People of the Year

Hobbs & Sachtschale

I'll spare you a treatise on Time's Person of the Year and tell you instead whom I would like to have seen on the cover: my young friend, Eva. She's 16 and represents to me the spirit of perseverance, creativity, and honesty that make me glad she is on the planet. It's people like Eva who will be the fixers of the world us elders have handed down in a shabby state. She had a sudden, tremendous loss this year and I so loved what she wrote on her Facebook that I asked permission to post it.

"About Me:

I lost my dad over the summer, he died on a hike with my brother, he just got dehydrated. Dying should never be so simple, so quick. Not now. Not my father, my role model, he cannot die while I am but 16. My mom devastated, my little sister still cries herself to sleep, and my older brother who was there to see him die, is stone. It confuses me so why he remains so unemotional, is he scared by what he's seen, by trying to save his father for hours on end without water or a phone in the mountains? I do not know. But how can my father, my ONLY father, leave in a blink. He had climbed the enormous Half Dome mountain and come out smiling. And yet no matter how hard I think it through, how much I want not to believe it to be true, he died on a day hike climbing Mt. Diablo. Mt. Devil as I see it now, the monster whose dryness, and dirt took my father from me. I am strong. I am 16, I am lost, I am old, I am wise, I am withering. Not the typical things you'd find on a facebook page..."

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I would also like to mention some young people my daughter is acquainted with. She does the website at UNC's Physical Rehab. http://www.med.unc.edu/phyrehab/local-global-outreach/rehab-reader/spinal-cord-injury-sci-rehabilitation-reader-2009

The stories will inspire you. I was struck by one man's thoughts after she interviewed him, "What's the point of being negative? How does that help me?" It reminds me of an Emily Dickinson poem:

"Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune--without the words,

And never stops at all,

An sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me."

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....may the blessings of a new year of healing, joy, and cosmic encounters be yours...