The Continuance - US

The American river lives inside our souls...
It spills onto the soil we touch,
and it spreads it's wisdom to those within reach.
The struggle to remain pure is clouded by fear and deceit.
Alone on it's journey, through freedom,
travelling fast against rocky
ideas, to questions we ask in silence...
and the answers live in peace...
The river's life, it runs through the American spirit...

My ancestors on my father's side came to
America in the middle of the Seventeenth century.
The original Cash was a mariner named William,
from County Fife in Scotland,
who sailed across the Atlantic and settled in Salem Massachusetts.
His sons and daughters,
and grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
spread south to Virginia and Georgia and Arkansas...
they never went farther west than the Mississippi Delta.

They were sailors who became southern farmers,
but no musicians appeared until my Dad, J.R. Cash was born in 1932.
Now in the twenty-first century,
the sailors and farmers have disappeared, but musicians,
singers and song writers are
spilling down through the modern generations.

I am part of the river of souls who make up the sliver of America
that belongs to mariners and musicians,
those who love the sea and those who'll make music.
The ocean and the soil,
the body and the soul... the words and the music.
I am at the congruence of sea and dirt, and it becomes a song.
I am from a long line of American
without illusions. We became who we were.
The river I sail is one of longing for what I
already have, and ache to be who I already am.
American without illusions...
a member of the world... captain of melody... sower of words.
The river and the ocean are closing tight.