Haibun: Renewal

Growing up in a Christian household, there was a parable from our sacred text about two men, one who built his house upon the rock and the other who built his on the sand. When the storms came, the one built on the sand was wiped away, but the one on the rock stood.

Climbing up and around Superstition Mountain two weeks ago, the closer my nephew and I got to the top, the more the strength, the magnitude, and the sturdiness of the solid block of rock became. And since wandering around towards the top, this massive rock has stayed with me in three ways. One, it’s made me want to go back. Second, it has given me an urgency to get to Yosemite. And last of all, it reminded me of the purity of solid foundations.

As a result of the last one, the idea of solid foundations is important. The foundations of & Haiku was to publish every week. But within no time, a deeper why emerged from a French thinker, Jacques Ellul. In a later documentary on his life, he built on the idea from his earlier writings that for technology to advance, technology had to become more like humanity and humanity had to become more like technology. How he built on that in the documentary was to point out how our humanity has always passed through reflection—sharing our reflections through stories around the fire, our poetry, and relationships—but now we are valuing reaction, the ability to reproduce faster and with more and more sameness, expecting it from both each other and technology.

It was out of these thoughts & Haiku took new life. And it is to that immense thought, the thought that is as huge as the pure rock wall at the top of Superstition Mountain, that this weekly publishing must return to survive so we all have a foundation for the storms of jobs lost to automation as a writer, truck driver, doctor and of the machines instructing us on how we must behave because that’s how they behave.