Adamah Identity

This is a wall-bridging of hearts and intentions. For over a year, I have undergone a spiritual search that brought me to Falls Village, Connecticut. Here at Adamah - a spiritual learning program - people in their mid twenties seek to pray and eat. They want to bring sustenance to and from the soil with their own hands through daily farming and morning spiritual presence as they seek to find their inner peace.

We all take time to plant a seed into the soil, into our conscious being, for some, into a reason for living. We question why we need to be here and the possible purpose of our lives. Big questions - even silly! Those who say it is a privilege to be alive remember that this place is a world filled with possibilities. We remember that some lessons are meant to inspire each other and to bring companionship. I arrived at Adamah looking for healing to quiet my mind and listen to my soul. To find balance in my life and to become rooted within the soil; after almost two weeks, I discovered a community of people who laugh, sing, pray, eat, work and move through their paths to these same or similar goals together.

Each person comes from a different background, religiously and spiritually. Each one of us needs a different form of healing even though we all struggle through many of the same difficulties. After almost two weeks, this place feels like a home where anything is possible - where the earth is integral to work and love.

Every day my tea guides me to love intuitively, to love my intuition and to love completely. This love would bring infinite strings of gentle connection. In all discretion, in such community, love and lust are easily confused. During Shavuot, Rabbi Zalman and his wife Eve Ilsen discussed the difficulty or difference between love and desire. Desire is selfish and difficult - it creates pain, suffering. It is an attachment; the string attaching one person to the other like a long chain, constantly pulling and tugging at each others' arms, legs, shoulders, hair . . . whatever part of the body we most lust or desire after. Even brain, if the brain is the most desirable.

Love is endless, infinite, Ein Sof. It has no attachments and no pain. It is void of desire and greed - it is void of envy or jealousy. It is complete and true, permitting itself to stretch to every corner of the earth and each person's heart. It seems to be the love that earth gives, that we posses, and that we give back to the earth and to each other.

Another adamahnik's form of love and healing is vibrated nightly as she passes the lake in the middle of the camp, enchanted by the sounds of toads. Walking to her tent in the forest, we listened to frogs, toads - wrote odes to them. Yes, these toads see and heal many. They clear the path from the fog in their eyes and awaken the light in their hearts. This toad was the beacon for one of my adamahniks.

This summer community is a small microcosm that deals with many of the outside problems each of us has experienced in our travels. We come with open eyes, soon to be open hearts, to give a little more back when we leave this space of harmony.

Adamah at Isabella Freedman