Haiku a Day

Our lives become what we put our attention on. And everything wants our attention: the internet, the news, the people around us. How can we slow it all down and choose what is really important? While miracles are happening all the time, we somehow don’t Notice. Magnificence is everywhere: a bird in flight passes between skyscrapers, the laughter of children charges the air, multi-colored sunsets paint the horizon.

What would happen if we stopped and started looking for the wonderful things? Moments that make us laugh, or give us cause to reflect, or stop us in our tracks wordlessly in awe? The more we look for them, the more we discover their existence. Increasingly, our lives are flavored with beauty and the sense of joy.

So Bob and I challenged ourselves to create a Haiku a day embedded in a photo. Could we do it for a week? A month? A year? It turned out to be a year, from Halloween 2024 to Halloween 2025. Most come from the mountains, mesas and back roads around Taos, New Mexico, with others from our travels through the Southwest. You’ll find bighorn rams and tundra flowers here, but also a feral kitten’s hello, a potato shaped like a heart, and a yard full of empty buses.

Haiku comes from a long tradition in Japanese culture that uses kanji characters to capture a felt-sense moment in time. Technically, a haiku is defined as a 3 line poem that uses 5 syllables for the first line, 7 for the second and 5 for the third. Some haiku books say this captured feeling one expresses is more important than the correct syllable arrangement.

We invite you to wander through, and to play along whenever you are so moved. Making the attempt to catch an Everyday Miracle might just take you there.

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