Yin Yuzhen, I learned your story and I haven't stopped thinking about you.

Your father got lost in the desert. A man saved his life. And to repay him? He gave you away. Nineteen years old, crying, begging — it didn't matter. Your father was a man who never changed his mind.

No wedding dress. Just a blue cotton jacket and a gray donkey, walking for days into nothing. Your "home" was a hole half-buried in sand. You stood at the entrance, looked inside, and cried for seven days.

For forty days after that, you didn't see another human being. One day someone walked past in the distance. You ran after them. They kept walking. You couldn't catch up. So you ran home, grabbed a basin, and covered their footprints. Every day after that, you lifted the basin just to check they were still there. You talked to them. You asked them who they were.

How lonely does a person have to be, to talk to a footprint?

Your father came to visit once. He saw you were nothing but skin and bones. He went home, and he died.

You sold your only sheep — a lame one — and bought 600 saplings. A sandstorm left ten alive. Everyone laughed. You said: if ten can live, a thousand can.

That steel rod you used to punch holes in the sand? Six feet long when you started. Forty years later, worn down by two feet. Your hands were covered in blisters that broke, and broke again, until they became calluses. You planted through pregnancies. Through miscarriages. You never stopped.

Eight million trees. Seventy thousand acres of desert turned green. Every single one, proof that you were alive.

Now you're a national hero. Medals. Awards. Applause. But they don't talk about the father who handed you over like a gift. They don't talk about the sand hole where you cried for seven days. They don't talk about the footprints under a basin.

Because the world doesn't want a whole person. It wants a hero. Someone who's only strong, who only gives, whose story starts with "and then she planted trees" — not "and then she was sold."

Heroes make us feel safe. They make us believe: if you just try hard enough, you can overcome anything. But the question was never "how did she survive?"

It was "why did she have to?"

Yin Yuzhen, you never chose any of this. But you chose to keep going. The wind blows now, and every leaf in that forest is speaking for you.

But I still want to know — who will plant the forest in your heart? The one that's been barren for forty years.

You were never supposed to suffer any of this. You stand taller than any tree you ever planted.

http://i.imgur.com/Lw5Lz4G.gif

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE

For example, my dad would experience frisson listening to Brahms but I highly doubt a person who likes Pink Floyd would feel the same way.

Similarly, someone whose dopamine levels skyrocket when they listen to Elliot Smith isn't going to be as enamoured when they hear late Coltrane, as I am.

Dunno, this subreddit just seems like another way for people to say 'check out my taste in music'.