2014.09.24 — 5-7-5 Birds, Water, and Cigarettes: Bizarre Haiku-Like Thing Fushigi*

The world is filled with magic. But often it is lost to the roar of life’s busy-ness. And sometimes, perhaps often, the smallest of magical moments are tips of much more, the more that is too big for us to see behind the buzz of our tea-pot tempests.

There was a delightful magic in my life tonight, an odd fushigi in the guise of poem-like things in the form of 5-7-5 syllables. Not proper Haiku, but an oftentimes delightful perversion of the form that can be found in the creative WSS / Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company Haiku-Game thread.

I was FB-talking with Al. She was sharing her poems with me, when I got the urge to continue the Haiku game thread from #7823.

To continue the game I followed with imagery from the previous 5-7-5. I wrote:

In water she floats
With a humming bird's grace
And wet cigarettes.

“May I see what you wrote?” she asked when I came back to our conversation. Her reaction to my words was a single one: “Weird.”

Al disappeared for a moment, and returned with something she had written earlier today, on paper in her journal. As she describes it in her blog, Pens and Erasers, she didn’t like what she had written and crossed it out. However, after reading what I wrote she transcribed it. Here’s what Al had written:

A cigarette floats
In rivers of tears and
She flies away

So. Fushigi or not? Very very odd, at the very least. So much so she decided to blog it, and asked for my short description or definition of a fushigi. Here is what I wrote:

I call such connections fushigis. In and of themselves they may mean nothing to everyone in the world, but they mean something to the person experiencing them. They are unique meaningful acausal connections.

Singly they can be dismissed as chance by the pedantic. But when collected, their meaningfulness becomes astounding.

C.G Jung called such things ‘synchronicities’. Not too many years ago I was burdened in my thoughts that Jung referred to ‘important’ issues when he applied that word. Which is why I adopted the word fushigi. But I have read more of his words since then, and now I think he would see this little haiku-like life-experience as a synchronicity.