discover challenges finding your place – Whippet Wisdom

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In this week’s Discover Challenge we are invited to post about a place that means something special to us and we can interpret this any way we wish. This challenge coincides with my completion of ‘Carpe Diem Haiku First Winter Retreat 2016 – Find the Silence’ where we were invited to find the silence and create haiku, haiga or tanka every day for thirty days.

This is a beautiful time of year to write about silence and connect with that calm place within ourselves.

winter silence
so many boats asleep
on dry land

More than half of my daily writings on ‘Finding the Silence’ were posted on twitter and I am sharing some of them here to show the many moments that inspired me to find the silence both outside and inside of myself.

the silent robin
awaits our return
eyes sparkle

The haiku below were previously posted on twitter and made me reflect more deeply. I added prose and created a double haibun for the blog in Frozen Footsteps.

frost rests
in silent caress
of the dawn

stillness
before the ski slopes
open to laughter

One fellow blogger commented that I am carrying the silence with me. It feels that way and I believe the accumulative effect of focusing on silence every day AND writing about it helps you to carry the silence from one day to the next.

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Fellow blogger Mark Aldrich has written many posts about Egyptian photo-journalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, also known as Shawkan. He has been held in prison without charge for more than three years and he misses the sky. On ciluna27’s Blog you can read more background information about the #SkyforShawkan initiative that was created on twitter where fellow photographers can post photographs of the sky for Shawkan.

After posting several photographs of the sky at #SkyforShawkan I found silence here too. Silence in the beauty of the many photographs posted here, silence in the invisible space where people who care about human rights come together.

I began to create haiga in aid of the campaign for Shawkan’s release and some of them took me to a completely different dimension of silence.

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One year later Shawkan is still in prison. I have created more haiga for the campaign and shared them on twitter. ciluna’s27 blog created a new and beautiful post on 12th December 2017 featuring many new photographs for the #SkyforShawkan campaign which include five of these haiga. You can read this post and see the images here.

Silence was to be found in so many places, including indoors.

candle light
warms the imagination
of shorter days

More than anything I became aware of the silent communication from something that is so much bigger than ourselves, the silent communication from nature and the silent communication and understanding between Eivor and Pearl. I could have written the haiku below every day for thirty days:

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