Perhaps I should have asked more questions as I made my glass of Flower Essence water yesterday morning. I remembered the Green Hope Farm friend who had a mattress fly off the back of a truck onto her convertible as she cruised down the pacific coast highway. On the morning of the flying mattress, her Angels suggested she take Jade Flower Essence which offers support for unexpected and out of control events. She wanted to know why her Angels couldn’t also suggest it wasn’t a good day to take her convertible out for a joy ride. Good question!

Yesterday, I wasn’t asking any questions. I whistled away while I got the nudge to assemble a glass of Flower Essence water, pink with Anxiety, Emergency Care, Golden Armor and a whole cast of characters for soothing the nerves. Yeah, yeah, I was probably daydreaming about this blog!

My morning began with a call from “the supervisor” at a label company we work with. It’s never a good sign when any supervisor calls and I knew this wasn’t going to be a hallmark memory.

Earlier in the year, I had ordered 100,000 of our Rose Flower Essence bottle labels. I signed off on the order when the press proof matched the dark pink roses of the last batch of labels. The new ones were delivered and the roses on these new labels were a faded coral. My account rep agreed that they were not the same color and needed to be rerun so I shipped back the 100,000 and waited for the next run.

This second group arrived with the same case of label anemia. When I got back to my account rep, she went quiet on me. I could guess what was going on at their end. I am not exactly their biggest client and the cost of printing these labels with consistency was beginning to outweigh my value as an account. When I got word a supervisor was calling, I knew they wouldn’t run the labels again and that I needed make the best of it.

Why? Because we have about 35 labels from the old batch left. Well, I consoled myself, it IS the same great vibration inside! And maybe you are going to LOVE the mellow rose color! And that chat with the supervisor? It WAS the most cordial drop kick I have ever received.

So, as I surveyed the boxes of labels I will learn to love, I sipped on my pink water and decided to make lemonade out of labels. The stars AND the supervisor were pointing out that maybe it was time to rethink our whole label design. The exciting work of Dr. Masaru Emoto in his book The Message of Water suggests that labels put on water bottles with the words love and gratitude on them amplify the vibration of the water within. Since that’s what we are all about, offering the best vibrational road maps of love possible, I am now excited by the prospect of seeing how we can redesign our labels to incorporate even more loving vibrations into our Essences via the packaging as well as via the Essence itself.

The real flying mattress drama of the day happened during our lunchtime walk with the dogs. A small group of us were hiking up a long winding dirt road across from the farm, past a house under construction. We heard a gun go off as we began the walk but weren’t sure where the sound was coming from. As we got closer to the construction sight, a man with the gun started firing in rapid succession from the porch of the half built house. We yelled out to him. We were clearly visible in a wide open field, yet he kept firing. I was close enough to see the barrel of the rifle pointed down the field, not quite towards us, but much too close for comfort. Poor Riley was very scared but all of us were shaking. We came off that hill at a run and the gunfire followed us all the way back to the farm. When I called the owner of the house, he suggested that we had heard a nail gun going off.

I do not quite know how to make lemonade from this lemon. I certainly was glad to return to my pink Flower Essence water and we gave Riley and May May Anxiety and Emergency Care too. While I was writing this, I stopped to do today’s e-mail and a Green Hope friend named Spring reminded me in her missive that it’s St. Brigid’s Day / Candlemas / Groundhog Day today.

She reminded me we are half way through winter and moving towards spring. The air does smell faintly of spring today and the light is wonderfully stronger than it was even a week or two ago. My friend Spring said she is going to have a traditional St Brigid’s day bonfire outside tonight to celebrate. I told her I would have an echo bonfire here at the farm.

Maybe that is all we can do in the face of crazy energy like the man with the rifle. Just keep on lighting our fires and building community. And tonight, when we are sitting around the crackling fire, enjoying its light and warmth with the dark snowy landscape at our backs, this circle of bright faces around the beautiful fire is going to feel like quite enough.