I was enjoying outside the other day, when a chance encounter with nature happened. I recorded it:

watching the leaves
blow in the wind

葉が風に舞うのを見ている
ha ga kaze ni mau no o mite iru

^{Mizuno Toshikata - Chivalrous Man in Autumn}

I was sitting outside, watching nature while reading my book. Although the temperature has finally started dropping a bit in the evenings here, the leaves have not even started to change, and we are even further from when they start to fall. Nevertheless, one did flutter past me while I was sitting there after a particularly strong wind gust. Perhaps it had been loosened by one of the typhoon we've had recently. At any rate, as I watched it fall to the ground, this simple descriptive haiku came to me.

It strikes me very much in the style of Santōka. He was a wandering Zen monk who crisscrossed Japan on foot, drinking and writing haiku the entire way. He eschewed the traditional 5-7-5 structure and followed a much more—and usually even shorter—free-form style. Whether mine above is similar to a haiku from him that I've read before, or simply reminiscent of his style, I couldn't say; I just know mine makes me think of him.

It also calls to mind—and this is another association I made only after writing it—a scene from American Beauty when they are watching a short film of a bag being blown to and from by the wind, fluttering this way and that, surrendering to nature, dancing in the breeze. As he says in that movie Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world.

A common falling leaves kigo (season word) would be momiji chiru (紅葉散る), but there are others. They are all kigo for winter, which is a bit away from where we are now. Leaves, of course, do start to fall during the autumn in Japan, but in the Japanese traditional view, the colored leaves were for autumn, but falling leaves indicated autumn was now over and gave an image more of winter.

【Also published on my website】

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David LaSpina is an American photographer 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 Twitter or Mastodon.