This winter I wrote haiku:

mrzel gozd -
oponašam
ptice

cold forest -
I'm imitating
birds

Alenka 2002

It reminded my friend Edin of his haiku written the winter before:

mraz v gozdu
zgoščuje tišino -
prihaja zima

cold in the forest
thickens the silence -
winter is coming

Edin 1999

.......and he wrote a joint haiku:

mraz v gozdu
zgoščuje tišino -
oponašam ptice

cold in the forest
thickens the silence -
I'm imitating birds

Edin & Alenka 2002

Edin, a philosophy teacher, was inspired by the content of Spinoza's work and therefore he wrote the following comment:

The first haiku goes from nature to a human being and then back to the nature. The second one goes from nature to the absolute, the metaphysical emptiness of a human being. Then the human being and nature become one. The joint haiku goes from nature to the metaphysical unity. The human being "speaks" wordless, only by imitating birds and expresses the final truth about the world, which is: the object and the subject are one, i.e. God is the same as nature, they are one, the human being is the part of them, being unified. By haiku he/she can express his/her awareness of this triple-unity.