Books for kids, teens, & those who are young at heart

Category: Nature (Page 9 of 20)

Still Grounding Myself Every Day

I’ve got lots of writerly things going on lately (still working my YA thriller BLACK BUTTERFLY, my follow up to ELIXIR BOUND called ELIXIR SAVED, and my chapter for the Great CT Caper) and I got my first editing assignment post baby. Seems I’m really getting back into the swing of things now that The Prince is almost four months old (yikes…the time does fly!).

The year anniversary of my grounding experiment–basically my quest to put my bare feet on the earth every day in attempt to help with stress, overall mood, energy, and such–passed by some time in August with little notice or fanfare. The last update I did on this was December, and I’ve been going strong ever since.

I missed some days, especially over the long, cold, snowy winter we had, but I got out in the bad weather more than I expected. Plus I was pregnant for a good part of the experiment, which I thought might make it harder, but it really wasn’t much of a hindrance. As a bonus once the weather got warmer, The Boy showed interest in grounding himself, too, so he’s been joining me from time to time. And my mom started doing it as well, so we’ve been comparing notes and keeping each other accountable.

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Thinking back on my year of grounding, I’ve noticed several parallels to being a writer. You have setbacks, like missing days for reasons both in your control and out of your control; you feel bad/guilty after these setbacks; it’s helpful to have others hold you accountable to help you get it done; when you lose consistency in your task, it’s hard to get back to it, but it’s never too late to get back to it, and it might be hard at first but it will get easier after the initial push; and it’s important not to beat yourself up too much when you fail, as long as you get back on the horse as soon as you can.

I’ve learned some helpful tips along the way. In cold weather, wear your cold weather gear outside even if you’re just going out to ground. Don’t go out in the snow with just a sweatshirt and sandals. First of all you’ll freeze. Second of all it diminishes the affect somehow. After I stripped off my boots in socks, stuck my feet in my little patch of grass surrounded by feet of snow, and put my socks and boots back on, my feet felt awesome, like I was walking on clouds.

Make it part of your routine. I often ground when I go out to get the mail because I do this almost every day. Don’t worry about what others think. My neighbors must have seen me with my pregnant belly and bare feet on the cold ground and thought, “There’s that nutso lady again out there with her feet in the snow.” If you miss a few days, don’t stress about it; the whole idea is not to stress. Just get back to it when you can.

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And finally, mix it up once in awhile: ground in the sand or some other place than grass, or do it at a friend’s house or while on vacation (of course making sure it’s safe to do it wherever you are, and there aren’t say fire ants or animal droppings around), or do it with a friend.

So I guess you’re all wondering if it’s working. It’s hard to say definitively that it’s working or not. I’ve had a particularly stressful, exciting, wonderful year. I’ve had the most challenging year with The Boy since he was born, a new baby to take care of, and lots of upheaval with work being done on the house. I wish I had more patience with The Boy in particular and yell at him more than I’d like to. I get crabby for no reason (being pregnant and now breastfeeding make for some fun hormonal emotions) and take it out on my husband. So on the surface you might say it isn’t working.

But I think it is. I can feel the tension leaving my body often when I ground myself, and this feeling is particularly strong when I’ve missed a day or two or when the weather was cold and I wasn’t outside as much. It’s kind of like a tingling that stops after a minute or two, and is similar to the calming feeling I get when I hold The Prince on my chest while he sleeps, only the feeling is in my feet instead of my chest. So, yeah, for that alone it’s worth it.

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And given all the stress and worry and mixed emotions I’ve had over the last year, I’d say I’m emotional handling myself better than I might have been if I wasn’t grounding. Some times all I have to do is think about grounding when I’m in a stressful situation and it helps to calm me…and maybe that is more a mind over matter thing than the physical affects of grounding, but whatever works, right?

The other thing I like about it is that it’s a pretty simple, straightforward, achievable goal, and one that doesn’t have any dire consequences if I fail. I like having an item to check of my list that’s so easy to do, and it’s one that gets me outdoors, and it’s an interesting talking point, and it might just be helping my overall well-being and health.

So after a year my year of grounding, I have no plans to stop. I’ll keep going out there and putting my bare feet to the ground, I’ll miss days and maybe feel guilty or maybe not, I’ll keep my reputation in the neighborhood as an eccentric lady, and hopefully I’ll feel better for it and will be a better mom, person, and writer for it.

Adventures and Writing Prompts in the Backyard

When people ask where my ideas come from, I always tell them from any and everywhere. As I’ve mentioned in my Confessions of an Author series, coming up with ideas is not a problem; it’s whittling down those ideas to find the gems and then following through on them that’s the hard part.

Out in the backyard the other day, just playing with the boys, there was no shortage of visual prompts that could easily turn into book ideas (and it was a different black butterfly on the butterfly bush that inspired my current WIP–see first pic!). So I thought I’d go ahead and share those visuals with all of you (and of course some cuteness with pics of said boys).

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Whenever I find mushrooms in the yard, I wonder what kind of magical creatures might live there. Though I knew The Boy had created the little rock formation, I thought about someone who didn’t know its origin coming across it and wondering how it came to be. And bubbles are always magical and fun!

Where do your ideas come from? What gets your creative juices going?

Big News for the Big Bang

If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, you might have noticed I stray from the writerly and motherly topics to science every so often. Black holes, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Big Bang are among some of my favorite topics.

While the first two episodes of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey linger, unwatched on my DVR (because the hubby and I want to watch them together and haven’t been able to find a time where we both have the mental acuity to actually enjoy them), a big scientific discovery about the Big Bang occurred just yesterday. No, I’m not talking about how it was recently announced that The Big Bang Theory was renewed for three more seasons (though that was pretty exciting news), I’m talking possible world-changing scientific news.

So picture a group of scientist in the South Pole gazing out into the depths of the heavens via a very powerful telescope called BICEP2. Now imagine they look so far and deep that they discovers very old light waves (as in nearly 14 billion years old), like the oldest light waves to ever have been detected. Well, you don’t really have to imagine it because that is exactly what they did.

It is believed that they detected cosmic microwave signals that show what happened shortly after the Big Bang. In short the Big Bang theory says that in a very, very, very, very miniscule moment in time, a hot, dense, teeny tiny singularity (which held all the matter and energy in the universe) expanded rapidly and in seconds stretched across space to create the universe, which we know is still expanding.

In order for that theory to hold water, something called cosmic inflation had to occur. Cosmic inflation is what happened just after the initial Big Bang, in which the universe went from essentially nothing to something 100 trillion trillion times that size in a ridiculously small amount of time, and the rapid (which I think is an understatement here) moment (which is an overstatement here) of expansion slowed to a pace closer to what we experience now in the universe.

Of course (as so many of our modern physics theories do), this idea stems back to Einstein theory of relativity, but had never been able to be proven. However, with the observation of these very old light waves, scientists believe we now have evidence of cosmic inflation. So it seems we have new insight into the birth of universe, which is certainly a very exciting moment indeed.

A few articles of further reading are in these articles: “A New Window On The Big Bang Has Been Opened” and “Big Bang, Inflation, Gravitational Waves: What It Means”. I leave you with this (lighter) explanation of the universe as provided by The Barenaked Ladies, a video that is one of The Boy’s favorite things to listen to (perhaps he’s a little scientist in the making!).

Winter 2013-14 in Pictures

Like many of you have been experiencing, our winter here has been snowy and cold. A few days in the 50’s this weekend made me hopeful that spring really is around the corner. Too bad we still have enough snow around to make it hard to even play in the yard with The Boy. Here’s a look at my winter in pictures.

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Before winter even started, we had this lovely snow/ice storm in which our garage had a close call with branches from the neighbor’s tree.

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While Daddy braved the ice to cut down the branches, The Boy got out his saw and went to work on his car.

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Trimming the tree and dancing to some Christmas tunes.

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A dusting of snow.

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Posing in our Christmas hats made by my grandmother.

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Opening a fire truck while wearing fire jammies on Christmas day.

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Present excitement!

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Never too cold to go pantless.

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I have to believe this face is a result of frustration over news of more cold and snow.

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A rare snowfree walk downtown.

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I think he’s simply given up on ever being able to play in the yard again.

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Snowman family!

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Found a little patch of grass to ground myself.

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The Boy “grounding” himself as best he can when Mommy won’t let him be like her and take his boots off.

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Just like it’s never too cold to go pantless, it’s never too cold for some cool shades.

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This about sums up how The Boy feels about sleeping in his bed lately.

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Lots of snow, but warm enough for some much-needed fresh air and sunshine.

 

Dark Matter, Alternate Universes, and a Story Idea

I haven’t had a science update lately, mostly because my favorite science project the Large Hadron Collider is on hiatus. It’s being upgraded to increase its power so it can smash teeny, tiny particles even faster and harder. Scientists are hoping to unlock the secrets of dark matter.

Dark matter is thought to make up a large part of the universe, but so little is known about it. Thinking about the universe and great mysteries like dark matter get my creative juices flowing. One of my favorite science programs is Discovery Channel’s How the Universe WorksIt kind of make my head hurts because the theories and science discussed are so mind-blowing in both concept and scope, but boy it’s so exciting to think about the universe.

I took physics classes in high school and college and found them, frankly, boring. Nothing we discussed ignited any sense of excitement. I get that you have to learn the basics to better understand the bigger concepts that theoretical and astrophysicists study, but I wish those basic physics classes had at least sparked some interest in learning more. And they just didn’t do that. It wasn’t until I was an adult, long out of school, that my own curiosity lead me to a passion for learning about the universe.

I hope to one day use a fictional story to meld my passion for writing and creating worlds and characters and my excitement over the universe. It’s been percolating for some time now and I think I have a premise and a main character. But I need to finish up a couple of other projects first and school myself more on the scientific concepts I’ll need to know to make the story authentic. Anyone want to give me a crash course? 🙂

I’ll leave you with this little gem of an article called “Quantum Theory Proves That Consciousness Moves to Another Universe After Death.” It definitely sounds science-fictiony, but it’s one of those ideas that I love reading about, if only to make my head spin a little with both excitement and confusion.

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