Are You Buzzing?

Are you buzzing, feeling like you are vibrating in your body? Do you wake up often during the night? Do you feel hot? How about anxious? Do you feel as though your heart is pounding, and you don't know why?

Well, according to Penney Pierce, you may be experiencing a change in your home frequency. That place inside you that puts yourself into a state of feeling good about yourself. A sense of deep pleasure. For everyone it is different, and you have your own trigger. For me, it is a feeling of being very grateful. I move myself into this state when I start to deteriorate into negativity, anger, self righteousness, self pity, etc. For you, it might be movement, such as dance, or running. For some it might be music, or gardening, or cooking. Your trigger moves you into your home frequency, and the trick is to try and remember this feeling so you can plug back into it when you need to. It helps you to stay in the present moment - which is key to everything.

She believes, as do many others, that the earth is experiencing a quickening of time and space - literally moving to a higher frequency. The body is also going through this quickening and experiencing some very interesting, and sometimes alarming, changes. I can honestly say I started experiencing these "vibrations" around 2007-2008. At the time I thought I was having health issues. It was terrifying to wake up and find my whole body was "buzzing." I thought it might be a sleep disorder, or maybe I was dying in my sleep, and waking up at the last second. I knew nothing about frequency changes at that time.

Penney says attitude is everything. If you resist - it becomes like a buzz saw, especially if you have high anxiety and don't give permission for your feelings - the "buzz" exaggerates those feelings. She says the key is to let it move through you, and as it moves through you to allow it to give expression to creativity and movement. It is the holding back that creates the difficulty and feelings of being unnerved. She says to trust it, allowing it to flow through you and around you, and it will then turn into something great. In other words, you're not dying - let go of the fear. Try to control your thoughts and not go into tape loops, which are all those conversations that get you all worked up inside your own mind. Speech is important, both inner speech and also what you express verbally.

I started reading Penney's book Frequency, the Power of Personal Vibration, about a year ago. I read about halfway through and was distracted by other books, (there is so much information out there that it's hard to finish one book before starting another), but was reminded to go back and finish it after watching an interview with her on CMN this month.

So if you are experiencing any of these symptoms, and you know it is not health related, you might want to watch the entire interview. It has actually given me peace of mind. I'm not sick, I'm just moving to a new home frequency.

WAFFLE: Why Most Books Are Too Long

I have a theory about modern books.

There's a certain kind of book, let's call it the "TITLE: How This Subtitle Summarizes My Big Idea" genre.

I don't think I need to name names.

Now, I read a lot of these, and I've come to the conclusion that most of these books shouldn't books at all. That's not to say they're bad - the big idea may be brilliant, but I don't care how big your idea is, you do not need 100-200 pages to explain one idea.

They tend to contain a couple of core chapters with the good stuff and maybe 4 or 5 chapters of what can best be called waffle. Anecdotes, backstory, additional illustrations, etc. Like a waffle this may be perfectly pleasant - but it's not very nutritious.

Here's why I think this is - publishers (we are told) increasingly want books with a single big idea that can be summed up in a sentence. Partly because they sell, and partly because publishers are overstretched and just don't have time themselves to spend hours thinking through a complex argument to find out if it's any good.

But the problem is that, for whatever historical and business reasons, books are meant to be a certain length, say 100 pages bare minimum. No-one prints 50 page books and few people would buy one, except children etc.

So there's a gap in the profile of the length of non-fiction writing. There are all kinds of shortish pieces - from the briefest news reports and op-eds up to long feature articles and New York Review of Books type articles. That covers all the way from 1 to up to, say, 10,000 words.

But then there's nothing until you reach the short book at (say) 35,000 words, after which, it's plain sailing again.

Think about it - have you ever read a 20,000 word piece of non-fiction? I don't think I have. It's too long for a periodical but too short to be a book. (Academic papers are an exception; I'm thinking of general interest pieces).

Yet it seems to me that a great many of today's books could have been that length, without weakening the argument or dumbing down in any way. And, if so, then they should be, because a fundamental rule of good writing is to keep things as concise as possible. The problem is that while that would make them better as pieces of writing, it would make them unmarketable as books, or anything else; there's practically no market for 20,000 good words and true.

Except... now we have ebooks.

So you could see this post as an argument in praise of ebooks, not just as a new technology but as a whole new form of writing falling somewhere between the "article" and the "book". Which is ironic because I don't even have a Kindle yet. Of course I'm not saying that all books are too long. I like books. Many are the right length, some I wish were longer; but just because an idea could be made into a book, doesn't mean it should be.

Edit: I hadn't read this when I wrote this post but it seems the industry are way ahead of me -

Yesterday, Amazon began selling its Kindle Singles online. Singles are e-books between 5,000 and 30,000 words long. According to the press release, these e-books are meant to “allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length.”

Hooked

I am currently hooked on the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. Has anyone else read this trilogy? My older daughter read them all at once over just a few days.

Soon to be a major motion picture to be released in March, I think.

See you in a few...

Beware Good Theories

The ancient Greeks had a lovely theory. Certain places on the earth (caves, mostly) were, they thought, gateways to the underworld. Plants growing near these places could absorb the deadly essence of Hades and became poisonous.

Snakes and other venemous creatures got their poison by consuming these plants. And stinging insects got their little doses of poison by feeding off dead snakes.

Isn't that a great narrative? It explains everything, in a nice logical progression. OK, it presupposes what we would call a "supernatural" force as the ultimate origin of poison, but other than that, it's an entirely "scientific" account. In accordance with Occam's Razor, it proposes a single unified process underlying diverse phenomena.

It is, in other words, a perfect scientific theory. It's completely wrong, on every point, but we only know that because we now understand atoms, molecules, chemistry and biochemistry, which the Greeks had no way of knowing. At the time, the Hades theory was surely the best possible theory about where poison came from.

The moral of this story is, beware nice theories based on incomplete data.


Reference: Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, which I'm currently reading, all about chemical and biological weapons.

The Help

I just finished the novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett. The book recounts the lives of maids taking care of white families during the early part of the 1960's in Jackson, Mississippi. Without giving away the plot, and I do think you would enjoy this book, it left me pondering so many issues of race, not only in the South, but also here in the West, and all over the world for that matter. How things have changed so much since I was a small girl and my father went to my elementary school to insist I not play with the little black boy in my class. I guess it was expected that the teachers would just keep us apart during recess. The year was 1958. It feels as though it was another lifetime, another world.

I have often wondered if that little boy might have grown up to be my friend's brother - who himself turned out to be a well-respected judge, and also the class president of my high school. (I don't remember the name of the little boy on the playground.)

The shame I feel for my father's prejudice is coupled with understanding the fear people had during those early years of civil rights. Fear of the unknown. Fear of giving up an established stratification that exists to this day. It does not make it right, however. Not in any stretch of the imagination does it make it right.

My daughters were raised to not look at color, sexual preference, or socioeconomic strata - but what of  other prejudices? I cannot always say that I was equitable about everything and everyone. I've looked back and realized I carried many outdated and stupid ideas at differing times throughout my life. In some of those instances it was my daughters that set me straight. I love that they feel free to express those values, unlike the maids and early civil rights workers in Jackson all those years ago.

It's easy to hold negative ideas about people that are different from ourselves. It is only when we see people as absolute equals - sparks of the same divine energy - that all of it disappears.

We're just role playing here in Earth School, helping each other to evolve.

The movie comes out in August: