Using Haiku to Notice Deeper

Not all attention is the same

Hello, Argonauts!

How goes the questing?

“come outside and play!”
spring weather beckons, homework—
should be forgotten

Using Haiku to Notice Deeper

Haiku is the poetry of noticing. At its core, a haiku is your artistic rendering of something you have observed in the real world or in your imagination. When you write about your observations, you can’t help but notice things you previously missed.

Your senses are always sending information about your environment to your brain. Trying to make decisions based on all of the sensory input you receive would be paralyzing, so your brain filters out most of the details. But, those details are still recorded in your memory.

Writing haiku gives you more access to some of that filtered sensory detail. You are retraining your brain about what is and is not important.

Imagine you see a squirrel run up a tree and decide to write a haiku about it. During that process, your brain may also serve up memories of many other times you’ve seen squirrels scampering up trees. Because of the way human brains are wired, your poem about that one singular moment of the squirrel and the tree, will be a composite of thousands of trees and squirrels.

What if you want to go even deeper into the details of the current moment or of past memories? Here are three haiku exercises that can help you notice at a deeper level than ever before.

Exercise #1: Your Attention is a Lantern

First, let’s change the way we think about our attention. We tend to think about attention as being a spotlight. If you’ve ever walked in the dark with a flashlight, you know that the relatively narrow beam of light only illuminates the path right in front of you. What if your attention was like a lantern instead? A lantern gives off light in all directions. They illuminate the stuff closest to you the most, but they cast their light much farther, pushing away the dark and allowing you to see a wider space.

The next time you are writing a haiku, remind yourself that your attention is a lantern, not a spotlight. Look at the edges of the scene. This will lead to some unexpected observations.

Exercise #2: The 10 Haiku Session

In poetry, we tend to favor quality over quantity—as we should. But, there is a place for quantity. If you really want to go deep on something, write ten haiku about it in one sitting. This exercise does several things for your ability to notice. One, it extends the time you are concentrating, making it more likely that you will fall into a zone of deep focus. It also forces you to come up with more things to say about what you are writing about. Writing a set of haiku about a single moment also changes the way you perceive moments. You start to see them as entire lifecycles.

You can do the ten haiku exercise with almost anything. Writing ten haiku about that squirrel running up the tree is just one possibility. I’ve found great insight in writing ten haiku about things such as money, loneliness, and time. This exercise allows you to dive deeper into your subconscious than any of us typically dare to go.

Exercise #3: Investigation

This exercise requires you to look a little strange. Go out for a walk, and when something gets your attention, stop and study it. Using the squirrel example, you might follow the squirrel along the ground, staring up into the tree to see where it’s going and what it’s doing. You might walk all around the base of the tree, noticing everything you can about the bark, leaves, and branches.

When I do this, I use my phone camera as an aid. I often stop, squat on the ground and zoom in as close as possible to a flower or insect, and take macro-pictures. This helps me see new colors and patterns. I also like to change the angle from which I’m seeing things. I get down on the ground and look underneath things and in between leaves. Having a phone or camera out also makes you seem less crazy to any observers.

Some pictures from some of my walks over the years

This exercise is about you becoming an anthropologist of a moment. After you complete your investigation, write a series of haiku about what you experienced.

Bonus Exercise: Stake Out

One variation of Investigation that I love when the weather is too hot or too wet is the Stake Out. I sit in my car and watch the world outside of my windshield. I watch everything and everyone that passes within my view like I’m a cop in an 80s movie staking out a criminal lair. I take notes or sketch about that world. When something interesting happens, I write a haiku or two about it.

We live in such an interesting world, and most of the time we only notice a tiny fraction of all the drama going on. As you deepen your ability to notice, you will start to feel more connected to the world and less connected to your anxieties and petty concerns.

Artist Note

If this was a different kind of newsletter, I would have written a long screed against homework in almost all forms. Instead, I made a haiku comic, and that is probably better for all of us.

If you end up trying any of these notice exercises, I’d love to hear about it!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason