This is a haiku I wrote years ago that still makes me laugh:

chocolate chip mountain
and purple trees in orange skies
God dancing with me

In grade school during art time I would draw a mountain that the teacher claimed looked like a chocolate chip so couldn’t be real. What she didn’t know was that my grandparents lived near a butte that looks exactly like a chocolate chip and I loved that place! That memory has never left me. The purple trees and orange skies were a sunset in the Smoky Mountains. Together the two visions capture so much…

Many years ago I wrote this haiku when I noticed that all the trees on my walk were slanted:

Trees slanting up straight
Am I the one standing crooked
In a straight-up world?

Today in reading for this lesson I came across this haiku by Issa:

Don’t know about the people,
but all the scarecrows
are crooked.

I’m drawn to this haiku because it makes me smile and because it reminded me of my own haiku. In this haiku I notice the word “crooked” and wonder about all the meanings that word has that works in the haiku. When I read it I experience a moment of pleasure, of knowing something that might be “secret.” I’m seeing a lot of “crooked” as I look around and work. lol

To be very honest I find that this quote irritates me and grates on me. The idea that there is a bigger picture out there that I cannot see to my pain, that there is something to be gained like a lesson leaned takes me out of the present moment and into some future time that most likely will never happen. What if the pain just is? What if there is no larger landscape? I’m thankful for the now of the pain – not for the pain of and by itself but for the “now” that holds that pain.