Gates are for opening and closing. As Robert Frost said about walls, gates are for keeping out or keeping in, and it's important to know which is which.
This gate is on Scolty Hill near Banchory. It's a place I've walked often, and remembering my stavaigin' as a boy, now and then I climb the gate rather than opt for the walk through side gate. Because gates are really ladders lying on their sides.
The photo is taken on the way back down.The canopy of trees only shows so much of the road ahead. Paths, gates, hills, trees, all you need really as a metpahor for what the life of faith is mostly about. "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly" is the very first verse of the Book of Psalms. Where we walk, and with whom, seems to be important advice if we are serious about God.
So instead of walking with the ungodly and sitting in the seat of scoffers the righteous person, the person who wants to live right and walk the right path delights in the "law of the Lord" and meditates on it day and night. Two choices then scoffing or delight; laughing at what matters, or laughing because we have discovered what matters most. And if we discover what matters most we follow after it; and Jesus said, "Follow me – take up your cross and walk."
Walking up Scolty, and down again, following a chosen path, seeing gates as ladders to be climbed and invitations to walk further, and always only seeing so far; it's an enacting of that daily walk with others, with myself, with God. This time of year some of the paths have ferns and bushes and overhanging trees that restrict vision. That too is part of the joy of it, especially when you near the top and the whole landscape opens up in a 360 degree panorama and you know this is what you climbed for.
Christ of the upaward way my guide divine;
Where thou hast set thy foot may I place mine.
And move and march wherever thou hast trod,
Keeping face forward up the hill of God.
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