For the first time ever, I entered a poem into a Haiku content.  I’m not certain it was the correct thing to do, but as it is not a thing that is easily undone I’ll have to leave it as is.  Actually it was a little forced since I had to bend it to fit the theme, so I rest calm.  It wasn’t a prize winner and so I hope to hear no more of it.

Why do I feel obligated to enter into hopeless things that afterwards make me feel unhappy.  I visit a number of sites (including some that I run myself) and post things not because I want to or need to but because I think others expect it of me.  It’s like as a long standing “community” member I have some sort of duty to get into various things.  Do things, read things, write things.

When really I just want to delete my account and go outside.  I’ve seen a trend in people deleting their accounts instead of not posting.  I think about the whys and whats of them leaving for almost several seconds.  It will not be different for me.  Only I’ll be outside so I won’t care.

After the entering the haiku contest I took my dog out and walking in the local woods for an hour in the rain.  This was far more fulfilling and filled my head with better images than any written word.  Nature isn’t a series of 5-7-5 moments, not even in 16C Japan.  Really.  Anyway you can’t possibly read my haiku and see what I see, only a representation of what you’ve seen, or if you know me maybe what you think I’ve seen.  This isn’t like 16C Japan.  A time and place where all readers had a common structure, rituals and rules.  The view out of a readers window was not that different from your own.  This is not at all so now.  That’s why I like senryu.

Haiku means boiling down or dumbing down nature to a thin film of itself hopefully to represent some abstract truth or beauty.  Read too many and you see the shallowness of this.  There is no shared context.  So why pretend you see a deeper meaning?  Noone likes to appear stupid.  This is the Japanese trick of Haiku.  It’s more about saving face than about inner truth.  Thus it is with website posting.