In Endurance, we created self reflective mandalas for our milestone. We did this on order to embody everything we have been studying these past few weeks concerning our current readings, morpheus, and enduring different tastes. The assignments purpose was for us to be able to make connections to all of these studies, and put them all into one piece. The task seemed somewhat intimidating, but once you started it felt like you couldn’t stop. Personally, ideas flowed like crazy. Here is a picture of the ending turnout of my mandala:

In my mandala, I wanted to portray abstractness. I found it very hard to make connections to everything in our class visually, so I decided to communicate it all with select words including “freedom” “find” and in my opinion, the most intense tastes a person can taste. The C in the middle stands for the main character in my book, Chris of Into the Wild, and my home state, Colorado. This connection was obvious while other parts of the mandala remain complex. The footsteps represent journey while the different colored toes show diversity. All of the lines are supposed to be roots and the fire-like balls, show controlled chaos. Controlled chaos is something that I can relate to the book because I want freedom but at the same time want my life to be in line. The different flavors displayed, show a sense of direction. Direction is HUGE in the story but, was also something we as a class had to endure in a taste testing. My mandala is hugely abstract and complicated but is easy to understand once explained. I feel it embodies a lot of things about me and I take great pride in it.