Because we took most of last week off, this was a wonderfully crazy busy week of catching up with email, making call backs, invoicing a wonderful number of orders and shipping them all out. We love it when we are this busy because it’s just plain fun. As we race around from task to task, we laugh and joke and the place takes on a sort of party atmosphere. We all switch jobs every few hours. Sometimes that leads to confusion, but never to boredom! I particularly like the moment when I have just finished packing an order. The box is taped, the UPS label in place, and I get to pick out a picture to put on the outside shipping box. That is one of the nice things about having every one of us do all the different jobs. My years of experience with Flower Essences are needed for answering questions on email, but the five year old in me can glory in cutting and pasting a pretty picture onto a box!

As we dashed around the office early Wednesday morning, it occurred to us that we never mention what SOME in the office would describe as our most important job, a job requiring seriously crisp DOORPERSON SKILLS. Yes, this job would be opening the outside door to let in and let out three cats and two dogs all day long.

So, on a whim we decided to keep a log of our doorperson activity. Here it is, our Wednesday log, in all its glory.

Who is who? Bella, Gus, and Mishka are the cats. All part siamese, Bella is all black while Gus and Mishka resemble gently toasted marshmallows. Riley and MayMay are the dogs, goldens and proud of it. I leave it up to you to decide if they have a good life or not.

The doorpersons on Wednesday? Patricia, Jane, Debs and me. Lynn, perhaps the most attentive doorperson on the planet was off resting from her rigorous doorperson shift on Tuesday.

9:02 am Let Bella in
9:03 am Let MayMay in
9:09 am Let Gus out
9:11 am Let Mishka out
9:38 am Let Mishka in
9:46 am Let Mishka out
10:40 am Let Gus in
10:45 am Let Gus out
11:02 am Let Gus in
11:02 am Let Mishka in
11:14 am Let Mishka out
11:16 am Let Bella out
11:20 am Let Riley out
11:30 am Let Bella in
11:32 am Let Riley in
11:47 am Let Riley, MayMay, and Gus out
11:48 am Let MayMay and Riley in
11:49 am Let MayMay and Riley out
12:09 pm Let MayMay in
12:15 pm Let Mishka in
12:17 pm Let Gus in
12:29 pm MayMay, Riley, and Molly out for lunchtime walk
12:34 pm Let Mishka and Bella out
12:58 pm MayMay, Riley, and Molly back from walk and inside
1:02 pm Let Mishka and Bella in
1:30 pm Let Mishka out
1:45 pm Let Gus out
1:52 pm Let Riley out
2:40 pm Let Gus in
2:44 pm Let Gus out
2:48 pm Let Mishka in
3:10 pm Let Gus in
3:12 pm Let Mishka out
3:48 pm MayMay and Riley go out & then in & then out to greet UPS person Claude with whom they are on a first name basis
3:49 pm MayMay and Riley back in to visit further with UPS person Claude ( a man who loves dogs, thank goodness)
4:03 pm Riley goes out
4:11 Day shift of doorpersons finishes the shift and the night shift of the family Sheehan comes on

Conclusions:
1. Having the cat door open during warmer months increases office productivity 400%.
2. Mishka is seriously the most high maintenance cat on the planet.
3. It takes a village to keep this quintet happy. Fortunately, they have a village.
4. Because each of us lets them in or out as we go by the office door, none of us realized until Wednesday, exactly how much doorperson activity we are engaged in. We are now considering getting ourselves livery of some sort. Perhaps a top hat and forest green overcoat with gold piping and our names emblazoned on the front.
5. Careful analysis of data will reveal that the dogs keep a low profile at the door until lunchtime. This is because after exuberantly greeting each staff person at 8:30 each day, they retire to the living room couches for a morning nap. It’s after their nap and their rejuvenating lunchtime walk that they are refreshed enough to come on duty to supervise all activities in the office for the rest of the day.
6. I would like to discuss all this in more detail, but there is someone at the door.

It’s called the Mishka stretch.

Someone gave Emily a New York Times #1 bestseller called 1,000 Places to See Before You Die for Christmas. Can I tell you what I think of this book? This book is like the hype around New Year’s Eve, only worse. You know the hype about New Year’s Eve, that everyone should go out and spend a big wad of cash to watch a ball drop. This book calls for more cash and a lot of balls dropping, a 1,000 in fact.

To buy into this book is to feel bad about our lives. I bet even the woman who wrote the book hasn’t been to all 1,000 places she lists as necessary destinations for a well lived life. Does this mean all of us, including the author, will have failed if we haven’t laid waste to our lives to see the 1,000 places she arbitrarily picked as the 1,000 most important places on Earth?

If any one of us was to buy into the value’s system of this book, given airfare costs and the actual expenses of some of the luxury destinations, it would take about a $1,000 a destination or $1,000,000 to see all 1,000 places on this list. Not exactly the budget I had for my last vacation.

But most crucially, what a waste of our preciousness to give away the guiding purpose of our lives to someone else’s idea of why each of us is here. Each of us have reasons to be here wonderfully unique to us. These are purposes only our own hearts can tell us, not a bestseller.

I will probably never raft on the Mangoky river, buy produce at the Chatchak weekend market, or ride the Riobamba express, but my life will not be without incredible pleasures, beauty, and meaning even if I don’t leave the farm, and neither will yours.

Her list made me want to make my own list of travel free freebies. Ever available things like laughter, song, dance, the moon, the stars, flowers, birds overhead, precipitation in all its forms, a shared smile, sunshine, clouds, jokes, furry animals. I know, I know, this list reads like an awful Hallmark card. But sometimes we probably need those sentimental reminders or at least, need to remember how we looked at life when we were very young.

When I was three, I did not need to horseback ride in Mongolia, an icebreaker cruise in Lapland, or trek in Sikkim to know life’s glory. And when I am peaceful and not wanting to shred a bestseller with my teeth, I still know the wonder of the world in the things that thrilled me then like dirt, bugs, and dandelions.

So I will be giving the cable car over Zacatecas a pass. And the whirling dervishes of Konya? I know it won’t be the same without me whirling at their side, but I have a dance of my own to do right here. It’s low budget and not too glam, but I have no complaints. I am going to go out for a walk with the dogs. It’s been freezing rain and there is a coating of ice on everything. The world’s all gray and silver, soft red and brown. Lets call place #27,365,346.

The Winter Solstice is an important moment for us here at Green Hope Farm. It is the moment when the Angels start the transfer of the divine plans for the next growing season into my consciousness. Until the Winter Solstice, these plans are completely unavailable to me. This is why when you ask me in the fall, “What’s up with next year’s gardens?”, I can only answer that I have no idea. This is why my seed catalogues don’t see any action until after the Solstice. This is why it’s January when my desk becomes a wilderness of garden designs, seed and plant lists, cut out Flower photos, rulers, garden books, and half drunk cups of tea.

To back up a step, let me share an earlier part of the dance through the seasons with the Angels and Elementals. The autumnal equinox marks the true beginning of the next growing season. This is the time when the Angels go into a kind of seclusion from the world of form to plan the next season’s gardens. I don’t know exactly the criteria they use for this planning process. For us at Green Hope Farm, the process includes deciding what Flower Essences need to come forward to serve a larger community of people and animals and how the Flowers behind these Essences should be grown in the gardens. I know it involves helping Green Hope Farm and the mandalas of our gardens be rose windows expressing the light of divinity moving out from the earth. I know it involves things I simply don’t understand. But I also know that it is a time for me to ask for help. I know that anything I say at the autumnal equinox is taken into consideration when the gardens are designed.

So, at the autumnal equinox, I harvest the Venus Garden Essence of the season, I give thanks for all that has been, and I float out my hopes for the next growing season. My requests to my Angelic companions used to be a much more elaborate list of specific requests than they are now. The longer I work with the Angels and Elementals, the more I know that I don’t need to ask for things in such a detailed way. I have learned that such an approach is actually counterproductive because it locks the gardens into the limitations of my understanding of how things work, whereas if I give a more general request, I can receive much more support in dramatically bold and unexpected ways, ways I could not have imagined or known to ask for.

Now, instead of specifics, I try to be really, really general. If I ask for help on the issue of acceptance, the Angels will know best what sort of configuration and ingredients should compose the gardens to help me with this issue. If I ask for the gardens to help me grow in love for God, the gardens as designed by the Angels can take flight in directions so far beyond my own conception of how to accomplish this task. And when the dust settles. after these plans have manifested in form as the gardens of that growing season, I can look back and be grateful. I can acknowledge that I never would have thought a plague of locusts or a vegetable garden of 114 Broccoli plants would have helped me that much to love God more, but they did.

If the autumnal equinox is a time of asking and letting go into the mystery, the Winter Solstice is a time of light and clarity returning. For the last two decades, I have celebrated this night by gathering every candle in the house, taking these candles out into the snow, and lighting them in the dark of the night. Whomever feels like joining in comes out with me and sings. We sing any song we want to sing, standing around this circle of beautiful candle light. In this way we give thanks to the Angels who’s night this is, to the return of the light, and to the divine that cradles us all and is our essential self. Plus it is just plain fun to light all those candles and sing our hearts out!

This year will be a bit odd. It’s still very warm here. The candles will sit in green grass, not snow. It makes me feel more now than ever, that we need the closeness of Angels and the wisdom of their guidance through these swiftly changing times. So as a warm breeze blows over us tonight, some group of us will be clustered out in the night, giving thanks for all that is and celebrating that we are all in this together, two footed, four footed, and winged ones. And I know I will be comforted knowing this. The Angels will see us through.

Imagine a twelve foot Christmas tree with four feet cut off the top and bottom. That’s right, imagine something resembling a rotund shrub. Then imagine several strands of lights on the shrub and a fuse blown in the last chain of lights so that none of the lights work. Then imagine a lone ornament hanging on the shrub. You got it. This is our tree in all its glory.

Standards are slipping and the old me that might have tried to hold onto them for dear life doesn’t seem to be here this year. Instead, I’m enjoying the silly truth that our holiday tree may well look like this through to New Year’s Day Valentine’s Day Easter when we cut it up and place it on the perennial beds. Dead lights on a fir ball. It has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?

I figure if anyone else in the family really minds the tree’s new look, they will open the big box of ornaments at the foot of the tree and start to decorate. I have my reasons for being too weak to decorate the tree myself. Reading Delia Smith’s Christmas Cookbook in which her timetable for the holidays begins in October really took it out of me. It’s probably dangerous to laugh that hard. It was also very grueling to get those chocolate coins ready for the kids stockings and convince the stockings that they are going to LOVE being a size 2 stocking and not a size 18 this year. It’s a lot of work to be the fashion consultant for four Christmas stockings. I may have to lie down on the couch in front of the fir ball tonight and read some more humorous literature. Martha Stewart’s Christmas cookbook should do the trick.

Let’s face it. This is not the easiest month to be a woman. I mean, most women only have four hands and this month they need twelve. When a woman finds a nano second to email us this month, it’s often one word, HELP.

I was mightily impressed with the eloquence of the following SOS email. It summed up the condition of being for womankind in America in the month of December and wasn’t the kind of half fried, typo ridden thing I probably am answering you all with this month. My only complaint about this email is that her remark about almost being done with her shopping puts her wildly ahead of me and I suspect most of us in the shopping category. But please don’t correct me if I am wrong and I am the only woman who is not on top of her shopping. I would rather think that I won’t be alone with a thousand glazed eyed men on Christmas Eve when I finally get to the shops. I have modified my shopping marathon over the years to only doing stockings for the kids. So far, I have plenty for Ben’s stocking, a few things for Lizzy’s and two bags of golden coins for the toes of the stockings for Will and Emily. That is it. When do I panic? Don’t tell me that either.

Back to what I was saying before I drifted off into my own private shopping reverie. Here’s the email that says it so well from a dear old Green Hope Farm friend named Catherine,

“What Essence would you recommend for assistance in staying sane amidst all the holiday madness? I seem to feel a fairly high level of stress/anxiety/pressure despite the fact that most of my shopping is done. The atmosphere seems to be pervaded with this frenzied activity that we MUST partake of and I am having difficulty screening it out. I love this time of year for its darkness, depth and potential for deep silence and drinking in the sacred stillness. Help!”

It’s a rough job I have, testing possible helpful remedies for a situation like this. Of course the old standby, Anxiety Essence, goes in my water. I think the Red Clover in this is a particular support in not getting caught up in the hysteria.

I also love Maple for its centering, grounding energy. It reminds us enough is enough in the most sweet and solid way.

I also keep going to the often overlooked but incredible Essence friend Rose a Parfum de l’Hay. This gorgeous Rose is all about feeling satisfied with what is. The Guidebook says “It helps relieve us of any feeling of lack or sacrifice, revealing the abundance and complete harmony of what is already in our lives. It energetically releases any restless desire for more, bigger, better or different by bringing us into the fullness of the Now.” This definition still feels a bit stuffy to me and not quite as emphatic as I would wish. The Essence has more snap to it. There is something about this Rose Essence that short circuits any escalating situation and returns us to knowing the wholeness that already is. That’s big this month of the year.

Of course there is always the combination remedy, All Ego Contracts Null and Void. Was there ever a time of year more in need of this one? It helps us break old bindings and think anew about what we really feel called to do and what can let go of with no attachment.

When Catherine emailed, the Angels also suggested one other remedy, The Alignment Garden, and that felt profoundly right. Again, this is one that I described in the Guide with too many words, none of which do justice to this Venus Garden beauty. The gist of its service is to help us know what our soul calls us to do and to help us stay in alignment with this knowing. If someone knows that December for her precious soul is really meant to be about being quiet, it helps her find the peaceful calm to do that, resistant, almost like teflon, to the demands, expectations, and general hysteria around her that would call her from her purpose.

Do you think Emily and William will buy this when they get a stocking with a few chocolate coins in it?

Yes, yes, I know, life, especially in December, is a compromise. I have to go out and get a full stocking’s worth for Emily and Will, but working with this Essence, I can do this more lightly. It can even be fun! With this Essence’s help, I can go out and be in the world, but not of it, so to speak. There is just something about the Alignment Garden Essence that helps us live out these necessary compromises with a light heart because we are so suffused with a joyful knowing that our lives matter and we are right smack dab in the thick of them.

Love and Blessings to all of you on this Monday morning!