What "From East to West" Taught Me About Receiving Each Day With Empty Hands

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This article sets out seven practices I've actually adopted at 66, drawn from reading Hiromu Murai's book From East to West: The Heart of Haiku, the Light of Scripture. It takes up one haiku at a time — by poets like Bashō, Buson, and Santōka — and reads the emotion behind each poem alongside a passage from the Bible. Unlike the memoirs and life-advice books I've written about here before, this isn't really a religious text so much as an experiment: holding one kind of invisible thing (the feeling behind seventeen syllables) up against another (a line of scripture) and seeing what emerges. It gave me a reason to slow down and properly receive moments I'd otherwise let slip past.

This illustration was created to evoke an Eastern sensibility, haiku, and a Western text, scripture, quietly overlapping.

Trusting what holds me up, even when I can't see it

— On a haiku by Nozawa Bonchō, describing a single dark river cutting through an otherwise unbroken field of snow

A theme that ran through the whole book was the relationship between what's visible and what isn't — the idea that behind every visible thing, something invisible is quietly holding the world together. Since reading this, my attitude toward my own health span has shifted a little. If I only track visible numbers — blood pressure, test results — I end up exhausted, swinging between relief and worry. Now I try to take a moment, deliberately, to notice the invisible things I usually take for granted: that I woke up breathing, that my heart is beating. I've come to think that living a long healthy life starts not just with managing numbers, but with noticing that you're already being kept alive.

Receiving today with empty hands

— On a haiku by Ozaki Hōsai, describing a moment of receiving something with two bare hands, no vessel at all

One haiku that stayed with me described receiving something with bare hands, no vessel, no container — taking in a sharp, clear phrase directly into the body, without excuses or hedging. I used to have a habit of intellectualising anything new the moment I encountered it: "in my experience, it's like this," "this probably means that." Now, on my morning walk, when I notice a flower or exchange a small greeting with a neighbour, I try to simply receive it, without analysing it first. Living in the present turns out to be made of small moments like this. And living each day with a sense of excitement isn't about waiting for something special to happen — it might just be about noticing how many of these bare-handed moments you can catch in a single day.

Keeping a "poor" heart

— On a haiku by Matsuo Bashō, describing a weary traveller borrowing a night's lodging beneath a wisteria in bloom

The book describes being poor in spirit not as owning nothing, but as being unburdened — free of resentment, envy, anxious worry about tomorrow, superiority, inferiority, all the "this and that" we carry around. This gave me a new way to think about money worries. Concerns about retirement funds are real, and I don't dismiss them. But I've started asking myself whether I'm also carrying an unnecessary weight of feeling I need more, or that I'm somehow falling short compared to others. I keep managing my actual finances calmly and practically, but I try to let my heart take on only today's portion, without borrowing tomorrow's worry in advance. Separating the two has made the vague anxiety around money feel noticeably lighter.

Loving the people I'd rather avoid

— On a haiku by Taneda Santōka, describing himself surrendering to the very centre of an overflowing hot spring

One chapter quoted the line about the sun rising and the rain falling on both the righteous and the unrighteous alike. It struck me that so much relational suffering comes from judging others through the lens of our own interests and position. Even at this age, there are still people I have to see whether I want to or not. I used to feel my mood sink well before such meetings. Now, before I see someone difficult, I try to remind myself silently: the same rain and sun fall on them as on me. I don't have to like them. But once I stop measuring them purely by my own interests, the whole encounter feels a little less heavy to walk into.

Finding hope in dim light

— On a haiku by Kubota Mantarō, describing a quiet late-life evening spent alone before a pot of simmering tofu

One quiet haiku simply describes someone sitting alone before a pot of simmering tofu. The author paired it with the phrase "dim light" — describing an old age lived through disappointment and solitude. Ageing does bring stretches where, instead of the bright light of youth, all you can see is something faint and dim. I recognise the days when that feels lonely. But since reading this, I've tried to sit with that dim light rather than dismiss it. I won't pretend the irritation of ageing disappears — the frustration of no longer being able to do what I once could is real, and it hasn't gone away. But I've come to think that enjoying one's later years isn't about erasing that irritation. It might be about learning to hold the irritation and a small light at the same time — steam rising from the evening kitchen, or the quiet of a late-night hour.

Tasting each day as something new

— On a haiku by Murakami Kijō, describing lying down in freshly changed bedding while listening to spring rain

Another haiku captured the small comfort of lying down in freshly changed bedding — nothing dramatic, just the sensitivity to notice everyday newness, which the author reads as the real richness of being alive. It made me reconsider how I think about "ending well," not only in terms of paperwork and putting one's affairs in order, but as a practice of receiving each day fresh, like clean bedding. The book also notes that time seems to pass faster the older we get. Precisely because of that, I try not to let a day slip past in a blur, but to notice it deliberately. That, for me, has become one small practice for a rich retirement.

Accepting death as "dust"

— On the death poem of Sōma Senshi, a physician-poet who, at 68 and nearing the end of his own life, imagined becoming a single speck of light dust filling a mild winter sky

The book also includes this poem, written by a poet who was himself a physician, near the end of his own life. Much of the pain of ageing, I think, comes from frustration at a body that no longer moves the way it once did. This poem quietly offers another way of seeing it: that a person has both a body that returns to "soil" and something else that returns to "dust." These days, when I catch myself irritated by joint pain or waking several times in the night, I try to step back and think, this belongs to the soil part of me. Framed that way, there's a little more room to feel irritated by ageing while still quietly appreciating whatever in me doesn't change.

Somewhere on the road from East to West

I think the book's title, From East to West, points to the place where an Eastern sensibility — haiku — meets a Western text — scripture. It doesn't offer a clear answer to where life, or any living thing, comes from and where it goes. But the idea that even in returning to dust, a dim, hopeful light can still dwell — that's become a quiet support for me at 66. Not chasing numbers, not rushing toward answers, but receiving today with empty hands, keeping a poor heart, and tasting the dim light as it comes. That's the small practice I'd like to keep going.

The book I mentioned here:

Hiromu Murai, From East to West: The Heart of Haiku, the Light of Scripture

A quick note: the author, Hiromu Murai, is my father-in-law, and I published the Kindle edition of this book. It's a book from within my own family, but what I've written here is an honest account of how it struck me.

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About the author: Hiromu Murai and the era he lived through

Hiromu Murai was born in 1937 in Nara Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from Kwansei Gakuin University, he worked as a company employee and later ran his own business, all the while studying scripture independently, without affiliation to any Christian denomination or organised church. While running a kimono retail shop in Sendai, he led a study group called "Learning from Scripture" and, from 1991, published a monthly scripture study journal. In 1994 he moved to London, where his daughter and her husband lived, and he passed away there in 2017. Murai's generation experienced the war and its aftermath in childhood and adolescence, then came of age professionally during Japan's postwar economic boom — a generation that lived through the collapse and rebuilding of national authority firsthand. That experience seems to have shaped his instinct to read scripture on his own terms, rather than through any established institution. In the book's afterword, he explains that he deliberately tried to compare two worlds that don't usually meet — haiku and scripture — which reflects an independent, unaffiliated way of thinking that resists ready-made frameworks.

Another notable feature is that Murai wasn't a professional clergyman but someone grounded in the practical world of running a small retail business, engaging with scripture from the standpoint of an ordinary working life rather than academic theology. His writing carries a grounded, lived-in sensibility quite different from scholarly biblical commentary. His choice of poets — Bashō, Buson, Santōka — figures associated with travel, wandering, illness, and old age, suggests that his own questions of faith were shaped not by a settled, comfortable daily life, but by unsettled times and the texture of ordinary struggle. His late-life move from Japan to London quietly echoes the book's own title, From East to West. Unaffiliated with any church, yet unwilling to let go of faith — that particular stance seems to run quietly through the whole book.