Contemplative Essays
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Cooking Poetry
There is poetry in cooking, and there is cooking in writing poetry. Both require science, art, observation. Both require an approach that is – to some extent – a combination of military thinking and creative thinking. A sense of when to obey the laws, bend the laws, break them, rewrite them, be served by them. Continue reading
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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 Continue reading
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Fastenings
What if you yourself didn’t want anything, what if you spent measureless lengths of time just people-watching, ruminating, taking notes of where your mind traveled to, at once engaged yet unaffected, an explorer holding the oar gently as he rows upriver, a tourist observing wide swaths of gold made by the afternoon sun as they Continue reading
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Noblesse Oblige
A medallion of liverwurst, a dish of warm milk. Even these, you hardly wanted in the end. You looked at the water in your bowl as if it were a stranger to you. No more did you come to the kitchen at the sound of a can being opened, the clinking of dry food against Continue reading
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A Great Many Sparrows
You know there are a great many sparrows in a tree when your view of the tree itself has been almost completely obscured by the birds. There are three ways to see these birds as they leave the tree in the morning, a single entity swirling up and away, as if together they made a Continue reading
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Safe Harbor
Down on my knees cutting kindling in the cold still air, I don’t just think I’m the luckiest man who ever passed this way – I know I am. It doesn’t matter where, or when, you live. It only matters that your heart stays open, that your heart can be your home, so that regardless Continue reading
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Wind and Rain
The cat sort of fell onto his side and stretched out against the cool ceramic floor, finding relief as he allowed gravity to press him against the tiles checkered blue and white. I could see his little belly rising and falling through the shaggy fluff of his hair, the motor of his purr shifting into Continue reading
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Awakenings
We can see so much more with closed eyes, as if in closing them we are truly opening them. We see our story, the story of ourselves, our human-animal birth, all the way through to the opposite gate. It’s not in color or black-and-white, but some strangely familiar quality of light, striking chords and nerves, Continue reading
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Swimming
Forgive me for being so plain, but all things aside – including the alchemy of eternity being the steady stream of each moment pouring into the next – my purpose for being here today is to plunge into the water, as far as I can tell. This lake, viewed from the sky, takes the shape Continue reading
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Listless
Every day I make a list of things that need to be done, things that might slip through the fine mesh net of short-term memory. Today, the list contained more items than I could possibly accomplish. So I did what you might expect – I pushed it down into the folds of my left-hand pocket, Continue reading
C.M. Rivers 