Day II Moments and Visual Haiku: explanation of haiku

On day II of the workshop Moments and Visual Haiku we started with analyzing haikus and writing one ourselves. A haiku consists of three sentences with respectively five, seven and five syllables. A haiku brings you in the now and usually is about nature, man as part as nature that is and not as a spectator. This is just a very simple explanation of a haiku and it's far from complete.
The first sentence has the principle of heaven, space or sense observation: we taste, hear or experience something. In Miksang: our availability is in that space, our flash of perception.
The second sentence contains the earth principle, something practical, something that can really be seen.
The third sentence contains direct perception and it links the whole thing together, that can be a surprise or a joke.
Together we made a haiku on the basis of what I saw and mentioned: our teacher's iPhone that was balancing on the edge of a kabinet (see the picture above, translated out of Dutch by myself):

iPhone on the edge
everyone is watching
giggling on the couch

Next we did a small grounding exercise and then we wrote our own haiku, mine was like this (translated out of Dutch):
the twittering of seagulls
stripes of sunlight
silence in myself
Mind you, we didn't stick to the 5-7-5 syllable rule just to get ourselves started. It was a lot of fun to do, but by no means easy. As a lot of traditions, writing haikus need a lot of practice.

collection of haikus on sticky notes