Dear freinds and family,
Happy New Year! I hope that this letter finds you well and looking forward to the coming months. I am sitting in a train between Bayreuth and Freiburg, Germany. We are just sliding through Bamburg and I still have about six and a half hours of travel time ahead of me. But I don't mind. I still have a "touristy" side that finds trains (as well as pretzles, old buldings, driving 180km/hr etc.) pretty exciting.
At the end of December I wrote a B1 German Languange exam (!!). One of the tasks was to write about modern correspondance media such as Facebook. I wrote that I am a friend of the letter. This is rather ironic because I very rarely write or receive letters. But I have always loved the annual Christmas card/letter tradition and this year, which has been very full and likely hard to follow for an observer, seems like a good one to try my hand at an annual update.
Since May I have made Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, home. Home. What a strange, important, and illusive word. In the past year and half (since this is my first Christmas letter, I feel I am allowed to do that--stretch back to 2010 if I need to, right?) I have called many places home: Victoria, Cowichan Bay, L'Arche Trosly (France), Bayreuth, and of course Freiburg.
But perhaps before I endeavour a chronological recap, I will simply try to descibe my present. Sebastian and I live in a lovely third floor apartment looking over a church and Freiburg's Old Cemetary on the one side, and Schloßberg on the other (there are pictures on my blog). We are about a five-minute walk from th pedestrian-only downtown, with its beautiful old Cathedral, daily farmers market and winding cobbly streets.
Since October I have been working in a small bakery/cafe in a gas station (a bit like the classier, German version of Tim's). I get up just past 5 am, drink a coffee and try to make myself look presentable, bike about 10 minutes, and then, between 6am and 1pm, I am known to most as "Frau Brown" (The "Whitney" was apparantly a little bit too complicated and in one of the cash-registers, I am actually signed in as "Frau Braun," which I find highly entertaining). I love it. I do not plan to make a career of it, but working in a little shop is pretty sweet. For one thing, I have the chance to engage in some serious People Watching. Because we are in a gas station, we get all sorts of wacky people coming through, from the Italian construction workers who argue over who is allowed to pay for everybody's espressos, to the (often pretty cute) bicycle repair guys, to the old regulars with an extroadinary German dialect, to the English truck drivers, to the Turkish schoolgirls, to the French tourists, to the rude businessmen, to the maildeliverers... I am reminded every day that there thousands of ways to live; that no life path is worthier than another and that we are always called to build peace and community, wherever we find ourselves.
When I came to Germany, I decided that I would make this year my chance to do things I had often intended to do but never did. One of those things is to take music more seriously. I had been toying with the idea of auditioning for a classical voice BA at the Freiburg Hochschule für Musik (where Sebastian is studying to be a music teacher) since I got here and started taking lessons again. In October, I decided to go for it, figuring that whether I am successful or not, the challenge of preparing my voice and musical theory (and piano skills!) for the audition would be a fun and worthwhile experience.
Now with less than seven weeks to go, I am singing more than I ever have in my entire life. It is amazing to (slowly) be able to sing not only "nicely," but with artistic precision and detail. Preparing an aria reminds me of writing a well crafted essay where each phrase deserves care and thought; polishing. That care and thought requires a well-trained voice in order to be accurately expressed. For you music nerds (or happy Youtubers), I am singing Bach's "Zerfließe Mein Herze", "Batti Batti" from Mozart's Don Giovanni, "Widmung" by Schumann, and two selections from Bernstein's Song Circle I Hate Music. It is a challenging but incredibly beautiful program. Thankfully, this audition has really become a team effort. Sebastian, his mother Uta, as well as my teachers Frau Bittner and Frau Müller have spent hours with me working through pieces, doing hearing or theory tests, piano lessons... The support I have going into this is incredible and I am so, so, so thankful for it.
Home. You have probably heard that "Home is where the heart is." I find this piece of cliche wisdom rather useful because it explains why I have spent the last year feeling rather stretched all over the place. This time last year, I was in Victoria beginning my fourth semester of an Economics degree, often visiting my family in Cowichan Bay, singing in a couple choirs and running every day beside the wide Pacific Ocean. Now I live with my (wonderful, talented, ridiculously attractive) boyfriend, work in a coffee shop, sing for hours alone, speak a foreign language, and bicycle everywhere. Freiburg is my "Home", Cowichan Bay is my "Home", and every day my heart gets a little more accustumed to this wild and unimaginable expansion of its capacity.
Outside, the blustering snow has turned to rain and the train has picked up a few more passengers. I am struck that over the course of one train ride, I have seen so many different landscapes... And yet, the same train track connects them seamlessly. It reminds me of the bike trip that Sebastian and I did this summer. We biked for a week along the Donau River, starting at the source and ending at Regensbourg about 600km or so away. We followed the water, sometimes a trickle of a stream, sometimes a wide, wide river, through endless corn fields, austere cliffs, old villages, monestaries, forests, and big cities. I find myself looking back at the past year, and the past few years even, and wonder, through all these landscapes of life, what has been my river, what has guided me or carried me on this crazy ride? Not long ago I would have said Peace, the desire to cultivate God's Peace in the world. And I do believe that we are all called to be instruments of God's Peace, no matter what life landscape we find ourselves in. But what ties these landscapes together more fundamentally (and I do not mean only in my life--I would venture that such is true for all of us) is Love. That sounds very idealistic and silly (and yes, I am the one who bought a one-way ticket to a foreign country in order to continue a fairy-tale romance, so I would understand if you don't trust my youthful "wisdom"), but Love is a powerful and constant motivator, whether I have always been aware of it or not. And, to venture one more abstract and idealistic conclusion, it is this constant Love that empowers us to be peace makers...
And with that last little bit of philosophising, I think I will draw this, my first "New Year's" letter, too a close. May God's Love and Peace be with you in the coming year and may you see many fantastic and wonderful landscapes (perhaps Freiburg?).
Peace, Love, all good things,
Janet
