Sitting here in mid April on Pesach vacation, I am very impressed with how fast time is passing these days. It feels like I was finishing that last paragraph on Bat Yam, saving it to a memory disk and sending it off maybe sometime last week, but that was an entire month ago! No more "I am here for a year". Now, when I tell people I'll be staying until the end of May, they respond with, "Oh, that's not too far off", and my friends back home are no longer trying to get through mid terms but are rather on the verge of finishing freshman year. But Year Course is just that, a year that starts and ends; and the days go by and the months pass and 9 months in Israel starts feeling less like a year away from my life and more like the year that is my life. So let me get on with telling you about my life.

Things are great down in Sde Boker. I am getting used to and really enjoying desert life, which for me, translates into eating only what I can cook, drinking about 8 cups of tea or Nescafe a day, sharing a lot and often (it is the desert way--as we've been told), doing laundry pretty infrequently, having about 5 people's normal share of down-time all to myself, thinking twice about whether it's necessary to use running water (because it's the desert and we conserve), being outdoors most of the day, and just plain-old appreciating how beautiful the natural world is. But my favorite part about Sde Boker, apart from the tea, is that down-time, which is anything but down for me. If I take a step out of the perimeter of settled Sde Boker, I may as well be stepping onto the moon; because in every direction to the horizon, there are only plateaus, mountains, canyons, and not a single human being in sight. So almost every day sometime in the afternoon after we've finished volunteering, I walk off the "grounds", with my iPod, my book, and my journal; I find a big rock to lean against, I take off my watch and for as long as I want, it's just me and the whole world and it is amazing.

What do I do? Well, I read, I write in my journal, sometimes I call a friend from home and find it really funny that I'm sitting against a rock in the middle of the desert talking to them in their dorm room. But mostly, I think. I sit in the desert all by myself and I think about everything there is to think about, and then I write some in my journal so I can look back and know that once, this is what I did with my days and this is how I saw myself, my friends, my family, my future, and my life. I think that I'm really lucky when I'm out there. I know that everyone thinks and grows and realizes things about themselves and does something new after high school, but how lucky am I that I am doing these things too, not in the middle of term papers and finals and strict professors, but here in Israel in this beautiful and quiet place, where I have all the time in the world just for that. I actually don't have a thing else to do other than appreciate the moment. In a month and a half when I go back to the rest of my life, this time will be so special because it was all mine.

And what's more, I don't just have this carved out block of time in Louisiana-- I have it in Israel-- in the only Jewish state in the world! The Jewish state that in only 58 years has established itself as a place where 400 Jewish teenagers from abroad would want to put off mainstream college plans to volunteer! I am living my day-to-day life in a country millions and millions of Jews had only dreamed of. Yes, I've already been here 7 months but it will take a lot longer than that for the magic I feel all the time to fade.

So with the time I have left on Year Course, I will just continue enjoying the fact that this is my life right now and that this "block of time" I have is no block at all, but rather just the beginning. 

Mia is this year's Year Course correspondent for Young Judaea and JVibe.