I spend Mondays on email. By the end of the day, I stopped reporting to everyone in the office each strange weather story. There were just so many of them. At first, each description offered confirmation of what we were all feeling. Things are more off than even the predictions of An Inconvenient Truth. By day’s end, it was hard to integrate all the stories. I heard from a Green Hope friend in Switzerland that the Magnolias were blooming in Geneva and in the alps beyond the city, Rhododendrons were in blossom. I heard that the robins had returned in full force to Boston. In New York City, people reported planters of Petunias and Daisies going strong. The cherry trees in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens were in full blossom. Up and down the east coast people mentioned that the air felt tropical, but the light felt all wrong for this warmth. Locally, the maple sap was running. Right in our gardens there were Snowdrops as well as Dandelions. Outside our office windows a Red Wing Blackbird perched in a tree. This is a bird I think of as returning to our meadows at the end of our usual sugaring time in late March. Our relationship with the Earth appeared broken.

However, I am not calling it a day or changing the name of the farm from Green Hope Farm to Green Hopeless Farm. Since the solstice, the Angels have encouraged me to write more about my relationship with them and the Nature Spirits. They offer that conscious community with them is the way through this wildly shifting time to a new beginning. They continue to offer hope.

So I am going to try to share more about how I work with Angels and Elementals.

To begin with I want to tell a story about brokenness, an experience of my own brokenness that shifted me and my life in such a good way that it leaves me glad that humanity is owning its brokenness right now. When we own our brokenness, we can let go and realign our lives in dramatic ways, we can receive a new life that we could never receive without acceptance of our brokenness.

So let me tell you about a particular moment in my life when this was brought home to me in a big way. It was at a retreat I was running at a New Age community in the back of the beyond.

To back up a bit, before Flower Essences became the farm’s primary focus, I worked with the Angels and Elementals to create the farm’s gardens. This creation process was such an amazing experience for me that I spent a number of years traveling around the east coast telling people the stories of my adventures with the Angels and Elementals. I felt very passionate about sharing my experiences. These workshops were my attempt to give back to the Angels and Elementals a tiny bit of what they had given me.

For this particular retreat, I had agreed to come teach for a four or five day stretch at this community. I did not know much about this community and I had not gone to my heart to check with the God within me about the advisability of this commitment. When I discovered the retreat was going to keep me away from home on Emily’s fifth birthday, as well as on the vernal equinox, I still didn’t listen to my heart and cancel the workshop. I was way out of balance with my life, but not yet ready to own this. Not to worry! This retreat broke me open to shift gears!

When I got to the community, I found a group of people very entrenched in a variety of rigid belief systems. I had learned over the years that at any workshop there always would be a few people who would feel called to play the role of devil’s advocate about my work with the Angels and Elementals. Knowing this, I was still not prepared for a whole community to choose that role.

This is what happened at this retreat. Within minutes of starting my workshop, one participant was on the ground beating her heels on the floor yelling at me about my choice of spiritual vocabulary. This incited the entire group to wildly shout at me about my vocabulary, world view, and belief system. I don’t think of myself as belonging to one religion. If you have read the guide you know how difficult I have found it to come up with language choices that don’t leave people excluded. With this group I could find no language consensus. Some wanted me to use the word “dog” to describe the creator. Some wanted language devoid of gender references. Some wanted only one gender used. Some did not want a creator mentioned. And this was just the tip of the iceberg of their complaints about the stories I shared.

In retrospect, I realize that I had walked into the middle of a community drama that wasn’t about me. At the time, I was completely overwhelmed by the rage I seemed to have unleashed. When I asked the Angels for help, they suggested we spend a lot of the time in quiet meditation. That is pretty much all we did, because every time we began to talk together, things escalated to near violence in a Manhattan minute.

Another unexpected difficulty for me was the dietary restrictions of the community. I think of myself as willing to eat anything, but what I had been unprepared for was a community with such a narrow diet that my body would flip out. I was not exactly living a life of anyone’s ideas of pure food at that point. I had been a vegetarian for a few years before I got pregnant with Emily. Ben refers to these years as the dark days of his childhood. His friends had Burger King. He had seitan and tofu. Anyways, once I was pregnant with Emily, I could practically hear this tiny babe within me yell “I NEED MEAT”. And so with this pregnancy our family found its way back to a diet of everything. Ben was never more grateful.

Anyways, this community was eating such an intense macrobiotic diet that I would have feared for my life had I mentioned that an animal food had ever crossed my lips. After a few days at the community, I was deep into a nasty cleanse with a cleanse headache that would not quit. The upper stories of the community had no railings on the hallways. The rooms opened onto ledges that were completely open to a central space below. Given my headache, I actually feared I might fall off an open hallway to the common room below. Young children racing along these corridors overhead during my talks our endless meditations made me unbelievably nervous. I was a basket case.

Nowhere in the community was there any unpure food to stop my cleanse headache. At one point, I went out to my car to search for anything that might stop the headache, if only temporarily. I found a lollipop left in one of the car seats by one of my kids. It was still in its wrapper, but frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if it had had half chewed cheerios on it. Refined sugar was just what I was looking for.

It hadn’t occurred to me to bring anything but myself and my Angel and Elementals worksheets and slides to the retreat. This is typical of me. I have never been someone with an organized Mom bag. On our first road trip with Ben when he was about six months old, we went on a day trip to see the overrated tourist attraction of New Hampshire’s Man in the Mountain. Ben threw up in the car about fifteen minutes into our trip and I had no change of clothes for him. I can remember carrying him around the lake at the bottom of the mountain with just a soggy diaper on. I think we all had headaches that day!

Anyways, this community was very, very isolated. I couldn’t easily slip away to drive the half hour to the nearest deli-mart to get a bag of sugar to stop my cleanse because I was giving talks meditation sessions all day. Once that lollipop was gone, my headache returned with a vengeance.

I continued on in a state of complete denial about how poorly things were going. I did session after session with a group of people more ornery than hornets. I had asked everyone attending the workshops to bring something from their gardens. Every last person brought a rock. I found it an unusual choice for all twenty or thirty participants, but by the time the workshops ended, I was only glad that these rocks had not been hurled at me.

One night, several days into my crash and burn, I got into an argument with the founders of the community about the movie Shindler’s List. The movie had just come out and everyone was talking about it. One of the many gifts of the movie for me was that I realized Shindler was in a position to do more good than most people because of his imperfections. It wasn’t so much that you’d want anyone to chose moral grayness, but that the God can use this grayness in powerful and unexpected ways. Had Shindler been what most people would define as a good person from the beginning of his life, he would never have had the opportunity to save the people he saved. His flaws set him up to be somewhere he could help and his willingness to shift gears and accept his brokenness opened him to do profound good. Thinking about this movie while staying at this community left me with two thoughts. God could redeem anything if only we acknowledged our brokenness and opened to receive God’s help and pursuing our own ideas of perfection instead of letting go and accepting our brokenness was a kind of hubris that could do a lot of damage.

Floating out these ideas even in a general form enraged workshop participants further. I have blocked some of this weekend, but can remember six or so people all yelling at me about my Shindler’s List ideas during a “celebration dinner”. This retreat was a wonderful mirror for me about the problems with following my own ideas about being the perfect mother, wife, lover of God, friends to the Elementals and Angels etc etc. Watching this community in action, I realized where I was heading if I kept on expecting my own variation of perfection from myself. Shindler’s List was a perfect contrast to this ethos of perfection. Being perfect wasn’t a necessary criteria to love and serve God. Admitting our brokenness and opening to receive help was so much more important.

It was after this dinner, with another thirty six hours to go at the retreat, when I owned my brokenness. It was Emily’s birthday. I had already missed this precious day because of my own confused sense of obligation. When I admitted my brokenness to myself, it was time to tell the Angels and Elementals and the folks at this retreat that I was broken and I needed to go home.

As I began to own my brokenness, I had the joyful thought that perhaps I could still see Emily on her birthday. If I got in my car and drove straight home, I might still be able to give her a kiss before midnight and the official end of her birthday. I asked the Angels if my trip home could be safely done that night. I was six hours drive from home with a wicked headache. They said yes! They suggested I leave at once and drive to the nearest MacDonald’s. They suggested I get a Big Mac and large coffee, and drive home with the windows of the car down. I guess I really needed the worst food available to snap me out of such dietary purity.

It was cold that March night. There was snow everywhere. I ate my junk food and rolled the windows down. Then I took off into the night, singing every song I could remember. My breathe was frosty, but I felt so warm inside. I had escaped, if only temporarily, from my own nightmare of “being perfect”. I had told the community founders that I had made a mistake to commit to being somewhere other than with Emily on her birthday and that I needed to leave. I accepted their fury as my just reward. My ideas of doing the right thing had smashed into my ideas of doing what my heart called me to do. I got home with six minutes to go before midnight. I kissed a sleeping Emily before bursting into tears. Though she only vaguely remembered the moment the next day, for me it was priceless.

This marked a moment when I realized I needed to find a different way to honor my Angel and Elemental partners. I wasn’t even sure any more whose idea the workshops had been, but this was the moment when I told them we had to find a different way to share our work with the world. I couldn’t travel weekend after weekend with three little children at home. What I was really learning was that I needed to surrender all my different agendas about how to be a good person to God and let the divinity within all of us lead the way.

Before that weekend I had been traveling all over the east coast doing workshops. I had been on the road twelve weeks in a row when I went to this New Age community for that weekend of self discovery. After that, I did one last workshop and then I was done. My life became much quieter. With my surrender, I fell into a better balance. I got help to be who I am versus who I thought I was supposed to be. In my brokenness, I was ready to accept that God knew best about my strengths and weaknesses and how best to use them. I was more ready to have God use me for what God needed me to do, not what I thought God needed me for. It was a new beginning.

And what was this new beginning? Green Hope Farm Flower Essences.

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.