I had the most wonderful dream the other night. Full of deep beauty. There was no plot to speak of, beyond the fact that I was falling in love with a man whom I didn’t recognize at all, whose face I held in my hands. Whose lips I touched lightly with my thumb. I kissed him when I knew people might see. (He didn’t mind.) Somehow, I had to present a cake to people, and it kept falling apart. But he came up behind me, and miraculously pulled it together. I put two small sugar rosettes on top to make it lovely.
But the beautiful center of the dream was a most extraordinary vision: a lemon tree. Nothing like an actual lemon tree. This one had a trunk and bark like a tulip tree. It was only as tall as a regular plum or apple tree. But the trunk was magnificent, straight, noble, worthy of boats. I couldn’t have reached my arms around it, it was that wide. The tree boughs hung thick with large green leaves and thousands of lemons, some yellow, some still not yet ripe. The limbs swayed gently at about the level of my face, which I nestled among them, amazed at the sight and smell of it. The man with whom I was falling in love in the dream, the man I have never met, reached out and picked one for me. “You have to taste this,” he said. “But it’s still cool. You have to warm it first in your hands.”
Warm it in my hands? How could a lemon picked off a tree just out of the sun be too cool? But I did as he said. I held it reverently in my hands for a while. And after a moment, I pulled off a bit of the skin so I could taste the flesh. It was delicious. Sweet. Nothing like anything I had every tasted.
What was this dream? The Garden of Eden in some sort of converse? A rooted desire and completion, instead of temptation. A wild hopefulness that life might still hold the possibility of wonder in a profusion of magical lemons. A tree and its heavy branches and the gift of my unknown lover.
That is how I like to imagine Eve’s gesture. The serpent a most ancient wisdom symbol. The lover acting not out of hubris or disobedience, but wonder. Inspired to the extragance of God. Ruach among the leaves of The Tree.
Which gets me (albeit a little jaggedly) to apples and honey. As we go into the new year, let us imagine the sweetness, not the dogmatism, of the apple. The beautiful cross-cut star at her heart. Her seeds, her hope, her fragrance. And let us dip our apple bits in honey together and revel in the sweetness of her as we imagine the wonder of a new year open to us.
Shanah Tovah!
Dawn Aberg 