Process Notes on a Video Haibun

I have long been intrigued with all of the experiments that people have done with video poems, and lately, Dave Bonta's haibuns have made me want to try the form.

Here's my haibun, with the words below:

Lower Your Boats


The Holy Spirit is that time in the morning: the sun breaks through, the light spreads across the sky, staining it with color, telling us, “It is time. Time to lower our boats into the water, time to go out onto the sea.”


Leave your safe harbor.
Find other fish to harvest.
Pluck the perfect shell.

To watch on YouTube, go here.

Process Notes:

In May, I was part of a team who put together a pre-recorded worship service for Pentecost.  My pastor asked me if I wanted to do a creative reflection or meditation, and I said yes (for notes on that project, see this blog post).

I spent a week walking around the neighborhood, being hit with all kinds of inspiration, and creating meditations by filming with the camera, while I spoke from behind the camera.  As I walked and created, I thought about how similar to poetry the process was for me.  I was trying to make people think about the Holy Spirit in ways that they never had before.  I was trying to jolt them out of their long held beliefs about the Divine, just the way that the original Pentecost experience had done for those first believers.

I ended up with lots of short bits of film, and as Dave posted his haibuns, I thought about returning to them to see if they might work.

I love the compressed form of the haiku, although I'm always hesitant to call what I write haiku.  Once I went to a haiku workshop at the Morikami Museum, and I learned that there's so much more to this art form than compression and syllables.

And I feel even less secure about using the term haibun to describe what I'm doing--I worry that there's an aspect or two that I'm mutilating.  I was so worried about issues of cultural appropriation/desecration that it took me some time to convince myself to post the haibun.

And then I laughed at myself.  It's a haibun-like thing, for pity's sake.  It's not like I'm writing a novel and appropriating the voice of a migrant worker or a Civil Rights icon.  People will not call for the revoking of my multi-million dollar book deal.

I'll keep working in this format--I like that I have lots of little videos already recorded, so even when I'm feeling blah and uninspired, I can make something new.  I like having a project that inspires me and scares me.  I like sailing beyond the harbor of my comfort zone.