Thought for The Day - Across

A Seed 8 x 11 Pastel

Took a road trip this weekend, a six hour overnight stay to Missouri to see my son. Now growing up, this was the extent of my yearly vacation trips when my parents piled up the car, visiting relatives in Kansas City, MO. But as a father of my own children, we took trips to Virginia for four years, taking my daughter back and forth to school. I fell in love with the mountains and the elevations. The roads seemed smoother - they actually are - and with the grand view as the car climbed a hill or you reached the top and looked down over the valley: SPECTACULAR! But Illinois is relatively flat and depending on what's on your mind, your thoughts become flat and monotonous as well. Missouri can be a bit scenic with it's elevations but for the most part, it's flat as well. Boring, right?

Where I am in at the moment, the life of my family and factors beyond my ability to describe, the scenery seemed exhilarating! The road is very familiar, traveled since I could remember and I could probably do it with my eyes closed. But it wasn't nostalgia, recalling road trips counting horses seen along the way. And it wasn't counting the number of signs for Merramec Caverns, either. No, it was SEEING ACROSS...

The sky, spread from where I sat, behind, before and on every side.
The lives of families and individuals in homes on the road side, connected to families, farms and apartment buildings I would never see from the roadside.
Truckers on long and short hauls, earning a living and a hundred thousand decisions made every fraction of a second.
Retired couples driving down the road, a life full of children in their rearview, parents on the other side and relatives on their road ahead.
Restaurants and diners, workers cooking, cleaning and serving hundreds in their lifetime and never realizing who they are sharing love with a plate of eggs, bacon and pancakes.
Water, mixed with concrete mix, becoming solid, hard and supporting millions of tires and lives for countless years.
Moisture, frozen and appearing white and grey and black on the road and hillside...

Across sky, land and lives, a connection exists, so integrated and complex whether one person or molecule should 'disappear,' not one second or emotion is lost. Everything remains intact no matter how many of us come and go.

We never really leave 'this place;' we are intimately connected to one another, whether we live in love or hate. For there exists a bond to all that only appears when we decide to open our eyes.