‘What’s the word for the sky in your house?’ my granddaughter asked as I was putting her to bed. ‘The sky in my house?’ And I looked up towards the ceiling, imagined the open space above it, between floor joists and the roof’s wooden rafters, and I saw what she was seeing, saw it confined there as if it had forgotten to move before we’d converted the derelict barn to a home. ‘Ah, the attic,’ I said. Fifteen years later I live in a house with no attic and sometimes I stare at the sky and wonder about all that time it was living with me and I hadn’t known. In his Afterword to The Wonder Code Scott Mason asks, ‘… where does wonder begin?’ And answers, ‘I believe it begins with a sense of discovery.’ discover (v.) from the Old French descovrir, which meant, satisfyingly in the above context, to unroof, and also to unveil, to reveal. We discover things when we lift the veils of self-importance, fear, indifference, cynicism, intolerance, impatience. We di
Lynne Rees on haiku writing - creative and critical