Reverb 10 for December 31 – CORE STORY

December 31 – Core story. What central story is at the core of you, and how do you share it with the world? (Bonus: Consider your reflections from this month. Look through them to discover a thread you may not have noticed until today.)

My story is intertwined with the stories of the people that I love. They make me a better person, they add meaning and depth to my story, they challenge and inspire me, they provide the plot twists. I share my story with the world through the people that I love and the profession – or rather passion – that I have chosen. My words would mean little outside of the context of the relationships I have developed, the good deeds that I strive to do, and the people that provide me with strength and wisdom each day.

Reverb for December 18 – TRY

December 18 – Try. What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn’t go for it?

I’d like to say I want to try something very ambitious and impressive like scaling the 7 summits or learning a new language, but in keeping with the theme of my previous post, I’m keeping it simple.

Every since they opened their doors, I have wanted to take the Beginning Quilting class at Spool. Spool is a fantastic, locally owned fabric shop in Philadelphia. Something about being in the clean, bright, white space makes me want to create oodles of hand-sewn goodies. As someone who is new to sewing, I felt that I would be a legitimate seamstress of sorts if I could cut, construct, and sew my own quilt. It seemed like a necessary milestone I needed to achieve before I could consider myself halfway proficient. Alas, every 5-week class Spool offered conflicted with my academic schedule.

Until now!

Now I have 5 free Tuesdays that I can fill with the Beginning Quilting class and I am pretty ecstatic. Probably more ecstatic than any person has a right to be over quilting. There is just something magical about learning and new set of skills and then implementing them to find that you created something completely valuable, usable, and unique. That’s what I love about knitting and baking and canning and sewing: the sense of self-satisfaction, of pride in a job well-done, the joy others express over lovingly-created gifts. Marx writes all about this feeling in Das Capital when he speaks of the how with industrialism and capitalism we are so very removed from the creation of the products we directly consume. It is such a wonderful feeling to wear something or to eat something or to use something that was born from your own labor and creativity. It gives everyday objects greater meaning in my life, meaning that is hard to find when I pick something from a shelf and realize that it has traveled halfway around the world from a factory. So learning to quilt will not necessarily be merely about making a quilt, but about engaging myself in a new creative process.