The Sleeping Giantess Wakes Up by Clare Rosenfield
What's It About?
Whether your little one could use a lesson in coping with stress, or if you want to emphasize the importance of the golden rule, “The Sleeping Giantess Wakes Up” is here to help the adults of tomorrow learn essential childhood lessons.Wouldn’t it be nice if one morning, we all woke up to a perfect world? That’s the idea behind Clare Rosenfield’s story, The Sleeping Giantess Wakes Up (Gatekeeper Press).
In this tender, ethereal children’s tale, two young heroes bring humanity together to help everyone find common ground — literally. The narrative in turn demonstrates to young readers how compassion and kind actions can help heal society not just on-page, but in real life, too.
An Earth-Shaking Discovery
Once upon a time, there was a sleeping Giantess who spread her body across the entire world. Her legs were in the south, her head and neck were in the north, her right arm was in the east and her left arm was in the west … But no one recognized that Mother Earth was the sleeping Giantess, and their only home.
With this fairytale-like opening, we’re first introduced to the protagonist, the sleeping Giantess also known as our home planet. While she has indeed been snoozing for billions of years, her sleep is a restless one.
The humans living upon the Earth’s surface don’t see what unites them, and instead squabble over anything and everything. Their arguments turn her dreams into nightmares, but those still don’t manage to wake her up. Nothing does, until two young children do something that ends up changing the world.
What do those two children do to wake Mother Earth from her long sleep? Well, they breathe.
They breathed in love, they breathed out appreciation. They breathed in happiness, they breathed out compassion. They breathed in goodness, they breathed out care. They breathed in peace, they breathed out calmness. When their caring became so big and vast and deep and wide, it became a caring for the whole, the whole world.
In for Three, Out for Five
Why is it so important for young readers of The Sleeping Giantess Wakes Up to learn about breathing, something they do automatically? Well, with a better understanding of child psychology than ever before, more parents, teachers and even health professionals are teaching children relaxation techniques like deep breathing and mindfulness. But it is more than breathing itself that matters. Children’s breathing is connected to expressions of love and peace, they breathe these things in and breathe them back out into the world.
It’s a stressful world out there and as much as we may want to shield kids from the harsher side of life, children are able to pick up on the stress around them. They’re aware of environmental issues and destructive world events, and those problems impact them as much as they impact adults.
What’s more, as children grow older, they will come to inherit the world — which means that childhood sets the foundation for the adults of tomorrow, from world leaders to environmentalists and everyone in between. By learning these lessons of kindness now, children can go forth with these tools in hand, ready to make the world more welcoming than the way they found it.
The moment Mother Earth wakes up, roused by the children’s compassion, humanity comes to its senses and recognizes everything that makes it united. World peace is achieved with something as easy as breathing, all thanks to two children who were open-minded and brave enough to reach out while the world around them quarreled.
Whether your little one could use a lesson in coping with stress, or if you want to emphasize the importance of the golden rule, The Sleeping Giantess Wakes Up is here to help the adults of tomorrow learn essential childhood lessons.
About Clare Rosenfield:
Clare Rosenfield was born in Cambridge, MA, and began writing poetry at the age of nine. She entered her poems to the Boston Herald’s Good Sports Page and if accepted, won a dollar along with the printing of her poem! Because of her trans-religious, spiritual approach to life, sparked by living six years in Thailand, her poetry often inspires readers to dive deep and access the “peace goddess who has been waiting since the Big Bang for just one instant of recognition!” An artist as well, she illustrates her own books with paintings of different media. Her favorite subject is portraits, ones which portray luminosity, goodness of heart, and wisdom, and which inspire women to value their inner knowing. Her poetry has appeared in a number of poetry journals.
Clare has also pioneered a holistic psychotherapy called Contact Healing which incorporates the healing arts she has studied over thirty years. She likes to empower people with tools for their own self-healing. Since the founding of the Global Healing Foundation in 2002, a non-profit focused on healing ourselves and the planet, she has been its co-director and at present, is its president.
