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I did end up going to Portland last week, so I didn’t take the Shopify store live. I’ll do that this week, probably Monday. I’ll send out a separate newsletter once it does go live.
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Every time I travel, and I’ve done this for decades now, even before I moved out here to the property, I get myself out into nature as soon as I possibly can once I get home. When I was living in Seattle in the condo, I would go out to one of the nearby parks and just sit in the grass. When I was living in my beautiful house with the amazing backyard, I’d go out into that.
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Now that I’m here, I can just walk outside. I find it really helps me recover and recenter, to ground myself in the here and now.
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So I spent some time out and about, looking at things.
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I don’t know about you, but I’d really only ever seen grapes when they look like actual grapes.
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What I learned this weekend is that the grapes are already forming, and we have what I’m referring to as baby grapes. They are so cute!
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Despite the exhaustion and still feeling sick, we attended the Enumclaw Beer Walk last night. The owner has the samples of beer being served in the far room of the book store. To get to the beer, the customers have to walk by a gauntlet of local authors selling books.
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So here is a picture of the author caught in the wild, at the event, with lots of books for sale:
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I learned so many cool things listening to my various podcasts while I was driving down to Portland as well as driving back. It took me about four hours to get there due to construction, but only about three and a half hours to get back. That’s a lot of time in the car listening to podcasts.
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A lot of it was Huberman labs. There was a particularly timely podcast on “Healing From Grief and Loss,” an interview with Dr. Mary-Francis O’Connor. It was one of the better interviews I’ve listened to. I would recommend it.
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Then there was the episode on Bolster Your Mental Health. This is an episode where Huberman summarizes previous interviews with guests.
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Some of this involves developing a better understanding of yourself and your mind. One of the theories is what they call the iceberg model: about ten percent of thinking is in the conscious mind, while ninety present happens in your unconscious mind, below the surface as it were.
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Something that Huberman via his guest suggested is a stronger connection between the conscious and unconscious parts of your mind. He gave more than one method for doing this.
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The one that really struck me, though, was journalling. I stopped journalling a few years ago. I think it happened around the time that I started losing my brain.
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I’ve always called myself an unconscious writer. All of the book work happened below the surface as it were, and just came out when I was sitting at the keyboard. I’ve had a lot of issues doing that the last couple of years. I’ve had to consciously solve book problems, brainstorm and come up with solutions instead of having it all flow. I’ve described it as losing the “what happens next” gear.
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I wonder if this has happened in part because I no longer journal and I don’t have as strong of a connection between the conscious and unconscious parts of my mind.
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So next week, I’m returning to journalling on an irregular basis. I don’t know if anything will change as a result of that, but I’m willing to try.
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Always looking for more improvements of myself. Project Leah, as it were.
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