Aubergine tea

As the light is dimming over Amman, the trees’ leaves are becoming more like shadows than green umbrellas and the call to prayer echoes from one hill to the other.

Time, as always, is of the essence.

The tea I just made from dried blossoms of one of the small trees on our balcony tastes a bit strange – it has an unusual flavour of aubergine, adding to the mild flavour of this evening.

I don’t know how many times over the last months I have said: “Never in my life have I been as busy as I am now”, as seeing good friends became a rare coincidence that would last only a few minutes before I had to rush off and as I often didn’t even take the time to pick up the phone to speak to my parents when they called – not to mention highly irregular eating patterns and sometimes severe sleep deprivation.

I guess there’s always an “even busier”…

Unfortunately.

And the constantly enthusiastic “improvement of the situation” plans that your brain makes in those situation – I should go to sleep earlier and get up with the first rays of sunshine. Then do some stretching exercises and twenty minutes meditation. Then a healthy Muesli with lots of fresh fruit and I would be able to start my day full of energy! That’s it – then all other things would eventually fall into place!
It’s not that these plans aren’t serious – but they’re funny somehow. As much as part of me says I’ll never manage that kind of thing anyway, another part keeps optimistically pushing for it and painting pretty pictures of a bright future.


Lots of exciting things are going on… surprise, surprise! Not only are me and my colleagues at “Entity Green” leading Jordan’s Recycling Revolution and taking the country by storm, we’re also planning on becoming the country’s first commercial producer of quality compost, which would help the Kingdom to maintain its rapidly diminishing soil – the basis of any civilisation, as many have said.
So our goals are humble: divert as much waste from landfills as possible, to reduce the groundwater pollution and methane emissions from the 7000 tons of waste produced in Jordan every day AND provide a way to turn as much as possible of all the organic waste from agriculture and large consumers (most of which gets either burned or dumped at the moment) into fertile soil for a drying country. And along with that, of course, change a culture of shame related to waste, fight total ignorance about the dangers of capitalism and work on building a currently vastly lacking awareness about the interconnectedness of environment globally and locally, of a healthy nature and human well-being and of simplicity and joy.