To Farm is to Hope:

Haiga for the Heartland

For one year I tried to write a haiku every morning while I walked our dog Newton through the fields and woods of our farm. Some days I wrote three or four haiku. Some days my mind was focused on other things. Some days I forgot the important seventeen syllables before we returned home and they were lost. In Japan, painters often combined haiku with a painting. These combinations are called haiga. I can’t paint with a brush, but I can “paint” with words and my camera. I can usually keep seventeen syllables in my mind and frame a photo to accompany those three lines and so here they are, my haiga for our small piece of the world, from my heart.