This is the one week of the year that Jim’s friends wish they were him. The other fifty one his laundry detail makes his life a little less appealing, but this week, his life is the bomb.

As the week kicks off, friends call. Friends e-mail. Friends stop him on the street. They want to go over every tiny detail of his itinerary. They want to be reminded how he became the luckiest man in northern New England. They want to drool a bit over what life has in store for him for four glorious days. You see, tomorrow morning, Jim will be eating grits in the clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Course. Then he will set off into the wild green yonder and watch a little golf.

Our story begins in 1990 when, after a good decade of serious effort, Jim managed to get two of the most coveted tickets in sports. Jim landed two big fish, tickets to the Masters golf tournament for the Saturday and Sunday rounds. He and his brother Stephen went down for the two rounds. It was a peak moment for both of them. The next year they returned without tickets, determined to find a way back in. Miraculously, they managed to procure two passes with what I thought was an insipid sign reading, “Two New Englanders Want Tickets”.

During those first two years, Jim and Stephen made friends with another Tom Watson fan. Together they followed Watson round after round. By year three, this Tom Watson fan revealed that his family were members of Augusta and that the Sheehan brothers were now on the list to receive tickets each year. This detail always seems to get golfers of any ilk to fall to their knees in wonder and awe. The ticket of tickets offered to Jim and Stephen on an annual basis? I have seen grown men weep when they hear this piece of data.

It’s usually sometime in January when the annual official invite comes. Their friend with his distinctive southern drawl calls to see if those Sheehan boys want to make the trip again to walk this course of courses. Jim and Stephen’s spirits perk up immediately. It may be thirty below zero in Meriden with a stiff wind out of the north, but now they know spring will come after all, if not to Meriden, New Hampshire then to Augusta, Georgia.

This is Jim’s seventeenth trip down Magnolia Lane. He has a lot of stories now and knows a lot of fun facts about the course and the people that populate its beautiful fairways. Jim knows how many urinals are in the upstairs men’s bathroom of the clubhouse. He seems to have run into half of Hollywood and all of the PGA tour in this bathroom. He knows the shortcuts from hole to hole and walked one side by side with Tiger Woods last year. He has seen the wine cellar as well as the press tent. He has brought me every cookbook ever sold at the tournament and a lot of used plastic glasses with the Masters registered trademark all over them too. He has eaten a lot of fabulous pimento cheese sandwiches and even some sandwiches they call catfood. He has learned so much about this golf tournament that I half expect him to return home wearing a green jacket.

Out in Augusta at large, he knows when the Krispy Kreme donuts get rolling down the conveyor belt each morning. He always brings Willy and Emily home a dozen each because we don’t have Krispy Kremes up here in the arctic north. He knows the restaurants where the lines are four hours long and he knows the places where the food is so bad you can be seated in four minutes. Masters week is a world unto itself for Jim and never was there a man who deserved this treat more.

This morning as he prepared to set off, we laughed about the year that the local paper and the local, now defunct, television station both did stories about Jim and brother Stephen going to the Masters. A film crew actually came to the local airport to film Jim and Stephen getting on the plane to go to Augusta. Okay, so we have very little nice weather up here in the north country, but we also have very little crime. Papers and television reporters are always looking for anything even resembling a news story. So one year everyone thought this was news! And around here it actually was.

Their generous friend with the tickets thought this media frenzy was quite a funny story. As they wandered the course that year, their friend told various captains of industry all about Jim and Stephen being feted for being the only folks in New Hampshire to make it to the Masters. One crusty industrial giant got a little confused about the details of the story and asked “Jim, do you own the paper?” Heady stuff for a sixth grade teacher.

So Jim if you are in the press tent checking out the blog and filing your report for CBS, know that everything fine on the home front. Just don’t forget the Krispy Kremes.

Jim sets off. Riley and May May still think they are going too.

Will thinking about his Krispy Kremes. Hey did I mention it snowed?

I believe we choose the family we are born into. We choose our families for both their spiritual knowledge and their spiritual weaknesses. While we grow up, family weaknesses often rub off on us and become our own weaknesses. Or maybe the truth is that we already have these weaknesses and need to have them re-ignited in us by the family we choose. No matter the case, confronting a family weakness gives us a chance to throw off the weakness from the inside out. We have to engage with a weakness and own it, before we can let it go. This is one way to do that.

Our family’s divine knowledge is often submerged by family illusions, weaknesses, and personality murk. Usually we have to work hard to retrieve this wisdom. Because of our efforts, the harvest will be something that really belongs to us. And regardless of the family murk, it will be a valuable harvest. Why? Because no matter what family we choose, it will be a family whose core identity is divine, holding eternal wisdom that is divine as well. Why? Because when the illusions are gone, everything is divine.

Those who choose to come into an adoptive family or find themselves raised by more than one family of origin will experience multiple strands of family strengths and weaknesses. One gift of this is that they will never completely believe that only one family lineage holds a monopoly on truth. They will quite literally embody a deeper truth that there are many ways to find our common divinity. They will experience first hand that there are many ways to lose track of divinity too. Consequently, they will often have more family garbage to toss. This can be an arduous process.

The Angels tell me that at the moment of birth, each of us holds an awareness of why we chose the circumstances of birth that we did. While I have been a rather disorganized mother in terms of taking photographs of my children’s milestones, I do have one photo of my eldest son, Ben, when he is a few minutes old. In this photo, he looks into my eyes with such a penetrating, clear look. It is easy to see that he has brought some of his before birth consciousness into this moment. My understanding is that this awareness necessarily fades within a few hours. Each of us must regain this sense of clarity about our choices and mission in life through our own effort and search process.

During this brief period after birth, we also have a clear view of the spiritual strengths and weaknesses of our chosen family, the tool bag for spiritual learning that our family will be offering us as we grow up. We remember, if only for a few hours, the full inventory of the useful as well as useless tools for living of our family of origin. We grasp the reasons we chose our family. This is yet another piece of awareness that fades away only to be regained through life experiences and our analysis of these experiences.

In the guidebook, I write about the process of sifting a family’s divine wisdom from its spiritual illusions and weaknesses in the descriptions of Black Currant and Bloodroot Flower Essences. This is because Black Currant Flower Essence supports cleaning up the counter productive habits and illusions of our families of origin and Bloodroot helps us to see the divine wisdom our families hold in the family tool bags. What an awesome truth that even the most garbage encrusted family holds divine wisdom at its core. And more wonderful still, this wisdom is the only thing that is real about a family.

I have always been drawn to make Flower Essences that I personally need. Black Currant and Bloodroot are no exceptions. With the addition of Borage Flower Essence to help me have the courage to do the work, Black Currant, Bloodroot, and the aforementioned Borage have been what all of us at the farm call the Family River Trio. This threesome has helped me recognize and remove family’s spiritual garbage floating in the river of my family’s bloodline. The trio has helped me uncover my family’s divine wisdom hidden beneath the garbage. It has helped me have the courage, strength, and good cheer to keep going when the garbage got me down.

Sometimes it feels like tossing family garbage overboard has been a primary focus of my adult life. I also have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what divine wisdom could possibly have compelled me to I choose the family of origin that I did. Let’s just say that there is so much detritus in my family river that it resembles Love Canal before the EPA arrived. I joke that I hope my soul gets the memo from my personality and agrees to choose another group of people for my family in my next life. But truth be told, I have come to a moment in my clean up process where I am at peace with my choice. This family, with its weaknesses and its divine wisdom, was one of many ingredients that got me to where I am in my life. And I am grateful to be where I am.

My family of origin obscured its divine wisdom in lots of ways. There were soul numbing addictive behaviors, values that acclaimed worldly accomplishment over self knowledge, ideas of intellectual excellence disconnected from emotions or the physical body, damaging notions that certain people’s ideas of perfection were superior to love, and a general approach to life at odds with divine purpose or any acknowledgment of divinity.

As is true with any family river garbage, none of these diversions work because none of them are based on anything real. Anyone who pokes through the guck and clears the water in their part of their family river is going to find treasure. I certainly did.
The strength of my family of origin river is a deeply obscured but wonderful Love for God. Maybe this is the wisdom of every family river. Let me know what you have found. I would be very interested.

When I finally connected with my family’s divine wisdom, it was a knock your socks off moment for me. It made me know my clean up operation was worth the effort. It also made me understand with more compassion why people might be afraid to encounter the divine wisdom of the family lineage. The wisdom requires a lot of letting go. I imagine this is true of any encounter with a family’s divine wisdom. Beliefs about what matters in life, choices of career paths, values systems, and the whole foundation of a life may suddenly be experienced as similar to the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Maybe it is a good thing that a family river clean up takes time, even with the best Flower Essence support. Throwing out garbage piece by piece while savoring each moment of expanding spiritual freedom helps get you ready for the experience that washes over you when you get to your family river’s divine self knowledge. BLISS! WOW! We are LOVE! We are LOVED! There is nothing but GOD! Why would I ever want to do anything else but LOVE THE GOD IN EVERYTHING???

It’s not an awareness I could hold onto completely, but it continues to inform my life. It leaves me with the work of trying to live a life in integrity with what I experienced, because what I experienced feels much more real than anything else. Love IS the only thing that matters! Only God is real! Everything else will pass away, so any effort to add to my pile of illusions with more illusions is about as sensible as putting icicles in a pre heated oven.

And how to avoid falling back into the obscuring habits of my family river, but hold true to this truth once I experienced it? I am working on that. I try to keep my tool bag as cleaned out as possible. I try to resist the siren song of old family beliefs that I really need this gizmo or that accolade or to be right, whatever right is. I try to remember to give everything to God instead of thinking I am supposed to do this alone. That’s one of the biggest, most recalcitrant pieces of my family garbage, this idea that I am adding to some mighty pile of worthwhile stuff all by MYself with only the tools of MY amazing intellect, MY willpower, and MY skills of discernment. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

It’s not me. The mighty pile is not real. There is only LOVE.

This cleaning the river is an ongoing process! But, oh, to taste that pure wisdom again! Hand me that pitchfork! God and I have work to do!

My maple syruping season will finish today. On my last collecting run on Friday I took a few more photos to share with you.

Here is one of the grande dames of the maple trees I tap.

Here are some of the young turk maple trees. They are 50 to 75 years old. You can see our truck in the background. The white thing in the back is the collecting tank. Okay, so maybe I should have been a little closer to the truck to take that shot. I would go out right now and take another photo of the collecting tank but we have already taken it off the truck until next year.

Here is a live action shot of sap dripping into a bucket. I have taken the lid off to show you this dramatic moment. Usually the lid sits on top as in the last photo, protecting the sap from rain. At the end of the season there are usually a lot of lightning bugs and moths in the sap. Willy and I try to save them by taking them out of the sap. I took another exciting action shot of this process but decided to spare you. It was a bit gruesome. Sadly, we don’t get our rescue operation going in time for every bug.

Here is a shot of the last boil, as in five minutes ago. I have now burned every piece of scrap wood left over from last year’s construction projects. Time for Jim to get the nail belt on.

Here is what I did on Friday. I handled a backlog of almost syrup. I had three pots cranking, 10 more gallons of nearly syrup standing by, cooled down nearly done syrup in the boiling pan outside, 60 gallons of sap in the holding tank ready to go AND two long suffering dogs moping around. Bubble over their heads read, “Not ANOTHER nice Friday morning with her choosing to be inside!”

Note much needed fire extinguisher on right, plate of marshmallow topped brownie fuel provided by Will’s fifth grade teacher and delivered in time for breakfast at top left. I kid you not! My children thought they had died and gone to heaven when Mrs Gallagher delivered warm brownies for breakfast. I don’t think she meant for us to show such little restraint and eat them when she dropped them off, but what is a person to do when presented with this kind of sunrise temptation? Also note the troop of Flower Essences ever at the ready, because the thirty yard walk from the kitchen to the shipping room is just too long a journey to make when you need an Essence.

Let’s call this shot “CSI Maple Sugaring”. I had a boil over the other day. I was out in the yard stoking the fire and Willy came running out to report a pot frothing over, as in cascading down the sides of the stove and all over the stove top. Syrup was everywhere! Then it got onto the burners and became a mess of burnt sugar.

This is the stove top after significant clean up. I don’t think Sears quite imagined what I was going to be doing with this stove top when they sold me my maintenance agreement. Probably there will be a clause next time that forbids them to sell a maintenance plan to me or anyone that knows me. I probably deserve this.

Here is some of the canned up liquid gold. You can see this syrup is medium amber in color. There is nothing blonde about this season’s syrup. Oh that pair of rhino beanie babies on the shelf above the syrup? Those are Jim’s. He puts these rhinos on the counter to indicate to his four children that they need to step it up and do their dishes, as opposed to leaving them for their father to do when he gets home from work. He would probably like to leave the rhino around to remind me to pay attention so he doesn’t come home from school to a kitchen full of burning sugar smoke. As mentioned previously, there are many reasons we refer to him as St. Jim

The miniature spring iris joined the snowdrops and crocuses yesterday. On into Spring! Yahoooo!

The ground has thawed a great deal in the gardens. Its just about GO time. I will finish off the maple sugaring season soon, maybe this weekend, if the days stay as warm as they have been this week. No sooner will I have rinsed out the sap buckets and put them away, than there will be six zillion jobs to do in the gardens.

I am working on several writing pieces now, before the gardens need my undivided attention. The Animal Wellness brochure needs to be rewritten. I spent this morning on that. I really like how much more clearly I can describe Flower Essences than when I last rewrote this brochure. My language is a lot less vague. I can better explain why Essences are both safe and effective.

I learn so much about Flower Essences from what you tell me. I say this all the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Your stories, your insights, and your intuitions all move me along in my growing understanding of Flower Essences. Your wisdom and experience ground my understanding more completely and I think this shows in my writing.

Even though the new guide is just out, I have started another folder of your letters and e-mails about Flower Essences for the next edition. It’s quite thick already, but this is partly because I only found one of two folders of letters I had saved when I revised the last guide. This second folder surfaced right after the new guide went to press. Grrrrrrrrr! The new folder is also thick because even though we just received the guidebook from the printer, the revision left my hands in October. We have had a lot of wonderful letters and e-mails from you since then.

What wonders will be part of the next Guidebook? In two more years, we’ll all know. In the meantime, I enjoy knowing that new stories and insights are quoted in this edition of the book and inform each definition for a Flower Essence that I wrote with the Angels.

One project I hope to do before compost, mulch, weeds, and Flowers fill my days is write a definition for Flower Essences for Wikipedia. My limited understanding of Wikipedia is that it is a web based encyclopedia written by anyone who feels like writing a definition for something. The inspired twist is that anyone else can edit whatever someone has written. This means there is a self regulating mechanism built into the system. As Ben explained it to me, the theory is that the collective wisdom of everyone can write a much better encyclopedia than the single voices of the experts that write for other encyclopedias.

I will let you know when I post that definition on Wikipedia and will look forward to your editing. Maybe you’ll get there first and I will edit your thoughts. In any case, I am certain that our collective insights will make for one heck of a definition.

Just south of us is Cornish, New Hampshire. It is a rural town with a small population, but it has a very large and dramatic history. From 1885 to 1930, it was home to the Cornish Art Colony. The Colony’s many painters, playwrights, sculptors, composers, poets, musicians, and landscape architects spent their summers and sometimes their winters in the beautiful homes and gardens they built in the hills of Cornish.

There is something about visiting a Cornish Colony house that informs and educates about the idea of “home”. The houses are sometimes large but their scale is infinitely comfortable. You want to sink down in every room and when you do, the vistas from each window offer a zen moment of beauty. The interiors glow with unusual paint colors and every room looks like a scene you’d like to paint. Over the years, I have visited a fair number of Cornish Colony homes. Sometimes, one of my kids has had a friend whose family lives in a Cornish Colony house. Sometimes a friend has been caretaking or gardening at one of the estates. Sometimes someone in Cornish has organized a garden tour of some of the Cornish Colony gardens. Any experience of these places is an ongoing gift from a group of people who really thought about their relationship to the natural world and built houses that embraced and celebrated this connection. Even the time we chased a run away pig during a nursery school field trip, all I noticed was the dell of blooming primrose and the way the terrace where we sat for milk and cookies was about the nicest place I had ever been.

Architect Charles Platt was part of the colony and designed many of these homes. He mentored landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman when she found herself in financial straights. Eventually her career took flight and she left Cornish to design many gardens on large estates across America. Her gardens are now considered among the most important gardens ever created in America. A recent retrospective of seven key American gardens at the Smith College Museum of Art bore witness to her visionary gifts.

Artist and illustrator Maxfield Parrish is also considered to be a part of the Cornish Art Colony, though his home was just over the border in our town of Plainfield. Our town was considered an inferior address by members of the Colony and people in the Colony actually printed on their stationery “Physically in Plainfield, Socially in Cornish. Can you imagine?

The sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens, lived year round at his glorious Cornish property Aspet. His sculptures can be found in many American cities, with his bronze Civil War remembrances particularly powerful and emotionally resonant. Aspet is a national park now and a place we love to visit. Last summer, the Masque of the Golden Bowl was reenacted in the fields of Aspet. This play was originally written and performed in honor of Augustus St. Gaudens and his wife Augusta during the summer of 1905. This time around, local children and adults dashed in and out of the woods dressed as Olympic Gods. A fun time was had by all.

The Cornish Colony had a long tradition of dancing around the woods in costume. In Meriden village, there were al fresco bird fetes with dancers costumed as birds. Locals continue to like putting on a show.

In fact, there is something about Cornish that makes it still a dramatic place, even with the Colony kaput. Meriden feels sort of vanilla to me in comparison with Cornish. Our Deb, the lovely woman who answers the phone with a British accent, now lives in Cornish. She tells us stories of the daily life in the town that make our jaws drop. Everyone likes to play their roles in Cornish with GUSTO!

One role that Deb plays is that of running the Cornish Farmer’s Market. Each spring she rounds up vendors, keeps everyone on the same page about the farm market calendar, advertises the market throughout our valley, runs the weekly markets, and also throws together a couple of exuberant farmer’s market special events. One of these specials is a June market called “Fur, Fleece, and Feathers” where you can find a Speckled Sussex chick, a Blue Swedish duck, an angora rabbit, sheep fleece to dye and spin, or a kitten to love.

Deb is getting ready for the next farmer’s market season right now. This has meant attending regional meetings with other farmer’s market organizers. She tells us of a regional campaign to get more people to support their local farmer’s markets. This campaign is called “Be a Local Hero”.

We have been reading a lot lately about the long emergency that fuel shortages in the near future will bring us. The crux of the situation as far as food production goes is that it is going to be too expensive, even impossible, to ship our food the long distances it is presently traveling. The word on the streets is that local food is going to move to center stage again by NECESSITY and not just choice.

Deb is a local hero right now because of what she is doing keeping this farmer’s market, with its network of local food providers, alive and flourishing. Even in rural New Hampshire, she has a hard time finding produce vendors to run stalls. Even with its location on the village square in Cornish, Deb has a hard time getting people to shift their shopping patterns to buy a local tomato being sold across the street, versus one that they get at their local Price Chopper. Even with this charming, sweet, wonderfully social, AND delicious market going, so many people drive on by or tell me that they have never visited this weekly local moment.

Deb has had to rally the troops through a time of marginal interest in local produce. She cheerleads. She unravels snafus. She and her husband set up and take down the signs, stalls, and other paraphernalia of the market every week. She deals with the trash. She helps vendors to understand that if four people sell winter squash, it attracts more winter squash lovers to the market and everyone is a winner. She congratulates those who are selling their offerings. She consoles, helps, and encourages those who are not. All this and she still bakes her amazing cornish pasties and other delicious treats for market.

So Deb is my local hero today and in her honor, I hope you will find your local farmer’s market and go out and support these folks that are keeping a network of food supplies vital and flowing, ready for when we need it once again.

PS This is Deb’s poster for the Cornish Farmer’s Market, painted by her. Don’t you wish this was your local farmer’s market?