Thanksgiving 2: Felix's Birthday

I spend a good amount of time with the people in Berlina’s WG. They range in age from about 21 to 33 and could all have graduated from the ‘old’ Bard. Pasana, vegan meals cooked together, button curtains, contact dance…its all just part of life. I think it is funny to have found contact dance people here. Maybe not unusual that this is here, every kind of thing is here, but interesting the way certain types of people find each other. Maybe we send out waves of some kind like a signal. Lighting bugs do it…
After dinner, for which Askhan cooked a vegan ‘turkey’ (a big stuffed butternut squash), we sat around the dance floor making lanterns out of paper, tape, pomegranate shells, feathers, a green pepper. We dressed in robes and carried our lights in a silent procession up the dark Kreutzberg. I wondered if I had been there before, maybe many times, when I was small. It all seemed almost familiar, but it may have been the familiar that comes when you believe you should be accessing vague memories.
So we all stood shivering slightly on the windy tower top reviving ghosts. Or we were the specters ourselves. The spectators. Surveying the berlin lamplights spread northwards below.
It was the first time I could think of that I had seen such a nighttime overview of the city and it gave me an unheimlich feeling. As though being at this remove and having such a broad perspective on the land momentarily brought a stepped back, distanced, consideration of my life. Extro-intraspection. I thought of seeing paris from the steps of monmartre, I thought of seeing ny from buildings and boats. All I could think of was ‘what? what is this place? where am I, and how, and how, and for?’

Later that night, we flipped through incredible graphic books that Felix and Clare had created. Felix has volumes and volumes of drawings and collages and comics printed out…it was overwhelming. People create such amazing things.