Last night before going to bed, I wrote

As I've written before, I try to make myself write at least one haiku everyday. I don't really think most of them are very good, but I write anyway. That's not me being modest, just realistic. Even the best baseball players rarely hit much above .300 (that's a 30% hit rate for the baseball illiterate). To continue the baseball metaphor, I don't take so many swings because I'm expecting to hit them all, I mostly just want to stay in the habit—and I enjoy writing them too.

Last night I was tired and ready for bed. It had been a long day. But then I realized I hadn't yet written any haiku for that day. So I pulled out a notecard and ... sat thinking. And thinking. And thinking. I might have nodded off a few times in there.

Then, it came to me, and I wrote down the above. And almost immediately went into the bedroom and fell asleep.

A little meta, perhaps, and playfully, but some haiku are both those things. Issa, who is generally considered the one of the greatest haikuists of all time, wrote some 20,000+ haiku in his life—which works out to several every single day of his adult years—and many of them were meta too, so I'm in good company.

David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. 【Support @dbooster with Hive SBI】