Bashō, Patron Saint of Wayward Wanderers.

Bashō (1644-1694) is the haiku patron saint of travelers and wayward wanderers. Years ago I put together a book arts collection of my poems and art and named it, “The Journey Itself Is Home”, a title taken from the opening lines of Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi ("The Narrow Road to the Deep North"), Basho's travel journal from his 1689 journey through northern Japan. 

The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
- Basho

Sampu, a wealthy merchant and admirer of Bashō’s haiku, built him a small house in Edo. It burned down a couple of years later in a fire that swept through town. He lived for a while with someone he had studied Zen with at the Chōkeiji Temple in Edo, Rokuso Gohei. He found himself constantly dreaming of the open road, and decided to, as he put it, cast himself away, restore his true identity (which he described as the ‘everlasting self which is poetry’) and hit the road. Bashō wrote, “I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of  Jyokyo among the wails of the autumn wind.”

Bashō was inspired in his travels by the example of a priest from bygone days, probably Saigyō (1118–1190) who is said to have travelled thousands of miles “caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon.” Basho wrote, "I leaned on the staff of an ancient who, it is said, entered into nothingness under the midnight moon."

In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Bashō wrote:

Days and months are the travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by . . . I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind –- filled with a strong desire to wander . . .  I walked through mists and clouds, breathing the thin air of high altitudes and stepping on slippery ice and snow, till at last through a gateway of clouds, as it seemed, to the very paths of the sun and moon. I reached the summit, completely out of breath and nearly frozen to death. Presently the sun went down and the moon rose glistening in the sky.
- Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North