Carpe Diem #696, Nudity

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

First this: I will not publish a Time Glass episode this week, because of lack of time and that lack of time came because of the creation of our new e-book "Haiku Writing Techniques", which is already available at our Carpe Diem Haiku Kai (you can download it at the right column of our weblog or read it in the menu at the top). And my youngest grandson has become 1 year so we had a birthday party to attend ...

Today our prompt is maybe in a way controversial, because today our prompt is nudity, not in the negative perverse way, but as seen in e.g. the paintings by Rubens. In those paintings nudity is celebrated as is done in several countries by the way. Every country has its own rules according nudity. Here in The Netherlands we have for example special beaches on which nudity is allowed. Around my hometown there are several places were recreation in the nude is allowed.

So in this episode we are celebrating nudity in the positive way.

In her "dictionary of haiku" Jane Reichhold has gathered modern kigo and one of the modern kigo for summer is nakedness or nudity and she shares a few wonderful haiku which I love to share here with you.

summer afternoon
the coolness of white
naked on a quilt

naked
on the porch
passion flowers

© Jane Reichhold

Credits: The Death of Adonis (1614) - Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

I love the paintings by Peter Paul Rubens ... he was really a great painter. He preferred the more voluptuous people for his models ... in that way I see nudity as a kind of art. There are of course more ways of nudity in art like photos.

I ask myself ... "why is nudity such a problem in our modern time, in our modern world?" We are all born completely naked, but as we grow older ... nakedness becomes shameful ... why? Our Creator has given us all a wonderful body ... why could we not show that to the world? Because of religious movements who are preaching that humankind was expelled from paradise and therefore we needed clothing and nakedness isn't accepted ... nudity is only for private circles and nudity isn't for the public.

I love to be naked ... it feels great and it gives me a feeling of freedom.... 

For this haiga I used a haiku from my archive which fits the prompt very much.

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until April 2nd at noon (CET). I will try to post our next episode, the last of this Carpe Diem Haiku Festival month, weeping willow, later on. For now .... have fun!

,