During the winter I thought about the possibility of more paths in our gardens.

Some of our garden beds float separately from each other. Whole garden areas like the Cherokee Trail of Tears garden seem to float within the property with no apparent relationship to other gardens. The Arbor garden and the Rose garden exist ten feet apart but have no sense of connection to each other. Paths connecting these gardens offered one way to create a greater expression of unity and oneness and make the experience of moving through the gardens a bit more organized.

Winter is a good time to think about changes like more paths. I read what I could about the topic of paths in order to get ready to make changes this spring. Rosemary Verey, a British gardener, refers to paths as the skeleton of a garden. She suggests they frame the beds, but also form the structure of how a garden is experienced as well as how it is composed.

The paths at the farm are mostly unplanned. They happened as a response to people and dogs moving around the property. There is the path to the compost heap. There is the path around the Venus Garden into the barn, made by all of us going to the barn for supplies. There is a wheelbarrow path up from the mulch pile. There is the path created by the dogs from the front porch to the back door. Why they need to run from one door to the other with such frequency is beyond me, but they do. Perhaps because they have a full staff of door people at every portal, they want to make sure we are ever at our posts. There are some short, almost invisible paths within the Arbor Garden that indicated how to get in and out of the garden, but not much more.

A few of these paths have that magic quality of a good path. They beckoned us to follow them and see where they go. The path to our neighbor’s house is one of these paths. It cuts a green swath through the rough yellow grasses of our meadow then disappears into a cool woods of black cherry and wild apples. As you enter the inviting copse of trees, a small cairn of stones sits on a chunk of exposed mossy ledge, marking the fact that a journey has begun.

In one of my most favorite gardening book, The Inward Garden by Julie Moir Messervy she suggests that gardens are best when they express timeless archetypal experiences. Our first landscape is our mother. From there, we explore increasingly bigger outer landscapes that echo this first landscape.

A landscape that builds on the archetype of the sea reminds us of our watery experience within our mothers before we were born as well as our nonverbal experience of oneness before language separated us into this and that.

The archetype of the cave references our experience of safety and enclosure before birth as well as right after birth when we are safe in a parent’s cradling arms.

The archetype of the harbor is like our early experiences of sitting on someone’s lap. Contained in a grown-up’s lap we are safe but also able to look out at the world around us for the first time.

The archetype of the promontory is that territory of our first experience of independent movement. It’s a landscape where we have have wandered to places out away from our mothers, but still close enough to run back to safety. The sense of freedom is matched by a comforting sense of having our mother’s at our back. A promontory feels its connection to the mainland even as it sits at the edge of new territory.

The island archetype gives us that experience of solitude, otherness, separation, and independence. With maturity we sometimes seek this kind of separate experience and so can identify with this quality of islandness when we see it in nature or in a garden.

The archetype of the mountain reflects how our journey beyond our first experiences of independence leads us on a bigger quest for self realization. The mountain archetype represents the spiritual journey born from our own efforts.

The archetype of the sky reminds us of the wonder at the whole wide open cosmos, the glory of its bigness and its beyondness.

Messervy suggests that the journey through any garden can be a journey of experiencing these archetypal in the landscape. Thee archetypes can be communicated in tiny spaces as well as estate gardens. When we create these archetypal places in our gardens we make a walk through these gardens a journey both exhilarating and profound.

The Arbor garden is a good example of the cave archetype. The way the farm is set on a hill yet encircled by higher mountains is the harbor archetype at work. The circular pool at the entrance into the buildings speaks of the sea archetype. There are archtypal references all over the place, but the lack of paths means that these moments have not been brought together into a unified journey.

it was time to begin to translate winter musings into action. So, this weekend we began to articulate the paths we have more clearly, and set about to make some new paths connecting disconnected gardens. Above you can see the landscape cloth we laid down under the paths before spreading peastone.


After reading about possible path materials and consulting the Angels about what kind of material to use on the paths, I settled on peastone gravel like the gravel used in the entrance courtyard.

Settling on the idea of gravel and actually starting to dump load on load of gravel into the garden are two different things. I found it a bit of a leap to lay down so much gravel. It seemed so permanent. As I waffled about going for it with the gravel, the Angels arranged that every time I opened a gardening book it showed a garden with gravel paths.

I got the point. They want gravel.

We began where I felt most confident, with laying down gravel on the path that the dogs had already made in all their travel from back door to front and front door to back.

We didn’t get as far as we’d hoped because it takes a lot of gravel to do a little bit of paths but this is how it looks so far. This is the entrance to the Arbor garden. As we get more gravel to spread, we will keep this path going around the south side of the house to the back porch as well as following the dog path in the foreground of this shot all the way to the main entrance on the north of the house.

You can see where we ran out of gravel, just as we turned to corner to run along the south side of the house. I created a small circle of a garden bed between the Arbor garden and the Rose garden. I hope it will be a sort of promontory moment when gravel encircles it and it has a bit more substance.

I still have to think of how to more cohesively connect the two gardens. This small circular bed of alpine strawberries, decorated right now with a fuschia in a pot, doesn’t quite unite the Arbor Garden and the Rose Garden into a whole. But it is a beginning. I will keep fiddling until it feels right. We’ll get more gravel next weekend when I have Jim to help shovel and then we’ll see what happens.

And in the meantime, I can keep mulching all the gardens. We had 20 cubic yards of native bark mulch delivered last week in the most enormous truck I have ever seen. The driver willingly backed the truck down to near the compost heap and then dumped the whole load in one fell swoop.

Here’s William atop the mulch pile in all its glory! That’s even enough mulch for me, the mulch queen. I have taken about thirty wheelbarrow loads off it already and it doesn’t even look like any has been used. That’s my idea of heaven, gardens to mulch and enough mulch to do the job!

Hiving the new bees last night was like a shortened version of toilet training several children. The bees arrived by Next Day Air UPS last night. Our UPS man sprinted off the truck with our bees, noting that it had been a very long day with a lot of noisy bees. As I cooed over the new bees, I told him being with the bee’s noise had been good for his health. I don’t think he really believed me.

I set the two boxes of wildly buzzing bees on the cool of the back porch and left them to settle down for a few hours. An overnight journey from sun warmed hives in Georgia to the still cool backroads of New Hampshire must be disconcerting, to say the least.

After supper, I donned my attractive bee suit and got to work. Will and Jim were off on a school field trip, so I did not have their assistance in hiving the new bees. They also took the camera, so I have no pictures either.

The two boxes of bees came attached to one another by thin wooden dowels, so the first thing I did was cut the boxes apart with my big pruners. Not an appropriate use of the tool, but it worked. This was necessary because I needed to work with only one box of bees at a time.

It’s not the easiest thing to use a screwdriver to pry up the opening of the bee box when you are wearing bees gloves. They are thick and cumbersome, but I prevailed without gouging myself. I managed to pry up the lid, remove the small box that held the queen bee, and then cover the box again with only a few bees airborne.

The first hiving was like toilet training my first child. Ben said one day when he was about two and a half that he was finished with diapers and we never thought about it again. I wondered what other mothers were talking about with M&M bribes for using the toilet and years of night diapers. I was certain toilet training was a piece of cake. So too hiving the first box of bees.

I removed the cork plug that kept the queen in her little box during the journey north and gently placed this box down into the hive. As I placed her, I could see her moving about the box alive and well, waiting to be united with her attentive workers. Then I poured several thousand of her worker bees on top of hive. They all poured down into the hive with such sublime order and harmony. Before I could even get the lid on the hive back on, the bees were moving towards their queen as fast as they could. It was clearly a gentle group of bees, already bonded to their new queen.

I went for a little walk in my bee suit to give the stray bees flying around the hive a chance to get settled in before I confused them by hiving the second box of bees. I ran into a neighbor who made no comment on the fact that I was wearing an enormous white suit and big black boots while out for a stroll on a summer evening. Perhaps she was thinking, “to each his own said the lady as she kissed the cow.”

Returning to hive the second box, my gathered audience of Lizzy, Emily, and our friend Heather Gallagher assumed that box two would go in as sweetly as box one, as did I. But this group of bees was feisty. The queen went into the hive, but a good half of the bees weren’t interested in following her. They didn’t want to leave the box and couldn’t be shaken out.

One beekeeper whose tomes I read last year said he hived bees by creating a ramp for them to walk up into the hive, giving them choice in the matter of whether to occupy their new home or not. I assembled a ramp and positioned the box of bees so that if they left their box they would be on the ramp with the entrance to their home dead ahead. I sat with them encouraging each bee that stared up the ramp to keep going. If I had had M&Ms to bribe them with, I would have used them. Like toilet training all my children after Ben, this hiving was more of a challenge. This second hive had attitude. The bees willing to leave the box in which they had arrived wanted to fly around my head, not walk up the ramp into the hive. I cajoled them until it got dark. Song, pep talks, everything but snacks were involved. Finally I abandoned my post, figuring that eventually the remainder of reluctant bees would join their new queen sometime during the night.

I got up this morning at six to see how things were going. Hive number one was humming quietly with nary a stray bee. Hive two was staying true to its character. Instead of abandoning their travel box, the bees had clustered together inside the box and stayed there all night.

Donning my bee suit once again, I cut the sides off this box and started to scoop these bees to the entrance of their hive. This was their signal to take off in all directions and then settle all over my bee suit. I began to lift individual bees to the mouth of the hive and that is where I have been the last two hours. Each bee that turned and headed into the hive gave me a moment of delight. Finally with only one sting for my time with the bees, I got the message that they could take it from there. The message was sort of a sassy, “Get Out of Here” not some honeyed words of thanks.

Just like surviving the arduous toilet training of child two, three, and four, there was a feeling of accomplishment that came with sort of hiving the second hive. Though as I positioned what felt like my eight thousandth bee at the mouth of the hive and scooted her towards her new home, I had to smile at cooperative hive number one which had given not a moments worry.

I guess we need the challenges to appreciate the sweet and serene moments, the easy toilet training experiences and the one that leave you feeling like spitting nails. Ah Life! Maybe it’s all that time with the bees of hive number two, but this morning it feels easier to not worry and just be happy. And grateful.

Thank you all so much for your love and prayers.

Someone emailed this morning asking for an update. I don’t exactly know what to say. These situations seem to take so long to move towards a level of safety that feels appropriate to me.

I can say that in addition to my gratitude for your love and prayers, I am grateful for the four different students that went to the guidance counselor to tell her about the “Kill Will league” and the child’s specific plans to kill Will with a 22 handgun. I am also grateful for the support of Jim’s team teacher and the school nurse, both of whom seem to grasp how extreme, even inhumane an expectation it is for Jim to be asked to manage a classroom that includes his son who has been threatened and the child who made the threats.

Jim will continue to manage this classroom with great care and compassion for all involved, but the stress is enormous. I feel very politically incorrect in how I feel about all this. I am deeply sorry for this troubled child and his situation, but I also don’t really trust a risk assessment counselor who after one session decided that there is no cause to change the status quo.

I am grateful for the local police. They know us from our other death threat problems. They have been to the home of this troubled child to make sure the family’s handguns are locked up, but they also cautioned us to be vigilant in our concern.

I am grateful for the tender love of Will’s older siblings. They are good at keeping it light and natural with Will, even as they feel particularly aware of how scary this situation is because they have walked in his shoes themselves. We filled the weekend with badminton and woods walks, a trip for ice cream and hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range. I worked off and on in the gardens. This was a big comfort to me and probably made everyone feel better because it was the most normal thing for me to be doing, not hovering kissing Will’s head every three seconds, but planting one of those wildly complicated gardens that have been our life for so many years.

Lizzy is back from Seattle and working locally. We are glad to have her back for many reasons, but one of them is that she is so close to Will. We are all close after the seven years of trauma with my threatening relative. I hope these ordeals haven’t made us too closed off and that each of the children will choose to trust the world. Whatever they decide, it won’t come out of naivete anyways.

I struggle with my guilt about having given pain by sharing our crappy news with you. One of the worst things about this kind of situation is how isolating it can be. I am trying to put aside my guilt and just be where I am, in need and most grateful for your love and support.

This year’s Venus Garden takes form with the planting of an outside ring of Sweet Peas, planting the fourteen rays with seven rows of Parsley and seven of Nasturtium. A water element in the center is encircled with seven blue pots of climbing Nasturtiums. A White Lotus will go in the center water element when it arrives.

I expected to be planting twenty five new blueberry bushes today with a joyful heart.. This kind of project usually makes me so happy. I may get the blueberries planted, but I think it will be with a heavy heart, not a joyful one.

Our youngest child has been the target of new death threats at the hands of another classmate, a child who, as of yesterday, had access to a gun.

Our son is twelve. He would literally not hurt an ant, yet he has already lived through seven years of death threats from a disturbed relative of mine. Now he has to deal with this.

I find myself in a familiar place of shock and adrenaline rush. It is sickeningly familiar.

Today, a lot of other adults are working with us to create a safe situation for Will. Except for police involvement, this never happened with our other situation. This time we have adults involved who are less naive, less in denial, and then they have us, seasoned veterans of this kind of horrible situation who simply won’t stop until we do all we can to try and make things safer for Will.

Sadly, this doesn’t feel like safe enough.

My thoughts go in so many directions. What have we come to as a country where a child living in a tiny town of two thousand people would have had not one situation like this in his twelve short years but two.

Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers. I would appreciate that so much.

Recently I heard about the circumstances of a new baby’s life. The baby was born to a teenage mother who smoked throughout the pregnancy. The teenage father of the child is in jail for a firearms incident at a local high school. The baby is going to be raised in a household where everyone still smokes, even knowing the damage this does to newborn lungs. Someone commented that, “This soul must have done something terrible in a past life to land in a family like that.”

I realized at that moment that I didn’t see it that way.

Let’s say that you have had previous experiences with a group of people and during your experiences with them, you have given up some sense of your own self worth because you came to believe their mistreatment of you was a valid reflection of your worth. In other words, you lost sight of your true worth in the face of their personality driven behaviors.

While you can come to a place of healing in which you know you would never give up your sense of self worth and therefore your power to these souls in the same way again, this is somewhat of a theoretical belief. As someone once said, “You can’t pass the test unless you take the test.”

To put our learning to the test and make it truly our own wisdom and not just an idea, our souls often choose to get us back into relationship with the various souls that we gave our power to in this or other lives, so that we can actually reclaim the pieces of ourselves that we gave away. And if it can’t be the same souls, then our souls find personalities that share similar illusions for us to enter into a relationship with.

With this baby, I imagine he came back into relationship with this group of souls so that he could immerse himself in his illusions about his self worth, as represented by this birth family. From within this matrix of an experience of his illusions, he can then move towards a truer experience of his worth, freed from these limiting ideas. I do not mean to condone the choices of the adults in his life, so much as acknowledge the bravery of this soul, who knows that the only way to actually take back what he gave away, is to go get it.

As I think about my own choice to incarnate into a family of origin with damaging illusions about personal worth, this way of looking at the situation has helped me let go of some lingering sense of having been, well, an idiot in my soul choices. I spent many years feeling like I was deranged to have picked the family of origin that I did. Some, of course, might say I was deranged to imagine I picked them, but I do think we pick our family of origin.

Now I see how I needed to pick this group again both because of the ways they triggered my own wounds about self worth and because of the way I had given my power to them and their illusions in earlier dramas. By incarnating in their midst, I sat down to take the test. By retrieving a sense of lovableness beyond their definition for me, I not only passed the test, but I moved into a more healed relationship with myself than the one I entered this life with.

Once I came to see that I needed to reenter the very relationships in which I had previously abandoned my sense of worth in the face of their personality opinions, I could see great value and courage in having dived back into relationship with these souls. What an precious opportunity to retrieve pieces of my self and self identity that I had left in their hands.

It took a long period of focused work and many Flower Essences like “All Ego Contracts Null & Void” to take back the pieces that I have retrieved, but it was worth every moment of effort. There is something very solid about where I am. I no longer buy into the definitions these souls have for me. Could I have learned this in a classroom where we talked theoretically about loving oneself better? Not really.

This dynamic is at work in so many other arenas than our family of origin. When we take a job with a toxic boss or have a romance with a person who can’t see us clearly, the same dynamic is at work. Instead of beating ourselves up for making poor choices, we can view these encounters as necessary parts of our journey towards wholeness. I am not talking about conscious choices to remain in abusive relationships. I am talking about accepting that when we find ourselves in relationships that trigger our illusions, we can know that this is territory ripe for real learning.

I don’t think we need to stay in relationship with people once we realize these old dynamics are at work again, unless everyone is willing to shift the dynamics to a new level together. It’s more that, in general, we often seem to reenter a relationship with certain souls or types of personalities in order to come to right relationship with ourselves. However their filters have colored our self concept in the past, by dealing with the personalities again and refusing to agree with their limited perceptions, we reclaim a missing part of ourselves.

One Green Hope friend recently told me how she found her life calling in an artistic community, but eventually came to realize that she had gotten confused as to the source of her artistic talent. Did it spring from this community who had nurtured her, defined her as excellent in her field, but was now trying to constrain and limit her talent due to their own personal insecurities?

She decided to leave the community and find an answer to this question. There was grief. There was emptiness. There was fear she was leaving her creative life behind as she set off on her own. Would she find that her talent existed only in the matrix of this community? Many months later, she finds herself more grounded in the truth that the origin of her artistic talent was never this community, but came from within her. However, she sees her journey into and then out of community with these people as having been a necessary retrieval of vital pieces of her self identity.

During her years working with these fellow artists, she was aware of lots of currents of control in her relationship with her mentors. She thought of these currents within the framework of having had past lives with these people, although she felt that even had it only been this one life they had together, the dynamics of the present day situation would still have demanded that she leave the community and find her own authentic voice and sense of herself separate from these folks.

None of this work of finding the wellspring of her own creativity, solidly grounded within herself, could have been done without the journey into and out of this community. Why? Because the community didn’t create the fear about the source of her creativity so much as show her that this was a wound she already carried.

She is aware that had she been certain of the inner source of her creative life, she would not have been attracted to work with a community that confused external feedback as a necessity for artistic self worth. She is aware that her newfound sense of joy in her creative self could only have come from owning this community’s wounds as her own wound, and then choosing to heal this wound in herself.

This newborn baby I mentioned at the beginning of this blog has a long journey ahead, but since the truth is that he is whole beyond any of the definitions imposed upon him by his family of origin, I am hopeful for this child. However this family of origin tries to limit his sense of his lovableness or other aspects of his self definition, the truth will still be the truth. Only God is real. As an indivisible part of God, he is of infinite value. And someday, just like the rest of us, he will know this. What a moment that will be!