Everyone just calls it “the gully.” It’s a bit of wilderness in the midst of our Southern California development. A creek runs through it, lined with eucalyptus trees.
A winter’s day. I am around nine. Some friends and I come upon a strange sight: large clumps of dry leaves hanging from the trees. These turn out to be monarch butterflies—in fabulous numbers. Some fly around the gully and near our faces, bright flashes of orange like enchanted confetti. I hold out my hands and for an instant, one almost lands there.
dappled light
the untamed taste
of sour grass
Soon after, my parents divorce. My mother, sisters and I keep moving farther and farther away. Then to my mother’s native Switzerland for a year. The day after we fly back to California, my father stops by on his way to the airport. He is returning to his homeland of Japan—for the rest of his life.
rope swing
assessing the depth
of my losses
More than once over the following decades, he moves without telling us his new address. We see each other just three more times.
return to sender
the chrysalis
unopened
As for the monarchs, severe drought and disease take their toll. For a few years, the butterflies all but disappear from the gully. But now they are returning: last December, more than 26,000 were counted on a single day. In just four hours of flying, I could go back fifty years in time and see them again.
“Sometimes it feels absurd to try to convey the complexity and nuance of any human experience with just 26 letters—like using a mud-covered stick to paint the Sistine Chapel. I find that combining art forms is one good way to expand the possibilities for expression. As an artist, I enjoy working in the Japanese tradition of haiga: art combined with haiku so that both elements deepen our understanding of the whole. A similar process happens in a successful haibun: together, the prose and haiku expand the overall meaning in an intuitive way that neither could do alone. And suddenly, those meager 26 letters transport us to a new world.”