This weekend, I went back home and pulled my riding boots from freshman year out of the very back of my closet. They were still pretty dirty, with the spurs buckled on and definitely felt more snug than I remembered. For the first time in three years, I am going to ride again! As spring trimester approached, I figured, when else am I going to have the opportunity to ride a horse again? I drew my horse’s name at a meeting on Sunday (Her name is Jewel. We have yet to meet. I am sure it will be a momentous occasion) and tomorrow, we will hit the trails. I hope I remember how all the tack goes on… Although, I certainly won’t have forgotten how to muck…

I am so excited by my senior exhibition project (a year-long research project in a field of choice mandatory for all seniors) looking into Street Art used for social change. When I began, I was mostly inspired by one relatively well-known artist and only hopeful that I would find more artists like him using his street art with this particular public-spirited passion, but the more I researched, the more I have discovered incredible, beautiful work beyond what I could have imagined and a real community of like-minded street artists and organizations dedicated to their individual socially-concerned beliefs. I only wish I had more time to work on it!

Four years have not yet taught me to make a good smoothie. Every Sunday brunch I try, yet my experiments in banana-strawberry-mango proportions never seem to lead to perfection, let alone edibility. There we were, all the same, drinking our viscous strawberry sludge on the Pergola while studying for art history, engrossed in our work, somewhere in 14th century Florence when my friend told me to look up– two arcs floating in the distance above the mountains… We paused, sat back in our chairs and watched the paragliders bob lazily in the chilly blue sky above the dining hall and imagined their view. The perfect study break. Little moments of little beauty like this remind me of a teacher’s TOADTalk from a few years ago on what he called “Joshua Bell Moments:” the little pauses in our quotidian mundane, the transient opportunities to appreciate beauty that we often overlook. The well renowned violinist Joshua Bell busked incognito in a metro station in Washington, D.C. and brought up the seemingly obvious, but increasingly more charged question of whether or not we have time for beauty. 1,097 commuters passed by him during morning rush hour– only seven stopped to listen, although thousands regularly pay ridiculously high prices for tickets to his concerts. I always try to stop and listen or watch now, because who knows where he will be playing next?