I went to a lecture last night and the speaker (Aviva Zornberg, an English PhD/Bible guru) talked about Keats and his idea of art as "diligent indolence". I have decided that will be the motto of my last few months of sabbatical. Diligent indolence begins now.
We've had a crazy few weeks, visitors and travel and sickness and adventure. It's been wonderful and chaotic and tiring. This picture sums it up, I think.
Here instead of throwing out their old books - or selling them, I guess - people leave them out on the street. Walking home last night in the mist I found a cardboard box of books, and a fellow reader shuffling through them. I took home a copy of Dr. Zhivago and a funny little book of English essays. The moon was full and every so often little explosions went off, firecrackers marking the very end of Purim.
At our hotel there was a floating pier - you could go out on it and watch the fish. The first morning the water was full of purple jellyfish. They are so lovely - frilled, pulsing, big as a heart. I thought they were poisonous but when I went diving the guide had me stroke one - they felt like wet silk.
Near the bottom of the crater the rain finally stopped and we saw this rainbow. I couldn't get it all in this picture - it stretched from end to end of the canyon. For a few minutes there was a double rainbow, a fainter echo of this one behind it.
The scale in this picture is messed up - you have to look behind Lev and Jeremy and imagine vastness.
I'm sorry for my long absence - we've had a few weeks of visitors, and have been away the last week, "rolodexing the fun" as my friend Debbie says. We left last Sunday to drive down South, through the centre of the country since the weather was downright tempestuous. We still ended up driving through vast puddles on the road that goes through Ramon Crater. We stopped at Beit Guvrin, site of a town from about the third century BC and known for its strange, double-cross shaped columbarian, with about two hundred niches where pigeons were kept for food and fertilizer and "ritual purposes." There are also majestic, bell-shaped caves formed by people quarrying limestone. Because of the rain, it was lushly green and very muddy. There were tiny flowers in the grass, and when we got back to the car we were completely filthy.
