Trying To Capture The Full Complexity Of a Human Experience

To some degree the haikuist is constantly trying to capture the full complexity of a human experience, but in the fewest words possible. — John Paul Lederach.

In my senior year in high school we had to compose a few haikus. You remember a haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.

Great orators, like my friend Luis Leon, find ways to to take the very complex and with intensity and directness of expression “capture the simplicity on the other side of the complexity.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes.

We all live very complex lives, but our goal shouldn’t be to take away the complexity, but to seek out the simplicity on the other side. In other words, to create a haiku. To discover the poetry in our life.

 

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About the author

Webb Hubbell is the former Associate Attorney General of The United States. His novels, When Men Betray, Ginger Snaps, A Game of Inches, The Eighteenth Green, and The East End are published by Beaufort Books and are available online or at your local bookstore. When Men Betray won one of the IndieFab awards for best novel in 2014. Ginger Snaps and The Eighteenth Green won the IPPY Awards Gold Medal for best suspense/thriller. His latest, “Light of Day” will be on the bookstands soon.