This is a short and incomplete list of Flower Essence options for times of transition and change, the kind of sea changes I wrote about earlier in the week.

I tried to keep this list short because my lists of suggestions often feel overwhelming to me. Sort of like what confronts me when I try to buy a pair of jeans. Do I want straight leg, boot cut, flare, loose fit, low riders, original, easy fit, original ultra low rise flare, yadda yadda yadda. I just want a pair of jeans!

How do my lists get so involved? When I start to compose a list like this, it sometimes feels like every Flower I know flashes me a little leg and insists it should be included. And they are right! But I still need to yell, “Enough!” and usually sooner than I do, because including them all would be a guide reprint!

This list has gotten longer than I hoped because every time I say, “That’s it,” a beguiling Flower voice chimes in with a “But what about me?” And I add another Flower Essence to the list.

So, I really am stopping with this group of ten fifteen twenty two twenty three.

If you don’t see the ones calling to you for your change process listed here, the Flowers that were not included here have obviously decided to talk to you directly about their skills for the job. And frankly, they have a point.

ALEX MACKENZIE ROSE- For me the key phrase for this Essence is “the courage to do what you are called to do.” It helps us access this courage within ourselves so we can make the changes we need to make. It’s been my experience that when we know what we need to do, but find it hard to pull the trigger, this one really helps.

THE ALIGNMENT GARDEN: Everything I say about this one gets too wordy and misses the point. If your process feels sort of drifting along in confusion, fear, or resistance or if you feel in any way that your understanding of your life purpose, life direction, or your experience of your divinity and divine connection could in any way be crisped up, this one is great. I find that working with this one is a two part experience of a ton of guck being cleaned out followed by a strong flow of lovely high vibrations rush in to fill the space left by the clean up. This means that when I try to describe the front end action of this Essence to clarify, I am also saturated by all the happy energies that have rushed in. As a consequence, my descriptions all sounds sort of dippy. There is nothing dippy about this Essence.

BELEREPHON OF THE OPEN DOOR: Sometimes we feel unable to cross the threshold from the old dying life to the new life waiting for us. This one opens the door and escorts us through to the other side, sometimes with a loving kick in the pants and sometimes with a gentle, but steady pressure.

BORAGE:- Helps us get up each morning and keep going even when we feel laid low by what is dying in our life.

THE SACRED FEMININE, THE SACRED MASCULINE, and BLACK COHOSH: This is a good trio to work with to help us know our inner feminine and inner masculine more deeply. The trio also helps to coordinate the two dynamics so we work from the inner feminine strength of knowing what needs to be done and then move to the inner masculine strength of doing this. Without this kind of synchronization, the wisdom of the inner feminine can be ignored and ill conceived actions can prevail..

BLUEBERRY- This one offers support for mavericks or anyone whose change process involves choosing the road less travelled. It helps us find confidence in ourselves, even in the face of strong resistance from others.

CHEROKEE TRAIL OF TEARS- Palpable comfort when the journey we find ourselves on is not a trip we wanted to make, but one that we must take anyways.

EMERGENCY CARE- This is such a support for the physiological stress of change. If you feel like you are in a high stress transition, consider using this one frequently.

FLOW FREE- You know me, the Flow Free Queen. This one helps to get things rolling, keep things rolling, move stuck energy, or help us to go with the flow of changes in our life.

GOLDENROD- For having spine and staying true to yourself in the face of peer, tribe, or societal judgment or disapproval about your choices.

GRIEF & LOSS- The old life may be all gone, but that doesn’t mean we are done with grieving its loss. This mix supports us to do this necessary grief work for as long as we need to do it.

GROUNDING- It’s very easy to get disoriented and leave our bodies when we are stressed by change. This one helps us to return to our bodies and know our bodies are the safest and most healing places we could be during transitions (and the rest of the time too).

JOE PYE WEED- Reminds us that we are not alone in our suffering. Change can trigger us to think we have to do everything all by ourselves. This one reminds us to let ourselves and our burdens go into the supportive sea of divinity that permeates all reality.

LARKSPUR- During a change in circumstances, our bodies have a lot to adapt to. If we feel off in some way, like things are misfiring or not quite right, Larkspur offers information to straighten out the energetics so we can keep going without our health derailing. The Angels compare the support of this Essences to the work of a flight controller at an airport.

MUTABILIS ROSE- This Rose radically changes colors as it blooms. It helps us to find a harmonious way to mutate when we must radically change our form or vibration.

NEW BEGINNINGS- When life changes bring in new places, new players, new jobs, or a melding of old and new, this combination helps with the blending process and helps us to adjust to and even welcome the changes.

PHOENIX RISING- For beginning again when an old life situation has completely fallen away, especially helpful when the end of the old situation was fiery, explosive, exhausting, and didn’t seem to leave much but chared remains to build from. This is an extremely restorative Essence in so many situations.

RECOVERY- Expect an eventual blog on this one. It has this incredibly deep healing vibration that makes it useful in a vast array of situations, including when we are recovering from the stress of unexpected or even welcomed changes.

RUSSIAN SAGE- To get our bearings when change dismantles our world and we wonder where the heck we are and where, if anywhere, we need to go. A wonderful emergency road map.

SHE CHANGES: Offered just because you haven’t had enough menopausal products thrust at you!

THE SUNFLOWER SPIRAL- The stress of change can make it hard for us to see who is there to support us. This one helps us to recognize and then get help from the support system that is there.

There, relatively short but sweet!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the balancing of our inner masculine and feminine lately. I realized I simplified the process in my own mind and made it more of a generic one size fits all exercise than it is.

I don’t expect people to be the same, so I don’t know why I expected the balance of these two different energies within each of us to be the same either. Or to be finished as a dynamic after a balance point is reached. This balancing process is a fluid thing that never reaches a set point but keeps on evolving. A certain balance point of our inner masculine and feminine may work well for many years only to need rethinking and restructuring when our life changes or when something within us changes. It actually begins to feel a lot more accurate to say we are in a birth canal of birthing a new balance of our masculine and feminine energies all the time!

What has made me look at this in more than a cursory way? I have been hearing from a number of you who find your lives have called you to a radical new balancing of your masculine and feminine energies. One woman explains that she finds herself unexpectedly separated from her husband of several decades. The allocation of her inner masculine and feminine energetic strengths are now up for reexamination with the end of her marriage. All the outer roles that brought both comfort and confinement in their consistency are gone. In this emptiness, she has a chance to reexamine and eventually find a different understanding of herself and find a new balance of her inner masculine and inner feminine, one that may send her outer life in vastly new directions.

Another young woman tells me how she found herself at a dead end after several years trying to relate to men by dressing in ultra feminine clothes. She has zeroed in on a deeper truth that while the balance of her inner feminine and inner masculine doesn’t feel expressed by a pretty in pink moment, there is within her an authentic self who is a woman that has her own genuine way to express herself. She brings no judgment to the wardrobe she wanted to inhabit with ease. She knows it is genuinely right for some people. She wished she was one of them, but in accepting that she is not, she finds herself exhilarated with a new freedom to explore who she really is. And, as part of the fun, dress to express this.

Perhaps the reason I am following the scent of stories like these is because I am in a place of seeking a new balance for myself. I have had twenty five years experiencing myself as a person whose primary role was usually that of mother. Within that context was a certain balance of feminine wisdom about being a loving mother taken forth into the masculine action of being that mother as best I could. But it’s not as necessary a pattern of self expression anymore. As my children begin to joyfully dig into their own separate lives, I have come to a place where this role takes up much less of my time than it did. Who will this person Molly be as mothering takes up less space in my life? I can see a glimpse of where I am heading and it is new territory. Territory that will require a listening to my inner feminine for new wisdom and action from my inner masculine to manifest these ideas into a new life. I can’t get to the crone place quite yet. It looks to be a particularly exuberant expression of feminine wisdom matched by an equally liberated masculine energy. I can’t go there quite yet because I am still a bit in the world of the last twenty five years. It looks fun to be a crone though. Maybe that will be where my journey takes me. I can’t know just yet, but the possibility helps me when I miss the particular physical and emotional pleasures of those years with small children, the tumble of small bodies so ready for hugs. Knowing of others who have navigated this specific transition into new unexpected joys and hearing all stories of major rebalancing helps me head out to unknown territory with more confidence. I listen to your stories and find community.

As I think about the new balancing tasks on my plate, some things haven’t changed. I continue to think of the dynamic of the male and female energy in the same general way. I think of female energy as the receiver and container of wisdom as well as the aspect of self that perceives and holds our true self in consciousness. I like how Jungian Marion Woodman’s connects the idea of a sacred well of water to feminine energy. The water feels more and more apt an analogy for the self. I also like the Native American tradition of the moon lodge as an example of right relationship between the inner feminine and inner masculine, and right relationship between men and women in a manifest community as well. The moon lodge was a perfect construct to protect, honor, and enhance feminine wisdom and represents male energy acknowledging this feminine wisdom in right action. In the best of all possible worlds, masculine energy aligns with the wisdom of the feminine and her experience of true self and this masculine energy moves into action in the outer world in union and alignment with this experience of the authentic self. In the best of all possible worlds, the masculine within accepts the changing nature of the inner feminine’s self understanding and flows with expressing this changing inner reality in the manifest world.

More and more, I come to think of external events as showing us when our inner masculine and inner feminine need our attention. A young friend finds the boss of her new job highly critical of her every move. She may need to find different work, but this dynamic has lead her to examine whether her inner masculine is also harshly judging instead of warmly supporting her journey to articulate her authentic self. To see this outer dynamic as a helpful mirror is to feel empowered to seek a new inner balance. But I suggested she look at the dynamic gently. There is nothing like adding insult to injury by beating ourselves up for having a bullying inner masculine!

The patriarchal wounds carried by all of us are so old and deep. We need to go gently as we analyze external events to help heal our inner wounds. The cosmos lives by Emily Dickinson’s line, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” but sometimes we can get confused in the slant. What kindness to be gentle to ourselves and each other as we seek balance and understanding, seek to live as our authentic selves, and seek to see if today we can best express ourself in pink or best express ourselves in hip high boots and a man’s shirt.

Maybe it is silly to dwell on costumes, but really, aren’t our bodies costumes we are wearing for this incarnation? And the playfulness of finding our way to an authentic expression of self through trying on different dress ups certainly strikes me as just as productive and a lot less harmful than a lot of the other ways we try to know self and express it.

In this, the best of all possible worlds, the costumes, the relationships, even the jobs are there only to help us know self. They give us a freedom to try things on and then, if that doesn’t work or feel right to try something else on. It’s one big wardrobe of choices there to support the exhilarating, painful, amazing, scary, but ultimately joyful process of figuring out who we are and what we want to do about it.

And no need to wear clothes or relationships or jobs because someone outside ourselves defines those things as right for everyone. Our self discovery process is too vital to waste in generic costuming in order to fit in. Yesterday I heard Ashley Judd say that one of her affirmations is “It is none of my business what other people think of me.” I thought this was an amazingly liberating affirmation, as good as any Zen koan I have ever heard. It’s a powerful nudge to be our truest self right now, a nudge to just go for it!

It was a kind hearted thoughtful ill conceived addle brained bad idea.

Jim and I were out mulching one of the garden with hay two weekends ago. We loaded bales into the pick up truck and brought them around to the top of the garden. As Jim picked up a bale to fling off the truck, it broke apart revealing a clutch of baby mice tucked into the folds of summer grass. They were tiny. They were cute. They were three blind mice.

What to do? Their home was gone. Their mother too. Emily had said she wanted a hamster. Caring for mice was vaguely like caring for a hamster. This might buy us some time in the small animal negotiations department. We even had a hermit crab’s plastic home to give to the effort.

I scooped up the mice. They lay inert in my mitten. They looked on death’s door. Would this be another one of those noble rescue attempts that ended with lots of small children crying at an animal funeral? Ignoring this thought, I took the tiny mice into the house and handed them over to the youngest children available. They set to work making a home for these orphans and of course, they gave them Flower Essences.

I hate animal stories where any animal dies. I don’t think I am over the endings of “The Yearling” and “Where the Red Fern Grows” yet. And to be honest, Lizzy warned me about “Where the Red Fern Grows” so I only heard about the ending.

So let me tell you now, in case you are like me, that this tale involves no funerals or sad moments. None.

Back to our story, by the time we had read up on what to feed baby mice, the warmth of the house had revived them. The trio was racing around their new home with great abandon. During the next few days they only got zippier. They demolished five times their weight in milk, toast, nuts, and dried fruit. They showed no interest in an offered potato. I think they thought it needed butter.

Soon they were twice their size and looking at us with shiny black eyes. They were adorable, though it was hard to believe how often their cage needed cleaning or how scarce the children were when this needed to be done.

No self respecting tale is complete without an adversary or two for its protagonists. Our young orphans had three. The cats.

Each cat took a shift to guard their prey. The cage was never left unmonitored. Here we observe Mishka, six hours into her shift. I am not even sure she blinked while on duty let alone took her eyes off her targets. With the mice getting this kind of loving attention, we decided that the rock on top of the cage might be a lovely souvenir if you are a die hard Red Sox fan, but it was not heavy enough to protect our mice babies. We piled on many books. Just for good measure, we wedged the mouse home under a bookcase on Jim’s desk. Yes, St. Jim’s desk was appropriated by us for the orphans. As far as we were concerned, he could keep up with Green Hope Farm finances somewhere else! “Mice First” was our slogan.

Things went smoothly for almost two weeks. We were delighted with how well the babies were doing. It was clear they could survive without our care. Will, Emily, and I knew it was time to release them back into the wild. We decided last Saturday morning we would make a fabulous mouse nest down near the compost heap and let them go free. It sounded like a good plan.

On Friday night we went out to see Emily and her soccer team play a night game under the lights at her school’s new turf field. It was a very exciting game. We returned home cold but happy. As we walked into the house, there was an enormous crash. Running into mouse headquarters, we found that Mishka’s brother Gus had managed to push the cage and the many books on top of the cage off the desk to the floor below. Everything in the cage was on the floor. We had arrived just in time! Well almost. No mice were crushed by a book, but also no mice were waiting for us to grab them. Two of them took off at top speed under the couch and one headed that way.

One slow mouse got caught and redeposited into his cage. Three cats got banished from that part of the house. Two tired adults started to take apart the playroom. It’s just what you dream about at 9 pm on a Friday night; moving every piece of furniture in a room to search for two baby mice. Jim, who deserved to throttle me, couldn’t have been nicer. “This room needs a good housecleaning.” he said. I was full of remorse. I welcomed the blame and apologized profusely, however Jim never said “I told you so.” That’s probably why we are still married. He could reasonably have said this to me at least forty five thousand times in the last twenty six years, but he never has.

A couple hours later, the room was spotless. My knitting center had never looked as organized. Every surface had been cleaned and/or vacuumed. And there were no mice to be found. The conclusion was obvious. Our house is only twenty years old but twenty years is a long time for mice to find a way in. Even as we searched the last corner of the room for orphan two and three, I suspect they were being welcomed into their new adoptive family of house mice .

And mouse number three? He was moved out to his new home at dawn the next day. I left a pile so high of mouse gorp at his side that I think he too was welcomed into a clan of mice within minutes of the drop off. I hope so anyways. An outdoor mouse should have the same lifestyle as his indoor relatives, don’t you think?

Baby Glew is one month old today! Earlier in the week, August was ready for the two mile road trip from his home in Meriden village to Green Hope Farm so Vicki brought him up to do lunch with his fairy godmothers.

It was Halloween, so August was dressed in orange. Here Deb proves an old hand at burping a baby while Patricia makes silly faces. Though William would disagree, for those of in the office, a visit from Vicki and August was the best treat of our Halloween day!

Here’s William and cousin Taylor assessing what they considered the best treats of their day!

Ben is twenty five years old today! And look how the world of Green Hope Farm is celebrating!

We love you Ben! Happy Birthday!