Free Learning, Free Fun

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a Knowledge Commons DC class and the act of re-creation and recreation. I really enjoyed the class that I took, and the more that I looked into the organization, the more that I discovered that I shared a common philosophy with KCDC: everyone is a student, everyone is a teacher, and everywhere is a classroom.

So I decided that if they took my proposal, I'd teach at the next batch of classes. Happily, they did, and Discovering and Writing the Spiritual Memoir is going to happen at St. Thomas' Dupont Circle on September 15th, at 6:30. If you're interested, I hope you can make it. If you're not interested in that particularly, hopefully you'll take a class on how to photograph airplanes at Gravelly Point, learn some Welsh, or take an abandoned schoolhouse bike tour, among dozens of other classes. More classes will be posted soon for the September session, so be sure to check back.

Another quick note: KCDC is always looking for places to hold classes, so if you belong to (or run) a church or another public space, and are interested in sharing, let me know. St. Thomas' Dupont Circle and St. George's U Street are already in on the action and are getting ready to welcome new friends through their doors.

Hidden Life

Although it's been a very busy week, I've been thinking about what is seen and what is unseen in our daily life. It started with finding this guy upon my arrival home from Brooklyn:

 H & 13th NE - May 20, 2014

I almost stepped on him, but luckily I didn't. Although he did make me shudder a little bit, mostly I was just impressed.  I had no idea slugs that large even existed on the East Coast. Where I'm from, we have snails and slugs but they top out at a few centimeters. Here's a metro card for scale. 

H & 13th NE -- May 20, 2014

I was less excited when I found that slugs had been making their way up to my second-floor balcony garden. Maybe this had been going on for a while, and I had never noticed, but knowing that there were slugs around made me look a little harder for evidence of them. The next morning, I found that my Johnny Jump-up seedlings had been slimed. 

Vicar's "Garden" -- May 21, 2014

There are other things that exist at night in the alley that ordinarily go unseen. Husband and I once saw a raccoon, nonchalantly walking the top of the fence, all the way down the alley. I've spotted a possum under a car -- I thought it was a cat at first. Definitely not a cat. There are at least two cats back there, big roaming tom cats, who work at catching the rats that scurry, and now and then people, looking for a late-night place to tryst, to fight, or (sadly) to shoot up. 

What I've seen, I'm sure, is just a sliver of what actually happens around me in my neighborhood. I just found an entire species that I didn't know existed here. How much more is hidden?

Recreational Recreation

If you are a regular reader of this blog, or know me personally, you know that words are a source of endless fascination for me. The word that I've been playing with since I got home from my very awesome Knowledge Commons DC class at SCRAP DC last night is "recreation."

SCRAP DC is a non-profit organization up in Brookland that takes donations of creative materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill and provides them to artists and other members of the community at very low cost. There are stacks of vintage wrapping paper, unwanted fabric, bags of bottle caps and buttons, piles of old costume jewelry, a metric ton of crayons, and balls and balls of yarn, not to mention some of the more interesting one-off pieces. Walking into the SCRAP store is like walking into an I SPY book: controlled chaos, stuff everywhere, but it's all very interesting to look at, and everything has the potential to be turned into something else. 

Which brings me back to "recreation." Recreation, as a noun, has two basic meanings: the first is that of an activity done for enjoyment, while the second is the act of creating something again. In the act of taking something that would have become part of the landfill and making it into something new, I was fusing the two meanings and participating in recreational recreation. In my case, the act of recreational recreation was making a basket out of vintage wrapping paper and some old fabric ribbon. Others in my class made baskets out of office paper, VHS tape, 8mm film, shopping bags, yarn, old maps, food wrappers, and receipts. 

KCDC's "Basketweaving from Scratch with Scraps" Basket
May 14, 2014 -- Not too shabby for a first try, huh?

Out of a bunch of trash came a bunch of things if not useful, then beautiful. And it was fun. 

I left the evening with my basket in hand, a few new acquaintances that I hope to see again, and thinking about how I could bring more recreational recreation into my life and relationships.