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Passage of time with words

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Staff

By Shawn Hoffman

As children, including my own, are beginning their school-day schedules once again, I’m going to take up a practice that I did for several weeks this summer while my son traveled Europe with backpack in tow – the practice of writing a haiku once a day –

Shift your weight and load
As you seek understanding
Backpack as fulcrum

Our 21-year-old son, John, traveled five countries in seven weeks for a unique summer experience. The impulse to write a haiku a day came from some need to discipline myself and examine my feelings along his journey. Anticipation, excitement, worry, gratitude – emotions felt from that first day of kindergarten and even today as he begins his senior year of college.

The trip to me was so symbolic of his journey, but my passage. Hasn’t it been our job to give him the skills that he needs to move through life with a confidence that he is his own person? Isn’t it my job to each day let go a little bit more until, like this summer, we let go and say goodbye almost completely.

Heart in transition
Your boundaries are the largest
They could ever be –

My flowing passage as his mom takes beauty and courage that sometimes cannot be captured in the stillness of a photograph. The loosening of my tongue and my heart through placing simple words on a page allowed me to press out the moments of transition in our lives.

To learn a bit about haiku, I went online and read several ways to discipline its form, but I simply chose one – that of a line rhythm of 5,7,5 – the syllables on each line. Some days, I chose my own style, which I coined “Folk Art Haiku,” when freedom was needed and my tongue could not be disciplined.

Poetry as “folk art”
Now that resonates in my soul
Words should have a freedom
To move on the page
Our lives unsettled
Often unpredictable
Moments of stillness we seek
When change is constant

In my busy day of going to work, visiting my mom with Alzheimer’s, trying to exercise and all the life challenges that so many of us have, I needed to allow words to become the compass for my direction each day.

Enjoy life’s compass
A navigation palette
Of colors you choose

The time of writing, usually in the morning but sometimes in the car or walking at the gym, became the pause of stillness to go into that part of myself that feels deeply about what it has meant to send my “bird from the nest” –

Red bird on cedar
It’s perch within our eyes’ grasp
What are you thinking?
the “shimmering verge’’
Of the space between not filled
Possibility lies

In the last weeks since he returned, I have realized that my passage with words those weeks served me in more ways than was their initial purpose. So as of today, I will take the practice and navigate with it once again. Sometimes it is a challenge in the demands of life to go to that part of oneself that feels deeply and say to it, “Open your truest voice because I care what you have to say” – the haiku practice offered my heart walking shoes to stay open and healthy on the path of what life offers in each moment – it allowed my brain to visit the other hemisphere of creativity and flow, and I’ve missed that journey these last weeks. The whole collection of my summer haikus is greater than each of its parts and has a shape all its own.

The shape still forming
Of the whole and its moments
Parts support the sculpture

My neighbor, Sarah, puts her last of three sons, my godson, on the kindergarten school bus this year. His first day of class is John’s first day of his senior year. I am nearing the end of the passage that for Sarah is beginning. Our “fulcrums,” while in two different places, have a sort of delicate balance – what a beautiful ride – Sarah this is for you …

Our shoes and hearts will
Journey to Nathan’s bus and share
Tears and mimosas!
And as John leaves our driveway for college –
Tracks of growing years
Through right or left rear windows
Views from fresh lenses
And for myself filled with a compass of emotion for all families in this journey –
(East): We greet our day
(North): With open hands to life’s force
(South): That shifts our children like the sand
and the seas
(West): Wild youths smiling in our salty hearts

After all, it is their journey, but it is my passage …

Shawn Hoffman is a Carrboro resident.

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