You may remember our rhino friend from an earlier blog. Rhino holds court in our kitchen where he reminds the younger children all the kids everyone under twenty five and their half zillion friends a cast of thousands from all walks of life to put their dishes in the dishwasher.

Here is our friend Rhino on the job yesterday AFTER the breakfast dishes had been dealt with (by Rhino’s friend the mother), but BEFORE the lunch rush.

And today, same time. This makes me Rhino wonder how many mid morning snacks do people need?

Let’s face it. Things are not going well for Rhino. He gets no respect. Job satisfaction is zilch.
He’d rather be….

Hiking small peaks.

Observing the Flowers.

Sunbathing in an adirondack chair with his girlfriend.

Frolicking with big game.

Visiting or napping with Riley.

Rhino has gone AWOL since I took these photos. He packed his bags and blew town to an undisclosed location. I may join him. No one will notice I am gone until all the clean dishes are used up. That should give me a good ten hour three hour forty minute head start!

It is very hot today. Part of the crew has settled into the Arbor Garden for the day to sort Red Shiso. This time of year we need to finish sorting the rest of the Red Shiso from last season so the building where we hang the Red Shiso is empty and ready for this year’s crop.

When we sort, we pluck and save only the most purple leaves from each stalk of the plant. It takes a long time to do but it’s the reason why our Flower Essences are pink. I just went out there to take this photo. Everyone was laughing. There was a bit of a breeze and it was nice and shady under the grape vines. The dogs, of course, were out there supervising.

Speaking of Red Shiso, so far, so good. The leaves look a nice deep maroon. We are hopeful that the crop will dry a deeper purple than last year’s crop which dried mostly green.

William, Jim, and Lizzy took a day last week to climb Mt. Liberty and Mt. Flume in the White Mountains. Will and Jim have decided to try and climb all 48 of the peaks over 4,000 feet tall. Here they are resting at the top of Mt. Liberty.

Here they are on Mt. Flume. Guess what number Mt. Flume is for the boys? Only 45 to go!

Back at the ranch, we are enjoying our new 3 bottle boxes. They look like Skittles and we love ’em.

In the office we do not climb mountains, we make them! Here is a small mountain of orders ready to fly out the door to you!

And because it is the summer of 2006, when it rains ( and it rains most every day) it pours and everything is about two feet taller than normal and sooooooo green!

Not enough can be said about the Animal Wellness Collection remedy Abandonment & Abuse. As we answer questions about Flower Essences on the phone and on e-mail, this is one of the remedies that crops up most frequently as a possible solution to animals and people’s difficulties.

WHO CAN BENEFIT?
If you are the caretaker of a rescue animal or any animal that has been through a traumatic experience at some time during his or her life, consider giving this animal Abandonment & Abuse. Even if you have not noticed any signs of stress in the animal, this may be a remedy that could serve this animal. And certainly, if you have noticed any kind of anxiety or stress related issues, this is a remedy I suggest you consider.

We have seen this remedy serve many different kinds of animals recovering from many different kinds of trauma. We have come to believe all rescue animals would benefit from Abandonment & Abuse. We only wish we could get this remedy to every needy animal on Earth! Hundreds and hundreds of bottles went to rescue organizations serving the animals that were traumatized by hurricane Katrina. That is just one situation in which this remedy has been helpful.

This is a wonderful remedy for people too. If you or someone you know has been through a traumatic experience, either in childhood or later in life, this is a remedy that can offer extremely helpful healing information. It is sometimes hard for people to identify with the name of this remedy or connect that a beloved animal in their care might benefit from a remedy named Abandonment & Abuse. This remedy is for situations post abandonment and abuse. It is for any person or animal whose behaviors or emotional state in the present are affected by traumatic experiences in the past.

WHY WOULD AN ANIMAL NEED THIS REMEDY AFTER HIS RESCUE WHEN HE IS IN A GOOD LIFE?
Animals who have been rescued suffer from the same kind of post traumatic stress reactions as people. Like a soldier home from battle, a rescue animal is well away in time and space from their pre-rescue life, but often even very small shifts in routine or tiny stresses in his present life can trigger a full blown anxiety response in which the animal experiences himself as back in the pre-rescue life. In this situation, he will respond with the survival behaviors from his pre-rescue world. The animal truly thinks he is back in the old life. The new life does not feel real. It is not a willful response but simply where his electrical system takes him.

It can be hard for people who are providing such a wonderful home to a rescue animal not to feel in some way remiss because their rescue animal is still experiencing difficulties. Sometimes people are puzzled when I suggest Abandonment & Abuse for an animal who has been in a marvelous home for all but a few months of his or her life. How could this animal need Abandonment & Abuse when his traumatic time in a puppy mill or experience in another home is so far in the distant past?

This is not a reflection on you or the love you are providing. It it is a reflection of the way all our electrical systems, animals and people alike, process experiences.
WHY ABANDONMENT & ABUSE?
These earlier experiences leave electrical patterns that are not addressed or healed by most healing modalities. Often they are not healed, even in the face of the most steady love.

With traumatized animals or people, the precise electrical pattern releasing information offered by the Flower Essences can help release the person or animal from the patterned responses formed by the early traumas. Abandonment & Abuse offers information to help an animal or person unbind and dissolve the electrical bindings and patterning that is keeping him in the past, reacting with past responses.

WHY DO YOU SAY THIS REMEDY TAKES TIME TO DO ITS WORK?
It is a very complicated process for animals and people to unwind and dissolve post traumatic stress disorder responses from their electrical system. People can spend a lifetime on this process. This remedy makes the process a much more efficient one because it offers the animal or person very specific electrical information from Flowers that have problem solved on these issues during their own evolution.

However, these stress related patterned responses built up over time and must be taken apart and released layer by layer as well. Abandonment & Abuse is a remedy that takes time to assimilate. This is because frequent exposures to the remedy over time will dismantle layer upon layer of counter productive patterned responses and emotional scars. Early exposure to the remedy will unwind the most recently laid down traumatic responses. Further exposures will work on deeper layers. When present day stress triggers counter productive responses, this remedy can offer problem solving information in the flow of the situation.

We see many animals who shift after relatively short exposures to other Animal Wellness Collection remedies and no longer need this information because they have integrated the Essences’ wisdom and made it their own. We frequently note how amazingly well animals copy and assimilate the healing data of Flower Essences, but traumatized animals and people need a bit more time to learn all they can learn from this remedy.

Because traumatized people and animals often have a post traumatic symptom of having difficulty processing information, they often need to be given information frequently to copy and integrate it. Consequently, frequent exposures to Abandonment & Abuse help. We also have noticed that offering Anxiety along with Abandonment & Abuse can help the animal or person calm down enough to better copy the healing information offered by the Abandonment & Abuse.

Even an animal that has had what would appear to be only a short traumatic experience may need this remedy for a long time. Our cat Jake taught me how this remedy can be needed for a long time well after entry into a safe new life.

Jake came to us as a tiny kitten. His feral mother had abandoned him and his siblings in a hollow maple tree. We think she got hit by a car which is why she did not return to her kittens. When Jake was found, his sister Bella was still alive, but another sibling had died. Jake came to us from a loving foster care situation when he had just been weaned from a dropper and was beginning to be able to eat for himself. His sister Bella came with Jake and we lavished love upon them both. He was one of the most regal animals we had ever met. He was also extremely mellow and seemed to show no signs of his early trauma YET Jake as Jake grew up, he would routinely go to our greenhouse and eat Red Hibiscus blossoms.

When Jake was still a young turk, we assembled the Abandonment & Abuse remedy for the first time. The Angels included Red Hibiscus and described it as a key ingredient in this mix, so we decided for this and other reasons, Jake was a good candidate for this remedy. I gave Jake the remedy for a couple of months during which time he left the Red Hibiscus alone. When I stopped giving him this remedy, Jake resumed eating the Red Hibiscus Flowers. This made me realize he needed this remedy for longer than I imagined necessary. I resumed giving him this remedy for another year or so. At this point, he no longer showed any interest in this Flower. I felt more confident that he had learned what he needed from this remedy to heal the wounds of his traumatic early childhood.

I learned a great deal about this remedy thanks to Jake. He opened me to the idea that animals and people could need to work with this remedy for a long time and could need this remedy long after the traumatic event. Everything I have learned since in talking with all of you has confirmed this understanding.

As I was writing this blog this morning, several people emailed with issues of spraying and indiscriminate peeing by rescue cats and a rescue dog frightened to go outside. It is important to note that present day stresses will trigger whatever adaptive responses the rescue animal took on during the initial trauma. Fierce defending of food, extreme submission, marking, fighting, and fear of strangers are just some of the different responses a rescue animal may take into his present life. The Abandonment & Abuse will help unwind these responses by healing the underlying electrical damage triggering the response. What a blessing when an animal finally knows, as you do, that he or she is safely in a new life of love.

And please, I cannot say it enough! All the Animal Wellness Collection are for people!!! A woman in her fifties called just a few moments ago. She felt she was still dealing with her parents emotional distancing of her as a small child. These are complicated traumas that can be challenging to resolve, but what a blessing and a help this remedy can be to the process!

It’s been a lovely hot week here. Lots of swimming and badminton. Then when we come in at night, there’s been the wildly exciting Tour de France to watch. Viva Floyd Landis!

The gardens seem to be enjoying the heat as much as the people. Blueberries are sweetening up in the sunshine and the raspberries have been abundant and juicy. The peaches are getting rosy. With all the rain we have had, I have never seen such a lush July. Nary a brown spot on the lawn.

The Red Shiso is doing beautifully. The Angels asked us to leave the self seeding Calendulas around the Red Shiso. I don’t know why they had us weed out everything else, but then leave so many Calendulas. It works for me! Not only do the Calendulas make for a gorgeous garden but they bring such a grounded but uplifting energy to the Red Shiso and the whole farm.

We have had some good news on the web site overhaul. As you may recall, Ben and I had thought that his job at the ceramics studio was going to leave time for him to work on the web site to create a splashy and frequently updated site. This turned out to be optimistic thinking as the long hours welding, heaving rocks, mixing enormous batches of clay, loading the gigantic kilns and generally using his back every moment of every day left him, well, toasted most nights. Buff but toasted. However, this fall he has a different job working at his alma mater Kimball Union Academy. And at least to begin with, it looks like there will be time for the web site work!
Building in cyber space is looking more and more appealing! Here he is getting ready.

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!