Haiku Ellipses...Invitation...Response...

HER CIRCLES Circular Colors with spiral arms spinning round moving inside HER Circle is the theme:  circle of colors,  circling spiral arms,  circle spinning,  circular movement inside. Multiple interpretations are possible:  multiple colored chakra centers inside her are spinning spirals,  one energy center is filled with many colors all spinning round,  the seed of life growing and spinning inside her circular womb... The perceptual move here is:  to see with circular eyes ,  see the circled colors all round us,  and perhaps more importantly,  to feel the different colored arms circling inside of us ,  our organs, cells, and blood...    

  ENFOLDED IN LOVE Seated, hands touch toes Head down to knees, breathing in... Surrounded by LOVE Sitting on the floor with legs outstretched, we reach our hands toward our toes, sometimes getting there (on good days when we've already stretched and feel flexible) and sometimes not. As our hands move toward our toes, our head moves downward in the direction of our knees, sometimes getting there, most of the times not. But, we can all reach and stretch to whatever degree we can, and we can all breath in to RELAX INTO the stretch. In doing so we might feel the breath of life entering our lungs, blood, organs, bones, cells...then we may begin to understand and experience being surrounded and interpenetrated by LOVE. This posture is one of many yoga asanas that are designed to bring health to the body's vehicle. By extension, we can add to this hatha yoga asanas the prana of the breath of life, consciously inhaling that which sustains us, feeling into the incoming breath and relax...

SNAKING AROUND The head of the line keeps moving, curving, snaking... swallowing its tail Free drawing shapes that begin with "lines" often turn into mandalas of some sort, but sometimes they emerge as a certain kind of thing...the head of the line transforms into some recognizable thing...the afternoon of October 3rd, sitting on a sheltered picnic bench at Bennett's Creek Park in Suffolk, Virginia, across from my wife and 16-year old son who were also drawing, i was fooling around with some colors, starting with black sperm like shapes, surrounded by orange, then green-bluish shapes surrounding the orange and also connected the spermatozoa, then a final layer of purple that surrounded the whole thing...the final result reminded me of a snake, moving, curving, and getting ready to swallow its own tail--a mythic symbol of infinity, see Dawn Baumann Brunke's Awakening the ancient power of snake: Transformation, healing, and enlightenment for more.  Take a long, loving,...

THE BIG TO DO The big to do list I tackle it with gusto It NEVER gets done In college i discovered a book called, How to get control of your time and your life by Alan Laiken. It helped me set goals, make lists, prioritize tasks, and get things done in the world. All this was necessary to organize and orchestrate an external life in the "real world."  An unfortunate side effect of this productivity, is i still, 40 years later, am making lists, setting priorities, and trying to accomplish everything on my to do list. With each thing i accomplish it seems that one or two more things get added to the list, thus, i never finish the "to do" list. How does this leave one feeling when you can never get to the end, never reach the goal, never breathe easy, never feeling completely relaxed, never done. We don't need to give up our goals, priorities, and lists of things to do. We simply need to reframe them (See Paul Watzlawick et. al.'s book Change: Principles of p...

  SILVER SPARKLES in morning sunlight... wind on silver threads sparkle spider jazz music While gazing toward the sun in a garden area, sparkles of light bounced like musical notes on a thin sliver web...now drifting in a light breeze...the web and notes seemed to "phase" in and out of existence, here a moment, playing a few notes, then vanishing, then reappearing...over and over, such a delight to be a part of, to dance with the spider's creation. Might there be moments in our lives where we are prompted, inspired, or propelled by the winds of life to use our gifts to sparkle for a time, then recede into the background, and when the time is right, to sparkle again.  What are your gifts? What winds of life could help you make your gift sparkle with golden sunlight?  

BEGINNING HAIKU image...thought...feeling blending and integrating... birthing the haiku we start at the beginning of the poetic process for the first haiku on a blog about haikus... something from life rapts our attention...an image, thought, and/or feeling... as we sit, play, & observe the ideas, turning them round, blending, integrating... we find that they begin to coalesce into a haiku...the birth of a haiku! 15, 27, 35 the above sequence of numbers is poetry code for HAIKU translated:  1=1st line, 5=5 syllables (15=1st line of 5 syllables in the haiku form) 2=2nd line, 7=7 syllables (27=2nd line of 7 syllables in the haiku) 3=3rd line, 5=5syllables (35=3rd line of 5 syllables in the haiku)          

  Haiku-Ellipses...POETRY...Invitation...Response.... Introduction: How is the poetry of haiku related to the idea of ellipses? The Americanized haiku of 3 lines with 5-7-5 syllables in each line is a modification of the Japanese nature haiku. My style of haiku retains the 3 lines with 5-7-5 syllables but the content is not limited to nature...the haiku can be ANYTHING.  The ellipses in grammar refers to a continuation of thought, a progression in time that does not specify the precise content. In this blog, the haiku serves as an invitation for you to respond, whatever form that may take, a thought, emotion, idea, symbol, something you want to draw, write, share, do. Ideally this response would also be shared in the comment section of the blog, as a continuation of the ellipses, inviting me to read and respond...a mini dialogue. A Good Haiku: A "good haiku" should set the scene in the first line, establishing a context. The second line should link to the first and develop ...