For years, I was drawn to a glass box that housed an exquisite bundle of paper encased within a beribboned leather wrap.* This box felt sacred to me. I longed to have one of my own. Eventually, after much deliberation and convincing myself I was worthy of it, I gifted it to myself. Yet once it was mine, it sat upon the fireplace mantel untouched.
Haiku Trace began when, after years had passed, I dared myself to place my own marks upon the papers inside.
I began by disrupting the perfection of the papers during my morning tea ritual. After my tea has steeped, I rest the teabag on the paper, allowing its tannins to soak into the fibres. Only then do I allow my own marks to take shape on the prized paper. This repeated ritual of staining and writing forms an ongoing performance.
These marks have become an ongoing collection of encounters with the natural world, distilled into haiku and handwritten on individual two-by-three-inch pieces of gold-edged paper. Together, they form a recorded stack of awakenings that I can add to and return to. Like the papers themselves, pieces of my becoming are held within the box I once felt unable to touch.
The collection now contains more than fifty haiku and continues to grow.
*The glass box, leather wrap and handmade papers were created by Lotus Blu Book Art. My work begins with staining and inscribing the individual papers.
