Remember when we hiked the 
Diablo foothills and dragged our weary 
boots up over what we thought was the 
last ridge to the top, only to discover it 
was just another false peak, and the 
real summit still loomed above us.

And when we drove across the 
Mohave, those shimmering pools of 
witch water flooding the desert highway 
ahead, really just images of the sky 
reflected in the thin layer of scorched air 
hovering above the torrid road bed.

Now with distance and time I have a 
cleaner angle and a better attitude 
about all that confusion and hurt, and 
I can see now that you were probably 
right after all, we were probably just 
chasing shadows, phantoms, mirages, 
optical illusions in the smoke and 
mists and fogs of battle. Sometimes it 
all just comes down to perspective, and 
sometimes you just can’t win for losing.

I remember watching an old movie called 
The Leopard, with Burt Lancaster, 
about the Italian Revolution of the 1800s, 
and how the old aristocracy survived by 
joining and taking over the revolution.

Reminds me of that old joke that
laws are written so what looks 
like a brick wall 
to a regular person, looks like a 
triumphal arch to a corporate lawyer.

Sometimes the search for a livable 
world can seem like dancing with 
a lover who lets you just near 
enough to almost touch her with 
your outstretched fingers, then 
dances away into the shadows 
and mists just out of reach.

Yet what can we do but follow her 
love song into those elusive mists over 
and over again, until we make her ours. 

It’s complicated. Maybe that’s just 
how things work. Maybe loves and 
revolutions are not won and lost in 
bedrooms or halls of power after all, 
but in mirages, distractions, optical 
delusions, tricks of perspective, 
in the devil’s details, in the ambiguous
spaces between words, in the 
warped mirrors of everyday life.