As though you were on a wide, gently rocking sea, and the mist that formed from that cool and incoherent night had been touched – who knows where? – by the morning sun. Gray became golden, chill became warm, and shapes materialized out of the glow. “Ah, it’s the lighthouse!” “Then this must be the point…” Near the shore the pine boughs are threaded with cotton. The earth awakens and takes a breath, the breeze shreds that veil. Stones whose forms were outlines begin to reveal themselves as mottled, lichen-laced. As you drift slowly into the day, what is around you becomes clearer and clearer.

I think it was my son who recently asked: “How do you get enough food if you just bike to the grocery store? It must get pretty dull making double round-trips every time you need to eat…”

This was a reasonable assessment: the side-bags, when empty, flatten to almost nothing, like deflated balloons. And even filled, we are talking about two to three plastic grocery bags of goods. How long can that last you, before you’re on your bike again, chasing down the evening meal?

There are places where effort is quickly rewarded, and others where you feel as though you are bailing the tide: no matter the size or your little beach bucket, or the passion you summon into your two human-sized hands, that water is coming in – lifted and poured onto the sand by the sun and moon! – and then out it goes again, while the waves tug at your heels and pull foot-fulls of grains out from under your feet.

The land around my house – “my” land – would say much about the hand that keeps it: overgrown, a feral lawn, become host for a multitude of insects and insects that prey on insects, for weeds with flowers and weeds with leaves and grasses with heavy heads full of seed. The tamed range is filled with Cawdor wood, and every glance outside is a reminder of my failure as a suburban land steward.

Solitude is the name of another neighborhood within the larger intentional community of Auroville. Krishna MacKenzie and his partner started this 7-acre farm several years ago in the curvilinear wedge land zoned for agriculture and industry. They adhere to the principals of no-till agriculture and partnership plantings – practices which demand you know much more about living things than how to dump chemicals on them – where mutually beneficial species are sown together into a single plot of land.