Learn a New Skill

Tapestries of Life
Weaving is a simple, sedentary activity--you just sit at a loom and pull the weft through the warp--right? Wrong. It's complex, strenuous and, Navajo weavers say, mystical. "Weaving is your thought," says Pearl Sunrise, who teaches a $355, five-day workshop at the Taos Institute of Arts in New Mexico. "You need to use your motor skills, your psychological being and your spirituality." Emily Hyatt of North Carolina has been weaving all her life and has a business educating schoolchildren about the history of the craft. But in Pearl's class she was a beginner again. Previously, she had looked at weaving from the outside, in terms of design. Pearl's class taught her how to weave her beliefs into her work and become part of her own creation. "It was different from any weaving I have ever done before," she says. Pearl has an unofficial teacher's aide: Taos itself. Students, who arrange their own lodging, absorb the rugged mountain landscape, the strong pure light, the rich blend of Native American and European cultures and incorporate them into what one student calls "blankets of love." Folks shouldn't feel intimidated by Pearl's body-and-soul approach. And even those who don't know their warp from their weft are welcome.

Inside the Beltway
Ever wonder why good legislation dies and bad bills survive? One way to find out is to sign up for a week with the Close Up Foundation's $1,160 Congressional Senior Citizen Intern Program in Washington. Participants go to hearings and briefings, take political seminars on topics ranging from health care to international relations, meet with vips and lend a hand in the office of one of their Senators or Representatives. Accommodations and most meals are provided by a nearby Marriott. During her stint as an intern in California Democratic Representative Bob Filner's office, Lupita Jimenez, a children's book writer from Chula Vista, was taken to lunch in the Members' Dining Room. "All of a sudden, the entire California delegation came through the doors, and I blinked because here was almost every well-known politician I had seen on television!" she recalls. "I loved being an insider!"