THE BRAVE NEW LAND

When I was younger, the world was a much smaller place. There were neighbors, parents, friends, and my little brother. We lived inside the Green Belt, in Laguna Beach, California. Laguna had a local reputation as an artist’s colony, with festivals and happenings all around town, which was separated from the commercial hubbub to the north, and from the orange grove dotted developments and track-homes to the east, by a vast land of rolling hills and sagebrush. The Green Belt was sanctified as untouchable open-space, even when it was owned by one of the largest development companies in the world, the Irvine Company. My dad worked for them as an urban planner, designing living environments for people moving to California in droves.  My dad was born in California, as was his father, as was I. My first born son was also born in California, but because of instabilities produced by over crowding and commercialization with no end in sight, we left the Pacific Ocean to move far inland...

Aliyah Shirts outside Dinah's in LA -  Looking down at the Swiss Alps while flying over, seeing the jagged peaks and crags that jutted from pristine valleys dotted with alpine chalets and winding roads perfect for cycling, I thought briefly upon my adventures over the last 12 years as a new immigrant to the Middle East. I had visited Switzerland many years ago with a backpack and a Eurorail Train Pass, so I imagined my hike navigating the distance around the Matterhorn as I flew overhead, on my way back to Paradise. I was heading to Boulder, Colorado, a place I lived in with my budding family for 15 years before making Aliyah to Israel. We pulled up stakes as soon as my wife said to herself that, “I could live out my life and be buried here… in Boulder.” It was a sign from above, or maybe just the warning siren that life is only what you make of it. We may never know. But, what we do know is that life in the Promised Land has been undeviating in its own rambling kind of way, ...

Cow Secrets —  Abandoned on the streets of Israel as a puppy, our new arrival peered through the neighbor-lady’s fence slats. She worked with the local humane society, placing animals in homes from a nearby shelter. His eyes lit up when he saw Dude, our black Canaani-mix, on our way into the nature reserve for one of our daily walks. I could have sworn I heard him giggle as we passed, like he knew his fate, even before we did. We weren’t looking for another dog, but after moving into a house that could house another dog, and also noticing a general sense of depression from Dude, we found ourselves standing at the neighbor’s fence saying hello to this strange, lanky, white dog with floppy ears and a slovenly loving grin. We talked it over then brought him home for a trial run, which really means that we were all hook, line, and sinker. We named him Bongo after we saw him fly into the air every time he met another friend. “Doing helicopters” became the terminology as he spun 180...

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...

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...

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 required to do so. Faith, I believe, comes much...

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 … “...