Haibun: Commitment

For over a decade I have written and published a haiku, for about 9 years I’ve attached prose to it. There have been some minor changes along the way. Style changes, shift in the prose, rhyming the first 5 syllables (to the under horror of those who just read Kenneth Yasuda’s book on haiku and can rebuke me!). Some days I want to close the chapter on this book and maybe start something new, take a break, or move into something else; on other days I want see what else I can pull out of this commitment I have to publish something, anything. It's all the story I’m telling myself at the time.

Wandering out of those canyons of routine and the familiar can be scary or an adventure. The definition is routed in the story that we tell ourselves. It’s all the perspective we have that tells us what we are getting out of what’s happening in reality. 

But the key is commitment. That commitment is how we get through the stories that call us away from what we have to do. That sense of commitment keeps me publishing.

canyon walls form hedges

for the water’s edges, and so

summer fills the ledges