Embarking on our Lenten Journey

OnFire: the young united methodist justice movement: Embarking on our Lenten Journey: Before 2006, I had never connected the term “social justice” with my faith as a Christian. Yet today, Christ's model of exemp lifying minist...

A Fulbright Reflection

At this time last year, I was mourning my retreat from Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and preparing to move to Essen, a city where I had had no connections and knew no familiar faces. However, as fate would seem to have it, I have been lucky to once again return to my home here in Berlin. Unreservedly, I am glad that this February does not require the same retreat that the previous year demanded. Instead, I continue to have months ahead to spend with my friends, colleagues, and the children here in Berlin.

A few weeks back, Fulbright had asked me to share a reflection on my Fulbright experience for their online newsletter and to also reflect on what it is like to be back in Germany again. The reflection is now up and published on the web.

For your reading pleasure, I pass along this link:
Integration, from the Other Side

From Trash to Treasure

I have always liked creating things. Whether it be sewing scrap fabric into a bag during a summer school break, knitting a scarf, or scrapbooking photos, I like the sense of creating something new and then continuing to use it to fulfill an already existing need. In an attempt to live simply, this urge to create has gravitated towards a creativity of turning trash to treasure during my time here in Berlin, a shift that has been accompanied by an adventure into new mediums of creation - from the familiar of sewing, knitting and decoupaging, to the somewhat explored photography and to the newer forms of painting and drawing.

As I gathered furniture together for my apartment here in Berlin, rather than buying crates or containers simply to hold 'stuff,' I have become a connoisseur of utilizing that, which would otherwise be thrown to the curb. To hold my knitting, I converted a box that my parents had sent me into a sewing basket. The sewing, knitting and crocheting needles, thread, scissors, paintbrushes inhabit glass jars from various jams and foods that I have eaten in the past five months.

Paper that I want to recycle gets tossed next to my trashcan into another old packing box covered with envelopes and tea bag wrappers.

My prize ‘trash’ creation, however, is my table. Since moving in in September, I have been regularly visiting flea markets in search of the perfect table for my room. A small end table to sit next to my sitting chair upon which to set my current reading pile and a cup of warm tea was all that I wanted. But, I found no table that met my expectations.

Then, however, one of the chairs in our kitchen broke. After bearing the wear of people leaning back into the wooden chair, the wood had split between the chair seat and back. One morning I returned from running to find the outcast chair alone in the hallway of our apartment next to the trash. After waiting one day, I smuggled the chair into my room and took the cracked chair-back, and made the crack final and official by severing the chair back and chair seat. Since then, I have found my perfect table. At a cost of zero, the chair (now turned table) serves all of the desired purposes. And with a bit of yellow paint, it adds a bright and jolliness to my room during these winter months here in Berlin.

Other than making cushion covers for the old chair I pulled out of our apartment storage, my creation of trash treasures may simply subside as my need for such handy creations ceases. However, my interest in sewing, photography, painting and drawing remains high. Perhaps, cards, things to wear and artwork for my room will be what comes to follow.