Every summer of my pre-adolescence, my stepfather and mother stuffed the children into an old VW bus and drove us to Minnesota, where my stepfather's parents lived. During one visit, when I was nine or ten, they gave us a project to keep us busy. It was a little canvas bag, containing gravel and rocks and other colluvium from one of Minnesota's many gem mines. The purveyor guaranteed that the bag contained sapphires. There were instructions for how to probe the contents -- I think you had to moisten the stuff first -- with a pair of tweezers. For days, it seemed, although it could have been just hours, my sister, stepsister and I sifted and resifted the rubble. We found a handful of tiny, pale-green slivers and peas. I put mine in a cardboard earring box, but I lost them years ago.

Southeast/Southwest is like the work we did on that bag of sapphires. I found the big gems the first time through, and showed them in five email dispatches I sent to friends and family from Southeast Asia. But I sensed there were smaller stones still in the bag that might reward closer scrutiny. And as it turned out, I didn't leave off traveling when I got back from Asia. I returned to the US in November 2001, immediately made a trip to the Southwest, and wrote about that, too. You may find, as I did, that my mood and eye pull these distant places into a common room -- put them in the same cardboard box, so to speak.

I arrived in Indonesia on September 6th, 2001, and was staying with a friend in volatile, sweltering Jakarta on the 11th. (As of December 2002 she still lived there, amazingly, not far from the half-empty US Embassy.) But I don't want to make too much of that except to observe that the world's doubt, fear, and loss seemed to mirror my own. Everyone lived differently that autumn, the massive face of terror looming over us all. I just pause here to note that 9/11 was one bracket of my consciousness in Asia.

Neil Young's epigraph names the other one. What I couldn't say in those dispatches from Asia, and can now, is that I was traveling with a broken heart. I know it's a tired story: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy flees the country to recover. I try to refute the cliché by remembering that I'd already planned to go to Asia before the breakup. Heartbreak is said to dull the senses (I just sat there watching TV for three weeks), and the grief may have muddied my vision; certainly it limited my voice. But in fact my bereavement gave me a ruthless hunger that forced the whole dense, intense experience through a narrow tunnel, and toward the clear light of awareness. I could not have made my peculiar trip without it.

I returned to the US in November 2001, and during that holiday season I traveled another 5,000 miles in America -- some of it on aimless impulse, some with external direction, all of it by car. I finally resettled in Texas just after New Year's. More than half a year had passed since I'd stayed in one place for more than six weeks. Like a sailor who has just returned to shore, I seemed to feel the ground rocking beneath my wobbly legs; my body had finally rested but my mind was still at sea, and I dove into remembrance of the places and names of those six long months. My email dispatches had sung verses to the grandstand, and quite graciously -- I was grateful for the contact with loved ones -- but there were quieter, modal solos I needed to explore. Finally I had the time and the instrument to play them.

And so, with drier eyes and clearer light, I go back through the bag of sapphires. It may take a few passes, a couple of rinses. But there is no hurry. Reading, like gems, is a luxury not a necessity, and I expect that you will sift leisurely, incompletely. I've tried to cut and polish the stones a bit, but some of them kept their lopsided and pocked shapes, as life does. I'm sure some of the gravel remains. You may need your own tweezers.

And every now and then you'll have to hear a sentence or two about my ex-girlfriend.

You may find my decision to change her name to 'Eve' perverse, or merely banal.

I'm glad you're here, and I hope you'll come along...

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