Recently I realized that my most creative periods have coincided with my practice of writing haiku (or really senryu) regularly. My first artist’s book was called Haiku, my calendars used my haiku as did my most recent artist’s book Walking. But for the past year, I’ve only written a handful of them. I’ve tried various strategies to get myself writing again, and because I think blog posts should be pretty short, I’ll write about them over the next couple of weeks.
What seems to have worked this week is reading Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. (I’m reading books set in New Mexico, since we just moved there.) Cather’s vivid landscape descriptions are perfect inspiration for haiku.
The picture below is from my family room window after a snow storm early last week. And yesterday we had a thunderstorm with lightening and snow. Here’s my reaction:
The sky grows dark
With a clap of thunder and jolt of lightening—
My computer screen flickers off.
Lovely photo!
I live in the southern portion of central Indiana, and while I’ve experienced the odd thunderstorm during winter, it has never been with lightning and snow together.
I actually don’t even really remember thunderstorms here during winter until very recently, but our winters have been strange in the past few years – we have abnormal warm periods mixed with extremely cold temps following one after the other.
I would love to see that though – lightning and snow together. That’s quite a combination to experience.