One of the most mistranslated words ever: Adam. It is NOT "man." It is earthling. The rabbis said it was a hermaphrodite: male and female. Adam from Adamah meaning earth. We took a walk today, our first hunting for mushrooms. The light in the trees, our eyes glazed the earth searching for the first signs of fungus. There weren't any. But what we found were the rushing stream, the somber evergreens, the earth covered with liken.

Would it were that we honored the "earthling" in us more often. Our relationship to earth is, at best, distracted. What if we took one day a week to get in touch with our earthling? One day without cell phones, computers, city lights...imagine it: one day. Impossible? We met up with six hikers in their late twenties. A tall, statuesque woman from North Carolina, who had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico and was headed for Canada. Wild. Perhaps, this Rosh Hashanah, which celebrates the birth of this original earthling, we could do some thinking about our relationship to the Earth. It sure could use it.