Find contentment....

An imagery exercise for English. Thinking back, I think that I may have been thinking about Marco Island, Florida.....

A darkness so black your eyes feel like velvet. The wind warm and damp, lazily caressing your bare shins. The sounds of traffic so distant they become almost indistinguishable from each other and even the faintest sound waves from that seemingly other world that reach your ears become confused with other sensations entering your head. You taste salt. You smell the faintly foul smell of seaweed. The sand shifts beneath your feet and waves lap shyly at your toes. If you were to open your eyes you would see the ethereal expanse of silvery, moonlit sands and the water disappearing into the dark horizon, floating the stars, but as it is, you are content to allow your vision to stay in that velvety ink and find contentment in these simple sensations.

La Neige (The Snow)

Another short little poem for French II....

le neige a dansé
je n'ai pas pensé
le monde a pu halter pour regarder
mais il a eu le silence à donner
le vent a murmuré
pour le soliel nous n'avons pas cherché
nous n'avons pas oublié
parce que les nuages sont déj à arrives.

the snow danced
i did not think
the world could stop to watch
but it had silence to give
the wind whispered
for the sun we did not look
we did not forget
because the clouds had already come.

I Could Not Be Persuaded to......

A journal entry in English class that actually goes wonderfully with the below post... The prompt was the title of this piece. 

You try to force me.

I will resist.

I am strong.

you may beat and shove me.

Try to cram your ideals into my mind.

Tell me what to do.

Why I am here

and

where I'm going.

But I will not

be persuaded 

to stop thinking for myself.

These ideas

are mine.

Unadulterated and pure.

The strength of my will,

will stand up to a thousand arrows

tipped with red-hot arguments.

Think!

This was an essay for English I Honors. The prompt was "persuasive essay directed at my individual class as the audience".

Society constantly tells us to be independent, to be creative, to be unique, but in a world with 7 billion people how can we possibly be individuals? Everyone is shaped by their friends and family. Each person’s environment helps form who they are. We allow ourselves to be lost in the rush. We let our ideals be shaped what everyone tells us. We turn off our minds and become cookie cutters. Our opinions can no longer be deciphered from the views of those sitting next to us; thinking has become a tedious process. Amidst being bombarded with the views of the rest of the world we must start to think for ourselves while still allowing ourselves to be mentored.

Everyday we swim through hundreds of advertisements, posters and others’ opinions. We walk through acres of propaganda. We are children. We are told to watch and to learn. We listen as our relations express their opinions. We carefully watch as our parents assess politics. We carefully temper our very selves to meet the standards of others. Our preferences can be affected by the likes and dislikes of those around us. Our political opinions are often impressions of our parents’. We are frequently born into a religion that we did not choose. Our very essences can be boiled down and auctioned off to the world around us.

We need to think for ourselves. We need to gather information from the tangible world around us and formulate our own thoughts. We need to beat off our apathy and actually pay attention to politics as they happen, not hear the faulty facts through the grapevine. We need to stop swallowing the half-chewed conjectures of others. We need to stop adopting other generations’ conceptions of issues. We need to shut down our computers, to stop accepting everything that is told to us; we need to drag out the dusty textbooks and examine the facts for ourselves. In the end we may come up with the same thoughts that our parents did, but we need to come up with those thoughts on our own.

Admittedly, we need mentorship. Without someone to show us the ropes, we would be awfully confused about the huge world that we live in. Our parents have had at least a couple more decades to figure things out than we have, so we should listen to them. Being born into something as stable as a religion can be comforting. Politics are complicated and our parents have good reasons (hopefully) for the beliefs that they have. We wouldn’t have the diverse world we have today if we didn’t have seas of media and oceans of styles and trends set for us. Yes, we do need influences, but they need to be balanced; not to be allowed to run rampant through our impressionable minds just as they are taking first struggling steps towards individuality.

We are who we are because of our influences, but after that helpful boost we need to take off our training wheels and ponder things alone. Our young minds are powerful and clean, do not allow them to be polluted by the washed-up ideas of other generations. Think for yourself, and you may find that you are an individual with unparalleled intelligence. We are each our own person, so why on earth would we allow our singular minds to be sullied by the views that already exist? The world needs our new thoughts to sustain it, not the values that already exist.