8.23.16

At an event
wishing i had brought a book.
Haiku, my constant friend.

Thinking of people
who i need to love better,
wishing i knew more.

8.15.16

Ancient bestiary
is just old school Photoshop.
Draw on!

Hippo-campus
half horse half fish
is not a Pokemon
but should be.

8.6.16 Haiku Chain

Is it possible
to have a haiku moment?
well i did just now.

Silver crescent moon
cicadas buzzing
in a green sunset
- private

I would love to have shared it
but you are online
and I'm on the porch.

Adventures of a Simple Mind

It doesn't rain in Tennessee 

When it rains in Indiana dark clouds gather and threaten the pedestrian. It begins with a light two-minute warming of rain sprinkling the sidewalks and pavement. Then it cuts loose! Rain pours from above soaking the buildings and vegetation. As storm drains backs up street flood. The next day everyone in Indiana is talking about the bad weather. But it doesn’t rain like that in Tennessee.

Rain in the mountains is noisy and I never actually got wet. The rain would hit the canopy with a glorious drumming. The heaviest of this dripped down leaf to leaf until the shattered particles sprinkled lightly on the ground. Smaller rain drops took even longer to reach the forest floor or sidewalk. So although it sounded like it was raining; it really wasn’t. One major problem with this delay effect from canopy was that I got dripped on long after it actually stopped raining.

So in Tennessee you can get wet when it isn’t raining and stay dry when it is. 

Adventures of a Simple Mind

I laughed at the sky 

I was on my way home to Indiana when I was shocked by how beautiful the sky was. It had a clear blue background with ranks of puffy white clouds. I laughed at myself aloud. I hadn’t seen the sky for four days.

In the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee the earth had a very odd second layer of skin called “the canopy”. Trees looked like sticks growing straight up out if the ground. There were no branches on the tree until at least sixty feet up. Back home in Indiana that would never happen. Each tree is silhouette perfect in a corn field.

But in the mountains branch touched branch, tree touched tree until a green skin covered the mountain and the next mountain. I saw enormous smooth green bumps creating a series of horizon lines no less than seven deep. Indiana has one horizon line of corn or no horizon line if you are in the city.

In Tennessee everything stopped much closer to my eye because of these mountains of green. What blue sky I saw was thick with plump dark rain clouds that poured themselves out on the heights but only sprinkled the valley. The Great Smokey Mountains were everything the internet pictures portray them to be. I was so struck with wonder at how different things were from back home in Indiana.  I laughed at myself a great deal.