Haiku of the patch
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I've created four haikus of the patch - one for each season.
Although I've adhered to the structure of 5-7-5 syllables, I'm not entirely sure they'd pass muster for the strict haiku purist.
Typically a haiku is an observation involving a fleeting moment in nature. These certainly concern nature, but are more attempts to evoke something about a detail - as depicted in the photo - than just the one moment.
Maybe I should describe them as short poems with the structure of a haiku.
My favourite kind of nature photo are those that home into to a small detail. I think there's a certain 'haiku-ness' to this kind of photo.
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After completing these it occurred to me that there are some pleasing parallels between a haiku and this blog itself.
The haiku writer is limited by structure of the poem. Similarly, in concentrating on a small area of countryside - the patch - the mind is concentrated in the same way.
This is the video I made earlier in the year - taking a photo once a month from the same spot. It seems to lend itself to a haiku commenting to the relationship between myself and the place.
You scan the horizon, your view an expanse of hill, field and sky, then you focus in on a detail, maybe a bird or a tree. Does your perceptual world contract to a shrunken fragment? No, it stays the same size or maybe even expands. As your attention homes in, so there is a mental blossoming – what was coarse-grained becomes finescale. Uniform Mondrian blocks show their true nature as a filigree of delicate tracery.
Like a baby in a pram, whose universe consists of its mother and perhaps some toys, it seems limited, but this is the canvas upon which the everything plays out – all the sights smells and sounds to feed the baby’s developing brain.
And this is what I’ve found when I’ve focused in on a ‘patch'.
Thanks to Alan Mee Get this
Very, very, very nice. I like it!
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot Britta!
DeleteI like the metaphor of the in-out breathing of the year's turning. Thank you.
ReplyDeletethanks you!
Delete