The companion piece Your Son Out There is a song written a year ago (or so), when yet another wave of military and civilian deaths spread across the Iraqi sands. Sand is thirsty for any kind of liquid, sand receives water from the sky or from the air itself, with gratitude and with greed. But blood? Blood falls on the sand and does not vanish. Blood never vanishes, how could any leader ever imagine it might?

While staying at the Verite Guest House, in Auroville, we were able to practice intentional small-footprint living. That “footprint” is more than where we physically step and leave a trace, but the cumulative and extended affect of our living, from food consumption and by implication food production and distribution, to energy consumption and its similar chain of delivery from source to our hands, to the consumption or acquisition of goods, whose origin is more likely than not an Asian city. 

Some months ago, for reasons which have become obscure to me, I purchased a 1Gb SanDisk U3 Cruzer Memory Stick: enough juicy words in that title to grab techies, musicians, dudes, the aging, and sportsmen by the collar, and haul them to the counter, cash in hand. If the words weren’t enough, the price of the ‘stick – $69 at the time – was neatly offset by not one, but two $20 rebates. You do the math.

Here I am, pondering the bits and pieces of technology that I am trying to band-aid together before our very real travel begins, trying to reach out of the past as I have known it – I am pre-moonwalk, after all – and into this strange and tenuous digital future, where words are sent out like puffs of breath in a pre-dawn sky, received by a few listening ears (maybe), then dissipate as quickly as they have arrived.

I imagine the feeling that swells in the heart of the traveler, mid-18th century, whose morning walk has taken him over the threshold of his cottage, past the weather-grayed wood of the gate, past the age-smeared walls of the neighboring houses, along down the cobbled road – hear the wooden heels’ hollow knocking along the paving-stones, something in the rhythm slightly quicker than usual, slightly more determined – over the bridge that is the heart of the town, then following the straightening line of the river toward the harbor. It is the dawn before the dawn, and each breath springs out like a hand of his spirit reaching out or offering, each small cloud emerges and slips off behind him, moves over his left shoulder as he turns his head to the ships at anchor; the clouds are touched with the slightest color.