“Follow Me”

I have wanted to post this picture for a week, but never felt like I could get the right words for it. I figured I’d just get on with it tonight.

When I opened this image to process it a week ago, I had a sweep of pleasure wash over me.

I thought the picture was a pretty nice image, but more importantly, it quietly offered itself to me as a powerful symbol of some other similar moments in my life.

Last Thursday evening after work, my sister came by and we went together out to the Rio Grande bosque- to check out cottonwood colors, to see the river amidst them, to soak in the glistening of fall.

Once we were finally wandering in the trees and thickets of the bosque, the sun was bright, and there was, for me an air of regression.

My sister pushed along into the woods, phone out, stopping for a photo opp here and a photo opp there, and I followed her, enjoying the waving yellow and orange and brown tree crowns against the blue sky. We were ultimately going to the river, and so she reconnoitered our route as I followed her lead.

For a moment, I was a kid again, with my big sister guiding me around through the cottonwoods and willows and Russian olive trees.

And at some point, she found a direct trail heading through trees and tall brush towards the river, and she signaled to me she was taking it. I, a bit behind from dallying to photograph shapes and swirls, came to the junction she had went down, and I thought “This is a fantastic image.”

And it is the photo posted here.

I thought it was a stellar image, though, because once I saw it, I realized it symbolized something I recognize has happened so often for me during my life with her.

She is not in the photo, because she has already enthusiastically transversed the trail. But my comfort in that knowledge is that she has taken the trail, and she is waiting for me somewhere down it.

She has been this way for me in many moments during our lives- my courageous big sister, a trailblazing spirit, who has gone down roads I would eventually need to navigate, and she has always been close enough and caring enough to say, “Yes- it is this way. Come down here. Follow me.”

I am thankful to have that sister, who displays courage and a willingness to risk to get from point A to point B; who not only does not shirk from pain, but who invite physical pain into her life regimen, to help her sharpen herself and steel her for the buffets of life; who is adventurous and enjoys the journey of discovering; who accepts what the journey gives to her as part of its merit, good or bad.

So, when I came to this view at the junction in the bosque, I knew I had to stop and take this picture. It’s not necessarily about the fall foliage or the colorful leaves.

It’s about the standing sliver of light in the image’s center, where the trail meets open space, where my sister has gone on ahead before me, and where she waits for me.

And it’s about the trail she walks, and has always walked, to keep me with her.