I enjoy writing Haiku poetry from time to time. I follow what I believe to be the English adaptation of the form, namely a first line of five syllables, followed by a line of seven, and a final line of five. A colleague who used a haiku activity as part of a workshop summarized a few guidelines for those participants. Haikus tend to: value conciseness; be weighted toward nature and emotion, address the eternal in the specific, deal with essence, and combine scale. I’m glad the indication is that haikus tend toward these characteristics, because I’ve not found it easy to hit each of these marks with every 17 syllable effort.
Recently I composed a few poems in which I tried to convey some essence of systems thinking. See what you think:
Do not blame for bad
Behavior look instead to
Change system structure.
and,
Wise understanding
Flows from open clean questions
Intention to learn.
And then just this weekend, while working in the garden preparing beds for seeds (sweet peas!), the idea for this haiku came to me:
Conversational
Leaves change color and falling
Mulch relationships.
I’ve designed and hosted a lot of conversations in community settings in the last six months. The issues that matter to these communities include how to increase awareness about employment of people with disabilities, diabetes awareness and overall community health, access to health care in rural communities, and strengthening families to prevent child abuse and neglect. In all these situations, my intention is to help build new relationships through meaningful conversations. I invite my community colleagues to consider the value of going slow now in order to go fast later. That is, of course, to focus on relationships early in any change process so that the “real” work seems to go quickly and smoothly. I think next I will try to find some images to convey the idea of mulching relationships to support creativity and high performance later.