The sky was still dark when we gathered in the parking lot of Mount Greylock Regional High School. There was a Box o'Joe in the back of my rabbi's car, and we crowded around it as though at a tailgate party, warming our hands on our cups.

Once we had all gathered -- maybe fifteen adults, and half a dozen children of varying ages -- we walked down the road to Green River Farms, and crossed route 7 to enter their apple orchard. There are connections between Pesach and apple orchards -- see Reb Arthur Waskow's Charoset and Sex: A Recipe, in Zeek -- so it seemed appropriate. This apple orchard is dormant, a tight weave of bare trees dreaming of spring.

I got to read one of my favorite poems aloud. I've encountered it before in ritual settings but it's never seemed so perfect as it did today:

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-- ee cummings

Happy birthday, sun!

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