05 September 2014
I recall days in my childhood when the whole family would stop and listen to unusual sounds coming from inside the house. It wasn’t that the house was haunted. It simply made unusual sounds. My mother was the best noise detective of us all; she would be still, listen, put her ear to the walls and doors, and wait. One time she tracked a noise down to the washing machine, which instead o...
15 August 2014
Carl Sagan once said, “Astronomy is a science that seeks to explain everything.” Although the late astronomer was a popular figure in modern times, people have been looking up towards the stars for thousands of years. Jainism, for instance, is one of the oldest religions in the world, yet it does just what Sagan declared in breathtaking detail. The origins of Jaini...
14 August 2014
Just a week after I moved to Chicago, I woke up to the rumble of airplanes zooming over my apartment. It was the annual Air and Water Show that my landlord had told me about. Rather than face a room full of moving boxes and half constructed furniture, I dashed out the door to see what all the fuss was about. The show was like nothing I had ever seen before. At times I was certain the...
08 August 2014
Traveling in Switzerland is ridiculously easy – a few hours on the road and you’re already in another country. I grew up in Switzerland and as a child my family traveled all the time. On one particular trip across several countries we ended up in Munich, enjoying a brunch stacked with sausages, potatoes and beer. When we were finished I helped my father count colorful Deutsche ...
01 August 2014
I never took her up on the offer, but I did recognize how difficult it was to craft pottery. Although she strived, my mother could never make two bowls look remotely alike in shape, size or design. This caused some trouble while trying to stack them in the kitchen cupboards, but I thought the irregularities were what made her dishes beautiful. They reminded me of ancient primitive pots &nda...
22 July 2014
One time on vacation my family almost missed an international flight when Stephanie was left behind at the hotel. I sat and wailed at the airport, refusing to leave without her. My father persuaded me to board the plane, but only when he promised to have Stephanie mailed home with the fastest priority delivery service available. This was no easy feat as we were flying from Japan to Switze...
10 July 2014
The process of making kamana is a joint effort between men and women. Women first create the bowl with soft clay, coiling up thin strands in the shape of the dish and smoothing the sides. Once dried, the men polish the inside of the bowl and use a chip-carving technique to decorate the outside with shallow reliefs. The women then low-fire the pottery; and men complete the process by paint...
27 June 2014
COPENHAGEN, 1646Curiosity brought you here. Although it is rainy and there is a chill in the air, you came out anyway because you were compelled to act. The rickety carriage stops in front of a weathered stone building adjacent to a shadowed alleyway. This area is quiet, distanced from the rowdy market squares in the city center. The cobblestones are wet and treacherous after a rec...
06 June 2014
Deep inside the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa is the Kuba Kingdom. There, men and women work side by side to create highly symbolic cloths, known simply as Kuba cloth. The cloth is fabricated from the leaf of the raffia palm tree, the plant with the longest leaves in the world. The transformation from leaf to textile is easy to understand, but difficult to exe...
29 May 2014