After seven weeks since the car crash of longing for my home, I'm finally there--starting a new phase of Rehab.

Saturday was my birthday in the Jewish calendar, and yesterday (Monday, October 12) my birthday in the Western one. Both -- the same day when I was born--are festive days, almost it seems contradictory. In Jewish time, it was the wintry festival of Shmini Atzeret, a time of inwardness when we turn from the showy fruitfulness of harvest to the secret life of the seed gone underground. In American time, it was Columbus Day, memorial of a time when a great outward burst of curiosity and exploration soured into conquest and genocide.

I have been trying to learn to hold these two impulses, inward and outward, not in balance but in a single path: "Explorer Who Can Go Home Again." Since the crash, I have been walking this path in unexpected, unplanned ways: exploring not outward but inward, exploring "new" worlds within my own body and my own heart. My weeks at Moss Rehab brought me into those new worlds. I explore them in this letter to you-all.