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 ultim...

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 season...