Vicki had her baby on Friday morning at 4:30 am, October the 6th. He was seven pounds six ounces and was named Augustin Richard Ramos-Glew by Kevin and Vicki. Yessenia was at the birth. She said it was a wonderful thing to be at a birth and not be the one in labor. We will look forward to sharing a photo when we have one to share!

Yesterday afternoon Sophie and I finished cutting and hanging the Red Shiso. The Red Shiso drying shed is now officially full of gorgeous purple bundles. Hopefully these bundles will continue to dry as purple as they seem to be drying right now. Time will tell.

It was a beautiful afternoon with incredible clear blue skies and peak leaf color, this according to the local leaf peepers report. Lizzy was home from her new job for the first time in more than a month. We were in the mood to celebrate so Sophie, Lizzy, and I decided to start digging up the potatoes. To us, digging up potatoes DID feel like a celebration. And as the saying goes “To each his own said the lady as she kissed the cow.”

It amazes me that anyone could think this was hard work! You put a piece of potato in the good earth. You mound up some dirt on it when the potato sprouts. Then you cover the mound with mulch hay and forget about it. Come fall, you lift up the mulch hay to find blue, pink, red and yellow potatoes!

Today, I will wash them off, leave them outside to toughen up their skins, and then put them in the coldest spot in our basement where it is cool but never quite freezes. All done except for the mashing.

Here adorable Sophie adds to the pile while adorable Lizzy leans on her pitchfork.

IN A NUTSHELL
Is it ethical to not worry and be happy? What binds us to worry and unhappiness? Illusion or truth? Can we unravel this dynamic and find a freedom to love ourselves just the way we are, accept the world just as it is, and know that happiness is a moral as well as joyful choice?

This is the arena and offering of this year’s Venus Garden Essence. After a growing season of work and play in this garden, it was time to make the Essence. With the Flowers plucked and in the water, I lay back surrounded by Flowers humming with bees. It was the Autumn Equinox. A beautiful soft day. For many months I puzzled over the theme of this garden. Not once had I guessed its name. Don’t Worry- Bee Happy. The Flowers, the bees, and our beloved creator pulled back the curtain to reveal the divine order in all things. Let Go? Why Not! Let God! Of course. Don’t Worry- Bee Happy!

If the weight of the world’s suffering feels yours to heal, if you are a person who does too much, or if you know your life calling, but find yourself awash in guilt as you let go of things that are not on your path, this Essence may hold helpful information for you. If it is hard for you to accept your own essential goodness without a marathon of proof, if the very phrase “Don’t Worry- Be Happy” pushes your buttons, or if worry is the bread and butter of your days, not happiness, this Essence may bring gifts to your weary self. It supports an unburdening, an unraveling, a letting go of the mind ideas of worthiness, duality, rules, shoulds, and judgment. It supports a return to spontaneous happiness and a state of being in which you joyously know your immutable divinity in an ocean of divinity.

USEFUL IN A TRIO
Don’t Worry- Bee Happy will be an excellent Essence to use in combination with the earlier Venus Garden Essences Love Prevails and The Alignment Garden. Love Prevails helps us know that love is the only abiding reality. Love Prevails helps us know that we are divinity safe in the arms of divinity no matter what the surface appearance. Love Prevails helps us know that everything else but love is a passing illusion, necessary for our learning, but not real.

The Alignment Garden helps us know our precise work in world. It helps us align with our divinity so that we can live this purpose. It is not about mind ideas of life purpose but soul truth. It sorts this wheat from this chaff so that we are clear about what is and isn’t our life work and who we are.

Don’t Worry- Bee Happy supports us to let go of that which is not our work. It helps us let go of the self judgment and guilt that would make us feel responsible for most of the planet’s woes. It helps us to know that being who we are, living the life divinity created just for us, and enjoying this life is not just enough, it is what is meant to be. The concept of judgment is left behind in an experience of grace. And happiness. Did I mention happiness? We can know happiness, at long last, as a guilt free experience.

THE ESSENCE SERVED UP WITH A LONGER EXPLANATION
I loved this year’s Venus Garden. Still do. From winter planning to spring planting to a fall harvest, this garden rested easily and joyfully in the green arms of the farm. The Essence from this garden took seven days to make, beginning on the Autumn Equinox, a day of balance. Now the Angels have begun to send it out into the world. And they told me this morning that it was time to write about it.

Once, while flipping through a compendium about Flower Essences, I noted that the author put forth his theory that I lived through the healing dynamic of each Green Hope Farm Flower Essence on my way to making the Essence. It was a funny moment because until then, I hadn’t seen this pattern that way. How I might have explained it is that I am attracted to the Flowers that hold helpful information about something I am struggling to resolve, be it an emotional tangle, a physical issue, or a spiritual thirst.

For example, when I first began making Flower Essences, I was intent on resolving lung problems and the deep seated griefs at the bottom of my physically weak lungs. This meant that many of the early Essences I felt called to make offered helpful information about issues of grief, the courage to speak one’s truth, to find one’s path, to stand fearlessly in one’s truth and to know one’s right to breathe deeply and take in as much air as the next person. This was a bit of an unconscious process. I just made Flower Essences from the Flowers that called to me and that I loved. Because of the laws of attraction, these were the Flowers with the healing vibrational information I needed. My process first built a collection that would provide for such Essences as Breathe and Grief & Loss. Then, as I moved through this particular healing dynamic, other issues surfaced to be resolved. When they surfaced, helpful Flowers came into my ken. It has been a joyful and efficient way to heal.

In any case, what this author said in his book was true. I think about this truth before each growing season because when I receive the plan for the gardens from the Angels in January, I know I am getting an overview of my learning lessons for the growing season. For example, if there are a lot of Zinnias, Borage, and Calendulas in one of the gardens, I know I’ll be working on containing a dynamic of sturdy joy, courage, and faith even as events in my personal life challenge my abilities to do this. In living through my lessons while the Flowers grow, I help contain the Essence being born and make it strong in the face of difficulties. Often, others here help to hold the dynamic as well, especially in the case of the Venus Garden, the highest vibrational space at the farm and the spot where many of our most helpful Essences have been created.

Sometimes, the Angels tell me the name of the Venus Garden when they give me its design plan in January. This clues me in further as to the theme of our project. During the entire growing season, I see how the Angels manifest this idea in form. I try to focus on what I am learning about this issue in my life, in and out of the garden. Usually the strands pull together after the Essence is created.

This year, I had no name for the garden, but I was given the hint that it concerned the issue of forgiveness. When in the depths of last winter the Angels offered that this year’s Venus Garden and Essence would hold a vibration related to forgiveness, I both relished the project and felt unsure that I could contain the dynamic of the Essence. I have felt so confused and humbled by various notions and expectations of forgiveness that I sometimes refer to forgiveness as the f word. I wasn’t sure I had a single idea about forgiveness that was helpful and I certainly felt shamed by many ideas I have heard about forgiveness. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t admire other people’s experiences of forgiveness, but that my own process seemed so much messier. In my own personal family of origin drama, I felt like a pinball bouncing from one emotional response to another. Yes, there had been moments my mind defined as forgiveness, but there was a heck of a lot of other stuff going on as well. All in all, it seemed an unlikely project for me to undertake, but also a hopeful one. I felt that to grow this garden was to have my limited mind ideas of forgiveness washed from me in the face of a more complicated but ultimately more loving understanding.

The Angels gave me the design, indicated the plants to grow, and got things rolling in a very matter of fact way. No hand wringing. No suggestion they doubted my capacity to contain the garden. This was very reassuring. The design for the garden was a five pointed star outlined in Yellow Marigolds. The star was filled with many purple Flowers including Heliotrope, Aster, Chinese Forget me Not, Ageratum, Alyssum, and Nicotiana. The center of the star was a spiral of violet Cleome surrounding a spiral of Mehera White Marigolds. The tips of each star point also featured Mehera White Marigolds as well as White Osteospermum. The entire star was encircled in a thick band of white Sweet Alyssum.

When I planted the Alignment Garden the year before, the directions had been as precise as anything I have ever done with the Angels. Everything was orchestrated with one directional movement around the garden. If I needed a trowel three feet counter clockwise from where I was digging, I had to walk all the way around the circle to retrieve the trowel. No volunteer plants or weeds were left in the garden or allowed to grow up during the season. The focus was on alignment with EXACTLY what was meant to be.

This new Venus Garden had a different ethos. From the get go there was something relaxed, even forgiving about the creation of the garden. As I prepared the garden for planting, I was asked to leave several rogue Flowers including a gorgeous orange annual poppy and a patch of white Love in a Mist. This was a gorgeous star but a quirky one too. Lizzy, my eldest daughter, planted the garden with me. It was a happy occasion of silliness, laughter, and fun.

My first stumbling block of personal forgiveness came when I didn’t notice the slugs decimating half the plants in the garden. I was so focused on protecting the Red Shiso from the slugs that my slug patrol did not include the Venus Garden. By the time I noticed the slug damage there, many of the greenhouse transplants, especially the Mehera White Marigolds that I love so much, had been completely eaten. Many plants were dead. There were gaps everywhere. I felt badly about my forgetfulness and couldn’t imagine that this garden would recover from this slug fest.

But it did.

This was a gentle reminder that I am not responsible for everything, even in my own backyard.

This seems so much the thrust of the summer the last year the last six years most of my life. When I get clear guidance from the divinity within me, I need to stop with the second guessing myself when things go awry. In fact, I need to stop second guessing myself no matter the quality of my guidance or what happens. I need to remember I am doing the best that I can. Doing the best I can is the best I can do.

This truth needs to sink deep into me. Lots of quart jars of Flow Free and Don’t Worry- Bee Happy ahead. I need help to stop falling first into mind ideas a.k.a. self judgments and then on into various emotional reactions to my mind judgments. These mind ideas include the notions that I am not doing enough, that a good person would not let unresolved situations and relationships go, or that you work until the work is done even if that is never. The emotions? Guilt, worry, doubt, a lack of kindness to self. Frankly, even with clear guidance, such as the Angels giving me one word directions like REST, I can lose my way in my variation on humanity’s grab bag of mind rules and emotional reactions to my mind rules.

Ah yes, the time is ripe for Don’t Worry-Bee Happy.

This brings me to the bees. In so many languages, bees share the same word as the verb to be. In my timeless time with the bees this summer and in my skirmishes with literature about bees, I have come to sense that they move in time differently than most of us, that they experience doing and being with more unity than most of us, that even as we described them as busy worker bees, its not so much a doing as a being with each Flower they visit.

As the summer unfolded, I found myself with the bees more and more. I asked them to be part of this Essence. They gently told me that this was really already a done deal. They already were one with the Flowers and with all of Green Hope Farm before I asked and therefore are part and parcel of all Essences here, this one included. It’s typical of all the loving parts of creation here that the bees were so gracious when I belabored the obvious. I also laughed out loud when I heard the name for this garden for the first time.

Before I posted this description, I decided to go sit with the bees to see if they wanted to say anything about Don’t Worry- Bee Happy. I went down to sit six inches from one of the hives with my notepad. I felt a bit of trepidation. The last time I sat so close, the bees were explaining about a bee sting acupuncture point called “the reveal” and when the short lecture was complete, a bee came over and stung me right on “the reveal”. Anyways, no stings today. Just this lovely bee song, all puns intended.

A BEE SONG
To our human brothers and sisters

Honey, bee
Honey, please, bee
Just bee.
The Happiness of Flowers, the Song of Flowers. We sing it.
We breathe it. We bee it. We be it.
This is our song, our hum, our buzz, our golden honey.
To bee is to be.
Not worlds apart. No difference. To bee is to be.
So Full. So Everything. So Sunshine. So Cloud bank.
So Warm. So True.
The Everything and the Nothing.
Don’t Worry, Bee Happy.
This being
Your beeing
is a Honeycomb
of
Love
No more. No Less.
Perfection
Honey, bee.

AND FINALLY THE ANGELS ON THIS ESSENCE AND THE F WORD
It’s been helpful to Molly for her to refer to forgiveness as the f word because it has lightened her energy around this misunderstood topic. There are few words in your culture more loaded. May our words lighten your load as well.

We want you to understand the intent of this Essence. We did not call it Do This, That, and the Other Thing and Then Don’t Worry, Bee Happy. We called it Don’t Worry- Bee Happy, a play on Meher Baba’s exhortation.

In every moment you are love in an ocean of divine love. There is nothing to worry about. You are safe and loved and perfection just as you are. No proof necessary. No action necessary. So much of human mind ideas about forgiveness veer off into ideas of proving something through a big gesture, a dramatic moment, an avowal that all is forgiven. In truth there need be nothing done and no words spoken. This is the nature of Grace. Yes, it is Grace we speak of here. We created this Essence to help you cut through the illusions that keep you from knowing this Grace. For so many of you it is earnest notions of being impossibly good that spin you away from ever experiencing your essential goodness. The Bees and all beings of Green Hope Farm invite you to rest in this vibration of “Don’t Worry- Bee Happy” so that you feel the happy joyful truth of being you.

We love you so very much. Ainsi Soit-il. So bee it.

What was I thinking, taking Rhino to Montreal. Our twenty four hour, late summer whirlwind tour gave him a taste for the high life, for foreign climes, for exotic foods served in dishes that were not his job to clean. It gave him a passion for life beyond his responsibilities at the sink. It introduced him to a world beyond stainless steel and dish soap.

Really, its nobody’s fault but my own that when Rhino went AWOL last week, he went to Europe.

Can I really blame him? Truthfully, his job had become so hit or miss. There was so much less dish activity to monitor. Somedays it was a dish desert. And standards had dipped. Rhinos like state of the art equipment and with a disabled dishwasher, standards were on the skids.

I didn’t notice his depression in time to remind Rhino that hope and dirty dishes were just around the corner. How many weeks is it to Thanksgiving anyways? That’s got to be the messiest, most dish dirtying meal on the planet. For Rhino’s sake, I could have offered to do Canadian Thanksgiving this year because its celebrated in October. But I failed to keep Rhino motivated and by the time I noticed his ennui, Rhino no longer thought of himself as a dish supervisor. He was a Rhino in search of a new purpose.

And he went to Munich to find it.

So, what happened in Munich? Is it like Vegas? Is he willing to tell us something or is it that same old story. What happens in Munich, stays in Munich.

Well, under duress, Rhino emailed me six lone photos. I will offer up my rendition of Rhino’s inner dialog because Rhino is the strong silent type.

Here I am on the open road speeding across Germany. The dishes on this train are all plastic. Nobody has asked me to lift a finger. I am free.

I knew you’d want me to do something cultural so here I am at Munich’s New Town Hall admiring the Glockenspiel.

In fact, I climbed up to a dangerous place to get a better view. My tour guide held me out over the precipice and considered what would happen if I was accidently dropped. My tour guide realized he might have to emigrate to Germany if he returned to New Hampshire without me. This is why I look bunchy and out of focus in this shot. I am experiencing a death grip.

But really, death grips are no big deal. I am like James Bond. I would have made a good replacement for Pierce Brosnan. Look at me in these next two shots and see how close I came to kissing my life of dishes away once and for all.

First I challenge a Boar. Very Black Forest. Very macho. I lived to tell. Then I sit in the jaws of a killer catfish. I know. I know. I am a brave Rhino.


But after a week’s frollick at Oktoberfest, I realized I was really a country Rhino, and dishes or no dishes. I needed to go home.

Here’s my pensive moment of truth when I realize I am not a city Rhino but a country one.

Editorial comment: This is all very well and good Rhino BUT you have actually been back in the country for FIVE days as in fifteen meals at Casa Sheehan and you have NOT returned home from your tour guide’s bachelor pad. I am beginning to wonder if there is a cover up going on. Maybe there was a drop at New Town Hall. Maybe you got a more exciting job in Munich as a boar baiter. Maybe you like bachelor life at Ben’s better than life at the farm. Maybe you really aren’t taking the loss of the dishwasher and all the dirty dishes with such eerie calm after all. I am calling you out. Come home Rhino!

I promise to make a mess in the kitchen this very afternoon for you!

No, this is not a shot from “The Crypt Keepers.” This is the Red Shiso cut, bundled, and hanging to dry. Looking nice and PURPLE too! The remaining empty loops of twine will get used as I bring in the rest of the harvest.

I still have probably about a quarter to a third of the crop to cut and hang. The building will be completely packed with Red Shiso by the time I finish. Sophie Cardew helped me last Thursday to cut and hang bundles. I hope to snag her for a couple of hours today. She is here on Thursdays, restocking the shipping stations and cheerfully doing a myriad number of weekly jobs.

Here is one of the sections of Red Shiso still standing. The white stuff around the feet of this Shiso is the protective cloth that can be draped on the Red Shiso if we get another frost before I get the rest cut.

Last week Sophie and I cut the southern part of the three Red Shiso rings. Over the weekend I kept cutting. Two nights ago we had another frost. That afternoon, I knew I wasn’t going to get everything cut before this frost hit, so I cut the rings of Red Shiso at the north of the garden and left Shiso in the east and west, hoping that the frost would roll down through this north south corridor and not bother the Red Shiso on either side. This worked!

Frost is a funny thing. In this neighborhood, I will get a frost when others don’t. Cold air is heavier than warm air so frosts roll downhill. We are up at about a thousand feet and we generally have warmer temperatures and an earlier spring than other places in the neighborhood, so you’d expect us to be more protected from frosts than we are. Instead, we get hit by these early frosts ahead of everyone else, even those down below us.

After almost twenty years here, I accept this anomaly with slightly more grace. The main garden where the Red Shiso grew this year is one of those places where the frost settles first. The cold air seems to roll down from Morgan Hill to the north of us and bounce through the gardens to this place and that on its way south towards the bottom of the hayfield. I am not sure I outsmarted the frost this time so much as went with the Flow of it!

Speaking of going with the Flow, Emily’s school has gone paper free. Her first set of senior year mid terms are posted on line. I have just receive a many page email explaining how to access her grades and teacher comments. I now need to go with this paper free flow.

I wonder if I will ever be done with my ambivalence about the technologies of our world. Dragged kicking and screaming to email and the internet a decade ago, I now passionately love my email friends and my blog world. I turn to Google with all my questions. Why even this morning I looked for a recipe I wanted on some recipe site and found it in a nano-second. And then there’s my Amazon.com habit too.

But I don’t want to have to login with a password to read Emily’s teacher’s comments. I don’t want to! Her’s is a small, friendly school and this feels so impersonal. I want a note from the teacher not a login experience!

Maybe my response isn’t just a lingering love for the envelope and paper. Maybe it’s resistance to being washed through an impersonal mechanism of logins and passwords to get to the information I seek. I think it might feel different if I got an email directly from each teacher. It’s funny how there are things that are personal about online life and there are things that just aren’t. Do others feel as strongly about these nuisances of connection?

On the subject of connection, I am always trying to think of ways to get more people connected to our local farmer’s market. As Deb wraps up another season running this market, I suggested an advertising campaign for next year along the lines of “Meet the Farmer who Grew your Spinach.” With the recent spinach problem, there wasn’t a farmer, but a corporation growing the spinach. But the problem was also about the SIZE of the farm.

The farmer’s market is a wonderful thing, not just because we meet the farmers, but because the smaller scale of each farm operations means that the farmers can care deeply about everything they grow. There literally is more love in their produce because of this small scale. And in my experience, more love actually translates into healthier spinach.

As I look at media photos of the spinach fields of California, it feels so off to me. When a corporation grows such vast quantities of one crop in one place, this can so easily create a cycle of every spinach loving pest in creation gathering in those fields, to be met by every pesticide in creation, to be met with every pesticide resistant bug, to be met with a new round of toxic chemicals. And the poor people working in those fields! How they must suffer from this poisonous atmosphere. And how difficult it must be to bring any love to such toxic and monotonous work. We all need a life more permaculture than monoculture, more familiar faces, less faceless bureaucracy.

Small is better. This is how I feel about Green Hope Farm. I don’t want to be the Proctor & Gamble of Flower Essences. I happily make decisions to keep us a place where we have personal relationships with you and with every Flower. Besides my own predilection to stay small, the nature of Flower Essences is that they don’t lend themselves to being Proctor and Gamble-ized. There has to be much love in the process of making and sharing the Essences or they won’t have the high vibrations needed to make them useful, informative Flower Essences.

As part of my continuing efforts to stay small and personal, I promise not to create a login system for talking with me on email or the blog. I also promise to get more help from Ben to deal with my technical difficulties with processing blog comments. They remain unposted in an enormous pool of thousands of spam entries. I keep asking Ben how to wade through this variation of spam. I have some good systems for sorting our email now. I CAN do this with the blog. But I keep forgetting what he says. It’s like logging on for Emily’s grades, I don’t want to process more viagra ads in order to manage this blog. I don’t want to do it! But I do want to support Emily’s senior year process, so I am going to login. And I do want to harvest the lovely comments that I know are there. I get so many helpful, loving, and wise ones on email. I know they await me under the blog spam.

I WILL forge ahead in this new world of technology we all inhabit and I thank you for your patience with me and the blog spam. Wish me luck! And Luck to you too as you face the spam in your twenty first century lives!