Trailblazing Then and Now

Astride his father’s shoulders
Like a double decker bus
There was always what his father saw
And the child’s gaze beyond
They learned together
What their senses taught them of reality

There were so many hills his father climbed
The boy seeing what was ahead on horizons
The father focused on firm footholds
Following trusted forest imprints
Relying on tradition’s habitude

This father is long gone now
This boy of shoulder wonderment
Has grown wise of rugged tracks
Leading to this day

A stormy December afternoon
Staring through a digital lens
Atop a mid-town observation deck
The boy now a man
Stares outs across a skyscraper landscape
A winterous tundra his father never had to pioneer

Realizing the Now of navigating
Relies little on the primitive tracks
When plant
Animal
Rock
Weather
Parts of the undeniable whole
Determined shelter and food
Life and death

Wisdom
The oft missing essence of success
Impacts little of today’s aspiration
Whose awareness respects not learned footprints
Nor hardened determination
To stay true to a right direction
Instead…

All too often
Success honors but bushwhacked obstacles
The opportunity to conquer any and all
The razed aside
Inert and live
Banished and dead
Leaving many to query
What lens can sharpen that which isn’t there?

Today exists but yesterday’s ethereal presence
Once preceded by integritous footholds/handholds
The resplendent oneness of nature’s vast inner-connection
Now all but buried beneath
A stumbling culture’s duplicitous stepping stones

Tracks lead precariously to penthouse suites
Where an eagles nest is but a Britannica reference
A redolent library book of often ignored history
Reminding a father’s boy
Staring through glass-layered revelation
That decisions need pondering past momentary reward
That Nature’s swirling white layering the once wilderness of discovery
May be foreshadowing avalanche forces
Unrestrained in their ability to bury man

Pulling his eye away from the telescope
He considers a wind gust
Lifting snow daring not to confront the ground
Choosing instead to swirl
To levitate with perhaps man’s exhausted currents from below
Struggling to rise through waning memory
Trajectories of so many devoted fathers
Trusting honest trailblazing would never disappear

Fortunately

Like the cyclic snows from on high
Rising temperatures initiate their own revolution
Endings return to beginnings
Nullifying load and weight

Time’s undaunted sagacity knows
Once civilization’s latest aspiration expends
Creation knows no better
Than to invent new trails
New boys on father’s shoulders
Tomorrow’s then and now
Again