Week 6

On Monday, I finished my bike ride and entered Eilat (here are some visual snapshots to accompany the verbal ones, if you'd like): My thighs strained delightfully against the many ascents, and I hooted and yelled my way down the many descents; I found myself at the front of the ride a few times, and often took the opportunity to fall to the back as I became absorbed in the brilliant beauty of the desert; at moments I paced myself to ride alongside others and talk about becoming a rabbi, and at others I allowed myself to bike alone for long stretches - the exact unknown coming into being that I am.

On the ride, there was only forward.  During stretches when no other riders were in sight, I began to sense the expansiveness within which my solitude was gently held and, at moments, started to dissolve: the desert, the sound of drums and tambourines that often guided us to our next rest stop, the birds, the smell of manure, the honking of greeting and surprise and anger from cars, the noisy activity of Bedouin villages and firing ranges and fighter jets, the camels, the clusters and points of other riders, the mountains and the endless sky.

Week 5

Here are a few moments from the 287 mile bike ride I did from Jerusalem to Eilat over the course of 5 days in support of the Arava Institute, which thanks to all my sponsors, received over $3200 from my fundraising!

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Today I rode about 50 miles from Jerusalem to Ashkelon, on a rented hybrid bike.

Using my body gives my mind some time to be caressed by waves of thought - during moments when I'm not concentrating on traffic, or socializing with other people.

At one point today, I was biking alone and anxious I had lost the rest of the riders, until we regrouped at a rest stop.  As we biked in 105 degree heat and compensated in balance for extremely strong winds, one of the lead bikers said to Lev, "If you bike close behind him, he'll block the wind, and I'll bike behind you."

Week 4

My first few weeks in Tel Aviv have been razor thin like mountain air. The warmth and nourishment of expected social contact - a dear roommate, a real "neighborhood", too much class-time - is gone. In an effort to pace myself on this hike, I've begun to learn how to move both more slowly, and without resting for too long so my blood can drink from the atmosphere without crystallizing into microscopic ice clumps that would otherwise slide slowly and painfully through my heart.  In order to scale this mountain, I need equipment and the presence of mind to shatter any illusion that I'm walking on terrain I know. This is a new place for me - a new place in my life and in the life of this place; only with this patient awareness might this experience reveal its True Name to me. Therefore, I've learned to equip myself with items to survive my trek into unknowing:

1) Sound: To protect my heart's hearing from the urban discord that races through the streets, throwing trash and scattering spices as it howls along the cement and ricochets off metal and brick with no grass to tenderly gather and soften it into itself. My soul needs songs it can belt out or a subliminal hiss that lets it coast into the shapeless place before dreams: white noise during the nights and early mornings when trucks grunt below and shuk doors yawn open

Week 3

As the shops of the spice market open, their alarmed doors create the sense that an army of tiny mismatched ambulances are wailing through the alleyways and sidewalks outside of my apartment.

Then the garage of each shop screeches and rattles open, and dawn dips back into silence for a moment - and I back into my slumber. Each time my eyes open, the sky is brighter, and the day pacing more hungrily beside my bed.

This morning one of the three once-glossy leaves of the orchid plant on the counter collapsed from the stem that bore it into the world, and from which it continued to imbibe its personal share of the green elixir of sun, water, earth.

It was a picture of my heart a matter of days ago, quietly starved of its native language, sense of community, familiar routine - and unable to find anything to replace these nutrients. Sometimes my breath still wants to be back in Boston. I regularly notice my lungs filling only half way with air, carrying me through the day like flat tires.

Week 2

First sight, the wonderous maladjustment to the newness of a place, is beginning to smooth itself into a new normal. Once radically independent of me - only absorbed by my senses, the blare of horns pressing through this narrow market street, the sunlight hotly panting at the windows, the staccato yelp of cats, are all slowly moving from sensed to remembered.

The city of Tel Aviv is a thinly and hastily applied cement mascara that manages to trick the eyes into seeing nothing of the suggestive, sensuous stir of dunes under her outer garments. You get the sense that beneath all her strange stacks of cement and brick, she can really move - but she's afraid that if she does, they'll get thrown askew. What's worse is, she seems to have pieced together her outfit from items that have no perceivable relationship with one another: the buildings here don't talk to one another, nor to the quiet dunes, and certainly not to the whispering sea.

I'm trying to listen through the cottony, unraveling, yet often suffocating solitude of life alone in a new place. In the occasional moments I trust the wisdom of the me that chose these circumstances, my body begins to sense when it needs to breath with awareness, or talk to Spirit. I can hear my dreams