"As you take the normal opportunities of your daily life and create something of beauty and helpfulness, you improve not only the world around you but also the world within you." -President Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Like you, my parents taught me not to brag and boast. That is why I am not going to mention that I just took first place in the League of Utah Writers annual writing contest in the Young Adult category. It’s very unbecoming to sing your own praises like that and not something I would ever do.
Ooops, how did that picture of my first place certificate get there?
In celebration of my humility, I will post a page a day of my winning first chapter over the course of the next week. Here’s the first page:
Paul, Big and Small
When I first met Lily, she burped in my face. We were only seven at the time, but it was still disgusting. I remember closing my eyes as if that might somehow protect me from the warm, moist air that erupted from her stomach spilling the smell of peanut butter and Fritos over me. I was trying to get a drink from the drinking fountain at a small park near my house. I thought she looked suspicious because she appeared to be trying too hard to look casual with her arms folded and legs crossed leaning against the cinderblock wall of the restrooms and staring off into the sky. Plus, all her friends were nearby giggling into their sleeves. I knew something was going on, but I walked up to get a drink anyway. I think I was a little curious and, I have to admit, it’s not so bad being the victim of a girl’s prank if she’s cute enough, and Lily was pretty cute. Just before I got to the drinking fountain, she cut me off, leaned over, and took a big drink.
I thought, That’s not so bad. Why’s everyone giggling if that’s all she was going to do? Then she lifted her head up from the fountain and leaned toward my face. For a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me and I was sort of thrilled and terrified at the same time. Then, only an inch from my lips, she let out a deep, gaseous belch. Her friends burst into an explosion of laughter and Lily just stood there and smirked at me. I tried to pretend that it didn’t bother me in the slightest and gave her what I hoped was a bored, “you’re-so-immature” expression. She was standing in my way so I said, “Excuse me, I’d like to get a drink.” For a moment she didn’t move. She folded her arms and continued to smirk at me while her friends started laughing even harder. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Should I push her out of the way? Should I turn and walk off? I didn’t want to look like a sissy, but she was taller than me and if she punched as hard as she burped, I was really in for it. Just before I decided to walk off, she stepped aside.
As I was drinking she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Paul. What’s your name?”
“Lily,” she said.
I looked up into her face. The first thing I noticed was her huge smile because she didn’t have either of her two front teeth. Just glistening pink gums where they should have been. The second thing I noticed was that she had a mole on the side of her chin. Not a huge mole, but a normal looking little mole. The reason I noticed it was because I was afraid of moles. My mother had a mole on her back that turned out to be cancerous.
“Is that a mole?” I asked pointing to her chin. Her friends quit laughing and watched.
Her hand went to her chin and her smile vanished. “Yeah, so?”
“Is it cancerous?”
“What’s cancerous mean?” she asked. She sounded mad. I don’t think she liked me pointing out her mole and I don’t think she liked me knowing a word she didn’t.
I stepped back and said, “It means you could die from it.”
“You can’t die from a mole,” she said.
“Yes you can. My mom did.”
Her expression made me step back again. “No, you can’t,” she said. She was mad for sure now. Her hands became fists.
I knew I should shut up, but it was true and she had a mole and she might have cancer and she needed to know that. They said my mom might have been fine if she had known about the cancer sooner. I said, “It’s true and you could have cancer and you could die.”
Madir Eugster creating a delicate kinetic sculpture out of palm branches and a feather. Photo: Tobias Hutzler
Artist Mädir Eugster performs for the Rigolo Swiss Nouveau Cirque by creating temporary sculptures. These ephemeral and incredibly delicate kinetic sculptures are held together by the weight of a single balanced feather. If the smallest puff of wind blows the feather off the end of the sculpture, the entire thing collapses. Eugster’s performance was captured beautifully by photographer Tobias Hutzler in his film "Balance". You can watch it below. (If it doesn't appear below you can use the following links to watch it at his website or on youtube.) Watch it to the very end or you’ll miss the best part.
I feel like every chapter in my new novel is like another branch in Eugster’s sculpture. At first, I thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, I can do this. Then I carefully added another chapter and another and another. Around chapter thirteen, I started to think, Holy cow, this is getting hard!
What you don’t realize until you’re neck deep in a novel is that you don’t just write a chapter and then forget it. You bear the weight of that chapter as you write the next. Then you add the weight of that chapter to your mental load and start the next. This goes on and on with each additional chapter adding to the combined weight. It gets mentally heavy!
But I’m not just stacking sticks in my arms as if I were merely gathering firewood. No! Just like Eugster, I have to keep everything perfectly balanced. This is a delicate and tenuous performance! With each additional chapter it gets harder and harder to keep it balanced even as it gets heavier. The whole book has started to feel wobbly and loose in my head. I’m struggling to keep it under control as it threatens to collapse at any moment. It’s scary!
I have piles of sticky notes and scraps of paper with hastily scribbled thoughts strewn all over my desk, pages and pages of journal entries scattered through three different journals, document after document of research for my novel on things like Leukemia, the Maasai people of Kenya, name meanings, flower symbolism, and climbing competitions clutter the files of my computer. I sit in my office everyday trying to bear all this weight and keep it perfectly balanced in my mind as I write and write and write!
I suspect I’m not alone in this. I’d be surprised if all artists and writers (probably all human beings) didn’t resonate with Eugster’s performance. Don’t we all feel like our creative projects, our lives even, are a balancing act? That we’re constructing this work piece by precarious piece, this life day by precarious day, and the slightest breeze might cause the whole thing to collapse?
So how do we do it? How do we keep it all balanced? Well, it begins with a feather. A feather so small and light that as the sculpture grows, it’s easy to forget it’s even there, that it’s serving any real purpose at all, until it’s gone and the whole thing comes down. The part this feather plays is very real and absolutely vital. This feather is inspiration.
Detail of a feather from an instalation art piece by French artist Isa Barbier
Consider the qualities of a feather: light, soft, beautiful, and designed to clutch at the invisible air so that a bird can fly. Inspiration is the same. When it comes to us, it is often so light and soft that we hardly know it’s there. There’s a real danger of missing it entirely.
In a talk on personal revelation, President Boyd K. Packer of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, quoted Spencer W. Kimball, former president of the L.D.S. church, as saying that many people “have no ear for spiritual messages … when they come in common dress. … Expecting the spectacular, one may not be fully alerted to the constant flow of revealed communication.”
What is inspiration if not a kind of “spiritual message”?
The inspiration for my current novel came to me as light and soft as a single down feather drifting on invisible currents of air to land almost imperceptibly in my mind. I hardly knew it had happened until much later. It started with seeing two teenagers hanging out together. Though they were both the same age, the girl was exceptionally tall and the boy was quite short. I thought, Wouldn’t that be funny if they fell in love? And suddenly I had my feather. That was it. No lightning flash or thundering voice from the heavens, just a seemingly ordinary thought in common dress.
Just like the feather in Eugster’s sculpture, this inspiration, as subtle as it is, has to remain constant. David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said spiritual messages, “most frequently… come in small increments over time and are granted according to our desire, worthiness, and preparation. Such communications from Heavenly Father gradually and gently ‘distil upon [our souls] as the dews from heaven’ (D&C 121:45).” I’ve found creative inspiration to be exactly the same.
Installation art piece by Isa Barbier made up of feathers suspended from filament
After I was initially inspired by the two teenagers of differing heights, I was filled with a desire to get to work. I struggle every day to be worthy and prepared and, thankfully, inspiration has continued to come “gradually and gently” and most always in very common dress. For instance, the opening scene of my novel came from seeing a little kid at an art museum burp in the face of another kid when he tried to get a drink from the drinking fountain. I noted this funny observation in my journal and later wrote this for the beginning lines of my novel:
When I first met Lily, she burped in my face. We were only seven at the time, but it was still disgusting. I remember closing my eyes as if that might somehow protect me from the warm, moist air that erupted from her stomach spilling the smell of peanut butter and Fritos over me.
Inspiration is only the beginning, of course. Imagine if Eugster just walked around on stage balancing a feather on the end of his finger. We might think, That’s a real pretty feather and all but so what? Inspiration is almost meaningless unless followed by a whole lot of hard work. Hours and days and weeks and months and years of hard work. When David A. Bednar spoke of the worthiness and preparation that allows inspiration to continue to come, I believe it is in large part made up of hard work. By the end of the video of Eugster, we can see him dripping with sweat and trembling beneath the weight of his sculpture. Despite how smooth and controlled he appears, this is clearly hard work. Not only that, but consider how many times Eugster’s sculpture must have collapsed while he was still learning to create it. Yes, it all started with a tiny moment of inspiration, that little feather. But it took years of hard work, grit, and determination combined with countless failures and frustrations to make this performance possible. And so it is with us.
My novel hangs in the air above my head, precariously balanced line upon line, paragraph upon paragraph, chapter upon chapter, growing ever larger, more tenuous, and terrifying. At any moment it might collapse, but that's okay. I'll just pick up the pieces and start again. Like Eugster, I'll begin with a tiny feather of inspiration: beautiful, light, soft, and designed to clutch at the invisible.
On rare occasions, I like to pretend that I’m a fly fisherman. I generally do this by dusting off my fly rod, wading into a local river, and then spending the rest of the day losing flies and untangling my line from tree branches. Eventually, I get frustrated enough to quit for another few months before I start this process over again.
I like to pretend that I look like this when I fly fish.
This is what I actually look like.
Between snags and tangles I do on rare occasions, by some stroke of pure luck, actually catch a fish. Around here, the biggest fish I catch are the brown trout. A real fisherman might tell you different, but, to me, these are the linebackers of the trout world. When you hook one, they hit the fly hard, dive to the bottom, and do their best to wrap your line around ever rock and root in the river. As I struggle (most often unsuccessfully) to land one, I never see much more than a big shadow moving well beneath the surface of the water. The rainbows are the most fun to catch because they put on a real show. They are the gymnasts of the trout world. They leap into the air, flipping and twisting and displaying their brightly colored scales in the sunlight.
My favorite fish to catch, however, is the brook trout. They’re much smaller than the brutish browns, they put up less of a fight than the rainbows and tend not to leap into the air, but they’re the most beautiful. They also happen to be, in my opinion, the tastiest, but I never keep them.
I used to. I used to keep virtually every fish I caught if it was big enough. I did this until one day I was fishing for brook trout with my youngest son. He was probably six or seven at the time. I reeled one in and I showed it to him. I was excited to see that he thought it was just as beautiful as I did. He liked it so much that he became deeply worried that I would want to keep it and eat it. “We should let it go,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. “It will make a delicious dinner.”
“But it’s so pretty,” he said and he was right.
I really didn’t want to let it go. I felt like I had earned that fish with a whole lot of lost flies, tangled lines, mosquito bites, and slipping around on mossy rocks in freezing cold water. I wanted to return to my family as the conquering hero to prove to them that I really could catch a fish every now and then. I felt like I needed some way to prove these hours out stumbling around in a river weren’t a total waste of time. I mean, how would my wife know I was a manly hunter and gatherer if I didn’t return with some dinner every once in a while?
I looked at my six-year-old’s pleading brown eyes reflecting the orange spots and white striped fins of the brook trout, and very reluctantly said, “Okay. We’ll let it go.” And if felt good. It felt really good. In a flash of orange, the little trout disappeared into the river, as much a part of it as the currents of water and polished rocks.
Ever since then, I let them go.
"Four Panel Brookie" by fly fisherman and very talented artist Derek DeYoung.
Not long ago, my good friend Kurt Moulton, an accomplished artist and illustrator, taught me about letting art and writing go. He came to me excited to tell me about an idea he had. He told me how he had bought a brand new hardbound sketchbook and wrote in the front cover something like: This sketch book is now yours. Use it to draw or write whatever you want in it, and then leave if for the next person to find (only he expressed it a lot more articulately and in his immaculate handwriting). He drew a few pictures in it and then planned to leave it on a shelf in the county library. “How cool would that be?” he said. “Wouldn’t you love to be looking through some art books at the library and then stumble onto this sketchbook?” Absolutely. That would be very cool.
The first pages of Kurt Moulton's sketchbook. Unfortunately, I didn't realize I cut off half of it when I scanned it.
It was fun to imagine this sketch book traveling around the state, country, or even world. Where would it end up? Who might add to it? What drawings, poems, or other creative ideas would they contribute? What a story it would make by the time it was filled! Kurt let me scan the first few pages where he had added his own contribution, and then took it to the library later that day. I wonder where it is now?
Another drawing Kurt did in the sketchbook (once again, half of it was cut off. Sorry!) before he left it for someone else to find.
I'm inspired by Kurt's willingness and excitement to let something beautiful go that he had worked hard on. Like a fly fisherman, he used his time, money, and talents to capture this beautiful thing, and then released it out into the world for someone else to experience with no way to know what was to become of it. And I’ll bet it felt good, really good.
I think I'll end my "Seven Days of Haikus" with a poem that is not a haiku. Now don't get all ornery with me. I already gave you several bonus haikus, if you were counting. Plus, this still happens to be a traditional Japanese poem. It's called a "tanka" and it is a simple two line extension of a haiku. So really there's a haiku in there, it's just followed by two more lines of seven syllables each. Here's a great example of a tanka by the 12th century Japanese Buddhist monk Saigyō Hōshi:
Sending my soul away
To where the moon has sunk
Behind the mountain,
What shall I do with my body
Left in the darkness?
"Saigyō" by Kikuchi Yōsai
Here's a beautiful example of a tanka by the modern American poet George Knox:
Watching her sweep up
November's fallen leaves
I am love shaken...
her body moving almost
as it did when we were young.
Here is my attempt to capture much of what I've been describing over the last several days:
Even the shadow
Of a parking lot pebble
Stretched long behind it
Like a dark cape in the wind
Is beautiful in dawn light.
Photo by Simon Sharayha
And, finally, I'll end with a haiku. This is the very last poem ever written by the greatest master of haiku ever to live, Matsuo Bashō:
So, when I said "seven days of haikus", I meant seven business days. You didn't expect me to work weekends, did you? Okay, that's a total lie. The fact is, I just got really busy (read: lazy) and didn't get around to doing a post Saturday or Sunday. But I'm here now so don't fret. You can stop filling up my mail box with hate mail and demands for more haikus. Okay, that's a total lie, too. Despite the dread with which I opened my email this morning, anticipating hundreds, if not thousands, of angry letters, there was nothing. Just digital crickets chirping where I thought the haiku fanatics of the world wide web would have formed a digital posse to chase me off of the internet with digital pitchforks and torches for not living up to my haiku promises. Huh? Weird. Nevertheless, you will have your much anticipated final two days.
As mentioned in an earlier post, traditional haikus usually portray scenes from everyday life. Many of the best haikus will take an image that we've all seen a hundred times and show it to us in a unique and enlightening way that makes us see it again as if for the first time. Or they will take something that's been right in front of us all along, but we never took the time to notice. This isn't just limited to haikus, of course. Much of the best writing and art shares this same quality. Prolific painter of flowers, Georgia O'Keeffe said, "Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time." Like O'Keeffe's flower, these small haikus take time. To write them and to read and understand them.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Light Iris, 1924
My haikus for today are about taking time to notice the small things. One simple trick for helping us to notice what we might otherwise miss is to close our eyes. When we close our eyes, we wake up the other senses and bring ourselves into the moment. Sometimes we even wake senses we didn't expect:
I close my eyes to
Hear the seagull’s cry and feel
The cold metal bench.
Another trick I use to force myself to slow down and notice things I otherwise wouldn't is to go barefoot. First of all, you need to understand that I hate going barefoot. I always have. But when you're barefoot, you have to slow down or you might hurt yourself. More importantly, you notice things you otherwise wouldn't: the texture of the pavement, the change in temperature of the carpet where the sun shines through a window, the dew still lingering in the grass as you pass into the shadow of a tree, etc... It's a simple trick to force you into the moment and heighten your senses. I think it works so well for me because I dislike it so much. It takes me out of my comfort zone which naturally forces me to pay closer attention. While teaching my Creative Writing class one day, I used this trick and made a disturbing discovery:
Hundreds of tiny
Red bugs wander the sidewalk.
I never noticed.
Not until I was causing a tiny red bug apocalypse by crushing dozens of them under my bare feet, anyway! The poet William Meredith said, “The worst that can be said about a man, is that he did not pay attention.” As writers and artists, our priority is to “pay attention”. Keen observation, noticing what others don’t, is what separates us from the average person. Taking note of all the little things, even tiny disgusting red bugs, that go unnoticed by others is what gives us something worth creating. For instance, even an observation like...
A worn blue crayon
Rests among the thorns, chewed gum,
And cigarette butts.
...could be a seed for an idea. This was a simple, factual observation I made years ago on the street outside my school. As I consider it now, it means so much more. Think about it: The crayon, the iconic instrument of a child's creativity. Blue, no less, the symbolic color of purity, the color of the infinite sky where our potential can soar. And where is this holy relic of creativity? Discarded, abandoned, left to rot with chewed gum, thorns, and used up cigarette butts. Cigarette butts being the perfect symbol of the destructive habits of a grown-up. So tragic! "Where is your proverbial blue crayon? Did it fall among the thorns?" the haiku asks me now. And did you catch that? It even had a nice biblical reference. Who knew? I didn't, not when I wrote it anyway. I only had faith that if I planted a seed, maybe something would grow.
A quick sketch in my journal of a cigarette butt and a dead bee along with some random observations and thoughts.
The writer Neil Gaimen said, “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”
On one occasion, I was sitting in my Language Arts class watching all the students waste the time I'd given them to work on an assignment. This happens far more often than I care to admit. Maybe I was bored or daydreaming, as Neil Gaimen said. More likely I was frustrated and a bit mad. Either way, it gave me an idea for a haiku and I was alert enough to notice:
Florescent lights hum.
Students ruffle paper and
Cough. Learning drifts off.
If we look close enough, if we take the time to really observe our world, to pay attention, to notice, we will discover it is filled with intriguing ideas for potential poems, stories, art, and other creative endeavors. As we strive to notice these miniature miracles all around us, maybe, just maybe, we can become a little like what the poet William Blake described:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
...and then use our creativity to share what we discover with others.
I do not like spiders. Not one bit. Only a few days ago, my family went out to Antelope Island to see a concert by the very talented Sierra. The venue was a little outdoor amphitheater with amazing scenery all around. Bison grazed on the grassy hillside behind Sierra, bucks with their antlers still covered in velvet passed by on nearby game trails, and the sunset over the Salt Lake as Sierra played was a gorgeous array of reds, violets, and blues. Everything was perfect…except for the giant man-eating spider hanging in its web over Sierra’s head.
Sierra out at Antelope Island with a bison grazing in the background.
Sorry about the quality of the photo, but I have a lame phone
and my hand was probably trembling because of the spider.
Ok, the spider wasn’t exactly over Sierra’s head. It was more off to one side. Way off to one side where nobody was at, if I’m being totally honest. But it was scary nonetheless and someone could have died…had they accidentally gone way out of their way to climb up a 12 foot wooden post to the web where they might have accidentally poked it long enough to get the spider mad and then it would have, well, probably run away. BUT if the spider didn’t run away, it might have viciously attacked the pole climbing person and bit them and, while I admit a bite probably wouldn’t have caused more than an upraised itchy bump, the pole climbing person might have fallen from the pole and been seriously injured or died as was most certainly that malicious spider’s plan all along. I mean, think about it, spiders make their webs to catch food, right? This is an amphitheater used by people. Why would a spider make its web there if it didn’t want to catch and eat people? So you can see why, under these perilous circumstances, I was deeply concerned for the well being of Sierra and all of her fans despite the beautiful music and scenery. (For some reason a one ton bison roaming freely nearby was less scary to me than a one ounce spider. Don’t ask me why.)
It looked a lot scarier in real life, okay.
My point here is, well, I don’t really have much of a point except to say that I have two haiku’s for you today that both involve spiders. Actually, they don’t involve spiders directly because that would be scary and gross. Instead, they involve spider webs, which are often scary, sometimes gross, but on rare occasions, truly beautiful despite the horrid creatures that construct them. I like both of these haikus because they mean something just a little bit different to me every time I read them. Here's the first one:
A delicate web
In the curl of a dead leaf
Catching only dust.
A few sketches of leaves from my journals along with random observations.
Fortunately, none of the leaves were occupied by spiders at the time I drew them.
A self portrait by famous 18th century Japanese poet and artist Yosa Buson
Lucky you! You get several bonus haikus today! I know, you can hardly believe your good fortune. All these haikus revolve around the same theme, my wife, Ruth, so I thought I’d just go ahead and include them all instead of doing just one. I genuinely hope you appreciate them because my amazing, yet reclusive wife prefers to live in anonymity, and I will probably pay dearly for posting them. Sorry, Ruth…sort of.
In case you don’t know much about haikus, here is a very quick and hopefully painless lesson:
A haiku has three lines. The first is five syllables long, the second is seven syllables, and the last is five again. Notice that if the poem is translated from another language, the number of syllable will be lost.
Haikus usually capture ordinary scenes from daily life. Not the grandiose or unusual. Here’s one of my favorite examples of this from Yosa Buson, a famous Japanese poet and artist from the 1700s. He wrote a haiku about getting sick from eating spoiled sushi:
Over-ripe sushi,
The Master
Is full of regret.
Traditional Japanese haikus also often include what is called a “kigo”. This is a word which in some way refers to nature and/or what season the haiku takes place in. Things like cherry blossoms, rain, or even mosquitos. Here is one of my all-time favorite haikus, also by Buson, in which the kigo is a chrysanthemum.
Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.
Above all else, the haiku form reminds me that the most beautiful and inspiring things are right in front of us all the time. They are hidden in plain sight, in our ordinary, everyday lives. Right in front of me, every day, is the most extraordinary woman, my wife, Ruth, so it seems fitting that I should have a few haikus about her.
I wrote this first haiku while sitting outside my school with my Creative Writing class. It was an in the early spring when the sun is just starting to feel warm again after a long, cold winter.
Sunshine warms the back
Of my neck and reminds me
Of a kiss from Ruth.
One thing about Ruth, is that I am not the only one that loves her. Everyone who gets to know her can’t help but love her. That includes mosquitos. For some reason, mosquitos will travel from miles around, bypassing countless other opportunities to feast on someone else's blood just to bite poor Ruth. This is good news for me. I never have to worry about getting bit as long as Ruth is nearby. She’s better than even the most potent mosquito repellent because they will always choose her over me. Here’s a haiku about a very satisfied mosquito:
A mosquito hangs
On the wall just above the
Bed, full of her blood.
Ruth is typically a very early riser. Very early. As in 4:30 am early. It’s a good thing, too, because I am powerless to leave the bed if Ruth is still in it. I just can’t do it. No alarm clock can get me out of bed as long as I still have Ruth there to cuddle with. That’s because:
My favorite place
In the universe is curled
Up with Ruth in bed.
One thing that most everyone knows about Ruth is that she loves to bake, and she’s very good at it. There’s hardly a week that goes by that we aren’t making deliveries of Ruth’s delicious cookies to someone in the neighborhood. Sometimes I feel like we are an entire family of Little Red Riding Hoods delivering baskets of goodies. In fact, for a while, Ruth and an equally talented friend ran a “cottage kitchen” bakery fittingly called “The Fairy Tale Bakery”.
Ruth's old bakery logo created by my good friend and talented artist Kurt Moulton
What most people do not know about Ruth is that she loves to punch things. Yep, you read that right. Sweet little Ruth can seriously throw a punch. I think she might have been a cage fighter in a former life. Luckily, she only ever punches me in play. These two seemingly contradictory talents, baking and punching, come together in the most remarkable and endearing way in Ruth.
Imagine that you are standing near a bookstore when a broken gas line causes it to explode. Amidst all the smoke, fire, screaming, and chaos, tiny pieces of The Velveteen Rabbit, The Tao of Pooh, and Dracula drift down to your feet like confetti and just happen to land in the form of a haiku. You never know, it could happen. Anyway, that's a little bit what today's haiku is like. It certainly isn't traditional. Its story is considerably longer than the haiku itself, but I think you’ll find a few intriguing insights into the creative process if you stick it out to the end.
It all started with a pet rabbit. A cute little thing, white and gray with floppy ears. We would often let it hop freely around the garden and eat whatever it wanted since we grow mostly weeds in there anyway. Then it had a stroke. At least that’s what it seemed like. Half its face went droopy and it couldn’t eat properly. Worst of all, it could no longer hop in a straight line. Only in tight little circles always to its left, the droopy side. It was sad and the image of it stuck hopping forever in circles really troubled me.
A few years after the rabbit died, my son got a pet rat. It was also grey and white and we named it Peppers. I’m not a fan of rats, but this one was very sociable and it grew on me. My son carried it everywhere. It rode in his pockets, up his sleeves, or sometimes even on his head under his hat. He even got in trouble for sneaking it into his elementary school class one time.
Why, yes, that is a rat on my son's head
and, yes, I am very proud.
Then, one day, my son, clearly upset, brought the rat to me and said, “I think Peppers is sick.” He held it out and the rat looked up at me with bleeding eyes! I’d never seen anything like that before and, once again, as you can certainly imagine, the image troubled me.
A few years later, after the memories of the rabbit and rat had long been forgotten, I was doing a warm-up with my Creative Writing class. This was a kind of warm-up I call “stream of consciousness”, but most people call “free writing”. It’s closely related to what psychologists refer to as “free association”. Anyway, it’s one of my favorite types of warm-ups for any kind of creative work. You simply start writing whatever pops into your head without any attempt to control or direct your thoughts. It sounds easier than it is. Our minds naturally want to stay in control and force our thoughts to make sense. Making this even more difficult is the inner critic we all have in our head saying, “Don’t write that! It’s stupid! People will think you’re a psycho!” or “You’re so lame and you should stop writing before everyone figures that out!” It takes some practice to just let your mind drift without any attempt to guide it and to ignore your inner critic at the same time. If you do manage it, the results can be astonishing. These warm-ups always look like the babbling of a madman when they’re finished. But hidden within all the dribble, I’ve discovered some long forgotten memories and images, beautiful and frightening metaphors, buried emotions, and truly unique ideas. It’s a powerful tool!
On this particular occasion, I decided, just for kicks, to also write left handed (my non-dominant hand). I’d read somewhere that this was supposed to help tap some creativity as well. Plus, it’s just plain funny to try. I wrote it on a page where I’d already made a pen and Prismacolor drawing of some Celtic art. This art, no doubt, helped trigger the memory of the rabbit. Here’s the result from my journal:
Left-handed stream of consciousness warm-up from my journal.
Since you likely couldn’t read any of that, let me just sum it up for you: In this bizarre little warm up of left-handed stream of consciousness I stumbled onto the two old memories of the rabbit and the rat and combined them into one sad little rabbit with bleeding eyes hopping in circles. I didn't mean to. I wasn't looking for those memories or any memories at all. I was just letting my mind wander whatever paths it wanted and that's where they led. I could feel the weight of it, sensed that I’d dredged up something important from the well of my mind, and knew that it was a little more than just a normal warm up. I thought, Whoa, that was a weird one, and continued on with my day, but the image wouldn’t leave me. So a day or two later, I wrote this journal entry:
I know, I know, I’m a little prone to the melodramatic (just ask my poor wife), but it does sometimes feel that way. I think most of us, at one time or another in our life, have felt like we’re just running on a treadmill, running like crazy, and with all this effort we think we must being going somewhere in life, but we’re not. In all the ways that really matter, we’re still in the same place we were before all that running. Through this silly warm up, I discovered I was feeling something like that. But what exactly was frustrating me so much? What was making me feel like I was stuck on a treadmill? What was making me feel like a bloody-eyed rabbit hopping in circles to the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” of all things?
Well, this disturbing image continued to haunt me for two more weeks. Then, I sat down to write a haiku. Guess what popped into my head? That’s right, my friend the rabbit. Here’s the haiku:
The rabbit hops in
A ceaseless circle, bleeding
Eyes seek a new path.
Now, I know it’s my own head and all, but even I am a little surprised at what comes out of it sometimes. What was this all about? Flannery O'Connor once said, “I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.” I'm often this same way (except I might insert the word "feel" for "think"), so I started writing to try and sort my thoughts and feelings out. Here’s the journal entry that came right after I’d written that odd little haiku:
When I wrote that entry, I stopped at the line where I asked: “How do I pull the rabbit from the hat?” Then I doodled my self portrait while I thought about it (apparently, I draw to figure out what I think, too). Somewhere in the middle of the doodle, I figured it all out and finished writing my conclusion: Live more creatively! Easier said than done, I know, but I’ve been happier ever since I started seeking this new path.
And that is the very long story of how I accumulated some memories, lost them, retrieved them, turned them into a very short poem even I didn’t understand, and then made my life better by figuring it out!
My second haiku I wrote after doing some research on an art project for my sister. I wanted something that was symbolic of rising above hardship and difficulty and becoming something new, pure, and beautiful. It didn't take long before the lotus flower became my obvious choice. This flower represented rebirth to the ancient Egyptians, purity to Buddhists, and divine beauty and spiritual enlightenment to Hindus. Chinese Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi said, "I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained." The lotus flower was exactly what I was looking for. Here's a picture of the charcoal drawing I made for my sister. (Next time, I'll remember to take a picture before I frame my art. The glass made it impossible to take a picture without a reflection.)
I used a photo by Bahman Farzad to make this drawing. If you see a beautiful photo of a lotus anywhere, he probably took it.
That seems like a lot of build up for a little haiku, but that's exactly the beauty of a haiku: it says so much with so little. Here it is:
I love the subtle meanings, the economy, and the deceptively simple form of haiku poetry. They are the kind of poem you have to lean in close and let it whisper to you and, if you're like me, you still can't hear the important parts half the time. If you're in a hurry, they sound ridiculous. Read the same haiku in a more thoughtful mood, and there's nothing more profound. One of my favorites is this one by Shuson Kato:
I kill an ant
and realize my three children
have been watching.
What a beautiful and simple reminder that our children watch and are influenced by even the smallest of our actions. All of that in just seventeen syllables! (Since this was translated from the original Japanese, the number of syllables is not the same in English).
I stumbled onto a handful of haikus I'd written over the years while thumbing back through some of my old journals, and I thought I'd post at least one a day for the next seven days. This first one I wrote while sitting on a park bench outside the Brigham City Tabernacle. From this park bench, I had a perfect view of the east side of the L.D.S. temple and it's fountain. Unfortunately, between the temple and me was a very busy street. Here it is:
The serene sound of
The temple’s stone fountain hides
Between passing cars.
Photo: Jon Adams
See more of his beautiful photography at reflectedpixel.com
