THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Carnival in La Paz, Mexico —  When I left Israel to fly to my Niece’s wedding in Southern California I was reeling from pain and loss. It’s difficult now to recall how I felt then, since so much has happened in the interim, but I remember walking in the woods. I remember crying to the Universe. I remember a feeling of loss, but more of confusion, since, even today, the loss still hasn’t set in. I remember standing in the hall of the hospital twiddling my thumbs, with nothing to do but to wonder about life, about friendship, about love, and about worlds other than this one: There has to be other worlds, right? I mean, maybe the fact that there are, according to scientific observations, so many distant, habitable worlds in just our Milky Way galaxy alone, it is an indicator of how our perceptions have been utterly warped by our individual belief systems into thinking like cartoons. You know, like: in this bubble goes the fantasy of Martians and Venusians, and in that bubble goes ...

I always thought of Madagascar as a big island with weird creatures inhabiting it. Actually, I wasn’t too far off from that assessment, my understanding having come from spending more than a month traversing its girth and length in road cars, dirt cars, water cars, boats of all sizes, planes that almost didn’t fly (Air Madagascar, you know…) and by foot, huffing it up and down steep wooded hills, crawling through dark geologically fascinating tunnels, cringing over rope bridges, wooden bridges and piers, and broken-down automobile bridges, too. We traversed as much as we could (barring the heavily touristic areas, of course), starting in Antananarivo (Tana), the capital city, where the head honchos rule, it seems, with a titanium gavel and inequity from everything physically binding including gravity, or is it gravidity. We met amazing people from all over the world, including … yes … from Madagascar. We chose our travel destination with a sense of logic, but you know how that goes … “...