Far Away

Thanks so much to everyone who read the entry Back. It is difficult, I know, but not so hard as actually being detained there!
Why far away ?  I am now so far away from Israel.
It never ceases to be deeply unsettling, that feeling of being here and there simultaneously, and yet, as soon as I board the plane, the realization of the actual physical distance.
I have not been in Israel in springtime since I left, so very long ago. I always go back in the fall - Rosh Hashanah, when the countryside is brown and parched. I forgot the beautiful spring, especially this year after the winter's rains. Everything is green and lush. Every little patch of earth  is covered in flowers - in whites, oranges, reds, deep pinks, purples. To me if feels as if nature is compensating for the war of last year, and too many years past. She reminds us that there is beauty on this planet.
As always, it is so  comfortable to be with family and friends - everything familiar, and yet always different, always more ... more construction, more people, more roads...
I have not been on kibbutz for Remembrance Day since I left.  I find it very hard to put into words the feeling of being surrounded by warmth and love and belonging -  of  shared  memories, of a past that no one here in America can fathom.
And now, here I am, back with that ever constant ambivalence and dissonance. The holy trinity, Africa, Israel, America - and so it shall be.