Haiku 2023–329

yesterday, today

Jess — I need her, I want her

in my day and night

— —

How did this haiku come to be (other than the fact that my beautiful bride is the most amazing woman I know)? Here’s how…

45, 28

55, 1, 70, 80, 1, 95, 80

10, 11, 39, 5, 35

Confused? Let me explain…

I had the notion this week to combine two of my interests, technology and writing, into a single project. I journal almost every day into a personal knowledge management program (Obsidian, if you most know) that I’ve used since February. I launch the program, set my watch for seven minutes, and write. I’ve gone back and forth in how exactly I write in my journal, but it does remain a consistent exercise of pouring myself into it. I began to wonder what kind of insights would come out of seeing how often I use certain words when writing. To that end, I wrote a Python program to crawl through that folder and find out.

I then decided to challenge my creative self.

My journal contains almost 4,500 unique words including proper nouns and a few commonly-used hashtags. Could I write a meaningful haiku about my life using only the one-hundred most frequently used words in my journal? One that would reflect who I am as a person? It turns out that I can. The numbers above represent what place they fall on the list. It turns out I only needed ninety-five.