C.M. Rivers

"The point of being an artist is that you may live." ~ Sherwood Anderson

Journal

  • Reception

    Friends, I toss myself aside for you.  I become available for you.  I eat, drink, mumble, run hands through hair for you, scramble down the gulch for you, carry wood, fold socks, scrub pots, ever-fearless, requiring nothing. These are not the days of time’s inhalation pulling way up under the world’s collarbones, stitching together the Read more

  • Light My Way

    May my heart light my way.  May it come into a place not unlike the narrow line that exists between water and fire, a pocket of stillness where both forces are within reach.  Then I could learn their ways, how to call on them, how to let them enter me, how to recognize which one Read more

  • Stones On The Shore

    Like stones on the seashore, we too are fragments of something larger, something greater. We too are individual yet connected. We too are washed up here from another realm, only to return to it. We too are picked up and thrown back, out of this sphere of gravity and oxygen, back out of a place Read more

  • We Cannot Wait

    We cannot wait for things to be different, for things to be perfect, for things to meet our requirements.  We cannot wait for everyone’s approval.  We cannot wait for the certainty that everyone will like what we have to say. We cannot wait for ourselves to feel less afraid.  We cannot wait for the coast to Read more

  • On Working With The Creative Powers

    This is a wonderful excerpt from the book Blue Pastures by Mary Oliver.  It is not about an artist’s discipline, that is an entirely different subject.  Rather, it’s about making oneself available at all times to one’s ideas and creative powers. “I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations.  It is as it must be.  Read more

  • Let Me Become

    Let me become a master of listening, a student of surrender. May a strong and blossoming tree grow from the root of all my fears, a tree with the innate knowledge of how to bend with the wind. I have much to learn from the ferryman who spends his life taking people across the river, Read more