The Hero's Trail

Confessions

            I am a bibliophile. I simply love books. I recently realized just how many I have when Jamie and me moved into our new apartment in Provo. We brought down boxes full of books, and we only have one bookcase! After three days of organizing, and reorganizing and sending books back home we finally figured it out.

            There are books from many different genres and subjects. Storybooks: Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Hobbit,  and My Side of the Mountain. Personal favorites include: Dante's Inferno, Frankenstein, Les Meserables, East of Eden, The Neverending Story. We have biographies about Gandhi, William Wilberforce, Michelangelo, The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt. Myths and Fables with Beowolf, The Poetic Edda, Grimms Fairy Tales, and Anderson's Fairy Tales. Books on adventure and discovery in Kon-tiki, The Lost City of Z, River of Darkness. Religious books like the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Quran, Popol Vuh, The Apocrypha, Book of Jasher, Baggiavad Gita, Dammapada, Confession's of St. Augustine. Philosophy and thinking with Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, Viktor Frankl, Buscalia, and Taylor Caldwell. Poetry from Shel Silverstein to Shakespeare's Complete works, to Mihai Eminescu, Robert Frost, Paublo Neruda. History with Gibbon's Rise and Decline of the Roman Empire, and Gardner's Art through the Ages.

           

 Merlin and Barron

            While the list is long it represents a very small number of my favorites that made it into the bookcase. Books and reading really mean a lot to me. One book that has been important to me is by T.A. Barron. In second grade I was starting to feel that the Bailey School Kids books were becoming too simple and repetitive. I branched out to the harder books and found myself intrigued by The Lost Years of Merlin. I read it and loved it. I fell in love with the characters and the world which was created in the pages. The morals and love of nature spoke to me.

In his sweater. Photo courtesy of www.soentpiet.com

            In the years following I devoured every book Barron wrote. I love how he helped teach me the impact a good person can have on the world. I followed the Merlin series to when it was five books. Then eight, then eleven. Until they were reprinted as a series with new titles. When I was 17 T.A. Barron came to Utah with his new book, The Hero's Trail. I took my little brother with me to go see him. We drove about a half hour to the auditorium where Barron would be speaking.

            We sat there nervously waiting for this great man, this creator of worlds in which we had spent so much time, to appear. He was announced, and up the isle he strode, skipping up the stage steps...he tripped! My brother and I looked at each other in amazement. "He's human!" I thought. "He wears funny green sweaters and trips sometimes!"

           

Small and Simple Things

            As I listened I thought to myself how he was another person, just like us, who does wonderful things. That was the message he spoke about. That each of us walks a trail in life, the Heroes Trail, and by the strength of our character we can surmount obstacles and make a difference in the world. The book, which I bought and had signed, shares stories and quotes about people, mostly young people, who have made the world a better place.

            I look back on my life and see this as one more learning experience that led me to who I am and why Longboard For Love did what we did. As normal people we wanted to make a genuine difference in the world, and maybe, at the same time, our example could ignite the spark of charity in anothers heart. Just as Barron helped do the same in me.

        
    "This world of ours is a truly wondrous place-full of great mysteries and great contrasts. Chief among those mysteries, I am afraid, is how a world with so much beauty and richness could also be home to greed, arrogance, and intolerance. How can a world that produces abundant fruits, inspires timeless poetry, builds lasting friendships, and creates chances for us to realize our dreams also contain the horror of war and religious hatred? That is the greatest challenge of our time, my friend; to tip the world's scale, to find hope where there might be despair, to help all living creatures live together in harmony" -T.A. Barron

            "Just as the smallest grain of sand can tilt the scale, the weight of one person's will can life an entire world." - T.A. Barron