I finally did it, sent away the stuff for the classes I’m going to teach next fall. Thanks for your comments,a and offers for help. When I told my husband about that post he said, “But I offered to help you last weekend, and you didn’t want me too!” (He’s right, I’m stubborn.) He also said that he knew I’d do it at the very last minute, that man knows me well. The thing I couldn’t write about myself turned out to be exactly three sentences long. It would have been much easier for me if it had had to be three pages. I do better with long formats – which you can see on my blog, ahem.
I finally managed to write something by writing a first draft in English. My excuse for being more comfortable with writing in English has always been that I’m more used to it because of the blog and the internet but yesterday as I was scribbling down my draft on a piece of grocery list at midnight I thought again and I think that I take writing in English a bit lighter because it feels like paying with toy money. It feels a bit less real and therefore less threatening.
I told my husband about my feeling that writing in English is a bit less real for me than writing in German (I know it doesn’t feel like that for most of my readers) and he said, “English is your teddy-land!” I don’t know whether you’re familiar with teddy-land, it’s a land that my son invented where all his stuffed animals live. He goes to sleep there because teddy-land is mostly his bed, and my son is emperor of teddy-land.
So, it seems that English is the land where I go to play. I do know that it is a real language and that there are people who speak nothing else but for me it is as if there where teddy-land inside my computer, it’s where all the nice stories and music come from, and they even invented their own language. Plus there are all these nice imaginary people, and there seems to be a lot of knitting and writing in my teddy-land.
Anyways, here is my draft for the short bio:
My name is Susanne. I’m a singing teacher.
I love improvisation which keeps me in the moment, as does mindfulness meditation.
Since I also love to knit I combine the two in mindful knitting.
I told you it was only three sentences. The tricky part was connecting the singing with the knitting, and the meditation.
In German and after several re-writes it turned into:
Mein Name ist Susanne. Ich bin ausgebildete Musikpädagogin und unterrichte seit mehr als zehn Jahren Jazz- und Pop-Gesang.
Mein Interesse gilt dabei besonders dem Bereich der Improvisation, der spontan im Moment entstehenden Musik.
Die Konzentration auf das Jetzt, diesen Moment ist auch das Grundprinzip der Achtsamkeits-Meditation, und dieses Prinzip verbinde ich mit meiner fast lebenslangen Liebe zum Stricken durch “mindful knitting”, Strick-Meditation.
Kreativität hat viele Facetten.
That’s (in toy speak):
My name is Susanne. I am a trained music educator, and have been a singing teacher for jazz and pop for more than ten years.
I’m especially interested in improvisation, spontaneous music made in the moment.
The focus on the now, this moment, is also the guiding principle for mindfulness meditation. I’m combining this principle with my almost life-long love of knitting through “mindful knitting”, knitting meditation.
Creativity has many facets.
See, it turned out to be four sentences in the end.
As for the classes, there will be a lace knitting class (that’s self-explanatory, isn’t it?). I probably will be designing a lace scarf pattern for this, one that starts easy and gets more difficult over the six week class. There will be a class called “knitting as a spiritual way” where we will use knitting as a focus for mindful sitting meditation and we’ll think about how knitting connects people, how it tells stories, and such.
And then there will be the most exciting class for me (never mind that I’m making each of these up as I go along) the circle singing. There will be a one-day workshop where we will be making up songs as we go along. If you want to hear this kind of singing, go to the webe3-site, or go and listen to Bobby McFerrin’s Circlesongs-CD . We’ll stand in a circle, and I’ll make up patterns for the others to sing, then we’ll build patterns upon patterns, and in the end there will be music made by all of us together. If the students are able there even might be a bit of soloing.
So, if you’re living next to M.unich I’d love to see you at these classes. I probably will put up a link to them once they are link-able. The knitting classes will start in October and the circle singing will be November 8th.
Seems that there might be a bit more posting in this place now that the procrastination is out of the way…