The EC Sampler Booklet - Phase 1: Design

My original Enlightened Child kids book cost me $66 to produce six. What I wanted was something that cost 25 cents... something I could just as easily give away.

With Rusted Root coming up, and all the fun I had at RatDog & Michael Franti, I decided to invest some of the money from a local patron and print up some promotional coloring books for kids who come play my Mancala game at concerts.

At one point I had an idea for a coloring book, but I didn't have line-drawings of all 12 signs. To save myself the time and effort, and just "get er done" I decided to make a sampler book with the first 4 signs and an explanation the parents can appreciate.

So I made up a little model of how it would work, and what it would say...

Then I folded it up to test it and see if I was on the right track...

Everything looked good, so I made transfered the model to Publisher and printed a shell version...

With a solid base to build on, I roughed in the content...

What I ended up with made enough sense to move forward with the plan. In the next post, I'll show what steps I took to bring it all together.

Would you like a copy?

Cool...

There's two ways you can get one. Just refresh this page and sign up for the newsletter, or join us at www.facebook.com/EnlightenedChild.

Everyone who joins will receive a free copy of this coloring book and a license to print them and share them with your friends.

Cheers,

Craig

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What Can You Teach with Two Rocks?

Today was a long day. I just got back from hiking in Letchworth State Park here in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate NY. It was gorgeous.

We hiked down in the river bed, and up to the top of the waterfalls. There's even a train trestle that I refused to walk across, because I neither bungee jump for pleasure, nor did I have a bungee cable on hand to keep me from plummeting to my death. So I just stayed near terra firma.

The gorges in Upstate NY (think: Ithaca is Gorges) are some sort of shale or slate stone that chips off easily into thin, jagged fragments too sharp to skip - sharp enough to skin a hide with when freshly broken off. I selected a stone from the river bank to represent the freshly broken off masculine energy that is cutting its way through the world.

On the other hand, in the river bed, there are rocks that have broken off many many years ago, and have been washed downstream for miles. They are not nearly as jagged and many of them are worn smooth from their interactions with other rocks, and nature in general. I selected one of these rocks to represent the feminine energy that is gently softening all the other rocks around it.

These two rocks are a simple example of a natural process that occurs in a mind pre-disposed to see patterns in the world. It could have been anything.

Today, it was two rocks and the energies they represented on opposite poles of the masculine-feminine energy continuum.

Are you more jagged or smoothed over?

I know I'm mellowing with age, but I certainly still have an edge or two to smooth over.

Cheers,

Craig

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