Toward the middle of April, I was plagued by some serious doomscrolling issues. Even though I swore to myself that I would not read the news or look at Instagram before 3:00 pm, I found myself doing it anyway. Beginning in the morning as soon as I woke up. This was not a good thing for my mental health. I was suffering. I was avoiding my regular morning routine, which included what Tom and I refer to as “gentle waking” (which, for me, is coffee, meditation, poetry, and puzzles) (Tom has his own “gentle waking” routine).

I knew I needed to do . . . something . . . to break the spell of my new scrolling habit. The new something needed to be easy. It needed to be engaging. I needed to be able to do it in 5 minutes or less and without any fuss and bother or special materials. Most importantly, it needed to be NOT digital.

I landed on . . . haiku.

I’ve done this before, this writing haiku thing. Back in the early days of the pandemic, for about a month that summer of 2020, I wrote a haiku every day and posted it on Instagram, paired with a photo (this was back when I used to post on Instagram). So I decided to try it again. (The haiku writing, not the posting.)

I grabbed an empty journal and a pen . . . and on April 24 I started this way:

Here I go again
spinning thoughts into fragments
thinking in haiku

And I continued on the following day . . .
and the one after that . . .
and on and on through the summer.

I set a few guidlines for myself:

  • I would follow the general rules of haiku (the 17-syllable, 5-7-5 format), but I wasn’t going to get hung up on the nature theme, the kireji, or the kigo (although if that occurred naturally, I was fine with it). (And if the 5-7-5 didn’t quite cut it, I was okay with some flexibility – a 5-6-6 . . . or something.)
  • I could only spend 5 minutes or less writing any haiku.
  • No editing after the fact; when it was finished it was finished.
  • And, maybe most important, no judgment allowed.

And that was it. The haikus I would be writing each morning . . . wouldn’t be poetry-worthy. I am not a poet, and I don’t aspire to be a poet. I just wanted to play with words using a specific structure while starting my day in a non-digital, non-scrolling way.

And it worked! I found . . . that I looked forward to starting my mornings with a haiku. When I woke in the night and couldn’t sleep, I tried to “think in haiku” until I went back to sleep. Sometimes I remembered them in the morning, but usually I didn’t. Most of the haikus I was writing were garden-related (it was spring, after all), but many followed the activities of my days . . . protests and trips up north and my mental state. My haikus . . . became part of my journaling; a way to keep track of my thoughts and feelings about what I was doing.

Sometime around the middle of July, I realized I was developing a regular haiku-writing practice. When I counted back, I found that I had been haiku-ing for . . . nearly 100 days. Now I’m not into 100-days projects, but here I was . . . nearing the finish line of a 100-day project without intending to start one!

On August 1 I wrote my 100th haiku . . . and I decided to continue with my practice. My days are generally more settled . . . when I begin them with a haiku.

Today’s entry:

I’m writing haiku
about writing haiku
emotional rescue

Emotional rescue, indeed!