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Description
There are rainbows through my eyelashes.  Underneath me, pebbles are smaller than my pinkie-fingernail.  The California side of the sun is setting across the fence, its warm rays on my face.  Fuzzy leaves of green and purple-petaled flowers remind me of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums:  “This world is a movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.”(181)  I have become interested in Buddhist principles.  The world has not changed much since 1958, when Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums.  People still place too much importance on material possessions, but “rucksack wanderers” and thinkers still exist.  I would love to be one of those rucksack wanderers and wonderers, to live a life where I did not have as many possessions.  I would love to live off the land, growing my own food, and feeling as free as I can.  Hiking up a mountain, I would settle on top, meditating the calmness of my environment.  I would like to sit in the middle of an expansive field, somewhere in Utah, with long grass waving in the wind, blue, cloudless skies above me.  I would listen to the wind only, and how it moves through the grass.  An Indian proverb says it best, “Treat the earth well, it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.”  I would sit there and learn about the secrets of who I am.
In sixth grade, my class went on a week-long trip to the outdoor school Loma Mar in California’s Bay Area.  We spent our days hiking through redwood forests and exploring tide-pools.  We had night-hikes, campfires, and one of the staff members would play guitar, singing about earth.  We helped take care of the organic garden.  I now realize how much that experience shaped my life.  On hikes I remember closing my eyes, wishing to capture the beauty as if it were a picture in my mind.  I had always been earth-conscious but, after my experience at Loma Mar, I became even more so.
After my family moved to Massachusetts a couple years later, I was looking through a cardboard box full of records.  I put a record on with a curly-headed boy holding a girl, both wrapped in a faded pink quilt.  There was a butterfly kite drifting lazily over the mountain landscape in the background.  The word “Woodstock” was written in black bubble-letters.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang “…but you know life is for learning, we are stardust, we are golden and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
I met a girl in watercolour class with whom I slowly became friends.  She fed my insatiable appetite to learn about the late sixties and early seventies’ counterculture by giving me a copy of a Jimi Hendrix CD. I found that at concerts there existed an incredible sense of community and, finally, a feeling of belonging that I had only previously felt in such a magnitude at Loma Mar.  I had been feeling out of place for so long.  Through my friend from watercolour class, I met people who introduced me to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.  They were people who thought the same way I did and were on their own journey of self-discovery.  We would discuss political issues and trade philosophical ideas.
I am inspired by glimpses of my life.  I envision hippie thinkers sitting on sofas under the stars and on chairs surrounded by the majestic redwoods.  I like to take vibes from music and transform them into visuals.  Last summer I went back to the Bay Area for the first time since eighth grade.  In Haight-Ashbury my friend and I walked past tiny Eden-like gardens in front of wooden bay windowed houses smushed next to each other as if the city could not waste and inch of space.
I know that a deep part of me always will belong to those dried, golden mountains in California’s setting sun.  While I may never want to become a Kerouac “Zen Lunatic”, I have some ideas of my own.  They are forming as I keep digging through me, discovering who I am more each day.  Music, literature, and the experiences I continue to encounter have created my need to find a way through art where humans can discover that they can work harmoniously with the nature that surrounds them.

Description
There are rainbows through my eyelashes.  Underneath me, pebbles are smaller than my pinkie-fingernail.  The California side of the sun is setting across the fence, its warm rays on my face.  Fuzzy leaves of green and purple-petaled flowers remind me of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums:  “This world is a movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.”(181)  I have become interested in Buddhist principles.  The world has not changed much since 1958, when Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums.  People still place too much importance on material possessions, but “rucksack wanderers” and thinkers still exist.  I would love to be one of those rucksack wanderers and wonderers, to live a life where I did not have as many possessions.  I would love to live off the land, growing my own food, and feeling as free as I can.  Hiking up a mountain, I would settle on top, meditating the calmness of my environment.  I would like to sit in the middle of an expansive field, somewhere in Utah, with long grass waving in the wind, blue, cloudless skies above me.  I would listen to the wind only, and how it moves through the grass.  An Indian proverb says it best, “Treat the earth well, it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.”  I would sit there and learn about the secrets of who I am.
In sixth grade, my class went on a week-long trip to the outdoor school Loma Mar in California’s Bay Area.  We spent our days hiking through redwood forests and exploring tide-pools.  We had night-hikes, campfires, and one of the staff members would play guitar, singing about earth.  We helped take care of the organic garden.  I now realize how much that experience shaped my life.  On hikes I remember closing my eyes, wishing to capture the beauty as if it were a picture in my mind.  I had always been earth-conscious but, after my experience at Loma Mar, I became even more so.
After my family moved to Massachusetts a couple years later, I was looking through a cardboard box full of records.  I put a record on with a curly-headed boy holding a girl, both wrapped in a faded pink quilt.  There was a butterfly kite drifting lazily over the mountain landscape in the background.  The word “Woodstock” was written in black bubble-letters.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang “…but you know life is for learning, we are stardust, we are golden and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
I met a girl in watercolour class with whom I slowly became friends.  She fed my insatiable appetite to learn about the late sixties and early seventies’ counterculture by giving me a copy of a Jimi Hendrix CD. I found that at concerts there existed an incredible sense of community and, finally, a feeling of belonging that I had only previously felt in such a magnitude at Loma Mar.  I had been feeling out of place for so long.  Through my friend from watercolour class, I met people who introduced me to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.  They were people who thought the same way I did and were on their own journey of self-discovery.  We would discuss political issues and trade philosophical ideas.
I am inspired by glimpses of my life.  I envision hippie thinkers sitting on sofas under the stars and on chairs surrounded by the majestic redwoods.  I like to take vibes from music and transform them into visuals.  Last summer I went back to the Bay Area for the first time since eighth grade.  In Haight-Ashbury my friend and I walked past tiny Eden-like gardens in front of wooden bay windowed houses smushed next to each other as if the city could not waste and inch of space.
I know that a deep part of me always will belong to those dried, golden mountains in California’s setting sun.  While I may never want to become a Kerouac “Zen Lunatic”, I have some ideas of my own.  They are forming as I keep digging through me, discovering who I am more each day.  Music, literature, and the experiences I continue to encounter have created my need to find a way through art where humans can discover that they can work harmoniously with the nature that surrounds them.