In the Beginning there was the Night I Nearly Died

It started on December 21, 2019, when I woke up lying on the couch in my living room and took note of a glorious sunrise. Something in that sunrise thumped me on the head as I took a photo.

I had been spending my days sitting on a recliner in the corner of my living room doing mostly nothing.

I had come close to death in the previous October and all I knew was... everyone else was so happy I was back home and healthy but truth be told, I was in a horrible space mentally.

I remembered how fun it was to write haiku – very descriptive, of sunrise and then post on facebook.

My friend Laurie lived across town from me. She would tell me how much she loved reading my haiku, how she would look forward to reading the in the morning before she left her house and then going out her door and seeing what I had just written.

It was like our daily personal celebration.

I sat in my recliner and told myself something had to change.

I had no one to give me an inspirational talk to myself except for myself. The preceding years I had become more isolated from friends after a rift with numerous friends after I took a stand for something I believed in strongly. I didn't regret the stand, I definitely regretted some of  my behavior before, during and after that time.

This time, after this sunrise,  I wanted to take that sort of energy and intention and create, differently.

I decided to do a trial run of morning haiku or micropoems and photos and see how I felt after a few days later.

Within a week  I decided I wanted to aim to write haiku all three-hundred-sixty-six days of 2020. I wanted to write haiku in the morning – before noon in whatever time zone I was in – and I wanted to post them on my personal facebook page. Since I was close to the end of 2019 I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool to span three different calendar years?" so I decided to cross over into 2o21.

In total that would be 377 haiku across four seasons with eleven bonus days of winter.

Those were my rules.

I had no expectations beyond posting daily, as best as I could.

I knew I risked failing or worst yet embarrassing myself or even worse, being boring, but somehow I created magic that turned into tree hugging and daily love notes to my next big collaborative project, #377podcasts which is where we are now.

Turns out what I wrote back in 2020 has definitely has had firework tendrils, unexpected when I wrote: "Somehow something as simple as writing seventeen syllables daily feels a lot more significant, a lot more special and I’m definitely a lot more likely to complete it, one celebration at a time."

With this project, I will have gone through the same amount of time as my preschool years or my college years, or the years I was married before I had a surviving baby or the years between almost dying and learning not to let go, but to choose to live and love and grow with my whole heart without worrying about results. PS As we begin I am still inching towards that last part.