Feather to Fire

Feather to fire, fire to blood, blood to bone, bone to marrow, marrow to ashes . . . ashes to snow.

It's funny what you miss when you live abroad. There's no accounting for what pops into your head at any given moment, though I guess that's also true if you stay in one place.

Arriving in New Zealand with seven pieces of luggage and a car seat, much of what we own—what we hadn't sold—remains in storage. Your life moves on, you live with less, and your precious things become less precious. It becomes very easy to divide your history, your mental landscape, into Before and After.

For example: Before, I had a TV, a bunch of DVDs, and a player on which to play them. After, we download programs from the Internet. There are a good many films, favorites, that I haven't seen in years. Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow is one of them, and a little while ago it popped into my head. It's something I originally saw as part of Gregory Colbert's haunting Nomadic Museum installation in Santa Monica, during my first trip to Los Angeles. Narrated by Katsumoto, Morpheus, and a Spaniard (a Mexican stand-off I'd like to see), the film is divided into several parts, including Feather to Fire. Enjoy.