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!

This morning I have been out in the barn hammering together twenty new frames for a new beehive as well as refurbishing my one available old hive. I have two colonies of honeybees with queens coming early next week. They will need new quarters as soon as they arrive.

More honeybees arriving! Honeybees already here alive and well! These are both sweet surprises.

Honeybees arriving is a sweet surprise because bees are in such short supply right now that it is an amazing thing that the bees I ordered last fall aren’t dead. The company in Georgia where we have gotten our bees for many years was spared the mysterious honeybee deaths plaguing so much of the country.

Honeybees already in residence is surprising because for the past decade I haven’t needed to make new hives for arriving bees. Usually, come spring, there are no bees in my old hives. Usually all our bees have died over the winter.

This year, we begin our growing season with two living hives and two more coming next Tuesday.

What with all the problems honeybees are having with tracheal mites, viruses, pesticides, GMOs, cold winters, and whatever is behind the new mysterious die off, it is an incredibly sweet surprise to have bees that survived all these difficulties.

Late last fall we had four hives of bees. Two were large hives up against the south side of the Flower Essence building, tucked in a warm nook that is well sheltered from winter winds. Two were new hives from swarms that occurred last summer, set down under our oak tree. I spent a lot of time with the honeybees last summer. I tried to listen to them more carefully so that I could give them exactly what they needed to survive our winter.

I offered all the hives sugar syrup into the fall. One of the swarm hives had a good fifty or sixty pounds of honey by the time the Goldenrod was gone and things got too cold for them to partake of the syrup. I felt that might be enough honey to get this new bee colony through the winter. I was aware that the fourth hive, the other hive from a late summer swarm, went into the winter with virtually no honey store. I did not expect it to live.

The Mama and Papa hives, nestled as close to the Flower Essences as we could get them, were hives boxes filled with full combs of honey. I knew these bees would have enough food. One hive in particular seemed particularly vibrant and healthy. I was hopeful the combination of enough honey and placement right up against the helpful vibration of all the Flower Essences in the most sheltered spot on our farm would be enough to get these hives through.

The swarm hives did not make it, but both of the bigger hives next to the Flower Essence building are alive and well. This morning these bees are out and about, collecting pollen from early Flowers and Tree blossoms.

When the two new colonies of bees arrive early next week, I am going to put them next to the Flower Essence building along side the surviving hives because I think that placement is one of the x factors helping the bees to survive.

Many of you have sent me clippings about the honeybee crisis in the US, Europe, and Asia. Thank you! I find myself thinking a lot about this crisis. My theory is that it is an electrical problem. This is one reason why I think hive placement close to the Flower Essence building helps our bees. Living next to the Essences, they get exposed to information that will help them deal with the dissonance of our modern world. It also gives them an oasis of vibrational harmony in which to live.

For many bees moving out into the modern world, our massive communication network appears to be fatally disorienting. Since 911, the Angels have kept us focused on supporting animals and people to deal with the difficulties posed by our dissonant technology. They encourage us to share Golden Armor with as many people and animals as possible, explaining that our dissonant technology is negatively affecting ALL of us, even if only some of us have symptoms of this.

We continue to see a profound need for this remedy with its information about helping us learn how to handle and buffer out this electrical dissonance, a vibrational disorder that our electrical systems have no built in capacity to handle.

The bees that are dying from this mystery situation leave their hives and don’t come back. This disappearing act is different than bee deaths from pesticides, mites, viruses, or other disease. I think mankind’s electrical dissonance messes with the bees’ radar system. I suspect that the bees go out to collect nectar or pollen and simply can’t find their way home. Much like trying to tune into a radio station in the face of static and other louder frequencies, the bees can’t follow the bead of their own electrical navigational system because of our dissonance.

Yesterday CNN said that bees are responsible for pollinating a third of the food on the planet. Will this be a compelling enough reason for us to back off our passion for vibrational chaos. Will we choose to quiet the electrical grid of our planet and give all of us, two footed, four footed, and winged a break?

During the 1980’s I was part of a local group called the Meriden Peace Trust. We sent folks from our town to the Soviet Union, hoping to create friendships that would break down the illusion of otherness between our two countries. We also hosted folks from the Soviet Union here in our town. Sometimes our visitors would be communist party big shots, but even these guys had grandchildren and vegetable gardens. The women that came would ask to go to JC Penneys the moment they got off the plane. Apparently Soviet bras were terrible and they loved the chance to stock up on American made undergarments. Supporting these precious new friendships was our village’s effort to make nuclear war less likely, one better built bra at a time.

Here was a postcard from this era that spoke to my heart.

Don’t these darling ladies look like they need a trip to JCPenneys?

We came to love a small group of Soviet citizens who had as little say in the nuclear arms race as we did. Their concerns and their joys were so like our own. I will never know if our efforts made any difference in the arms race, but it made our lives sweeter to know these Soviet friends.

I remember the moment when I first felt that we were not going to pursue this arms race until nuclear war happened. An economist spoke at one of our Peace Trust conferences. He said that the economies all the countries on Earth were going to get radically interconnected with each other. He explained that it would be this global economy that would prevent us from destroying each other, because there would no longer be an economic “other” to nuke and destroy. This was the early 1980’s and it was a new idea that made sense. And of course, it is what happened. The main road south out of Moscow now has an IKEA and no doubt a Sears as well. Bombs were always bad for people, but it was when they became bad for business that the arms race slowed.

Now that the economy of the country is severely threatened by the death of the honeybees, I hope that bees also will be spared annihilation. I don’t really care if it is a basically self interested agribusiness agenda that spare the bees. I just want them spared.

Perhaps in the righting of this situation and in the turning off the bee killing technologies, all of us will have less dissonance to deal with. This will be a sweet gift from the bees. Perhaps the strange bedfellows of bees and agribusiness leaders will become real friends. These bees, so in need of protection, have such a capacity to enchant with their vibration of loving harmony Maybe in the silence necessary for pollination to keep occurring, the bees will transform us more deeply with their song because we will finally all be listening. Life is certainly full of the most unexpected sweet surprises. I hope this will be one of them.

Mid week, just when we were all about to jump ship for warmer climes, the weather turned on a dime. The last four days of seventy degrees and sunshine broke our world open into glorious Flower!

Chionodoxa

Crocuses in the Arbor Garden


Siberian Squill (Scilla siberica)

Forsythia just beginning to strut its stuff

Within a few minutes of the weather shift, the spring peepers were chorusing with reckless abandon in the pond across the street. We celebrated with badminton and garden projects. I cleaned up the gardens and spread compost and other soil amendments in all the beds. As I worked, piles of brush accumulated where piles of snow had been just moments before.

There were lots of branches to rake up from the big storm. Here Jim loads the truck with one of many loads of small twigs blown down by the high winds.

Of course, mulch was involved in the weekend’s projects. If you read this blog before, you probably know how passionately I feel about MULCH.

Jim and I made an executive decision to mulch between the rows of blueberries. The grass between rows is hard to mow ( Jim’s input) and the thin rows of blueberries and mulch are hard to keep weeded because the grass grows into them so fast ( my input). So, we covered the ground with the cardboard boxes that our various bottles and boxes arrive in and then covered this layer of cardboard with native bark mulch.

We have found this system of mulching works so much better than commercial landscape cloth. We save all the boxes during the winter and then have a big stash for projects like this in the spring.

Is it any wonder that when one of us walks into the garden center where we get our mulch, whomever is at the service desk just picks up their walkie talkie without missing a beat to alert the person out back with the heavy machinery ” One load native bark for a gold pick up.”

One of our Plum trees blew over in the storm last week. The Elementals suggested we use a come along to pull it upright. Here it is anchored after its been straightened as far as it wanted to go. Since then, the Elementals have had me take a five gallon bucket of Essence water down to the tree once a day. I thought that they would want me just to water the tree with this mix, but instead they have had me scoop the water up into branches and air around the tree, bathing the aura of the tree in the energy of Recovery, Grounding, Golden Armor, Healthy Coat, Emergency Care, Anxiety and of course Green & Tonic. I am hopeful that the tree will recover from its traumatic experience. We hope the greening world and the Essences will set this tree free to flourish again. All this green is make us dizzy with JOY!

All in all, what a difference from last Monday!

Snow. April snow. One storm piling into another, day after day.

I try and think of these storms as a chance to keep on with winter crafts. I finished knitting the border for the third of the fifth grade afghans, modeled here by William.

We keep feeding the birds. There are so many unusual ones at the feeder, looking like the rest of us, a bit bewildered by this spring.

On Sunday, our fifth day in a row of falling snow, William stayed in bed reading books with a couple of cats to keep him company. This was a good model for the rest of us who had hopeless aspirations of fighting the high winds and pelting snow for some fresh air.

Late Sunday, the sky turned that awful strange black and green color I have seen before with microbursts and tornadoes. I did the land clearing process for the farm grid and hoped for the best as relentless winds with some serious gusts of sixty to seventy miles an hour pounded us all night. Today, it is still extremely windy, though fortunately the precipitation has become sleet and rain. None of us have ever heard such whistling and roaring noises in this building. Branches and sleet beating against the windows and roof add to the cacaphony.

At the bottom of our hill, about half a mile from here, the storm damage was extensive. The shots below are of a formerly dense forest.

We seem to be the only house on the road with power. I am going to post this while we still have power. And bring in another load of wood to keep the home fires burning.