One interesting thing Einstein said was that the consciousness that created a problem cannot solve the problem.

One of my kids said to me today, “Well then, how do I find a consciousness outside myself to solve this problem I am dealing with?” This question made me think how each kind of Flower tries to show us the specifics of the different consciousness it can offer us for our healing.

Here’s the Bee Balm in one of the perennial beds right now.

In this photograph, the Bee Balm is in the shadow of the Magnolia tree because it was early in the day when I took this photograph. However, Bee Balm has a strong presence in the mid summer garden, even when it is in the shade. It lets us know in no uncertain terms some of the qualities of its unique healing consciousness, a consciousness outside our ken and therefore potentially helpful to our problem solving.

Looking closer

and then closer, the ways Bee Balm indicates its healing gifts become more clear.

Like other members of the mint family, Bee Balm has four square stems. Consequently, its Flowers do not flop over in rain and wind. These stalks are fibrous, sturdy, and tough. They rise up through other Flowers so Bee Balm never gets lost in the garden. Bee Balm’s stalks help it have a dramatic presence in any landscape, standing steady and strong. This is one way Bee Balm indicates its unapologetic vibrational punch.

The Flower heads are showy both in their architecture and their color. The blossoms spike out in all directions. Sometimes one mighty spiked head is topped with another spiky head. The spiky shape of the blossoms and the Flower’s bold coloring are two other ways it reveals its gifts. Each tubular blossoms with its spiked tips reflect Bee Balm and its Essence’s ability to dig deeply.

You may recall from the Guide how Bee Balm describes itself as a cleanser of hidden electrical tangles. It offers its Essence as an ally in any situation where we feel weighed down by a difficulty that just doesn’t seem to want to move out from that dark corner where it is hiding. Bee Balm talks about its ability to find this hidden business and resolve the problem once and for all.

Bee Balm’s overall structure, color, and petal shape advertise these unique gifts . While it may have developed its healing strengths as a consequence of the environmental challenges it faced during its evolution, it has a consciousness of oneness and knows that in supporting us, it supports this oneness.

Therefore with obvious delight, it shines in the garden, sings its song, and offers the glory of all it has learned to all of us.

I am glad for the chance each growing season to renew my friendships with the Flowers whose Essences fill our shelves. Today, I am glad for Bee Balm’s zesty offer to show us its unique way to houseclean our energy systems. I am grateful to be reminded of its willingness to help us resolve our challenges be they fiery red emotional dilemmas or obscure but niggling difficulties that drain off our life force in unproductive ways.

And now to offer some Bee Balm Flower Essence to the child with that great question!

The flea beetles are making lace in the gardens. The slugs have decimated most of the Venus Garden. Inside the office, the printer is chewing paper, the fax machine is on the fritz, and freeze has become the email verb of the day. And this is just the silly stuff.

But dear readers, my heart is full of a strange and lovely joy. I am so glad I get to sort through all this clamor of splendid imperfection with you. It is a great solace and delight to visit with you on this blog. The other solace I feel is, well, let me get to that in my usual sideways manner.

Last week, a woman emailed to offer her theory that my worry and general negativity attracted the bug infestations, rampant poison ivy, and garden weeds gracing Green Hope Farm this summer. She wrote that because our fears give energy to the things we fear, each of us will manifest whatever we are afraid of. She suggested that if I learned to control myself with only positive thoughts, only positive things would happen.

Thankfully, I see the bugs and life differently.

For all my complaining, I see the bugs, weeds, office snafus, and larger difficulties I face as bringing me the gifts I need this summer and beyond. Right now, I am in the whining stage about the bugs. Right now, I am completely in the dark about what their gifts will be. But, I know that when the dust settles, the literal and metaphoric bugs and slugs of my summer will gift me with the harvest I need most. It may not include any live plants, but there will be gifts.

This means my job is to accept that what is happening is for the highest good, to feel what I feel, and to stay open to receive the gifts of the experiences.

This means the big and little events that fill my life are circumstances I am not so much meant to control and manipulate as surrender to with faith that they are for my learning and for my own good.

This gets at the core of my conversations with the Angels, Elementals, and precious God.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking for specific outcomes. Nowadays, I try to discern what divinity asks me to do and then I do it. I try to offer up the rest to God, not that this is necessary but it helps me.

Sometimes, I get ahead of a situation and imagine an outcome.

Consider this summer’s Venus Garden, I assumed that because I was asked to plant a spiral of Mehera Marigolds, it was going to mature into a fabulous spiral of Flowering plants. Now that most of the plants have been consumed by slugs, I know differently. I have been reminded to separate process from product. I remember this with a bit of whining, but the whining is not the end stage. Once I see that something different than I imagined is unfolding, I eventually return to a place of happy expectation. I await a mysterious outcome, not the expected one, but that does not mean it won’t be a marvelous outcome. It is only that I have been reminded, this time by slugs, that outcomes are not in my hands.

I have a lot of feelings about the email I received about controlling outcome with positive thinking. I certainly felt upset that someone would lay such a burden on themselves and others. Life would be a nightmare if I still thought I was supposed to be controlling everything.

Perhaps that was the greatest gift that came from Elizabeth’s birth defects. You may recall from other blogs that she was born deaf with a cleft palate. I did not harvest many gifts during her first year. In a crisis, just getting through seems the only reasonable expectation. But given my warped family of origin training, had I not been an exhausted wreck, I probably would have tried to control her problems right out of existence. Blessedly, by the time I got used to her situation, I had come to know her “imperfections” to be the perfect gift of love from God to me. This opened me to try and see everything in my life as God’s perfect gifts, not events I needed to control.

Now, as you have noticed, I don’t pull off this attitude without complaint. Maybe in some future incarnation I will completely know that getting a foot chopped off is as good news as winning the lottery. In the meantime, it usually takes me some time to come to see every event in my life as a gift OR to love what is versus pine for what my personality wants. What’s life without a bit of highly dramatic gnashing of teeth?

Take the death threats I have mentioned before. Eventually I found a solid faith that God brought us these trials for our own good, but I did not find this faith right away. At first I was just scared and in shock. The conviction that there was purpose in these horrible events became a life raft built over time. As things continue to unfold, I feel the life raft under me more and more. I didn’t get there by suppressing my emotions. I felt hurt, angry, and sad. Often, I still feel this way.

It has surprised me that my emotions have been my way to finding a rock solid faith. One reason for my surprise is that I came from a clan that thought controlling all feelings was the way to live. I think they had some of the same ideas as the email I received. First control your feelings so as to control events and then if events go haywire, shut your eyes and pretend bad things don’t happen to good people who are doing things “right”.

I suppose some people can control events, but unless I was a God realized being I would no longer try to do this. I do not think I know what is best to happen in any given situation. Plus these control techniques require so much energy that they leave us little chance to bump into an awareness of God. The experience of God’s love has come to me in the space left by letting go of control. In letting go, I found a feeling of love and a heart felt knowledge that God loves us in the particulars of ALL events not just at the personality picnics.

This brings me back to the email I received. If we think good and happy events are the only way God brings love, oh my gosh, life is going to be a lonely journey. I find it a comfort to know that EVERYTHING God does is for the best, not just the stuff my personality finds fun.

Not only do I have no idea what should be, but what a relief not to depend on my imagination to manifest my life. I couldn’t have imagined a life containing the difficult challenges I face OR the sublime joys. I am so glad that it wasn’t my personalities job to imagine either because my life would be the poorer if I was meant to be in control. I couldn’t have imagined a brother wanting to kill me or parents and other relatives standing back to let it happen. Conversely, I could not have imagined the breathtaking beautiful love I find in all directions in my life here at Green Hope Farm. Blessedly, it’s all so much more than I could imagine.

More importantly, I am uncomfortable with this notion that we control our life experiences on a conscious level and therefore, if there is suffering in our lives, its because we are not doing the control techniques right.

There is a terrible secondary whiplash of guilt when someone tells us that it was our own negativity, our own imaginative fears that brought us all our woes. It’s a heavy grief to feel such responsibility. What an unburdening to know a wiser consciousness than my personality shapes my life, that God has given me this life in ALL its particulars. My job is not to fight the life I have been given either by trying to visualize something different or simply pretending what is happening isn’t happen. My job is to inhabit the life I have been given and make the best of it.

I don’t know how this all ties into theories of free will. Once, before my troubles with my family of origin exploded into a made for TV movie, I had a dream in which I looked at a diorama that said “Molly’s Life” on it. As I examined the diorama, I noticed that I could not move any of the pieces in the diorama, but that God was underneath this diorama holding it up. The dream ended with God winking at me. With that wink came a rush of amazing, expansive joy. I recalled this dream many times when nothing shifted in the family of origin firestorm docudrama no matter what I did. This dream and all my guidance suggested and continues to suggest that all I can do is let go and let God. So that is what I try to do.

I am not able to budge the bugs either. Way back when I first worked with the Elementals in new gardens of Green Hope Farm, I had some experiences in which big armies of ants did what I asked them to do. For some reason, it served me to have ants and other bugs listen and respond to my directions. Now they don’t respond. After the whining, I accept that it is more important for my soul to not have this kind of success redirecting any six legged creatures….. or four legged or two legged for that matter.

There was great euphoria in my early gardens at Green Hope Farm when the produce was bigger than life and the bugs were all well behaved. But I have learned more in my struggles with the bugs than when I could command them like an army general. It’s not that I sometimes am not wistful for that early time of pristine gardens, but it is in my suffering in the face of things out of my control that I have grown the most as a person. Whatever love and tenderness I bring to the table, it has grown because of difficulties not successes. I have no easy confidence that life is going to spare me bugs, but I now know that this is life’s blessing not its curse.

My life since the first years at the farm has been challenging. I have felt broken open by what I have gone through. But I also feel much more able to be a compassionate companion to others in their pain and suffering because of my own suffering. I also feel closer to God. Everything was a bit glossier when I imagined myself able to keep ants, slugs, poison ivy and difficulties at bay, but I would not go back to that place again.

One last thing I want to say in this blog.

Many years ago, I shared a book of stories about beloved Meher Baba with an old friend. He sent the book back covered in copious notes in which he put forth the view that he was sure Meher Baba was not a spiritual teacher or God realized because people around him suffered.

I am convinced that God, either in the form of a God realized being or in all the billion other forms God takes, is the ONLY consciousness that brings us suffering with complete love but that God does not spare us suffering. God sends comfort amidst suffering but God also sends the suffering. This is because God alone knows what we need to unravel from the illusions that bind us and God knows that what is needed is often suffering. Bugs, slugs, death threats, whatever God sends, it is sent with a love beyond our imagining. God knows what is needed, what is to be accomplished, and that love is the only reality even in terrible suffering.

Early one morning as I listened as best I could to the God within me, I received a message that compared the process of healing to modern surgery. It was explained that as with surgery, it is often necessary to cut things up and make things appear worse before making things better. It was suggested that if I were to walk in on an open heart surgery, I would freak out. The heart might be out of the body. Many people would be using sharp instruments. There would be blood everywhere. Yet it would be organized disorder leading to a healthier situation for the patient. So too suffering brought by God the surgeon. God knows what surgery needs to be done. God knows the most efficient operation to accomplish this. God knows how to do the operation. In God’s operating room, everything moves towards healing and oneness. Viva the Bugs! Viva the Surgery!

Here’s the beginning of an Angel tale.

Two winters ago, all of us in the office were taking the dogs for a walk during lunch. About half a mile down this road is an old farmhouse, then used as a summer house by a retired music and English teacher. As we passed the property, I noticed that the door to the house was open and banging, not a good thing since the owner was in Florida. I waded through the snow to the front of the house and firmly shut the door. We walked on by.

As we came back by the farmhouse, the door was open again and banging. This time, as I shut the door, I asked the Angels if they were trying to get my attention with the banging door. “YES!” they told me, “We hope you will call the owner and ask for first refusal on this property.”

This little house sits on a lovely, quiet spot of land. My imagination tore ahead of me into thoughts of one of our children settling there at some point. It was not hard to motivate me to call the owner, a man I had known since teaching with him at Kimball Union Academy 26 years ago. Jim Ingerson, or JDI as everyone called him, mentored me through my first year teaching junior English. JDI said he would be delighted to put us on the list of folks interested in buying the house, but we should know that many others were on the list ahead of us. He expected to sell the house in a few years, when he settled full time in Florida.

The phone call was made and like so many Angel suggestions, there was nothing more to be done but let go and see what did or did not germinate.

Fast forward a year and a half. JDI had died unexpectedly, leaving the farmhouse to his sister Jean. We had not heard from Jean when he died so we assumed that someone ahead of us on the list had bought the property. The town manager actually told us that someone else had bought the property. So, it was a big surprise when the Jean called out of the blue to say everyone else on the first refusal list had passed on the property and we were next on the list. She encouraged us to look over the property and get back to her.

I was, of course, extremely enthusiastic. That two foot drop from one side of the kitchen floor to the other? No problem! That permeating smell of rotting wood? Not to worry! Walls like cardboard? Big deal! Ben was beginning to think that he’d like a fixer upper in town, a place to put his potter’s wheel and grape vines. This seemed like, well, a gift from the Angels!!!! Ben and I wandered the property looking at the mature trees and vistas up a beautiful pasture. We climbed over barbed wire fences to explore the wetlands below the house. Would this be a place to raise koi? We fell in love with the stonewalls and the stone foundation of an old barn. We imagined the beautiful gardens built from these bones.

Poor Jim! He always has to bring the rest of us back to Earth with hard cold facts. He and several friends, one of whom is an excavator, examined the house itself. They reported back that two thirds of the house had no foundation. The sills and joists for this part of the building had been logs place right on dirt. These logs had long since rotted and broken, allowing the rest of the under built structure to fall in upon itself. No one who examined this part of the house thought it could be saved. The consensus was that two thirds of the house would have to be taken down.

In the salvageable third of the structure, a chimney had fallen down into the crawl space basement and pulled part of the house into the crawl space basement with it. This was hard to see as the basement was full of water. Upstairs, there was no real heating system and no insulation. The septic system was dodgy. The vintage 1970’s decor was not covering anything beautiful. The orange shag carpeting had not been tacked over wide oak floor beams. The drop ceilings of asbestos tiling were not covering gorgeous plaster ceilings. Behind the dark wood panelling was strange matted insulation materials not carved chair rails and baseboard trim

The good news was that all these problems made the property very affordable. When we called Jean to report our findings, she agreed with our assessment. She told us that JDI had hoped we would buy the house and that he did not want her to dicker with us but to ask a fair price. We agreed on a price in one of the most harmonious conversations I have ever had. The price was in alignment with the problems, a rare thing in this town where land is hard to come by.

And so last week with Tia, Jean’s lawyer’s basset hound at our feet, we closed on this property. Jim spirits had risen when all of us in the family agreed about what a big project it would be. He was as enthusiastic at the signing as me. We are all on the same page now. Gilding the lily with a koi pond won’t be happening for awhile. For now, we will be taking most of the place down, one piece of plastic siding at a time.

We have found out some lovely history about the one hundred and fifty year old front part of the house, the part brave Jim thinks can be saved. It was originally positioned across the street from our farm and used as the True Road Schoolhouse. Only later was it moved by horses down to its present site a half mile away. The town historian Howard Zea noted that the moving of the Schoolhouse was remarked upon in town records because the building got away from the horses for a bit on its downhill journey and no one was quite sure for awhile where it would end up.

We also know that Monnie and David Benson, the wonderful people who sold us the land for Green Hope Farm and supported us as we built our home and started out farm enterprises, spent their early married life in the True Schoolhouse. We remember Monnie telling us of arriving from a gentler life in New Canaan, CT to live in this farmhouse with her groom. She remembered snow in the bedroom and a mother in law that carved supper off a frozen cow in the pantry with a chain saw.

That Monnie still loved this little old house encourages us. We can only hope to improve on the insulation situation and of course, what a blessing to have the Angels, Monnie, David, and JDI looking over our shoulders and cheering us on as we take down two thirds of the house and restore the original True Schoolhouse to its former glory, one board at a time.

Ben with his fixer upper. Everything to the left of Ben is slated to go. Its amazing how plastic siding and a standing seam roof can make something APPEAR in good working order!

We toast the purchase with the fam and a group of Ben’s friends. Jim’s shirt describes the ice cream flavor Cherry Garcia with a fitting slogan, “What a long strange dip its been.” ( and about to take a strange new dip!)

May May and Riley of course part of the party but not given any champagne. Willy didn’t get any either which is fine with him because he thinks it tastes gross.

An horde abundance of civil servants in local, state, and the federal government dictate supervise Jim’s sixth grade curriculum. Basically his curriculum gets more scrutiny than the budgets of most countries. It wouldn’t surprise me if he has nightmares many pleasant musings about curriculum mapping, curriculum guidelines, and curriculum in service days. These days, such activities plague figure largely in the life of a public school teacher. I try to stifle limit my contributions to the litany of directives suggestions he receives, because it’s already too much to process let alone implement. His curriculum already reads like a high speed tours through Europe. You know the kind. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. If it’s Thursday, this must be the Bill of Rights.

So, it is only out of the deepest convictions that I offer up what I see as some great new curriculum ideas, talking points, and vocabulary for his classroom next year. To make things easier for a beleaguered Mr. Sheehan, I give definitions for the words AND pithy sentences using the word appropriately.

precipitation: all forms of water particles whether liquid or solid that fall from a cloud and reach the ground
Q: “Do you think this precipitation will ever end?”
A: “No.”

condensation: the act of making more dense as in the reduction of a gas to a liquid
“Is that condensation from today’s rain on your face or are you just happy to see me?”

dew point: the temperature at which a condensable gas, esp. water vapor, in the air starts to condense into a liquid
Q: “Do you think there has been a moment in the three months when temperatures have not been at the dew point?
A: “No.”

continuous: precipitation which does not cease or ceases only briefly
copious: very plentiful, abundant and profuse
Like the copious dirty dishes that bred and multiply during summer vacation, we also observe copious amounts of rain falling continuously.

overcast: sky completely covered in clouds
glower: to stare with sullen anger
The water logged sixth grader grappled with the great philosophical issues of his time such as “Which is worse? The glower of an overcast sky or the glower of a tired mother as she grapples with mold, mildew, and jungle rot.”

drizzle: fairly uniform precipitation comprised exclusively of very small water droplets (less than a .5 mm in diameter) very close to one another
torrential: rushing, roaring, continuous precipitation which does not cease or ceases only briefly
Q: Do you think this drizzle will change to torrential rain soon?”
A: “Yes.”

cabin fever: a condition of increased anxiety, tension, boredom caused by living for some time in a confined space
The children knew their mother was experiencing the advanced delusional stage of cabin fever when she chirped “Isn’t this fun to watch the rain beat against the windows?”

Well, I have to go. I need to start work on today’s indoor activity. Using vocabulary already in current use doesn’t begin to stretch the minds of eleven and twelve year olds. Its time for some new words. I once read that Greenland has forty different words for snow. Today, I am going to make up forty new words for rain. Jim is going to love teaching a new language to his students.

Learning these new words will be the perfect activity when it snarflecks and whindershicks all day and given this summer of scremalatious rumblesnuffins, I expect this fall will be equally cretilacious, if not more grunboomershang than ever before . The sixth graders will NEED some sort of exciting curriculum while they look out the windows at the bumblution. Lets face it, the five thousand hours of curriculum mapping Mr. Sheehan already has done is just not enough.

Gosh, it’s really too bad the girls still have the digital camera on vacation with them. Consider yourself lucky. Without a camera, you are spared don’t get to see the plant carnage what happened during the last four days.

Lizzy is housesitting on a lake in Vermont. The owner invited the whole fam to come over and enjoy the lake. So we did. I swam, kayaked, and read trashy books. I did not think about insects. Sadly, they thought about the 24 hour a day buffet at the farm. Would it be an exaggeration to say that every bug on the planet visited Green Hope Farm for a meal during these four days? I think not.

The spiral of Mehera Marigolds? Well, it’s hard to tell what kind of plants they were, let alone that they were planted in a spiral. The “spiral” sort of looks like twigs haphazardly stuck in the ground. Ditto for the Yellow Marigolds planted in a star formation.

The Roses? From forty yards all looks well. Up close, it’s like the back of a gardening book where the editors show action shots of pest damage. I ask myself, how can so many insects do so much damage so fast? Then I think about going out to the gardens to eat worms.

One fun fact surfaces after four short days. Torrential downpours do not inhibit any bugs from high speed munching. Three of the four days I was gone it rained very hard here. The bugs braved it all to do as much damage as possible.

After I dragged myself through a full garden tour, I lay down in the grass and consoled myself with several brilliant insights:

1. Had I been at the farm during the four days of big eating, I could not have stopped more than a handful of the six zillion bugs from chowing down. It was better that I rested on a lake while they ate.

2. While Lynn has perfected weather control to an alarming degree, I have not. It is a fact that people planning a wedding around here call the caterer first and Lynn second. It is a fact that they think RAIN when they think about the kind of weather I attract. And after these four days they will think PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS as well.

3. The Red Shiso is still alive and thriving, probably because I planted it in a solid bed of all organic non toxic but slug unfriendly iron pellets. It was unrealistic to circle every other plant at the farm with said pellets and sadly, the slugs recognized this truth and made the most of it.

4. Bugs are people too.

5. I know the sound of insects eating and pooping at the same time. Do you?

This afternoon, I did triage work. I mixed Green & Tonic, Emergency Care, Flee Free, Healthy Coat, Golden Armor, Recovery, and Immune Support in water in my big spray tank and hoisted it onto my shoulders. Then I went out and sprayed every sad plant on the farm and anything else that was still green. With all those Essences blowing downwind towards me, I felt a lot better when I was done.

Time will tell if this helped the plants too.