Summer Reading With Meaning: Noticing
This Labor Day blog post is the last of our 2026 Summer Reading With Meaning selections.
At the end of a rushed visit to a dear friend, I spotting a volume on her coffee table while heading for the door. The book was "Noticing: A Selection of Haikus" by Jim Freiburger, a collection of photographs and accompanying poems in the traditional Japanese form of three unrhymed lines with a 5-7-5 syllable structure. Pressed for time, I quickly glanced through the slim volume before finding myself doing precisely what the book itself does: I slowed down; I took a breath; I began to notice.
If you live in or are a frequent visitor to the seacoast of New Hampshire, you’ll recognize many of the scenes, across the seasons, captured in the volume’s photos and translated into poetic lines. The Swansey Parkway riverwalk, the Exeter Mill and public boat launch, a windchime, a balcony flower box, a parking lot obscured by autumnal trees—in other words, the everyday, even the mundane, what’s here and now, in front of us. If we stop and notice. The neighborhood may never look the same.
Accumulatively and quietly, the book’s simplicity places such ordinary scenes within a universal context, with nature as the bridge. Each piece focuses on a view of the natural environment, some with the human nestled within it, others with nature taking full and center stage. The haiku form itself is traditionally a mediation on a transitory moment in nature. "Noticing" as book, and noticing as practice the volume suggests, enacts a respect for nature, a gratitude for its tenacious generosity. All corners of the globe, after all, are gifted the “beam streams” beauty of a “Waxing Gibbous Moon” and many people understand that “Leaves rustling in sea breezes/Heal body and soul”—seacoast New Hampshire also (especially?) benefits from that ubiquitous bounty.
In reading, you do not get the impression the pieces are intended to be perfect or “refined” (in fact, they were published as a private collection to share with family members). That informality may be part of the invitation the book extends—to note the stunning world hidden among the daily rush, waiting for us. A few pieces are humorous (bob houses on a frozen river are a “fishy story”). My favorites focus on the messy artistry of small pockets of wilderness hidden in plain view. A photograph seizes upon what could be any spontaneous backyard stream in early winter or spring, icicles, easily overlooked, serendipitously appearing among leaf litter on a rotting branch: “Crystal image forms/Capture weeping log’s tears/Icicles sculptured."
It all coheres, the planned and the unplanned, the daily and the cosmic, and someone noticed, and in noticing, gave thanks. Next time, I hope it will be me.
About the author of "Noticing: A Selection of Haikus"
Jim Freiburger is also the author of a prose memoir, "An Iowa Farm Boy’s Odyssey: Priest, Parent, Professor," self-published in 2021. Brought up in the Midwest, he joined and later left the priesthood and married Eleanor Dunfey, spending the next decades in New England. He is Eremitas Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and a longtime supporter of Global Citizens Circle.
Theresa de Langis, PhD, is an academic, researcher, and policy analyst at the intersection of women’s rights, sexual violence, and post-conflict justice. She’s recently repatriated to the U.S. after living in Cambodia for more than a decade. Dr. de Langis is currently adjunct faculty of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Education at Southern New Hampshire University. She is an Advisory Board Member of Global Citizens Circle since 2025.
Please note: We invite members of the greater Global Citizens Circle community to contribute to GCC Voices. The views and opinions expressed in each blog post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Global Citizens Circle.
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