Haiku Shuukan – Perfection – February 6, 2015

cold winter morning
tea rose’s perfection
spider’s web

© G.s.k. ‘15

This week on Haiku Shuukan we begin a new spiritual journey, let me quote our host:

” … I have found a new “spiritual” series of prompts starting this week with “I have managed to reach perfection”.

This sentence is from the short novel “The Way of the Bow” by Paulo Coelho. In this novel he describes the spiritual path of the Bow, the Japanese art of archery. This sentence is said by a man who challenges Tetsuya, the most important character in this novel, to shoot the bow with him.”

I’m inclined to believe that perfection doesn’t exist … in the sense that something that cannot be improved, which of course is the meaning of perfection, doesn’t exist.  But we can try to look for a relative perfection … always considering that in this world of constant change that perfection will be gone with a blink of the eye.  So I’m looking at perfection as a relatively perfect moment.

I took th photograph of the above rose a week ago.  It was really very nearly a perfect shot in the sense that the rose came out beautifully … of course the photo isn’t perfect because the background is not very pretty and to work around this I’d have to cut the rose out and superimpose it onto a better background.  I decided that I would monochrome the photo and see what would happen – whilst I was looking at it in my editor, I noticed for the first time a tiny spiderweb among its leaves… an imperfection right?  Well obviously not from the spider’s point of view!  So I decided that that spiderweb would be my idea of perfection … a beautiful rose which also gives hospitality to a spider one  cold winter morning.