On Love and Barley - Matsuo BashoBasho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature. Basho himself enjoyed solitude and a