All our hearts must be broken.

Relatives and loved ones of 12 U.S. soldiers attend a group burial with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The 11 men and one woman died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. (Getty Images / October 12, 2007)

I can't look at this picture without crying. There is so much I feel I can't control right now. But, this war on Iraq seems out of everyone's control. It just goes on wasting lives, cursing families. The grief will reverberate for decades in the lives of the families whose loved ones have died so miserably in a foreign land.

I propose that every newspaper and magazine in America produce one supplement every week that includes only photos of every military burial that took place that week for soldiers who have died in Iraq (and Pakistan). As a country we are shamefully passive about the destruction of the lives of Iraqi's who now number in the hundreds of thousands. It seems this knowledge alone would move us to revolt, but, it doesn't.

Maybe, if we could see the compounding of death to just our own soldiers, we might get up in arms---an American insurgency against this nightmare. But, these images of burials are few. We are protected from this suffering. We need many, many images, over and over, day after day until the hardened American heart breaks open---until an American insurgency takes root. We must stop this war. This warring. This mindless, unconscionable waging of death.

Leadfield, Death Valley, California

It is often hard to discern what is before you in the desert. There is so much light that the pupils constrict and your vision becomes unreliable. I luxuriated in the southern California desert for over two years and became a devotee. One of my most consistent yearnings each springtime is to return to Death Valley for a visit and a room at the Furnace Creek Inn.

The photo above was taken in April, 2001 on my first trip to Death Valley. The area pictured is Tyson's Pass, on the northeast side of the Valley. It is high desert, dry, but green. Off in the distance and around that mountain, the elevation drops drastically to the desert floor. When you reach the basin of Death Valley you are below sea level in a serious way. I put this picture up because it is one of the most hospitable areas of the Valley. People rarely see its green and "kinder" side. Yet, even here, survival was impossible.

Tyson's pass is drop dead beautiful. The problem with these big, beautiful spaces in our country is that in order to get a shot of them you need a six-trillion dollar lens. This I do not have. So the meager shot above must suffice. And it does. It yanks me right into a deep yearning for the place and the unending narrative of the desert.

The tale of Leadfield reveals a common desert failure; the inability to grasp the excruciating heat and terrible dust of the desert environs. Also, wrapped up in this Leadfield story is the cautionary narrative about trusting your future to winning the Lottery. One who came believing in stories of fortune was, well...toast. Blind to the desert's merciless environment, the adventurer is either found crawling out on his hands and knees or dead. The dead then become part of the blowing dust of the immense, lonely place.

Death Valley provides a glimpse of an astounding natural world. There is no other place like it. You may catch the sites and feel of the desert in other parts of the USA and other countries. You can see it in the Mojave, Gobi, Sahara. But the sheer freaky, beautiful variety of the landscape of Death Valley is like no other. Knowing that I could return to the Furnace Creek Inn at high, frigging, noon and jump in the pool, made it possible to explore the gorgeous place. To me it is similar to the surprise and grandeur of the Grand Canyon (The vertical drop from Telescope Peak, highest mountain in the Valley, to the Badwater Basin is twice the depth of the Grand Canyon). But Death Valley is different from the truly, grand, Grand Canyon. It has a startling variety of landscape and it is formidable and inhospitably treacherous. These qualities add a nice edge to a trip.

Wild Strawberries

AJ and I have been attending the Monday night Bergman retrospective at the Charles. I want to jump up and down and praise him. So far we've seen Secrets of Women, Seventh Seal and tonight, Wild Strawberries.

It is a struggle to get over the archaic quality of the film. I know this is the wrong issue to gnaw on, just look at the frame and lighting on the son and father above. I know Bergman was doing things in film that no one else had imagined. I really, really liked Seventh Seal. Who else thought of playing chess with Death? Brilliant. Aren't we all going to live forever if we just make the right moves? Aren't we always going to be here? Alive? The images of the Seventh Seal are forever in my mind. Thank you. Thank you.

But, it is hard to hang in there with these early movies. The pace, the somberness lull me towards sleep. I fought sleep tonight during Wild Strawberries. AJ lost the fight and snored softly to my left. Again, I liked the film, this simple tale of a man coming to terms with his life and finding infinite support in the happiness of his childhood memories. The three young travelers were a terrific contrast. And, there was the wise and angry daughter-in-law who helped him to begin the move toward a deeper understanding of the harm his pompous indifference has caused.

The man who plays the part of the professor is so vulnerable and fragile by virtue of his age, this viewer could feel only sympathy for him. Here he was on this epiphanic car trip to receive his scholarly award. Each time the old man dozes off, a nightmare awaits him. Each nightmare shocks him into a deeper encounter with consequences of his actions. We should all be so lucky, earlier!