About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Julia Remillard, a sophomore at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans, writes that humans should show more gratitude to the Earth, and that we have it backward when we think the world owes us something.
Who Owes Me?
By Julia Remillard
[I]sn’t it strange that people think the world owes them something –
like the Earth and sky should be bowing at our tiny feet?
The truth is the world does not owe us anything at all.
It’s our job to make good choices and stand tall.
Asking a huge void to answer our complaints is pointless.
And I’m sorry if you’ve never been told this,
but you don’t “deserve” anything; you can hope to be blessed
and not have overwhelming stress.
But your life and your idea of repayment is completely wrong.
The world and everything in it owes nothing to our polluted bodies.
We owe it our gratitude and hopeless smiles.
The fact that we see the world as our worshipper is weird,
especially when we are inhabiting its surface, not the other way around.
