A Recipe for Writing Haiku
with help from Wombo Dream AI and Photo Studio Pro app for Android
Pleading for Symmetry (Balance)
I know not all my readers are fans of any kind of poetry—especially haiku. But I’m going to ask you to do me a favor and try just once to let this lesson speak to you and create one stanza in this simple poetic form. I think that once you try it, you’ll understand how the restrictions used for patterns and symmetry can be grounding and relaxing. It’s actually a good way to battle anxiety. Whatever you’re going through, write a haiku on it.
For example...
A thunderstorm poured.
Lightning danced to thunder's beat.
We needed the rain.
That is the basic 5-7-5 syllable form of (American) haiku. And it made it so simple to record what was going on around me. If it were a stressful type of scenario, it might have read …
Notifications!
They keep invading my space.
Stopping my progress.
But I asked for them.
And I can silence them, too.
So deep breath--relax.
And I really do feel better after writing that because it made me think more about the syllables than the frustrations of a drop down notice and momentary freeze on my tablet. I challenge you to write your anxiousness as you count your syllables. And with that, here’s my recipe for writing it.
Ingredients and Instructions
Haiku Ingredients:
- Three lines.
- Seventeen syllables total.
- Five syllables in the first line.
- Seven syllables in the middle line.
- Five syllables in the last line.
Haiku Instructions:
- Consider a subject like … your day, something you love, or something as simple as a color.
- Describe your subject in five syllables like red is a color.
- Say something about how the subject affects you like, red makes me feel happy. Notice how the diphthong in “feel” (where a vowel sound has two beats) gives me my seven syllables.
- Use the last line to describe something opposite or a conclusion. Like, I’m glad it’s not blue.
- Haiku are usually non-rhyming.
Here is an example using haiku to describe the contents of haiku. 😁 I’ll use underlines and dashes in this example to show the syllable breaks…
…..This is a hai-ku;
…..se-ven-teen syl-la-bles are
…..cap-tured in three lines.
When you write about subjects taken from daily life, it’s important to use your first impression.
Here’s another example from my main website full haiku lesson page…
.....Quiet all around (5)
.....Just a whisper here and there; (7)
.....People reading books. (5)
Between my website and a Haiku My Day post I put up in 2016, you can learn more details of haiku like the cutting technique and the seasonal and nature influence on most traditional haiku. (If you’re interested. 🤠) But I will challenge you to do a renga, which is a series of haiku, on good ‘ol “Roy G Biv.” In other words, write a haiku stanza for each color in the rainbow 🌈: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
A Final Encouragement
As a result of writing haiku…
- You will be more apt to notice, or be aware of, the present moment. And placing it in the boundaries of pattern and symmetry can make you feel a bit more in control.
- You will realize the POET-ential (😉) of each moment for settings to be used in stories and articles if you’re a writer.
- You can recapture some of the colorful perceptions you had when you were young and everything was new and exciting and worthy of further investigation.
- You will have a heightened and deepened appreciation of life & nature, how to paint them with words, and how to tell the world about all you see in a creative way. Or, if you keep them to yourself, I can tell you that old journals are way more interesting to read in some kind of verse.
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🎬 🎵 Recipe for Making Apple and Orange Pomanders 🍎🍊
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with help from Photo Studio Pro app for Android
First, what is a pomander? Grokipedia has a detailed article about it with 55 source links at the bottom. I think you’ll be able to turn anything into a wonderful bit of scent after reading all that. 👃
The PIP above is my own cloved apple pomander from a long time ago, and it really did last a number of years. I wish I’d read instructions first to learn that puncturing the fruit with a large toothpick or bamboo skewer helps the cloves go in better. I just imitated what I saw a neighbor make for my grandma when I was young. I knew it was about inserting a lot of cloves into an apple, but I didn’t know how sore your fingers could get from many repetitions of pushing sharp, dried flowers into place.
But the smell was so worth it! With my reactions to scents, especially from chemicals, this is an air-freshener I can actually use. And the smell of cloves reminds me of the cloved hams my grandpa made for holidays. The ONLY reason I haven’t made more was the finger pain, but now I’m ready to try again with the assistance of pre-punctured holes. And maybe I’ll even consider turning it into an ornament like they do in the video I’ll share at the end. I set it on a glittery red gift box for a picture, but a real ornament would probably look even prettier.
To keep it simple, here are the ingredients you may want…
- Apples or Citrus (oranges or lemons)
- Whole Cloves, about 1/4 cup
- 1 Tbsp each of Ground Cinnamon and Ginger (should be enough for about two apples)
- Bamboo Skewer, Large Toothpick, Needle, etc.
- Ribbon and Twine
- Hot Glue Gun (for decorations and ribbons)
Instructions
- Your apple (or orange) should be fresh and blemish free, have a fragrant aroma, and still have its stem to hang it up to dry.
- Puncture the fruit with a skewer in the design you want to make for the cloves.
- Use whole cloves, and fully cover the fruit if you want it to last even longer, but the antioxidant properties in this craft make it resilient already.
- Put the apple in a paper bag with the spice mix and close the top then shake gently to coat the outside of the fruit. (I consider this optional since I didn’t need the extra scent before, but this was in the instructions from Homestead Lady and you might like it better that way. If I do it, I’ll probably try some other spices as well.)
- Once you remove it from the bag, you can simply add some twine or string, or you can get fancy with ribbons and glue and cloth leaves.
Here’s a nice instruction video from My Quaint Cottage on YouTube where they have other crafty videos as well, though the newest one is 4 years ago:
And just because I really like music and singing, here’s a music video about apples:
I found one more with lyrics and clips from the movie Up, but it was only listed 4 months ago, so I’m not sure if it has any copyright risks that could make it be taken down. For now, though, it’s just adorable:
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🎵 Recipe for Making a Long Drive More Fun
help from Gemini Nano Banana and Photo Studio Pro app for Android
Are We There Yet?
Even adults ask this question if the drive is long enough. Though sometimes, it’s also because you need a rest area really bad. Lol 😅🧎♀️➡️
But what if you could turn that into, “No, we can’t be there yet! We haven’t finished the game!!”? And there are so many ways you can play it that some of your time can go by just thinking of new ideas. I think this was a sanity saver when following a slow truck on a highway from Arizona to Roswell New Mexico where we just couldn’t get around and we felt stuck there for at least an hour.
Christmas Songs Game
So, you’ll notice the Christmas songs in the picture above. Christmas is all year around in our hearts, so that’s one of our favorite lists. We take turns exchanging letters, and when each of us comes up with our song, we sing one verse and one chorus together. You’ll also notice that the letters for the turn can be anywhere in the title (our rules), but you can make it more difficult by saying the song must start with whatever letter you’re on.
Depending on the list (Christmas songs, Christian songs, pop music, etc.), when you’re doing songs, you can choose to demand the letter be in the title, or choose that it can be in the first line since we know some songs by popular lines rather than official titles. On other lists like TV shows, stuff you can get at Walmart, popular brand names, or famous product slogans, it’s a little harder to bend the rules, but it’s your travel time, so do what works for you. For example, if someone uses “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” you can choose T for Timex, W for watch, or any of the other letters that start words in the slogan.
Some Ideas to Get Started…
Christmas Songs (DEF since you have ABC above)
- D: Do You Hear What I Hear?
- E: Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel
- F: The First Noel
Christian Songs and Hymns
- A: Amazing Grace
- B: Blessed Assurance
- C: Create in Me a Clean Heart
Other Songs (We do older ones of course 😁)
- A: A My Name is Alice (Donny and Marie’s Deep Purple album)
- B: I was Born Under a Wandrin’ Star (from Paint Your Wagon)
- C: Catch a Falling Star (and put it in your pocket)
That last one often gives us some great laughter as we remember songs like Ah, Shaddup You Face (shared below) and Junk Food Junkie (below).
One issue you might run into is difficulties with the letters X and Z. (Sometimes Q but when you’re doing slogans, you’ve always got The Quicker Picker-Upper for that letter.) You can agree to leave out the hard letters or let the one who gets it try to find something or beg for mercy. 😺 Whatever makes it fun and not stressful will make the travels enjoyable.
Slogans, Products, or Clichés
- A: An Apple a Day
- B: Chef Boyardee
- C: C and H Pure Cane Sugar
TV, Movie, and Book Titles
- A: Angels in the Outfield
- B: Beauty and the Beast
- C: Courageous
I think that’s a good starter list for your next travel game. A to Z also works for each person finding something that begins with their letter as seen on the road outside the car. That one at least guarantees an X for next exit signs. You can look things up when you have a signal. Or, you can create some A to Z lists before you ever leave, but half the fun is trying to think of something when it’s your turn.
A Few More Fun Ideas
Oh yeah, on the subject of turns, you can also do the one where each person says the line of a story based on what letter they currently have. And an alternate to that is that somebody starts a story, and each person must continue it beginning with the last word in the previous line. Of course, the one for quick thinking is where the first person starts with a word and the next person says the first thing that comes to mind. You might end up with a string like apple, eat, meal, steak, baked potato, etc.
Please try one or more of these games next time you travel, and let me know if it added some fun or helped consume time while keeping your communications working better than having everyone’s face buried in a device of some sort. Now, here are a couple of fun videos:
This was the only one I could find with lyrics, and it’s fine, though I’m not a big fan of just watching someone share selfies. I watched it all the way through to make sure there’s nothing inappropriate, though.
And you can look up some others for fun like I’m My Own Grandpa, but one day I might do a post of nothing but funny music. In the meantime, go travel and have fun while you’re on the road, or gather some friends for a story/game night and play without getting on the highway.
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😋 Recipe for a Fresh Bowl of Color 🥒🍅
(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with Photo Studio Pro edits
You can see what I don’t do this recipe as often because once you add a dollop of mayonnaise on top, you’ll know why the time-consuming dicing is better. This is one of my favorite summertime meals, but it’s good anytime of year if you can get the veggies. Because of advances in food transport, most of the world can get products at any time of year.
So this is my first post for November’s recipe month, and my first post using a PIP (Picture-in-Picture) filter. I had a kaleidoscope image behind it like the one I did on my Flickr, but I decided the red bokeh lights made a nicer background where you can still see the bowl from the original image clearly.
So the recipe is simple, and you can see it just by looking. Dice up your favorite type of tomato (I like Roma or pear tomatoes best), then slice and dice up a cucumber. Mix or layer them in a bowl and sprinkle some salt on top. Optionally, mayo or salad dressing are quite tasty, but if you want to treat this tasty bowl like a healthier-than-popcorn movie snack, toppings are messy, so bring a fork. 🍴
But no talk of cucumbers and tomatoes is complete without a mention of Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato from the VeggieTales videos. If you’ve never seen the amazing and creative animation by these folks, you’re in for a treat. You don’t have to be a kid to enjoy humorous ways of learning God’s Word. Here’s one of the very first ones I ever saw:
If you watched to the end, you saw the Qwerty (the computer on the countertop) gave them the verse from Colossians 3:13b. Here’s the whole verse …
“[13] Bear with one another and forgive any complaint you may have against someone else. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. ”
And since you’ll probably need to bookmark this post with the video embed being much longer than usual, here’s another longer one for good measure because, well, doesn’t everyone love Silly Songs with Larry?
If you’re in a hurry, fast forward to 4:18 or just click that timestamp to go right to the best song ever written about hairbrushes. 😂 🪮
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🎵Prompt Response: Alien Communications 👽🖖
If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?
We Come in Peace
Wait, aren’t they supposed to be the first ones talking and telling me they come in peace? I know I’d probably feel better about talking to them if they started the conversation that way. But then if we’re both waiting for each other to speak first, it could get awkward.
So let’s just assume that, with or without an introduction, communication is easy and free-flowing. Maybe they’re asking about Earth or humanity, and I’m trying to think of a better ice-breaker than; “Are you offended by alien jokes?” 😂
Jokes
But just in case that was my first question, and just in case they said they were okay with them, here are a few just for fun.
- Why don’t aliens golf in outer space?
- There are too many black holes.
- How do aliens keep their pants up?
- They use asteroid belts.
- What kind of music do aliens listen to?
- Neptunes. 🎶
- How do alien poets write their poems?
- In Uni-Verse.
But In All Seriousness…
I like my husband’s idea the best. Remind the aliens that I’m an alien, too. After all, what does Scripture say?
“But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables Him to subject all things to Himself, will transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body.”
In another place it says:
“For here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.”
So, once we’ve established some common ground, maybe then I could ask the aliens if they are familiar with The Creator of the Universe. I know I’d be surprised whether they said they knew all about God and interacted with Him frequently or whether they knew nothing at all but wanted to learn.
We don’t know for sure if there are aliens, what they look like, or what they know. But, if they exist, we know Who made them and we know He has a plan.
Like the aliens may be looking for a new place to call home because their original planets are facing troubles, we have our own share of troubles on Planet Earth, so a new home promise is a good hope. This life may be temporary, but God’s promises are eternal. Have you given your heart to The Lord, so you can also look forward to eternal hope?
And this is the perfect topic for a great old hymn:
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🎵Cliché Month: When Pigs Fly
The Ultimate Badge of Impossibility
Whenever someone says something completely absurd, improbable, or unlikely to happen—ever in a million years, our wonderful English language gives us a delightfully sarcastic reply: “Sure… and pigs might fly, too!“
It belongs to a colorful family of expressions known as an adynaton—a figure of speech so exaggerated that it highlights an absolute physical impossibility. We use these sayings whenever we want to express skepticism with a wink, whether we are talking about waiting “until the cows come home,” looking for something like “a needle in a haystack,” or promising to tackle an unpleasant chore “on a cold day in July.” Or maybe “when the sun rises in the west.”
Note: An ancient example of an adynaton was “Till the rivers run backward.” Of course, they could not have known that in 1812, an earthquake on the New Madrid Fault would do exactly that to the Mississippi River. It’s an interesting factoid you can read here.
From 17th-Century Satire to Real Biplanes
Long before our neon aviator pig took to the skies, people were using airborne swine as a comedic punchline. The earliest known variations appeared in 16th-century Scottish proverbs, but it was formally recorded in English print by lexicographer John Clarke in his 1639 collection Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina. His phrasing carried a wonderfully silly visual: “Pigs fly in the air with their tails forward.” It was the go-to retort for calling out someone telling tall tales or making promises they had no intention of keeping.
For centuries, the phrase remained safely locked in the realm of sarcasm. But on November 4, 1909, an eccentric English aviation pioneer named Lord Brabazon (John Moore-Brabazon) decided to take the idiom literally. Determined to prove the cynics wrong, he strapped a small wicker basket containing a live piglet onto the wing strut of his biplane. Before taking off into the skies over Kent, he pinned a hand-lettered cardboard sign to the basket that read: “I am the first pig to fly.”
With that short flight, history gained its first official airborne pig—and the world lost its most foolproof guarantee of an impossible event! And if you think that’s funny, check out my previous post about the first cow to be milked in an airplane.
What’s on Your “Flying Pig” List?
We all encounter dreams where our first instinct is to look up at the clouds, throw our hands in the air, and say this cliché or something else meaning we don’t believe it will ever happen. Maybe we try to tell ourselves that “With God, all things are possible” but that often doesn’t go beyond the encouraging words. What big dreams or everyday moments make you think you are more likely to see a pig soaring through the stratosphere than to complete your task?
- Getting a book published?
- Getting an entire house decluttered and organized?
- Emptying out your storage shed?
- Or finally crossing off the last lingering chore on your to-do list?
While we will always find things that seem impossible, with a little extra determination and maybe some ingenuity, we can do more than we think possible. Share your comments, and we’ll pray for each other to find hope (or supportive friends) to help us tackle the overwhelming obstacles that try to hold up our dreams. And speaking of tackles, here’s something fun:
A Super Bowl Take on Flying Pigs
One of the funniest modern takes on the idiom came from the 2015 Super Bowl in Doritos’ fan-created commercial contest. When a boy asks an older man on a porch for a chip, the man smirks and says, “Sure kid, when pigs fly!” Refusing to take no for an answer, the kid builds a harness with rocket fireworks and wings for a farm pig—launching the airborne swine right past the stunned man’s porch to claim his bag of chips! Here’s the video…
A Parting Riddle
And speaking of flying things…
Why did the boy throw his alarm clock out the window?
Because he wanted to see time fly! ⏰✈️
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Cliché Month: Read Between the Lines 🧩
It’s a cliché AND a game! What more could we want, right? And though I planned something simple for a relaxing Sabbath weekend, I ended up having to learn some new things, but I’m very happy to share a cool new trick at the bottom. After you look at the rebus puzzles to try and figure them out, you can click to reveal the answers. And this is so much easier than trying to print upside-down text like I tried first. 🙃
So for this cliché, it’s a phrase we all the time whenever we sense some kind of unspoken truth lurking beneath polite conversation. To “read between the lines” is human nature’s built-in radar for deciphering what is meant beyond what is merely said. But long before it became a way to “hear” the subtext in everyday dialogue, reading between the lines was a literal, tradecraft—essential for wartime communication, diplomacy, and survival.
Invisible Ink and Wartime Grids
The idiom traces back to the mid-nineteenth century and has direct roots in cryptography and steganography. Military couriers, spies, and clandestine correspondents needed ways to transport secret directives through enemy territory without raising suspicion. The solution was deceptively simple: write an ordinary, innocuous letter with unusually wide gaps between the lines of text.
In the blank space between those visible sentences, the author penned the real message using sympathetic, or invisible, ink made from organic acids like lemon juice, milk, cobalt chloride, or vinegar. To an officer who tried to intercept the message, the parchment appeared to carry a simple, and maybe even mundane, missive. But once the intended recipient exposed the paper to heat, a candle flame, or a specific chemical wash, the hidden writing would darken and reveal itself. If you did not know to literally read between the lines, you would miss the mission entirely.
A similar tactic relied on physical cutout masks known as Cardan grilles. When a recipient placed a custom stencil over a lengthy, seemingly boring letter, only specific words from alternating lines were visible through the cutouts, spelling out the real message.
Not by Words, But by Things
Visual rebuses operate on that exact same creative frequency—they challenge our eyes and minds to decipher hidden meaning from spatial placement rather than literal text alone. The word rebus originates from the Latin phrase non verbis, sed rebus, meaning “not by words, but by things.”
Originating during the Renaissance as intellectual parlor games across Europe, rebuses eventually evolved into the beloved graphic wordplay puzzles we know today. Placing a word in a specific direction, altering its size, or planting it firmly between physical boundaries forces our brains to decode subtext in a playful, visual way.
Try Your Hand at Deciphering
To celebrate the art of hidden messages, try solving the puzzle card below. Look at the spacing, arrangements, and word positions to unlock each common phrase or idiom.
Click here to reveal puzzle answers
1. For once in my life (four ones in my life)
2. Forget it
3. Try to understand
4. Travel overseas / Overseas travel
5. Breakfast
6. Downtown
7. Eyeshadow
8. Stepfather
9. Once upon a time
10. Potatoes (pot 8 O’s)
11. 3D movie
12. Top secret
Shabbat Shalom and let me know if you had fun with these. You can visit the ESL Vault Rebus Page for a bunch more free puzzles, and you can also find some rebus puzzles—including one called Read Between the Lines at the Google Play Store.
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