I don’t think I’ve ever written anything on the 4th of July to celebrate the United States of America.
As I’ve been to every state in America except Alaska, done retreats & workshops, and met people all over this beautiful country, I do believe I know it pretty well.
This is the soil I was born out of. The place that shaped and formed me. To not love America, would be to not love myself… and I fully, wholly and completely love myself.
I am deeply grateful for the heartbeat of America and all its brought into this world..
I am grateful for baseball
And those short little jean shorts
Bob Dylan
& cowgirl boots
The banks of the Mississippi River in Memphis
Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy
Buddy Holly
Walt Whitman, who sang America into mystic, ecstatic exaltation
Chuck Berry
The deep stillness of the gigantic redwood forests in Northern California
Muddy Waters proclaiming he’s a man
Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire
Elvis shaking his hips
Autumn sunsets in the Appalachian mountains
Bonnie and Clyde
Wild Spring flowers in the stunning Rocky mountains of Colorado
Levi Strauss inventing blue jeans in Old San Francisco
Cold pizza for breakfast on the subway in Brooklyn NY
Amish country in Pennsylvania
A million shimmering stars in the huge evening sky above West Texas
Jack Kerouac somewhere out there still on the road, awakening & restless
Edward Abbey looking out from the mountain top
Aretha Franklin just wants some RESPECT
Marilyn Monroe
Mohammed Ali floating like a butterfly
James Brown
Flannel shirts
Miles Davis
Janis Joplin
Laying in the bright green, morning grass in the suburbs of Virginia
John Coltrane
Sunday morning church & football amidst the cornfields of Nebraska
John Cougar Mellencamp
Tom Petty
The bright lights of 1970’s Las Vegas on a steamy Summer night
Hunter S. Thompson
The Santa Monica Pier
Thousands of Saquaro cactuses in Southern Arizona
The silence of Joshua Tree National Park at midnight
Leadbelly
Andy Warhol
Pine trees in North Carolina
Quentin Tarantino
Bourbon St in New Orleans on a humid Friday night
James Dean
Beautiful old live oak trees in Savannah Georgia
Marlon Brando
Babe Ruth calls his shot
Henry David Thoreau meditating on Walden pond in idyllic, rural Massachusetts
The magical, other worldly landscapes of Southern Utah, Arizona & New Mexico
The Snake River in the Early Spring
The steel mills of Northern Ohio
Dr. Richard Alpert becoming Ram Dass
The Summer of Love
The LA palm trees in the morning twilight on Hollywood blvd
The old cowboys riding underneath the big sky of Wyoming in 1849
Louie Armsrong thinking to himself its a wonderful world
Hamburgers in Kansas City
Broadway
James Taylor
Quiet Hopi elders with deep wisdom in their eyes
Clint Eastwood
Tacos in San Antonio
Purple Rain
The Badlands of South Dakota
Country roads taking me home in West Virginia
I’m grateful for the truckers
And the artists
And the working class
And the middle class
And the leisure class
And the billionaires
And the homeless
And every ethnicity, shade and color
And every religion
And every sexual orientation
And every political persuasion
From the beaches of the Florida Keys
To the cold Winter forests of Maine
From the surfers still riding the wave in San Diego
To the lush rain forests of Washington State
God bless America!
Are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The answer is up to you.
-Brian Piergrossi
