The California Life

So Gap Year- 2^nd semester. It is so weird to think that I only have a few more hours out here. It seems like just yesterday that I was moving into the Bay Area, discovering things I had never known existed like sprouted food and Dim Sum. But being here and doing what I do with environmental internships definitely has changed that. I remember sitting on a wooden picnic bench with some co-workers from an outdoor ed school, and having one young woman telling me about the Native American burning rock ceremonies and another explaining to me how her plant-based diet had changed the way she saw the world.

I remember some retired hippies telling me about some all-nude festival in Joshua Tree for a week in the summer, and others recounting the good-ol’ days of Woodstock.

OK- maybe I painted a picture of the most eccentric people I came across. Let me try to give you a better sense of the atmosphere here.

There is definitely a sense of community here. Everywhere you go around the bay you sort of have a community. Not necessarily because you are related to one another, or have mutual friends, but because there are some underlying values that you all have. Peace, Innovation, Creativity, Sustainability- a general appreciation for nature.

And a lot of that has to do with the setting. Between the sparkling blue San Francisco Bay and the rolling green hills, there is the consensus that if you live here you have to value this stuff. Enough to fight for it like the Marin County citizens did in the ‘80s for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Now, over 75% of the county is open space and parks. It’s what makes  Marin County such a special place to so many people.

As for the creativity, I see it pop up all over the place. On the East Bay in the streets of Oakland as a homeless man strives to make a breakthrough with art, on the Berkeley campus as students protest the fossil fuel industry by dressing in black and spreading around an oil rig, in the maze-like crisscrossing of San Francisco, as people with all musical talents create recording studios  out of the street corners. It’s beautiful in a way. The creativity. Because it brings about hope, and a general fighting spirit.