July 30, 2006 at 8:45 p.m.
Ben is in the air, right now, heading east, not quite to the far east, just the middle east. The middle chakra of the world. From www.sacredcenters.com:

Chakra Three:
Fire, Ego identity, oriented to self-definition
This chakra is known as the power chakra, located in the solar plexus. It rules our personal power, will, and autonomy, as well as our metabolism. When healthy, this chakra brings us energy, effectiveness, spontaneity, and non-dominating power.

I know he was very excited to go, but tempered his excitement around me because he knows that I will be worried about his safety and that I will miss him so much. I just don't know how I can go a year without seeing him. All the technological ways of communicating are only substitutes for real human contact in real time.

I am a soup of contraditions inside: I let him go and I shouldn't; I want him to travel and study oversees, and I miss him; I worry about him and I know he is a capable young man, who can look after himself; I am so sad that he is gone, and so proud of him for boarding the plane; I admire his interest and determination to go where the action is and I wish his interests were closer to home; I want him to be an adult and I want him to be the small, squeaky boy he was; I trust he will do his best to keep safe and I am afraid he will get caught up in the passion and patriotism of Israel and not come home.

I feel like when he left our embrace to go through the security line at the airport, that he passed through the door of dependency to adulthood. Again the contradictions: I am proud of him for passing over the threshold, and I am not ready to let him go.

I can only imagine that he has crossed the Atlantic and is flying somewhere over Europe. Even to think of that is too hard. Yet I couldn't be more proud of him.

I await for his first phone call, to hear that he has arrived safely, that he has already met people he can be friends with in the group, that the dorms are or are not as bad as he imagined, that Tel Aviv is alive and well.

Maybe I will be lucky enough to get wakened up at 3 or 4 a.m. to him calling. I will jump out of bed and grab the phone with my stomach awash in contradiction soup: hoping everything is allright and dreading that is is not. This emotional soup is causing indigestion in my third chakra area.