I wanted to write to give my profound respects this morning to Johnny Cash. The man was a meteor travelling skywards rather than towards the earth. He's the closest thing American music has had to a profound Shakespearian actor, and his mythic personality - enormous mortal appetites, a desperate search for a spiritual redemption, and an aspiration to be nothing more than a good man - has been more than an example of a life well lived, it has become nearly indistinguishable from the topography of the American landscape.

What I always found to be the most inspiring about Mr. Cash was his belief that underneath the ragged and the dirty and the impure and the evil, there was a true being which could emerge from time to time.

As he sings in "Peace in the Valley": "The lion will lie down with the lamb, and I'l be changed from this creature that I am." On September 12, 2003 he changed for the final time.

I mourn his passing deeply as I know many of us creatures do...