A comment by John Fleming over on AD struck me this morning. I hope he doesn’t mind if I copy his words:

“Some people might like it, conversing with your ghost. But at some point, either your heirs will pull the plug on your echo, or your echo will become so antique that all the new folks are not interested in what you might have said about anything. And then as Gerard says, digital dust to digital dust.“

On occasion, simply heading out in some random direction from a point in the back-country brings surprises. I found this grave somewhere out in the Nevada desert. Nothing much out here but sagebrush, badger holes, and the fading ghosts of lost dreams. Any “town” that might have been nearby had fallen into ruins of less notice than this old iron fence. Any headstone or marker – like the body within – had long returned to that from which it came.

An elaborate fence, someone buried with love, care, and expense – they themselves now gone a few generations ago.

I doubt I could find it again.

But I wonder what was once here; the lives lived, hopes flourishing, a town of future substance being built … being Nevada … on the hopes of some mineral strike that would turn “our town” into a new metropolis.

Then the mines played out.

Genesis 3:19
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”