A gourd is a good thing to have, if you are Gaara no Subaku.
It's a handy place to keep blood-soaked sand because it is watertight and the gourd itself is lightweight, though the sand is not.
The sand is very, very heavy.
The blood of men, women, and children are infused into that sand.
All these people, devoured by the bloodlust that embodies Gaara, are forever memorialized in a single, once-empty gourd.
Only they know that the bloody sand is still wet when it comes out of the gourd.
Gaara believes that the sand gives the gourd a purpose.
Gaara easily carries his utterly inconceivable weapon; an impenetrable shield that no one's gotten past in years.
Not since that night.
He lets the shield of sand into himself, using it to fill up the achingly empty spaces in his soul.
It blocks the foreign presence in his mind, hateful and all-consuming.
Every one of his emotions, all the world is put behind a icy wall of bloodied sand he takes from his gourd and sets solidly, implacably in his sharp and calculating mind.
A gourd is a good thing to have, but it is the perfect thing to fear.