THE BRAVE NEW LAND

My Mother, Photo by My Father -  The bones of our lives bleach in the naked sun when we tell our secrets. We all have them, you and me, but rarely do we find the opportunity or desire to knock on that particular door. I walk past bleach-white cow bones, a jawbone, vertebrae, and a rib or two … almost every day. They reside within the Bone Grotto in the nature reserve near my home in Zikhron Yaakov. Many times I find the bones there scattered into new arrangements, as if other beings … a jackal, boar, or human disturbed their previous formations, like constellations seen for the first time with new eyes … through a new type of telescope. Down the hill from me, in a town called Jisr ‘aZarka, built by Turks using African immigrants resistant to malaria for the clearing of swamps around the source of the Tananim Stream, a print of an image hangs . It’s called The Dream, and is a visual reminder of a dream that I had once had about my mother … and her decline from health and ultimatel

In the real world we dream. In the dream world we create with our legs spread wide across a chasm of despair—at least perceived “despair;” since, after all, in reality it’s only a dream. The first dream that I remember … was a repeating dream that happened over and over as a child, but repeated itself throughout my life as an adult, as well. Back in reality, as a young teen, back in Laguna Beach, California, we would gather at the mouth of a drainage culvert next to our Little League baseball field with candles and matches. The concrete pipe was only a meter and a half high, so … being the tallest of my compatriots, I had to duck the entire way or else scrape my head on its top. They later installed a pirate jail-door type of grid over the entrance to our underground maze, but back in the days of my youth we were free to roam the tunnels there as we dared to do so. Flashlights had already been invented, but we were young and batteries were expensive … so we used candles instead. Hot

The Gift, by Drew Doron Noll, All rights reserved ©   -  The sound of wailing broke the silence one evening, as I sat on the deck watching the sun set over the Mediterranean Sea. It emanated from the nature reserve nearby, but wasn’t the typical howling from jackals that we had all become used to. It was a sound as distinctive as bagpipes from Scotland; and … as a matter of fact, it was exactly that, but it was coming from the darkening woods of Baron Rothschild’s burial plot, Ramat Hanadiv. The sounds carried over the crisp air in a ghostly manner, as if they didn’t exist on the same plain that I sat within. It was exciting and spooky at the same time. I thought, then, of making it a painting, or of writing about it, or even hiking into the woods to follow the sounds over the hills and through the trees. Someone was out there, wondering perpendicular to the trails, playing with the Universe. The sounds faded, eventually, but would return occasionally as the seasons changed and

Skateboarding in Boulder, Colorado with my son, Josh. My new skateboard was a dream-come-true. I cut the grip tape with scissors myself into the Chinese symbol of harmony in the Universe, a Yin Yang intersecting red and black wave curves with opposing dots to symbolize balance … perfect for a board deck. With red Kryptonic wheels, extended-axle kit Bennett trucks, and a laminated deck with a shaped kicktail, I was the envy of skate-rats across the expanse of my universe … our neighborhood. We lived in Laguna Beach, California, and rode the hills from our middle school at Top of the World down to the Pacific Ocean at the bottom. In the 1970s and 80s, we were the first to bomb Park Ave., Skyline Dr., High Dr., and other insane drops from mountain tops on tiny planks with plastic wheels. Most believed we were insane, doomed, and beyond the standard reason that we were fed with sharp forks by our parents and teachers. But, we were the future, something I knew in my cells. Our generati

Gallery, Studio, Photographed from the Loft —   It was mad hot. There was no aircon in the family van. There were places for my feet on the floor if I jiggled them a bit … and then we skidded to a stop, again. Invariably we left skid marks at the recycling areas all over our little hilltop/beachside town of Zikhron Yaakov. We were building an art center smack in the middle of town, and really had no choice. There were limited resources and we needed to recycle, reuse, refurbish, and repurpose … or RRRR for short. So, growling in the heat and humidity, with the windows rolled down so a hot wind would whip across our faces, we collected the junk that had been thrown out by our neighbors. Talking about art and artists of old, careening through the streets with junk teetering from our roof and flowing into our laps, we were living. My partner, a religious man, had already developed an eye for the good stuff. I learned as we went how to RRRR, but understood right away the level of faith req

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 spac