillness inside the noise.

[00:09:33]These poets understood something we keep forgetting. Nature doesn't just surround us, it teaches us.

[00:09:40]Summer doesn't just happen to us. It shows us how to be fully alive in the time we have, precisely because that time is passing. This is the heart of shizen, [music] the Japanese idea of naturalness and spontaneity.

[00:09:56]When we stop forcing and start flowing with nature's rhythms, we enter [music] the state we enter that state where action and awareness emerge, where creativity comes effortlessly and where life simply feels more like living. If you want to go deeper, if you want to learn how Japanese aesthetics like wabi-sabi and mono no aware can transform your life and your creativity, I've written a book called Shizen Style Flow. [music] It's your guide to designing a lifestyle that brings nature, creativity, and flow into your modern life.

[00:10:30]You'll find practical techniques for entering flow state, [music] timeless wisdom from Japanese aesthetics, and exercises to help you find your own path.

[00:10:40]The link is in the description below.

[00:10:42]Before you go, I'd love to know which of these three poems spoke to you the most.

[00:10:46]Drop a comment and tell me which summer lesson you're going to carry with you.

[00:10:50]And if this video helped you see summer and life a little differently, I hope you subscribe and hit the like button for more explorations of Japanese aesthetics, photography, and the art of mindful living. Until next time, walk gently, stay cool, and flow with your own summer.

[00:11:09]This is Shizen Style. If you want to keep going, watch this next video.