Every morning before work, a friend and I compose and send each other a quick poem, a “flash haiga.” The rules are: it must include an image we made ourselves, preferably that morning, and the writing (done as a loose sort of haiku) can’t take more than 15 minutes. (We can revise later, but the first, fresh thing must be done in a flash.)

It’s a discipline. A creative practice. It primes the pump for a day of thinking and writing and making–even if the main thing we think and write and make that day is, say, a training schedule for new teachers.

We’ve been frolicking with words for years, and although we are playful about haiku we actually respect the form deeply and understand that our correspondence is a way to pay closer attention to the details of our daily lives–sometimes even before we’ve made sense of why they seem to matter enough to share.