Echinodermity: 5 Healthy Ways to Live Like a Star
Echinoderms are a phylum (Echinodermata) of five-based marine invertebrates including the ever-popular sea stars (“starfish”), as well as brittle stars, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, sand dollars, feather stars, sea lilies, and a wide variety of other delightful creatures. The Latin word Echinoderm literally means “spiny skin,” and all echinoderms have some level of spiky armor, which as a sort of prickly introvert I find inspiring.
This young lady has the right idea.
I recently took a poetry class at my college where I created a short book of poetry that I decided to base around the theme of what humans can learn from marine (and other) invertebrates. Entitled Invertebration, that class assignment has inspired my current personal trend in my philosophy and writing: how can I write like a human and let myself live and love like a sea star? Here are 5 lifestyle tips from the realm of echinoderms:
- If it’s closed, pry it open and drain every drop of its nourishing juices.
- If s/he climbs on top of you to get closer to the sun, you climb right on top of him/her and get even higher.
- If the tides are crashing and trying to wrench you away from your rock, solidify your malleable form to fit the place you want to be, and harden your musculature so nothing can pull you away.
- If it bites off your armored arms, grow back more colorful and stranger arms with fancier spikes.
- If it piques your instinct, seize and devour it.
Image credits in order of appearance:
By E. M. Grosse – The echinoderm fauna of Torres Strait: its composition and its origin (1921) Clark, Hubert Lyman, 1870-1947, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38650232
By Sebastian Grajales – Colombia, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5102157
By Steven Pavlov – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16279384
Davey Scones’ Locker!
I lied in my last post when I said I’d been away at college the past few months. Actually, I’ve been traipsing the Coral Sea on a bedraggled schooner with several diverse characters including Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson, Michael Crichton’s Lazue (hawk-eyed female, raised as a man), and the obligatory Jack Sparrow. Our mission? Capture all shark-finning boats, train the fishermen onboard to be marine biologists, perform emergency surgery on the sharks, and of course, take all the fishermen’s treasure for ourselves.
We managed to overtake one ship just as its captain was about to slice off the dorsal fin of a reef shark. Madame Ching the pirate queen shocked him with a spontaneous performance of “Call Me Maybe,” which made him drop the thrashing fish to the deck.
Noticing the peculiar shape of the shark’s stomach, I came over and performed CPR until he coughed up none other than Auntie Teach’s Recipe Book. Allegedly handwritten by the aunt of Edward Teach (Blackbeard) in the Golden Age, this pudgy, homespun volume of recipes to fuel illegal activity on the high seas has been sought after for centuries by foodies and historians alike!
I decided to sell it to a museum as an act of charity that also made me a lot of money. But before doing that, on our last day on the pirate ship, I flipped to a random shark-bile-soaked page and made the recipe lovingly scrawled (and personalized with drips of rum) for “Anti-Scurvy Scones.”
When traveling at sea for weeks, particularly before refrigerators were invented, getting fresh fruits and vegetables was a serious problem. Sailors used to drink lime juice to avoid nasty diseases resulting from a lack of certain vitamins.
Auntie Teach’s recipe includes flavorful limeade, as well as coconut flakes that could have been harvested from local islands, dried cranberries that would have been brought onboard to replace fresh fruit, and white chocolate chips to sweeten the deal. She packs even more nutrient-rich fruit into these breakfast delights with the surprise inner filling: passionately tart red raspberry compote made from frozen raspberries. As our formerly shark-finning friends loved smoothies, they had a freezer full of the berries for me to mush to pulp.
Over a breakfast of hot scones oozing gooey raspberry filling, we discussed the state of sharks in today’s changing world, as well as practical matters such as the leeches in Jack’s boots and how terrible the internet service was in the middle of the ocean.
By the time we got back to the states to drop me off at college, everyone was begging me for this recipe. I promised to publish it on my blog. And a pirate always keeps her word, especially if she doesn’t want to be troubled with revenge while trying to finish school. So here it is.
Click here for the full recipe: “Pirate” Scones (Key Lime Coconut Surprise)
Like reading about swashbuckling environmental pirates as much as you like healthy treats? Check out my free ebook People with Fishtails on Smashwords and Amazon, and my active author blog, aseaworthyfrigate.wordpress.com for more.
Image credits in order of appearance (excluding scone pictures which were taken and edited by me using iphoto and Ribbit):
“Nordsee”. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nordsee.jpg#/media/File:Nordsee.jpg
“Wreck of the Dart (Sketched on the Morning after the Storm of the 25th Octr 1842) at Madeira” by Emily Geneviève Smith – National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wreck_of_the_Dart_(Sketched_on_the_Morning_after_the_Storm_of_the_25th_Octr_1842)_at_Madeira.jpg#/media/File:Wreck_of_the_Dart_(Sketched_on_the_Morning_after_the_Storm_of_the_25th_Octr_1842)_at_Madeira.jpg
A Healthy Read!
Everyone knows reading is good for you. It stimulates the brain and teaches new words upon occasion. Unfortunately, many people associate reading with boredom on account of too many school assignments involving reading something that person didn’t want to read.
Summer is the perfect time to engage in some pleasure reading – read a book that may not teach you any new words, but that you actually feel like reading! Allow me to suggest (blatantly indulging in self-promotion here) my new, short fictional book, People with Fishtails.
Here is a short description of the book:
Gayle has mommy issues. Her mom left when she was eight, abandoning her in the hands of a drunk and unstable father. Oh, and her mom was also a mermaid.
Sander has daddy issues. His dad is the CEO of KrakenGo, the largest renewable fuel company on the planet. Oh, and he’s also destroying the planet.
When Gayle and Sander find themselves on an environmental pirate ship, bound for the four corners of the earth to pillage and plunder what’s left of the ocean’s magnificent creatures, they agree to band together to stop this madness. Oh, and they still have parent issues…
You can download this book from Amazon here. Download from Smashwords here. It’s currently free on Smashwords, coming soon to Barnes and Noble for free, and will take a while to become free on Amazon.
True Healthy Me 
_at_Madeira.jpg#/media/File:Wreck_of_the_Dart_(Sketched_on_the_Morning_after_the_Storm_of_the_25th_Octr_1842)_at_Madeira.jpg){kind=link}