07/04/2026
A photo and a poem for the day. Hope you all enjoy.
I have been trying to remember
what it means
to love a country.
To watch hands reach
for families who crossed deserts
with nothing but a dream
stitched into their pockets.
To read about the bombs of distant wars
masquerading as righteous
as though another horizon
must always bear the cost
of our comfort.
To see mountains and rivers,
older than every border,
measured not by wonder
but by what price they might fetch,
our public lands bartered away
like heirlooms at a garage sale,
as if the oldest cathedral
were only timber and stone.
Some days it feels
our nation has mistaken power
for greatness,
and forgotten
that mercy was always
the stronger country.
How strange it is
to love a country
while grieving what it has become.
Yet I cannot surrender
to despair.
Because dawn still gathers
along the jagged alpine ridges
The rivers still remember
how to carry snowmelt through every valley.
The pines still lift
their quiet prayers into the evening wind.
And everywhere I travel,
I find ordinary people
whose kindness outlives
every administration
neighbors who leave water
for strangers,
who open their tables,
who shoulder one another’s grief
without expecting anything in return
Perhaps they are
the truest flag
this country has ever flown.
So tonight,
while fireworks bloom and vanish,
I will place my faith elsewhere
in the mountains
that know no king other than the creator
in the rivers
that keep moving us
toward one another,
and in the stubborn,
unremarkable love
people offer each day
the kind no government
can legislate away,
the kind no empire has ever managed to conquer.
If there is still
an America worth believing in,
I think it lives there.
