The Wildest Blue

I am terrible at flying. Every time, the anxiety creeps in.

For twenty-six years, living away from home, through hundreds of flights and every kind of trouble, what held me together were mantras my brother Eran taught me. Statistics. How airplanes actually operate. How much time and care goes into every single flight. It always kept me together.

And then suddenly I was sitting in the cockpit, with him. It was almost surreal.

It takes time for your body to adjust to a small plane. But having Eran flying it, I felt at ease faster than I expected. My body and my mind were in a wild dance. I felt every turn, every movement. At times all I wanted was to close my eyes.

At one moment on that first flight, someone told us we could fly out over the ocean and look for whales. A small plane, out over the Atlantic, searching for whales and flocks of dolphins. A miracle of a moment I will never forget. And at the same time, I felt like I might faint from fear. Flying over the ocean in a small plane is not a joke. You feel every turn. You suddenly don’t know where you are.

Eran was the one. A second before I closed my eyes, he told me, calmly, not to close them. He was the one who calmed me down.

The whole flight, Eran spoke to me in a calm voice, explaining every turn, where he was looking, what he was doing. I listened to his voice like it was a meditation, and it grounded me while I was so high above everything, in the sky.

There is a memory of him making us dinner when we were kids. He would take a pita, turn it into a pizza in the small toaster oven in our childhood kitchen, and hand it to me like it was nothing at all. It was everything.

Eran was almost a father to me when we were young. He was the one who showed up, who steadied things when they needed steadying, who made a home feel like a home even when it didn’t. I trusted him then without knowing I was choosing to. It was simply the ground I stood on.

We have crossed continents for each other for years. I visited him twice in Kenya, where he lived for twelve years, with my whole family. He came so many times to the US, small trips and large ones alike.

One of the things that left me in shock, after so many years living in the most urban place in New York, is that you fly and suddenly you see wild nature. Beaches with no one on them. Lagoons, wild and rare. Unbelievable mountains, rivers, lakes. And then the wine country: miles and miles of fields, fertile land with its own special soil. I have never encountered such beauty as I encountered in South Africa.

Eran’s girlfriend was a huge presence on this trip, with her warmth, her open heart. She gave us so much room, so much of herself.

From the airport, I got on a Zoom call, my first doctoral seminar. The first twenty-four hours back were a haze of jet lag. So much luggage to unpack, the mess, the cooking, the not sleeping.

Then I went for a walk. I walked through my Brooklyn streets, and I suddenly felt fall in the air. I saw the flowers, I saw the houses, I saw my beloved streets, and I realized: I’m home.

This is a big year for all of us. I am a doctoral student, after twenty years away from school.

When I close my eyes now, I see the mountains of South Africa. I see the beauty of that nature, and it shapes something in me; it changes something in me. I see the art, the design, and it calms me down. It gives me a feeling of connection, of possibility. If I can find so much beauty out there, I can find it within. That excites me. It motivates me.

What I carry with me now is trust. The love, the feeling of home. I found it with Eran, with his girlfriend, with my family. That, I think, is the most important thing there is.