When we last left Sparrow [Issue 181], he had just arrived in France after six months of roaming the British Isles, struggling to keep his marriage intact, and looking ahead to the culmination of his pilgrimage in India six months hence. While in earnest search of himself, God, and true love, Sparrow is frequently overtaken by fits of jealousy, periods of poverty, harangues of self-doubt — by a host of troubles which seem both unique to him, and yet touchingly emblematic of all that is truly human.

As this month’s US section attests, homelessness exists in many forms. There is the public spectacle of those who dwell on city streets; there are the more private dramas of those who suffer, in whatever form, diminishments of the soul.

Twenty years ago I had my first and only mescaline trip in a remote part of the Himalayas that borders India and Nepal. I had already traveled and studied Tibetan Buddhism in India for three years. I had read Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s book on psychedelic experience, which they compared with the Tibetan bardo, or after-death realm. When I actually ran into Alpert — now known as Ram Dass — in a small town in northern India, the meeting seemed fortuitous.

It was supposed to be a romantic night without the children. But the motel walls were so thin, we could hear the elderly couple in the next room talking and playing cards until nearly midnight, their voices — very Southern, very proper — looping around our whispered endearments and labored breathing. Since we could only wonder what they were hearing, we became a bit self-conscious, as if our parents were in the next room.