Learning to draw a labyrinth

Saturday from 9am to 3pm I had my last meeting with the art therapy block seminar group, an experience which was just as was calming and insightful as expected. I learned a complex labyrinth design that, when used with typically-developing older kids or adults can be very a meditative internal process. An embellished/decorated version of this that I drew and stuffed in a letter for my friend Norman is below. We drew them with pastel chalk and then used clear baby oil to trace the path.


We did a lot of clay excercises too, for the sake of knowing how to implement them with children in the future. Another activity was one that is apparently altogether common in German elementary schools: felting, which oddly enough is done with wool. You take polyester or cotton as a base and roll it into a ball before affixing colored wool onto it, which magically sticks. Once you have formed a giant fluff ball, you soap your hands and wet the whole thing, gradually decressing the size and giving it a more concrete shape. After some time, you add more wool and create a distinguishable form, such as a fish or flower.

(eyes currently pending: will be sewn on later)

It's really an enjoyable experience and the creation process serves to relax the individual, allow one to open up and learn to properly recognize actual goals for a project, albeit in a simplified manner (e.g. making a fish out of wool), but it's a start. Saturday was also brilliantly sunny and I sat outside of my favorite Munich tea house, writing letters. A few friends and I met up, intending to go to a "trendy" (Munich is far too stylish/hip and ridiculously self-aware of this for it's own good. I often prefer the blunt, brash nature of Berlin) vegetarian restaurant but landed in a great, previously frequented Indian restaurant instead.

It is nice not to work this year - although my work during the school year has never consisted of more than unpaid internships, grading papers and babysitting and it was more during the summer that I got serious 'real world' experience - but I will enjoy the regularity and insignificant yet nonetheless helpful amount of money of a job next semester.

I have made an admirable attempt to enjoy the sun's warmth before the recurring storms these past weeks. It has been raining like crazy and even more intensely than in Portland, which is unbelievable. The frequency is not as great - except for during this month, when it pours three times a week. The pounding and thunder are just absurd, as if the weather needs to exaggerate in order to make its presence known. It pours straight down, too, like in films, rather than in the natural diagonal manner. The only prior experience I've had that holds a candle to it is monsoon season in Arizona, riding in a truck with enormous tires, wading through the flood in a fervent mission to reach an open mic night performance in Phoenix. Seeing the likes of this rain again is somewhat overwhelming in Bavaria, which is not a desert by any means.

Taken during the train ride.

Some compatriots relaxing at Ammersee.

Recent undertakings have included finding multiple ways to cook eggs (see below), making earrings out of old stamps, trying to draw a proper penny farthing, narrowly avoiding the purchase of things on Etsy, buying significantly cheaper Voxtrot albums on iTunes instead, meeting and chatting with German boys, working on the zine and going to Ammersee with friends to sunbathe, picnic, drink wine and swim. It's all been pretty wonderful, too.

Huevos

Autism: the "supercharged brain"

I read two good articles on autism and was interested in sharing them. The first is very comprehensive and was spawned by a theory developed by a Swiss research team. Initially I was confused as to why children with autism who were found to typically have an enlarged amygdala (sector of the brain controlling emotion) were not as a result more adept at experiencing empathy and comprehending theory of mind or the emotions of others. This surprise, however stemmed from the false yet automatic belief that something which is bigger potentially functions better. Wrong... I quickly realized, with the help of the article, is that the pronounced amygdala would exaggerate the feelings that already exist. This explains the apparent hyper-perception of individuals with autism, or at least the sense of feeling too much that I perceived in the children with whom I worked.

It's similar to how children with autism generally hear things at high frequencies and much louder than most people - hearing is not like emotion, sure, but the perception is equally exaggerated.

ich fahre einfach gerne Fahrrad

Happiness for me is presently caused by:

1. Bicycling
2. Nature (insbesondere der Englische Garten)
3. The radical changes in weather that are occuring right now, from sunny bliss to lightly pattering rain to crashing thunderstorms
4. Mellow music, [audio]books
5. Puppets, sketching
6. Coffee

It's funny that my most influential and mood-determining factors in life at the moment are classes, biking, and the softcore and widely accepted drugs of coffee and wine. I am being highly social, though, and actively meeting and talking with people. I suppose everything is just very internally generated right now in that self-centered but nonetheless positive way things happen to be during ones twenties. Even my enjoyment of courses is something I cause, as it is my perception of and interaction in those courses that lead to contentment.

I did experience some melancholic Portland withdrawl feelings a few days ago and wrote, between pages of puppet design, some of it down.

What I miss: feeling a sense of belonging. What I feel in Munich is a territorial ownership of and pride in knowing this city. It still has the 'new car' smell to me and I am excited when I navigate my way correctly to a previously undiscovered place. Yet I miss being able to ask another biker in SE Portland if he has any extra batteries for my light and his reply being to freely go to his house to pick some up. I suppose that this random act - or orchestrated, as I did ask for the batteries - of kindnessis one that could occur anywhere, and in Italy I saw it again, in a more extreme variation, with the students from Padua.

That realized, though, I still miss being surrounded by mindful and kind compatriots and ex-pats who have made their place in the US. Although the Münchners are very informed and also polite, the sense of a shared cultural history, when not thought of in the grand-scale, with World Wars and global economic crises, is lacking for me. I think I am just missing Portland again, as I always do when it rains...


Well then, I leave you with a picture from Lucy Knisley (see above), a graphic novelist/comic illustrator I have been really excited about recently.

Nothing remarkably different has come about as of late, just a continuation of all that is good. I have been listening to a lot of Blind Pilot lately, as well as the audiobook version of The Picture of Dorian Grey. I keep falling asleep to the latter and am therefore led to try to recall whether any dreams were exceptionally violent. None [remembered] so far, but it's still worrisome and probably not the best bedtime material. The last This American Life episode was glorious; if you are in the States GO SEE the theatre version that is playing only once more.