ein gedi

ein gedi
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Me and Jeremy went away together this week, for three nights, the first time we've gone on vacation together without children for six and a half years. We'd been planning it for a long time, and my mother had offered to watch the boys while she is visiting. The day before we left, the airstrikes on Gaza started. It felt gauche, vacationing while rockets fell in Southern Israel and bombs fell in Gaza--when we decided to go ahead we had to decide to screen it out a bit, though at night we watched the news. And I suppose terrible things are always happening in the world, but this feels a little close - Lucretious says cries of death and cries of birth sound out in the same night. Maybe we need a bit of Lucretian ataraxia to get through all this. I remember years ago meeting an Australian woman in India who had just been surfing in Sri Lanka. "Isn't there a civil war going on?" I asked and she said, in her broad nasal accent, "Yes, but the civil war's in the North, and the surfing's in the South". So, the war is in the Southwest here, and the diving and snorkelling and New Years celebrations are in the far South-East, and in the centre all the restaurants and cafes are open and busy, and people are buying challot and flowers for shabbat. Right now it feels like this may be over quickly - I am hoping for a ceasefire soon. I wonder, though, if anything will have changed.

I took this picture while me and Jeremy were hiking in Ein Gedi. He slid into this little waterfall and I was worried he'd bump his head. We saw ibexes and hyraxes and lots of lovely little birds.