Barbara Rose, creator of Dancing Rocks Permaculture Community, says that growing up in St. Petersburg, Fla., she was frustrated that she did not find support for her love of nature in her family or her synagogue.

Tu B'Shevat, the "new year of the trees," was not celebrated, and at the harvest festival of Sukkot, the etrog was only a "bumpy lemon," the lulav something to wave -- "there was no connection to the land," says Rose.

She recalls that at age 15, she found a copy of the Zohar, a key kabbalistic text, in her rabbi's library. She reveled in the passages about nature, and still recalls reading about "trees and fruit, some connections between how systems regenerate." But when she sought to discuss the Zohar with her rabbi, he directed her instead to the tasks of a Jewish wife and mother. He did not see any reason for a woman to read the Zohar or undertake the Torah study that forms a foundation for immersion in Kabbalah, says Rose. Since the Zohar was the only Jewish book that ever held any interest for her, she says, she declined to undergo confirmation.

As for her family, they had always seen nature as something to view only at a distance, she says.

But that changed when her grandfather came to visit her at a cabin she and a friend had built in northern New Hampshire in the 1970s.

"I picked lunch out of the garden and tears were streaming out of his eyes because he had never seen a vegetable connected to a plant," she says.

For her mother, it was a fear of bugs, snakes and dirt that prevented her from enjoying nature, until those fears "fell away" when her mother developed Alzheimer's disease, says Rose. For a time, until she began to need 24-hour care, Rose's mother lived in a studio on the Dancing Rocks property. It was an opportunity for her mother to experience what she had built, Rose says, recalling walks in which her mother would stop and appreciate all the beauty around her.

Although Rose was stymied in her long-ago attempts to study Zohar, that interest may come full circle. Lately, she says, she has been intrigued by notices about local workshops on the Zohar. For now, she is very busy with work on the land, but, she says, "It's one of those interests that I think I'll follow up on someday."

She also would like to research her family's history, but knows that it will take a big time commitment. In the meantime, a book that her son gave her for her birthday last winter has been helping her reengage with her Jewish roots.  She reads this Yiddish dictionary every night before going to bed, enjoying the humor, history, and complexities of the language. "In those words and phrases, I think, is probably most of the aliveness that I remember from my family, because it was [in] Yiddish that they spoke their most passionate expression," she says.