Kennedy, King and Lennon. Public squalor, private wealth. What is this strange country, the United States of America? It is the dog that – when left unattended – discovers everything on the table is within reach, the pleasure and the poison, and devours both.
There are times I feel socially homeless among some of my fellow citizens. No wonder my heart struggles to not become an old battle-axe, rust-worn shield, divided realm.
Watch out for the prison guards you yourself have employed, steer clear of the wartime radio news editors who work overtime inside your mind and never take a vacation. Beliefs are roads to the ultimate nowhere, and are always under construction.
I wish I could get up on my soapbox all mighty and righteous, and urge us all to renounce gain and loss, pleasure and pain, but they are the characters who inhabit our landscape. And none could exist without the other – they’re like political parties. There is no “side” with One. You need two, or more. Without villains, what’s the point of the existence of heroes, and vice versa?
It’s comforting to remember that beyond the horizon of all our drama there’s an ocean. Beyond the anatomy of all our choices there’s an open sky.
Our addiction to fear has sent us careening into wonderland, and we’ve elected the queen of hearts as our president. We’ve closed ourselves in with defibrillators, fire extinguishers, medications, and an obsession with life expectancy, youth preservation. We are addicted to comfort, its creation, replication, perpetuation. How do we find a way out of our house of smoke and mirrors?
It’s comforting to know we will breathe in and out until we no longer breathe in and out. We, a passing rain, a prairie wind.
How much peace might we experience if the glowing lanterns of our hearts could learn to not be afraid to change, to flicker, to fade. The shifting of stones can alter the course of a river’s current.
C.M. Rivers 
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