The “In Box” always occupied a particular flat area of my desk, a particular field of view just in front of my mouse, where I could (and would) clearly see it fill and the mound of papers build, day after day.

Sort-of to-dos – those important enough to stay in my awareness, but not quite important enough to handle immediately – would land on the top of the pile, be buried by the next falling document, and never leave. This became my Pile of Disappointment, and I did eventually empty it, once a month or so; but in that month, oh what an emotional toll it took. It’s little lash reached out to lick my hand several times a day.

For miles and miles and miles the southbound highway: stalled. A fog of idling cars’ combustion flogs the air: no progress. Stagnation is repeated in a wide arc to the city’s west and south. Every major and minor artery clogged.

To the east there are no cars: maybe a ferry or two: or a fishing vessel: Here Lies the Atlantic.

Glut is stamped into the morning of a major American city. Stamped on every other, major and minor, from sea to shining sea. “Glut” is the root of “gluttony”, one of seven cardinal sins. Wisdom traditions wisely name destructive behavior “Sin”.

As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison – radioactive decay – that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

There is an assumption that we hold as we approach relationship. Or: an assumption that holds us, often so deep inside that it seems to be the fabric of our lives, woven into us, inextricable. Perhaps it arises from our earliest days after birth, when what we need is provided for us: our food, our shelter, our warmth and clothing - for most of us, all provided, after some fashion or another, by our mother and our father. Being nurtured is a “given”.

We ate little at Ramana Maharshi’s ashram: certainly little compared to the standard American Diet. Steamed, fermented rice cake (which I grew to adore and now make at home); a splash of some pulse - a lentil or a dal; a dusting of some spice, poured over a plate of sewn leaves. That was breakfast, that was lunch. I think it was dinner, too, or something similar.

It was wonderful. I have never been overweight, and yet the weight of all those calories flowing through me was palpable in its sudden absence. My mind was lighter (yes, India and jet-lag had something to do with that; but the affects continued for a month at least), and my physical frame was lighter.

I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

Today unlike other Thanksgiving holidays I find myself alone. The day began in silence, shrouded in fog from the eastern seaboard; it passed quietly in a town whose shopdoors shut tightly against profit and house doors opened wide in favor of family; and ended in fog from the eastern seaboard, backlit in a dusty red, dusky purple, then dark.

There was no turkey except for those roaming the wood behind my house, and no stuffing or potatoes or pie. There was, in fact, nothing special whatsoever, except for this contrast of need (a darker color?) to necessity (a pure white sheet).

Such colors of an August afternoon. First, the shades of wedded green, from the backlit leaves and their lapped and shadowed neighbors, to the heavy hip-high grass, to the mosses of the rock garden; the ruffled ears of rhubarb and dense and barbed raspberry thickets; the high architecture of island elms and the near-black interiors of the shrouded pines. As if in backdrop to all the rest: for when you turn your eyes away from the boundless seas of growing, grown greens, there are these highlights, flags and banners above the surging day: red in the bowl of just-picked berries, sunlight filling the shards of brilliant glass mosaic in a living-room window, a far sail on the deepest green of the sea, and an armful of gladiolas, released upon the table with a flourish, waiting to be arranged in a vase.

The crickets are loud outside my window, because outside my window, the grass is high. Life, in fact, in terms both general and specific, has got a lead on me, and the kind of maintenance my neighbors would like to see in my yard and which they cannot see and would not see within my home have dropped into the category “Only if it’s urgent”. Owning a large home and a relatively sizable parcel of land is plenty of work for a small squad of attendants, while a man alone turns in the eye of change touching what needs a touch, and leaving alone what is well enough – or as well as can be – alone.

The human spirit and the human body seek to be refreshed. Seek to find: the human body feels movement in the cells, a one-way current of life through life, source to sea. The human spirit opens wider and wider as waves of experience crash against its sand and stone; we are carved into bays and bars by the tide.

We seek, at a conscious or subconscious level, to be refreshed, and apparent refreshment appears at our reaching fingertips. We scarcely need to make an effort. A student of mine brings a passage from a book she had been reading… on her telephone. A man or a woman walks down the street, slim wire running from ear-buds to hip, while at the hip a small white box contains hours or days of favorite music, presented in the order or disorder desired, at the highest fidelity.