Contemplative Essays
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Medicine in the Moment
The essence of time is found spontaneously in moments, not measured in minutes. Minutes are fleeting, moments are precious. Minutes are disposable, moments are priceless. In man’s strange invention of measured time, minutes tick tick tick away, evaporating, yet somehow stacking up to become the years of our life, a row of slender volumes held Continue reading
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Tommy Orange’s Powwow: Stage or Symbol?
If you were writing a novel and you had something you really needed to say, from deep down in the marrow of your bones, wouldn’t you love to turn the setting for your story’s climactic moments into a perfect stage upon which your characters could play out their final scenes, while at the same time Continue reading
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Circles
If I didn’t have to go to work today, I’d write a clever turn-of-phrase or a cryptic suggestion only you would understand the meaning of. I’d spend my time among the dead, paying my respects with a few well-put-together lines destined to become a classic. I’d write a poem for you because you’ve been on Continue reading
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Connecting Poetry With Song
Two powerful songs that resonate just as much now as they did decades ago Continue reading
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No Small Wonder
It’s those unexpected details in life that can astonish you sometimes, like little thieves waiting for an unwary tourist around a corner. Ants coming out two days before it rains. Burro dung holding up adobe walls for two hundred years. A hummingbird’s heart beating over a thousand beats per minute. A blue whale’s tongue weighing Continue reading
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Dharma Wonderland
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 Continue reading
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Dragon Gates
While drinking cold tea from a glass jar and dividing your thoughts between Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Neruda, you cut a kiwi in half the long way and consider the oval ring of black seeds at its heart. You always see Our Lady Of Guadalupe there, proving that eating a piece of fruit can be Continue reading
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Obituary
Will it only be a list of information, a collection of the external? Born in so-and-so, to these parents of this descent, lived here and then here, and then here. Worked as a nurse, a cook, an accountant, managed a dry cleaning business, taught fifth graders or at the university, produced movies. (Your name here) Continue reading
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Whirlwind: How The Heart Is Wiser Than The Mind
There are times when our thoughts sweep us away. We get caught up in the whirlwind of the mind’s magnetic pull, and something needs to happen to reel us back to the moment we’re actually in and what is happening there. It could be something small: we have forgotten the bread in the oven, or Continue reading
C.M. Rivers 