The Road I Travel


 This is the track I travel to get down to the creek bottoms.  This, of course, is my view on the way UP out of the creek bottoms.  I am determined to get back to where I can walk up it without having to stop one or more times to catch my breath.  

This is the track the dairy herd used to traverse twice a day in the summer, going to and from milking.  The grass stays greener and the temperatures cooler during the day down along the creek.  After two years the weeds and dead leaves are starting to encroach on the track and it looks different to me. I was here for 18 years of dairy farming, so in my mind I still see it broader, muddier and more gouged out by cow hooves.  I figure eventually the leaves and weeds will make more ground cover over the rocks and in a decade or two or three there will only be a narrow track, used by deer or turkeys and the occasional coyote.

Sometimes I wonder about the paths I have made in life; not the physical paths, but the spiritual, though that isn't the exact word I want to use.  Is there a specific word for the impact a person makes throughout their life?  Like, is there an unseen spiritual aura following us about; an ephemeral impact swishing along behind that we have on the lives of others we encounter as we go along the way?  And when we move along, either move on to a new job, a new town, a new life; does that unseen path we've made fade and grow over?  I guess this is the age old pondering most people have of making an eternal mark on the world while we are here.  

It makes me think of the Bible verse:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 

                                                                                            Ecclesiastes 3:11

We forever want to leave our mark on the paths of time because God put eternity in our hearts, but only He can see the aura, the spiritual effect, that we leave behind us.

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