Having hit a wall in terms of stories and articles because silence these days seems preferable to speech, it’s time for some haiku.
For about 40 years now I’ve had a semi-regular practice of spontaneous composition of free-form poetry or haiku. They often get lightly edited afterwards to clarify the original thought or polish it up a little, usually a word here or there (like in this case I changed a ‘the’ into an ‘a’ and then took it out altogether in front of the last line’s ‘pool.’)
With haiku, I used an old daoist-confucian method that doesn’t count syllables but rather follows a simple formula:
Line 1 = Heaven
Line 2 = Earth
Line 3 = Man.
Heaven sets the mood, the weather, the context; earth complements, grounds, makes heaven manifest as a thing, a scene, whatever. Man makes the two come alive as something to do with experiencing, or humor, or a coconut of wakefulness falling on the head as a nice human realm flourish. This can be used to design architectural plans, political campaigns, the social structure for an entire nation or simply arranging flowers. The Heaven Earth and Man trinity is simple, profound, universal and fun.
Here’s the first one:
2021 Haiku #1
As incense smoke curls upwards
So also spirit of mind…
Time to plunge into the pool!
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