It is a ritual of childbirth. Shortly after we enter this world a nurse takes our left foot, inks it & presses it onto a sheet of paper. Thus the loops, ridges & whorls that become part of our body's signature etch their first marks into the landscape of this world. 

   At high noon on Sunday, October 31, 1943, as bullets & bombs screamed death in Europe & Asia, Lassie came home on the silver screen & The Little Prince skipped into the world, my mother & I met for the first time.

   Both of us cried. Then the image of my left foot was duly recorded. 

   At age one, I rose to walk on that foot matching its stride with its partner. Since then, my feet have taken millions of steps. A band on my left wrist tells me I average more than 8000 per day (about four miles) down from the 20,000 or so I took when I was a high school distance runner.

   If you walked just one mile every day you will have circumnavigated the globe by age seventy-one. 

   You have taken millions of steps. Some caregivers journey down hospital hallways into the chambers of people who would be grateful for a single precious stride unaided.

    For the rest of us, the number of our steps counts for little. What matters is where your spiritual feet have taken you on your outward odyssey & inward expedition. How has your heart changed since the nurse first pressed your foot on paper & how has your presence affected the lives of others?

   "Every step, even a tentative one, counts," Anne Morrow Lindberg wrote in Gift From The Sea. "For we are, actually, pioneers trying to find a new path through the maze of tradition, convention and dogma."

   What footprints have you left behind? Where will love lead you in the balance of your years?

 -Erie Chapman