When I walk the pasture these days I find evidence of an epic battle. Really, this is a job for a poet. Not a photographer, not a simple bread baking mother, not even a farmer. Epic battles really require poets for their powers of simultaneously condensing and expanding an event.

What I see in the pasture, quite literally? A simple mom can say that, at least. I walk through and I see where the grass is hard pressed, scraped, compacted. Pushed would not be a strong enough word. At the same time, the grass is ripped, aerated, lifted. Torn apart, for sure.

There are tracks in the field. Well, of course, tracks everywhere. But for this one brief time, there are unusual tracks in the field and I wish I could convey how it makes me feel to see them and know what they are. This kind of knowledge makes me wonder about God and our place in the universe. Does it matter, when we gather esoteric knowledge, as we go about the job of living?

And our jobs feel like an epic battle, sometimes. I do not know an artist, parent, or worker who escapes this truth. We all work hard to survive our lives. Some harder than others. Still, is there a person alive who lives less than an epic battle with reality, the push and pull, yen and yang, fear and love, work and rest cycle we all plod and rage? Does it matter, at all, what we learn here as we go, in the largest scheme of things?

Does it matter if I snap at my children for the sin of singing in the room as I am sitting here frantically trying to collect a few of these quick thoughts before we race out to meet our day? Yes, I feel sure it does.

When I walk through the field I see a spot where great hooves have rent the earth and great horns have gouged the grass and this renting and gouging makes a pattern. Long straight gashes almost two feet apart, flanking deep scraping hoof marks. Anyone can look down and see them there and there and there, progressing. They almost scream in the grass, to my eyes. A bill board would be about as subtle.

I have a roll of film, undeveloped, from last summer. Its a farm roll and I happened to capture that bull before he was taken to slaughter. I had no idea it was his last day. And, for some reason, I stall developing him. He was not bred to live. And what can it mean, that his unique self is captured here on this earth in a deep, dark, secret, magic place? A place we call film. A mark he left. Marks and tracks everywhere.

Its the same question, really, about these transient, silent, and for most people insignificant, marks in the grass. Do they matter? Do we care what the bulls were thinking as they fought? No, no one cares. But, what if we stop to wonder how they were feeling? What moved them to fight in the grass that day? To slam their great and ponderous heads against each other. To bring the full weight of their power to bare on the most important moment of their life. To get the girl, make a mother, start a family.

Maybe we do know how they were feeling. Maybe we all feel it, or something enough like it. Does it matter, then, those feelings of others? The bulls leave their mark. The children who all live as passionately. Who leave marks all over my house, my marriage, my heart, and my soul.

I can expand on this forever, to uselessness. I really wish I had the talent and intelligence to be a poet. Photography is nothing compared to poetry. And all of that is nothing, nothing what so ever, utter insignificance, compared to the marks I saw on a child's face. What I saw walking through the great American pasture, yesterday, at Walmart.