“I love this and that.”
We often declare lightly.
Love is everything.
kat ~ 9 February 2017
For Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge, prompt words Love and Light.
Tag Archives: Haiku
Uh Oh…Someone’s in Trouble
Henry
When your mother blasts
your first, middle and last name,
you know she’s not pleased!
kat ~ 4 February 2017
For Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge, prompt words: Blow (blast) and Please.
Cloudland – Friday’s Word of the Day Haiku
Hello Word Fans! You’re going to love today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day. It is “Cloudland”. It literally means “the sky” or a region of unreality, imagination, etc.; dreamland.
“Hmmm. Okay Kat. I guess it is an oKAY word, but worthy of love? I think you might be stretching it a bit.” (I’m smiling as I play this imaginary conversation in my head.)
Well, you don’t think I would leave you with such a bland, blah, blah, blah definition without giving you some juicy rest of the story info to write home about, now…do you? That would just be mean. And besides, I guarantee you will learn to love this word! (not to mention it is February the month of LOVE! :))
Being a Gemini, an air sign, and a bit of a word nerd, I am often accused of living in Cloudland; not specifically of course, but in oh so many words. Ah but, I digress. I do that a lot, hence the Cloudland references. I do think I would love living there. In Cloudland, that is, because it is actually a real place in the upper Western corner of Georgia. You probably didn’t know that, unless of course you are a nature-loving, canyon-hiking, waterfall-scaping, spelunking, yurt enthusiast. Then you might know all about Cloudland Canyon. Here’s a LINK if you’d like to visit Cloudland one day. 🙂
Oh, but there is more! Cloudland entered the English language in the early 1800’s but it has a distant Greek cousin based on the word, Nephelokokkȳgía, which means CloudCuckooLand. Its origin is traced to Aristophanes’ 414BC comedic play, The Birds, referring to the realm which separates the gods from mankind. It’s an interesting political allegory that includes such things as building walls, religion, power struggles, the creation of self-serving laws, and ultimately, the fact that a perfect world does not exist. In fact, it is said that anyone who is naïve enough to believe in such a place is a “Cloudcuckoolander”!
In the 20th and 21st Century cloudcuckooland has been used quite liberally by various politicians and big thinkers to include: Margaret Thatcher, Newt Gingrich, Paul Krugman, Imran Khan, a Pakistani sportsman turned politician, Henry Wallace, US Secretary of Agriculture in the 1930’s, and Yuri N. Maltsev, an Austrian economist and economic historian. Read more about it HERE.
So there you have it. I must admit I wouldn’t mind being a cloudlander myself, sans the “cuckoo” part. I’ve always fancied the idea of flying like the birds. I could use a bird’s eye view these days. The view from the ground lately rather cuckoo!
Dreams of Cloudland
In my wildest dreams
I sprout magnificent wings
and take to cloudland.~kat – 3 February 2017
Have a happy weekend. 🙂
Shivoo – Friday’s Word of the Day Haiku – 27 January 2017
Happy Friday and welcome to this week’s installment of Word of the Day Haiku based on dictionary.com’s word of the day. Today we have an Australian slang word to add to our growing vocabulary of obscure and unusual words…Shivoo. It means “a boisterous party or celebration” and showed up in daily discourse in the 19th century. Very little is known about its etymology (origin), which dictionary says is common for slang words and colloquialisms (by the way a colloquialism is a word that is considered colloquial or conversational, informal, referring to types of speech or to usages not on a formal level. Colloquial is often mistakenly used with a connotation of disapproval, as if it mean “vulgar” or “bad” or “incorrect” usage, whereas it is merely a familiar style used in speaking and writing.)
Of course, if you’ve been following my weekly dive into words…beautiful words… you know that I am seldom content to take one dictionary’s meaning at face value. I like to excavate other references when possible.
It did not take me long to find that Shivoo is also listed in baby name books. Its origin is Gujarati, Hindu, Indian. It means “Devotee of Lord Shiva”. My curiosity was peaked now. What is the meaning of Gujarati, I wondered…or more precisely, as I discovered, Gujarati “people”? Wikipedia answered my question with the click of a mouse:
Gujarati people or Gujaratis (Gujarati: ગુજરાતી) are an Indo-Aryan ethno-linguistic group of India that traditionally speaks Gujarati, an Indo-Iranian language. Famous Gujaratis include Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Morarji Desai, Sam Bahadur, Vikram Sarabhai, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Shyamji Krishna Varma, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Freddie Mercury, Azim Premji, Dhirubhai Ambani, Narendra Modi and Jamsetji Tata. Gujaratis are very prominent in industry and key figures played an historic role in the introduction of the doctrine of Swaraj and the decisive victory of the 1947 Indian independence movement in British-ruled India.
…which caused me to wonder about the doctrine of Swaraj. It is attributed to Gandhi. Here in Gandhi’s own words in 1946, the description of his vision:
“Independence begins at the bottom… A society must be built in which every village has to be self sustained and capable of managing its own affairs… It will be trained and prepared to perish in the attempt to defend itself against any onslaught from without… This does not exclude dependence on and willing help from neighbours or from the world. It will be a free and voluntary play of mutual forces… In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending circles. Growth will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual. Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.”
Though Gandhi never realized this utopian model before he was assassinated, there is a reason he inspires us today. In my country we have our own “utopian” dream. It’s called “we the people”, which we too still struggle to realize in its beautiful fullness.
What was our word of the day again? Ah yes, Shivoo, which most dictionaries claim is an Australian slang word for a huge party. I am afraid I got carried away in google-land, but I hope you took away something you could use. As for me? This weekend poet and storyteller hopes for the day when the world reaches its utopian potential for peace, justice, love and compassion where everyone has a voice and everyone matters. Now that will be one amazing cause for a wild shivoo!
One more little tidbit I’d like to share with you in parting… just in case you think it slipped my attention. Did you happen to notice that Freddie Mercury is listed in the middle of the names of famous Gujaratis? I’ll give you a second to track back to the that section above. I’m not making it up! 🙂 I am suddenly transported into a rousing chorus of “We are the champions…”
And I’ll not apologize if you too are now stricken with this rousing earworm. I am a carrier of such things! 🙂
Peace my friends. ❤
Shivoo – the Haiku
Let the dreamers dream
utopia is a place
it’s one wild shivoo!~kat – 27 January 2017
Soul-Scape
a tear in the veil
where souls from Elysium
flow from light to gray
©kat – 26 January 2017
For Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge based on the prompt words: flow and tear.
Most Inspirational Blogger Nominee
like mercury colliding... 