Transcript from the TEDx video: Amazement of the Ordinary:
Life through a haiku lens [Transcript and video, used with permission]
"We see things not as they are, but as we are."
That's a quote from the Talmud, an ancient text, containing opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects.
Now I'm sure many of us have been there, overlooking the ordinary because we feel it's... well ordinary... mundane, boring, annoying, a distraction, or mostly unnoticed in our busy schedules.
I'd like to talk about how a tiny practice of reading or writing haiku, the world's shortest type of poetry, can add an extra depth to our world.
I'm adding examples of my own haiku poems to attempt to inject some lateral shift time, as in our linear lives some of us can rarely take time to step off, safely, we've just got to keep going even if it kills us, even if it alienates those we love.
Lateral shift? Bending time? No.
It's just that sometimes we are only aware of how long time is if
1) it's horribly boring, or
2) we are in great danger.
This could be your third choice, your third option, and all without a safety net, to have something parallel on your timeline.
mist haze-
a crow cleans its beak
on a rooftop aerial
Ah, perhaps you are a driver, worried you might miss the early morning sights and sounds of birds getting up for their own day ahead?
traffic jam
a driver fingers the breeze
through the sunroof
One of the world's greatest short story writers, Raymond Carver, back in the old century, wrote about people who worried whether their cars would start in the morning; about unemployment and debt; of individuals who make our day to day life tick. He never pretended a wonderland still existed but said: "a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement."
Are we not writers of our own life, writing out cheques, or pin numbering our way to coffee and snacks; those last minute remembered bunch of flowers at a supermarket, to filling our cars with petrol to get somewhere...
an attic window sill
a wasp curls
into its own dust
...and however much we can afford a mortage, or need to pay the landlord...
the rain
almost a friend
this funeral
As the 1931 song says: "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
Brother, Sister, can you spare yourself a haiku moment?
sunlight breaks
on a bird
and its portion of the roof
A day consists of 86 thousand and 400 seconds: A haiku is six seconds.
Try bending some time, maybe on your travels, catching a...
train whistle
a blackbird hops
along its notes
Mary Oliver, a poet, said, from When Death Comes:
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
I'd like to end with this last haiku, that takes less than six seconds to say,
and, time me if you'd like...
this small ache and all the rain too robinsong
TEDx YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxLTiR7AKDE
