Each day’s email brings a lot of interesting questions and stories about Flower Essences.

Here was feedback and a question from yesterday, “I have a four year old Doberman Pinscher female…who I have been competing in agility for two years. We have had great success using Showcats and Anxiety. I will not trial here without them! Although they have worked wonders for her ring stress ( 99%better than previously ) something is still “missing”. In trial, she doesn’t run as fast as she can and does in practice because she constantly has to take in her surroundings. She used to bark and get her hackles up about the judge and ring crew, which she doesn’t anymore, but she still will wander off course to make sure they meet her approval. She is overly suspicious of people, even for the breed, and bossy with other dogs, not in an aggressive way. I like to say she is full of attitude. Any little hint from me that she id something wrong stresses her immediately. She is extremely sensitive to me and my emotions. I guess what I am looking for is for her to be more carefree, able to enjoy playing with me and focus on me without worrying about her surroundings so much. I need her to know that she is safe with me and she doesn’t always have to be on guard. What are your recommendations? I have considered Run & Play or Fairy Rose for her.”

As I was reading the email I thought of both Run & Play and the Fairy Rose for this dog even before I got to the end of the email where this dog’s caretaker had thought of these herself. This is so typical of conversations about Flower Essences. You know what is calling to you and have excellent insights into what might help you or the animals in your life.

I also suggested Neediness and Golden Armor for this dog.

As I explained, Neediness helps animals find their right relationship with other humans and their right relationship with themselves. It helps them feel anchored in an experience of their own self worth so that they are neither too demanding or too anxious about what other people think of them. I mentioned that I thought an animal that felt special was really dealing with the same issue as an animal that didn’t feel special at all. Animals and for that matter people as well, have worth just because they are, and once they get into a situation of feeling better than or worse than others, they have begun to lose sight of this essential truth. The Flowers in Neediness help us or our animals to know that being ourselves is enough and no feedback from other humans or any other experience can alter our value.

I suggested Golden Armor to help this dog to buffer out this data of what others are thinking about her. It will also help her to buffer out all the extraneous stimulus in the ring, and of course it will help her buffer out the dissonant sound vibrations that exist in and out of the ring in this modern world of ours. To experience the pure joy of doing an agility course, it has to be an experience of just self and the course. For a sensitive, empathic dog like this Doberman, Golden Armor offers supportive information on just being the experience of doing the agility course, free of the burdens of all other intruding vibrations. I think this is when the purest joy occurs, when we have lost ourselves in the experience of what we are doing.

In a subsequent email back and forth we discussed whether Neediness would make a dog more indifferent to her humans. I tried to explain why I thought having this Doberman work with Neediness would only make the relationship more loving. Clinginess and aloofness are really the same response, one of insecurity about the relationship as well as insecurity about one’s own value. When one finds right relationship with self and knows one’s own self worth, then one is free to be one’s essential self. And let’s face it, we are such lucky humans to have the example of dogs whose essential self is so often such pure love and devotion. In most dogs, Neediness helps the pure strands of love to be better known and felt. It only dismantles patterns of behavior obscuring this love not the love itself.

So thank you for every email sharing your experiences and asking your questions. I learn something from every email!

As I type, it is snowing outside here at the farm North Pole. It reminds me of the holiday weekend we had. A fresh brisk bitter arctic wind rejuvenated chilled us to the bone as we took walks force marches with the dogs. Being an intrepid New Hampshire native a native wanna be ever the recovering flatlander that I am, I did not gather the clan for some festive April snowmobiling. I did not organize some hair raising telemark skiing through a maple sugar bush, doubling our skiing pleasure by dodging plastic piping as we merrily sped down a mountain slope. No, I got the group organized with some old fashioned indoor craft activities.

If the only green we were going to see all weekend was the fake grass in the Easter egg baskets, then I was going to make sure we had gorgeous eggs on top of that crappy plastic stuff. I got out our Ukranian egg kit and made up some new dyes and set everyone loose with a couple dozen white eggs.

On Saturday, as chill winds blew, we started our heaping pile of decorated eggs.

And since Sunday was as charming a spring day as Saturday, we gathered around the kitchen table for a second afternoon of crafts and then had a late day but glorious indoor Easter egg hunt with a serious pile of gorgeous eggs.

However, even with these eggs to enjoy, I don’t want to hear from all of you who were frollicking on green lawns for your hunts. Jim has just arrived home from school to report that the weathermen say were going to have another storm on Thursday bringing six to twelve inches of new snow.

Ukranian eggs anyone?

Ah yes, there is nothing like April in New Hampshire.

I often leave gaps in my explanations and directions for processes so I appreciate your questions about the Land Clearing process I gave again last week. If you have a question, no doubt other people have the same question. So keep those questions coming.

Questions I have received since my last blog about Land Clearing had two main concerns. When you do this process are you dumping negativity from the land you are clearing onto some other piece of land? As one Green Hope friend said, “Do I really want to rob Peter to pay Paul, clearing my own land and dumping this cleared negativity onto some other piece of land?” The second question revolved around this thing I called a “christed grid.”

These questions made me realize that maybe Land Clearing isn’t a very good way to describe this process. Maybe it would be better to call it a LAND TUNING.

Land, like everything else vibrates at a variable rate of speed. These vibrations are a kind of music. The lower or slower the vibration, the more heavy, dense, and negative the land feels. Land so encumbered is too burdened to make beautiful music or express its truest self in song. When land is cleared and the vibration is high, there is a greater likelihood that the land will be free to sing the song of its true self.

We all know pieces of land that feel just right, places where you just know the land is singing its music freely and gloriously. Land is really no different than a musical instrument. Just as with a musical instrument, you can bang out notes on an out of tune instrument and get the drift of the melody, but after a tune up it’s a different musical experience entirely. The more frequent the tune ups, the better the music. And just as when you tune a musical instrument, these vibrational tune ups on a piece of land don’t dump anything on anyone else.

I imagine you mostly thought of wild places when you thought of lands that sing, but even these places need tune ups nowadays.

Where does this negativity come from? Land’s vibration is affected by negative events that happened on the land as well as negative man made creations on land. I don’t think any land is meant to host a war, store nuclear waste, or be the sight of an arms manufacturing plant. Land that has suffered from these degradations screams out to be tuned and will continue to need this tune up until it gets this tune up, even if the war that threw it out of tune was centuries ago.

Land also can be adversely affected by other factors. Even an argument between a couple of people leaves negativity where the fight happened. There are so many ways negativity gets deposited on land. I often think that the reluctance people have about going to the dentist is in part because of the accumulated negativity dumped by all of us in the dentist’s office. While I try to be appropriate about what land I clear and whose business it is to clear a piece of land on a routine basis, I do clear my dentist’s office before I go for a cleaning. It may be the dentist’s responsibility the rest of the year, but I clear the office for my hour. This is one of many places that accumulate negativity at a dizzying rate and that could benefit from routine daily clearing.

Even if a spot of land receives little or no direct dumping of denser emotions like fear or anger, all land needs clearing. Wind and rain deposits negativity from other sources onto land. Dissonance from our modern technologies also affects the vibration of land adversely as our technology affects the vibrations everywhere on Earth. This is why even wilderness can benefit from land clearing.

In my experience, two things happen when you do the Land Clearing process. In response to your request to clear a piece of land, the Angels and Elementals raise up the vibration of the land and everything on it to a higher frequency AND negativity that does not belong to the land is returned to whomever it belongs to.

The tune up part, “the clear and illuminate” part is no different than a request to the Angels and Elementals to tune a musical instrument. The Angels and Elementals are well suited to any tune up job including tuning land.

The Angels’ work in general is to take some aspect of consciousness that is vibrating at a low rate of speed, say the emotion sorrow and raise it up a few octaves to express the higher spectrum of this emotion which in this case is the vibration of joy. The Elementals’ work is about raising up the vibration of anything in form to its highest level of vibration, for example taking the idea of a carrot and manifesting in form the most beautiful carrot possible. This means both the Angels and Elementals come to this work of raising up the vibration of land as a duck takes to water, well prepared and happy to do this work.

The tune up that they do in response to your request doesn’t leave a detritus that is being dumped on anyone else. It’s an energetic process in which something manifest, in this case the land you are working on, is made more full of light and higher in vibration by experts in this field of work. The Angels and Elementals are like piano tuners. This tune up work does no one and no other land any harm.

The “cleansing and rebalancing” part of Land Clearing does involve movement of energy but again, this part does no harm. It is more a process of a restoring things to their natural order. The cleansing and rebalancing aspect of Land Clearing involves the Angels and Elementals returning other people’s negativity to them when they have either consciously or unconsciously dumped it on a piece of land. Perhaps an example will make this part of the process more clear and help ease any concern that cleansing and rebalancing land means indiscriminately dumping junk on someone else.

Let’s say you have a beautiful japanese Maple in your front yard. Let’s say many people drive by each day and send this tree appreciation and love. This appreciation raises up the vibration of your land as does the presence of this lovely tree singing its note of beauty on your land. Let’s say however that there is one person who drives by every day and feels really jealous and angry that you have this lovely tree in your yard. This person’s thoughts accumulate on the land as negativity.

When you clean your land using this thing I called a christed grid, you are asking the Angels and Elementals to take this negativity dumped on your land by this angry person and return this energy to this person without a return address on the energy. In other words, the energy that was of this angry person’s own creation goes back to this person, but it is returned in a form that doesn’t indicate that it was you who sent it back.

People dump negative energies here, there, and everywhere. In cleaning your land, you want to make the return to sender process a neutral process of returning things to their rightful owner. Without the christed grid filter, the energy would return to this person but with your energetics on it. This person would receive back his or her own energy but might think it was a new negative emotions sent from you, not negativity that belonged to him or her. This confusion might escalate the situation and lead this person to send you and the japanese Maple tree even more negativity. With a christed grid, people get their own negativity back to process as their own business and the circle of sending negative emotions back and forth to each other is not continued. This is true rebalancing.

Let me know if this leaves further areas unclear. I know I keep on and on about Land Clearing or Land Tuning, but in my conversations with the Angels and Elementals, they encourage me to write about this more than any other topic. It really is that important.

I will close with a heartening story.

A Green Hope friend on Mauritius, a beautiful paradise in the Indian Ocean, wrote that after she read the blog message from the honeybees, she noticed there were no bees in her garden. When she realized this, she redoubled her land clearing efforts. Just this week she was sitting in her study, windows wide open, and a bee flew in to visit with her for a moment. She knew it was not a disoriented creature who had strayed accidently into her home. She knew it was a bee who had come to say thanks.

May you too be visited by a grateful bee as you help the land where you live to sing its song!

Ten days ago we boiled maple sap because there was a slight amount of sap to boil. Here’s a shot of the group that gathered then to sunbath, schmooz, and watch the steam rise off the boiling pan.

This past week the sap didn’t run very much at all. About half of our forty taps have not run at all this season and the other half have run very little. We haven’t had a collecting run with more than a modest thirty or so gallons of sap to collect and mostly we’ve had collecting runs of much smaller amounts. As you may recall from all my blogs on maple sugaring last year, it takes forty gallons of sap to get a gallon of syrup. We usually make fifteen or so gallons of syrup. I don’t know if we will make more than five this year.

The weather has been peculiar with multiple day stretches of deep cold then stretches of warmth then stretches of cold again. This is not conducive to the sap running. The sap usually runs after a cold night in the twenties followed by a warm day in the forties or fifties, but this year even after the rare ideal night and day temperature fluctuation nothing much is running in our tiny sugar bush. We are hoping it is going better for those friends and neighbors that depend on the sugaring for their livelihood. We do it just for fun and because it gets us outside and moving after too much winter.

When the sap is really running, I have an excuse to be out and about, but not in the gardens. This is good because while I am ready to get into the gardens, they aren’t ready for me. The very wet, still almost frozen soil can’t take my stomping around right now. I need to wait a bit longer to let the gardens dry out before I start my spring rounds of garden work.

Usually maple sugaring and pruning the fruit trees keeps me from being too impatient. This Saturday without the sugaring and with the last of the fruit trees pruned, I needed to divert myself somehow or other. I found the perfect project.

Fruhbeetkasten!

Yes, I purchased some fruhbeetkasten or cold frame kits to replace the wooden cold frames built in 1993 that finally fell apart two years ago. Last year I tried to limp along with some cobbled together make shift cold frames and lost some lovely baby plants because these makeshift cold frames fell in on the plants. So I decided to buy some kits. My other option was bugging Jim to build me new cold frames, but I decided not to spare Jim. (I am saving him for bigger projects later. Lucky guy.)

The Fruhbeetkasten and Anbausatz arrived in many many boxes. On Saturday morning Will and I poured a box out on the ground and found the directions.

The Fruhbeetkasten model I had purchased was for the model with the Anbausatz extension units. The modest English directions I had were for a different model, for Fruhbeetkasten without Anbausatz. These directions included helpful phrases like, “Put hex screw F in each of the lower bores of the aluminum corner piece C, J tightening with wing nut K and clamping washer G affixing one ground anchor P with each of the clamping washers.”

This got us only so far since we were assembling the delux with Anbausatz model. Will spent a few minutes letting the directions for our model, given only in German and Italian, flap in the wind while surveying the tiny bit of progress we had made. After a few minutes looking at the pile of strange parts and hardware left by just the one opened box and knowing that there were three more boxes left, Will had an urgent need to go next door to see if his friend was home. His parting words, “I think we need Dad.”

My gosh, how those five words galvanized me into action. I was going to assemble those cold frames BY MYSELF if it was the last thing I did.

And assembling the fruhbeetkasten with anbausatz was the last thing I did, on Saturday at least.

As the sun began to set, I put the last halbrundkopfschraube through the last alu-winkelproll lang into the plastikcobel set into the distanzrohr and I used my screwdriver as I had been using it for five hours, like a woman possessed and YES, my fruhbeetkasten with anbausatz was DONE!

And so was I!