Lately a lot of you have been sending me articles about the mass death of honeybees across our country. Thank you for sending me these articles and for sharing a concern about the fate of the honeybees.

If you have been reading this blog long you know how passionately I love honeybees and how concerned I was already about their survival. When William’s “Time for Kids” makes the mysterious death of honeybees their cover story, it’s clear that a lot of other people are worrying about the honeybees too. One statistic I read last night said that honeybee pollination results in 14 billion dollars worth of food each year in our country, food that would not form without honeybees’ pollination. Just as a global economic community helped stop the arms race because bombing the Soviet Union was bombing American economic interests, perhaps this terrible situation will be resolved because of economic pressures. I hope so.

Many theories are being floated out as to why the bees are leaving their hives in droves and never returning. Some think it is pesticides which disorient the bees. Some worry about an x factor in GMOs. The recent scourges of varroa mites are not being blamed. No one seems to know for sure how to explain this mass death.

This is one of those moments when I wish more people grasped what Einstein was saying. It’s not that I have grasped it, because I haven’t. But everything I have learned about Flower Essences suggests this world is not a chemical cause and effect dynamic but an electrical, vibrational dynamic. If I were one of the scientists studying the bees right now I would look for what inharmonious vibrations could be causing this massive bee death, as well as looking at the pesticide problem.

As I searched the media for any reassuring data about the possible survival of any bees, I was heartened to read about how organic farms were the one place where colonies of native bees as well as some honeybees seemed to be surviving. In a wonderful full circle moment, I read how Full Belly Farm, anorganic farm in California, has been working with scientists to create native shrub hedgerows that help the native bees flourish. It was a full circle moment because one of the women who farmed here in the early years, Shifra Levine, also worked for many years at Full Belly Farm.

As of several days ago, our bees were alive. They spent a slightly warmer afternoon cleaning their hives. While this is heartening in a small way, I wondered what was up in our country for all the bees and asked for a message from the Deva of Honeybees. Here she speaks,

“The situation is dire but not without hope. The factors behind our disappearance are myriad and form a chain link that is impenetrable at times. As the matrix for our existence is vibrational, we receive the loving vibration of your thoughts and the outpouring of concern as a healing balm. This is a great help to us. So send us love.

The focus of the groups who stand to lose money because of our demise helps us slightly, but love does much more. As far as the GMOs, they are, of course, a problem. They represent a manifestation of a collective disharmony and schism between humanity and the natural world. It is not so much that the pollen of GMOs make us sick, but that the disharmony of the whole direction of agriculture makes it nearly impossible for us to do our work of harmonizing the land. We die of exhaustion with too much to rebalance, as well as from the effects of pesticides.

Along with your loving concern, another specific thing you can do to help us is to do land clearing. This eases our burdens as without your support we must work ourselves to death to clear and rebalance the land. In this way, we are like so many animal species right now. Our service to the world is land harmonizing as well as pollination. Honey is our fuel to keep going in our work. As the land of this country falls into deeper and deeper disharmony, we still strive to do our jobs. We will do our jobs until we drop dead. That is who we are. Because of the extreme disharmony, we are dropping dead in a way that threatens the very survival of our hives and our species in this country.

As you work to clear the land, you ease our burdens and allow for a more balanced appropriation of our energies to land harmonizing. As you share the responsibility to clear land with us, you leave us with enough energy to keep our hives going. We are just one of many species which will die in droves if greater responsibility is not taken by humanity. Each person who involves themselves in land clearing lifts a great burden from the yoke of many animals. That is the hope of which I spoke.”
I AM the Deva of Honeybees.

Directions for Land Clearing
If you can do this every day for the land that you live, work or care for that would be a wonderful gift to bees and all creation. Even sporadic land clearing is a help. It only takes a few minutes. I have built land clearing into my morning meditation routine so that I do it each day. This is the only way I can keep myself organized, but if this is not feasible for you, it is truly better to do it whenever you remember than never at all.

Humanity’s role in land clearing is to invoke the clearing. The Angels and Elementals of the land will do the actual clearing but they cannot do it without you asking for their help. When we do not get involved it falls to species like the bees to fill the void created by us. Extreme weather will also occur to clean up extreme negativity.

I begin my clearing work each day by grounding myself and the land I am going to clear. I ground us to the heart of the Earth and then I anchor both myself and the land to the heart of God. I ground myself to the HEART of Earth not Earth in general because Earth itself is having a hard time with only its heart being solid ground, so to speak.

When you invoke the divine beings connected to a piece of land to help you, you can be specific ( I list a specific group of beings that will help you at the end of this description) or you can simplify the process by just asking for help from the divine beings connected to the land. You do not need to list specific names to get help. Any genuine request for assistance will get assistance. Right now, the Angels are telling me, “Make this as simple as possible so people actually do this process. We need help.”

After you call in this group, however you do it, ask this group to cleanse, clear, rebalance, and illuminate the land you are clearing. Ask them to clear the emotional, mental, physical, and etheric bodies of the land of everything that is not pure light or divinity.

Ask that the negativity be released through a christed grid. This is not a religious thing, it is simply the name of a filtering system that will not let the specific negativity you have cleared return to that specific piece of land.

You can visualize things getting clearer but visualization is not necessary . The land will be cleansed no matter what because you have asked that it be cleared. It does help to ask that the land that has been cleared be filled with divine love and light. This is a good thing to do because it means that new negativity won’t just sweep in and fill the void left by the cleaning. Instead the void will be filled with love.

That’s it! Thank everyone involved and you are done with the cleaning.

In a few minutes you can easily clear an area that would take several hives of bees to clear and rebalance. That is no small thing!

Lots of people ask me how to figure out what land to clear. People ask if they can clear the whole earth? Can they clear someone else’s toxic home? Can they clear their local Wal-Mart? These are questions that only your own heart can answer. In general, you have every right to clean your own living space and working space and the land around you. When I want to clear other places, I try to ask myself if it is my heart asking me to do this or some other part of me. I trust my heart’s guidance to clear a place, but also trust when I get a heartfelt feeling that a piece of land is someone else’s business. My land clearing assignments change all the time. I will get asked to work on a place every day for several years and then I will be told to let go. There are factors here which are beyond my understanding, but one thing I do believe is that sometimes there are other people who must take responsibility for a piece of land I have been clearing and I must step aside to let them either rise to the occasion or not.

Please email me at green.hope.farm@valley.net with any questions. As always when talking to a Deva, I experienced the Deva of Honeybees as a being of immense loving calm. However her message is as clear a call for help as I have ever received from a Deva. May we all rise to the occasion and help save the honeybees.

Here is a list of divine beings that will help if you want to request for help very specifically.
The Overlighting Deva of the piece of land you want to clean. This Angelic being holds the divine plan for this piece of land
Other Angels working this piece of land
The Elementals of the land
Pan, head Elemental of Earth
Any Ascended Master or God realized being connected to this piece of land
Deva of the Earth’s atmosphere, Lunaria
Deva of the Earth’s surface, Sapphalo
Deva of the center of the Earth, Darndella
Our Sun, Helios and Vesta

After a string of warm days melted most of our snow and just when it looked like we were going to reclaim the lovely green and brown earth for good, we got another really big snow. The one good thing about massive quantities of snow in late March is that it leaves lots of time for knitting (because frankly I can drum up no enthusiasm for actual outdoor winter activities at this point other than walks up and down the road with the dogs).

The first fifth grade afghan got finished with a two color border. More importantly it got road tested. Bella settled right in only to be moved off by MayMay who felt she had the right to test it for a twelve hour night shift.

With this rigorous testing process behind it, the afghan went back to where it all began, the fifth grade classroom at the Plainfield school. Now it’s time for assembling number two afghan. With high temperatures in the twenties today and a predicted fifteen below tonight, the snow won’t be melting, the sap won’t be running, the earth won’t be appearing and I will get a lot done on the next afghan (which I might add is going to be another beauty!).

Heather tells me it’s a good thing that the assembly line is moving along because the fifth graders are still knitting! Yahoooooo!

Here is but one shot of some of the beautifully knitted and downright gorgeous squares created by the two fifth grade classes of the Plainfield school. Their squares are piling up as the fifth graders continue to knit every spare moment. Already we have enough squares for at least three or four afghans with more in the works. I am so impressed by the quality and quantity of squares knitted by these hard working fifth graders.

As you may recall from an earlier blog, the fifth graders read a book about a girl their age struggling to survive in modern day Afghanistan. When they heard about a project called “Afghans for Afghans” in which hand knit wool blankets are sent to families in Afghanistan, they ALL learned to knit and began to amass an enormous collection of hand knit squares for afghan families.

The last couple of afternoons Heather Gallagher, their teacher, and I have begun to piece all the squares together.

First we take similar sized squares and knit them together into one long strip and then we knit the strips together into one big blanket. We hope to knit an edge on each afghan to finish them off, but so far we are just piecing the squares together.

Here is the first assembled afghan with loose ends not knit into the blanket yet and seam side up.

Fortunately Mrs. Gallagher has the toes for this work. And to keep it fresh, yesterday I dragged her out to collect sap in between sections of afghans.

Here Heather is checking the buckets on one of the grandmother maples we tap while Lizzy empties a bucket of sap into our 125 gallon holding tank. Yesterday was our first boil. Usually we are a third if not a half done our syruping season by now, but since we had the warmest December on record followed by the warmest January on record followed by the coldest February on record followed by the coldest March days on record, is it any wonder the trees are reluctant to get started?

Yesterday was suddenly in the fifties. We found ourselves full tilt into mud season, with the snow piles receding like fast action photography, the roads a wild mess of muddy ruts, and the birds and people singing about spring.

Before Ben left on a two week school trip to Costa Rica, he brought us an upgrade on our extremely low tech boiling pan. “Your going to love it” he called out to us as off loaded the new pan and jetted off to Yessenia’s hometown with nothing but flip flops, a few pairs of shorts, and a grin on his face.

Here is the new set up in action, after a couple days of effort to get it on line. The new set up is a pan divided into three long channels with a sap pre-heating pan on top. The pre warmed sap drips into one side of the boiling pan without affecting the temperature on the other side because the sap must go up and down and up the pan through these channels to get to the other side. The pan is set on a barrel cut especially to hold the pan with the firebox inside this barrel. Our former system was a big open pan set on cinderblocks with a fire on the ground underneath. A lot of the heat got lost on its way to the bottom of the old pan and sap coming into the pan cooled the whole pan down.

PLEASE ADMIRE COPPER VALVE ON RIGHT SIDE OF PAN ABOVE AND ON LEFT SIDE OF WARMING PAN BELOW

As Ben departed for Costa Rica, only Jim focused on Ben’s comment there was “some assembly required.” Before use, the pre warming pan and the main pan both needed to have valves plumbed onto them so that we could regulate adding sap to the boiling pans and regulate pouring off nearly finished sap from the big pan. The stovepipe hole in the barrel proved not to be the right size for the piping so that also proved a bit of a fiddle.

I knit but I do not plumb, so this work had to be done by Jim. In a now famous Sheehan family dynamic, the ideas person ( usually me, but in this case Ben) wildly underestimates how long it will take to translate “Let’s put in an orchard” into actual fruit bearing trees or “Let’s get a new syrup pan online” into actual finished syrup. I consistently underestimate how long things will take as opposed to Jim who usually can predict so accurately that it is postively scary. Nowadays, if someone ( me, Ben, or Jim’s brother) suggest we need a new storage shed, someone else immediately riffs ” We should be able to slap that puppy up this afternoon.” And then of course, when the laughter has slowed, Jim gives us the accurate timeframe for our project, an assessment which usually snaps us out of our delusions of grandeur.

However this time, the sap was running and that puppy HAD to be slapped up that afternoon……. So long suffering Jim spent most of Sunday bringing the new boiling pan online. What with two trips to the hardware store, a crappy new butane torch, and an expedition to the town sheds to get sand to fill the bottom of the barrel because we had no fire bricks, it took, well, as long as Jim thought it would take.

Fortunately Ben was in mid flight over Mexico so it was not wearing heavily on him. And me, the underwriter of this whole venture? I was thinking how to say thanks. I came up with a plan, a simple plan, one that I can actually implement myself.

Jim will need, no he will DESERVE the season’s first syrup, maybe on a nice stack of pancakes. And if I boil all day today, a pitcher of nice hot syrup for his pancakes should be a realistic goal, and that’s not just the ideas person in me talking!

As with all the mixes born here, this one was not created in a vacuum. The support you asked for, your stories, and what I was trying to figure out in my own life created a synchronicity of events that suggested it was time for a new mix. When I asked the upstairs staff if this was so, they kicked in immediately with this mix to support us.

I love your stories and I am lucky to hear a lot of them. Right now, many of your stories hold a common thread revealing a common struggle a lot of us are having. Right now, many of you describe feeling deeply tired of your ideas about life. It isn’t that you are tired with your life, but you are tired of your approach to your life and your view of your life.

You note that your ideas feel like confining thought loops that cut you off from genuine experience. The specifics thought loops leaving you exhausted and numb are deeply varied. Many of you describe being weary of ideas about how much you have to do to feel like enough. Many are weary of a belief system that leaves you feeling anxious and afraid. Others of you are tired with your ideas about what success looks like. Some of you want to be done with the pervasive notion that you must rush yourselves through life as if it is a race to the finish. Others mention being weary of patterns of relentlessly judging both your own and other peoples’ confusions and decisions with a values system that no longer feels right. You describe being sick of shoulds built on convictions and opinions that feel claustrophobic and limiting. I hear a collective weariness with the limitations of our own points of view and the ways we each respond from within these views.

One commonality in your stories is the depths of your weariness with long held core beliefs that suddenly feel wrong. You describe a wrenching emotional process to own these feelings of discomfort with long held ideas. You recognize these long held ideas are constricting, even claustrophobic filters keeping out the world and narrowing your experience of life. They are inhibiting your ability to see and binding you from genuine experiences of being here now. You agree it is discard time, but how?

At first I considered each confining thought pattern you mentioned and offered specific Flower Essence suggestions for the specific binding. As I heard a flood of stories about this pervasive weariness with old frames of reference, I realized it was the whole pattern of holding onto thoughts as right, true, or important that is the gist of the difficulty. Yes, it was important to support the release of specific ideas with specific Flower Essences, but it also felt important to support the dynamic of releasing long held beliefs in general. This is really what Carry Less is about.

A few years ago, in the middle of some difficulty, the Angels told me that I needed to decide between picking through my trash as I threw it overboard or simply throwing it ALL overboard. Ah yes, what a habit us humans have made of holding onto our garbage. But lately there seems to be a collective desire to throw it all overboard in one swift motion. And without sorting! This remedy will help us with this process of efficiently dumping it all, hence the Angels’ name for this remedy, Carry Less.

My habits of picking over the garbage on its way to the dumpster leaves me wondering why this dumping feels so necessary right now. I really don’t know, but it appears to be a pressing need. So many of you have connected with us to speak of uncovering core ideas that are strangling the lifeblood out of you and your lives right now. Perhaps the rising vibration of this beautiful planet makes thoughts that might have fit our lives not very long ago feel downright uncomfortable now. Perhaps there is an entirely different reason why so many feel an urgent need to let go of their burdensome ideas right now. All I know for certain is that the discomfort felt by so many of us galvanized me to want to make a new mix and when I went to ask the Angels what to include in the mix, I was given the formula for Carry Less with a clarity and speed that made it apparent that this remedy’s time was now.

CARRY LESS AND SANSKARA RELEASE
Sanskara is a word used to describe these filters clouding our experience of reality, the filters that Carry Less offers support to unbind and release.

Sanskaras are imprints left on the subconscious mind by experiences from this or previous lives. They influence our nature, behavior, responses, state of mind, and experience of life. According to Meher Baba, sanskaras are impressions or trace memories accumulated through evolution and over the course of the evolution of consciousness in human reincarnations. They are not a substance nor a force or energy but are best understood in more psychological terms. For Meher Baba, consciousness, not matter or energy, is the intrinsic substance of reality. Thus sanskaras, as the smallest building blocks of consciousness, could be described as ways of experiencing.

By their very nature sanskaras narrow our ability to experience fully, being themselves a kind of filter limiting full perception. It is not that sanskaras limit reality so much as they limit our experience of reality.

This is because sanskaras, once acquired and accumulated, form a sort of multilayered lens through which we perceive our experiences. They are filters that block us from experiencing what really IS in this now. Sanskaras are useful in that they create a bridge to consciousness, but then they serve no further purpose. They are actually a hindrance to full consciousness and God realization. The goal for humans is to be rid of our sanskaras through a process of unwinding them from our consciousnesses. Life experiences can unwind sanskaras as does contact with perfect God realized teachers, but often life experiences add, rather than remove, sanskaras.

FLOWER ESSENCES AND SANSKARAS
Flower Essences unwind sanskaras. By their very nature they ARE about sanskara release. While so many things and experiences clutter our consciousness with more obscuring data, creating more sanskaras, Essences unburden us and set us on a course to simply BE. Each Flower Essence supports a release of a specific illusion or sanskara. Each release moves us towards an experience of self beyond bindings.

Over the years we have created combination mixes that pool the gifts of many Flower Essences to unbind certain bigger sanskaric themes. For example, your requests for and my need for a remedy that would help unbind us from illusions of tribe and family led to the creation of the family river trio of Bloodroot, Black Currant and Borage. Your requests and my desire to disentangle myself from counter productive bindings to other people, and find freedom from concern about the opinions of others or even the opinions of myself led to the creation of our mix All Ego Contracts Null & Void.

The need to unbind and release emotional scars led to the creation of Abandonment & Abuse. Many of the combination remedies of the Animal Wellness collection as well as the other combination remedies were created to support the unbinding of specific groups of sanskaras.

Fro example, each Venus Garden concerns itself with a shedding of a group of sanskaras. From the first Eight Garden that helped us shed sanskaras about what could be healed to the latest, Don’t Worry Be Happy, that helps free us from the illusion that worry not happiness should be our daily fare, all of the Venus Garden Essences have supported our pursuit of freedom from filters, illusions, in a word, sanskaras.

Carry Less supports the whole dynamic of sanskara release. It helps expedite this release process much like a bowl might make mixing a batch of ingredients together easier or the right tool for the job might make a repair go much faster. Carry Less helps you make the most of the support you are receiving to let go of sanskaras into a greatly expanded experience of self.

I AM my true self revealed

Alfalfa, Batchelor Buttons, Bay Cedar, Bee Balm, Box Briar, Box Elder (Ashleaf Maple), Comfrey, Coralita, Daffodil, Easter Lily Vine, Eyes of Mary, Flowering Quince, Flow Free, Grape, Joe Pye Weed, Lily of the Valley, Love in a Mist, Meadow Rue, Mehera, Orange , Osmanthus, Paper Birch, Pavonia Spinifex, Pink Water Lily, Pumpkin, Purple Leafed Chokecherry, Rosa Glauca, Ruby Moon Hyacinth Bean, Scarlet Pimpernel, Spiderwort, Turk’s Cap Cactus, White Water Lily, Wild Yellow Lily, Yellow Mullein,Yellow Water Lily

The Angels suggested I start our seeds for the season a month earlier than usual. This sounded reasonable during December when we were having 63 degree afternoons and all the crocuses were about to bloom. Now that there is three feet of snow on the ground, it’s a bit more of a stretch of the imagination to think we’ll have an early spring. None the less, I did start a bunch of seeds.

I have flashed you a picture of the flat of tomatoes mid sowing. We grow a lot of different tomatoes in a staggering variety of colors. I did pass on last year’s white tomato variety aptly named “Cream Sausage.” It really looked as unappealing as the name. Frankly, none of us got past the appearance of this tomato enough to even notice if it tasted any good. This year we will just have to suffer through with only purple, pink, yellow, orange, green, striped, and red tomatoes to harvest.

No sooner had I made the most enormous mess in the kitchen sowing all these seeds when our water pump died. I had to melt snow on the stove in order to finish the project and then melt some more to flush the toilets, and clean up all the oil mix everywhere. It is amazing how fast things get complicated without running water.

Because our greenhouse is already full of tropical Flowers, I start the seeds on heating mats outside the greenhouse and then move the tropical plants into the house as I move the flats of germinated plants into the greenhouse. By the time the greenhouse is packed full of seedlings in April and May, the rest of the house and office is full of tropical plants pining for their greenhouse. When summer comes, everyone goes outside and recovers from less than ideal conditions. Another greenhouse remains a project on the horizon.

Speaking of projects, we tapped the maple trees last Sunday. The sap didn’t run much this week, but we went out yesterday to collect what was there and stomp down paths to our buckets. Where the plow had piled snow it was not unusual to sink in almost to our hips. After entirely too much time indoors this winter I am completely thrilled to be outside with something to do! Yahoo for sugaring!