Carpe Diem #926 Nature

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

My excuses for being this late with publishing our new episode. I am in the nightshift and I hadn't time to publish this episode earlier.
Today we are going further with sharpening our senses through the wonderful essays by Hamish Managua Gunn (a.k.a. Pirate). By the way ... I hope to make his E-book "Forest Walk" available this week.

Introduction

One of my co-workers has been on a holiday to Iceland and came back with wonderful stories, but I was mostly amazed by her photo of the "Northern Lights" or "Aurora Borealis". It's really the magical and mystical mysterious beauty of our wonderful nature to which we are "hooked" through our love for haiku.

Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) photo © Marleen Duimstra

The photo of the "Northern Lights" inspired me to write the following tanka:

sign of the gods
the night painted in thousand colors -
cracking snow
reflects the 'dance of the spirits'
aurora borealis

© Chèvrefeuille
 

Hamish on nature 

Howard Gardner sees the sense of Nature as an Intelligence, and has added it as his 8th intelligence to his Theory of Multiple Intelligences, where he names 7 other different intelligences (Intrapersonal/Interpersonal/Audio-Musical/Kinesthetic/Spatial/Linguistic/Logical-Mathetmatical) A sense of nature, the rhythms of nature and its beauty is perhaps not only an intelligence, and not merely an appreciation, either.

The connection of haiku to nature is important, deep, and vivid. It is hard to imagine writing haiku that are not about nature. And in nature there is so much to explore. When we look at the life of plants in more detail, for example, we can see how they sense light, gravity, temperature, humidity, chemical substances, chemical gradients, reorientation, magnetic fields, infections, tissue damage and mechanical pressure. The absence of a nervous system notwithstanding, plants interpret and respond to these stimuli by a variety of hormonal and cell-to-cell communication pathways that result in movement, morphological changes and physiological state alterations at the organism level. This is quite amazing.

In the animal world there is also electroreception (or electroception), the ability to detect electric fields. The platypus has the most acute sense of electroception. A dolphin can detect electric fields in water using electroreceptors. These electroreceptors can detect electric fields as weak as 4.6 microvolts per centimeter, such as those generated by contracting muscles and pumping gills of potential prey. This permits the dolphin to locate prey from the seafloor where sediment limits visibility and echolocation. Several species of fish, sharks, and rays have the capacity to sense changes in electric fields in their immediate vicinity. For cartilaginous fish this occurs through a specialized organ called the Ampullae of Lorenzini. Some fish passively sense changing nearby electric fields; some generate their own weak electric fields, and sense the pattern of field potentials over their body surface; and some use these electric field generating and sensing capacities for social communication.

Nature is so full of mystery, science, beauty and art and patterns. What a beautiful topic for another haiku about the beauty and wonder of our natural planet!

Aurora Borealis (source: Wikipedia)

My response


What a beautiful essay Hamish. You are a talented writer and poet and I am glad that you have done this for CDHK this month.
This prompt especially had my attention, because of the title "nature" .... because our beloved haiku is real poetry of nature and learns us to watch closer and with love to our surroundings trying to catch her beauty in three lines.

treat of Mother Earth
coloring the skies
Aurora Borealis
a palette of colors
treat of Mother Earth

© Chèvrefeuille

What a joy, what a spectacle ... Aurora Borealis ... magic.

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until February 29th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode, the last CD-Special by Hamish Gunn, our featured haiku poet, later on. For now ... have fun!

!! PS.: I am busy with creating the anonymous list of our "Time" - kukai and I hope to publish it this weekend !!