On Tuesday, the whole staff of Green Hope Farm gathered for a wonderful lunch in honor of Yessenia and her second baby, due in April. We had the shower now so her darling mother in law, Penny, could come. Penny was visiting from Portland, Oregon, and won’t be back until after the baby arrives. We were so happy Penny could be part of the party as she is so much fun!

I took some pictures of the whole crowd of us but the only thing you could see was bright light coming through the windows with a lot of dark blobs in front of it. We like to have parties, so I will try again to get a photo of all of us at the next event. That will probably be one of our spring birthday parties in the Arbor Garden. In this photo of Yessenia, Vicki is writing things down for Yessenia as she opens her packages. It was such a happy occasion for us to celebrate Yessenia. She has brought such good cheer, love, and sparkle into our midst.

In the spirit of Team Earth, here’s an update on various projects mentioned in previous blogs.

MAPLE SUGARING SEASON
After my Cassandra-like blog about global warming weather, we experienced several weeks of freaky sub zero cold spells. Yesterday, however, the temperatures went above freezing again. We got out our maple sugaring equipment and Jim, Will, and I went off to tap the small sugar bush in Meriden village where we gather our sap. The ancient mother Maples were in excellent spirits. It was a lovely reunion of old friends.

Maples have so much love to share. I feel lucky to visit with them every day during sugaring season. Even with a north wind blowing, it was warm enough for a good run. As we put in each tap, sap gushed from the holes. This afternoon we will make our first collecting run and then perhaps do our first boil tomorrow. It’s about two weeks later than our first run last year, but in the realm of normal for timing. Maple sugaring season is a notoriously quirky thing with strange beginnings, strange endings, and strange middles. I will look forward to sharing endless amounts of musings, data, theories, prognostications, and folklore with you this sugaring season!

YOUR COMMENTS ON THE BLOG
This “dashboard” place, where I write the blogs, says I have comments to moderate before posting. I have asked Ben a couple of times to tell me how to do this. As when one tries to scratch a diamond with a crayon, his infomercials are not denting the surface of my brain. This is my problem, not his, and I will work on listening better. In the meantime, I appreciate your e-mails to our regular e-mail address (green.hope.farm@valley.net). Thank you for all the wonderful comments and questions. They have been fabulous springboards for blogs. PS to Vicki, I WILL get to your question about gophers! I promise!

DEB’S LUNCHES
Still good, still better than the rest of our lunches. Last week, she finished out her work week with a lunch of mesclun, delicately sliced radishes, red pepper slivers, cherry tomato halves, medallions of roasted chicken with a drizzle of goddess dressing plated on an elaborately carved green oval ceramic dish. Yes, Deb brings her own dishes to plate her lunch with everything packed in the most charming wicker basket. If you had her pottery collection made by husband Ara, you would bring your own ceramics too.

KNITTING
You have already heard about my Knitting Olympics asterisk victory. Willy had to show further patience this week when I took further time out from his afghan project to knit a pair of socks and finish a baby sweater for Yessenia’s baby shower. This shower is tomorrow. Miraculously, the sweater is done and wrapped.

PANTRY
Jim finished phase #1 of his pantry project with minutes to spare before returning to his sixth grade classroom. It is amazing to have all this beautiful space for food and to actually be able to find food products when I look for them. Bravo Jim!!!!! Sadly, all the different kinds of muffins I made last week to celebrate the ready access of supplies were gone by the time Jim got home from school.

PHOTOS ON BLOG
I hope that this blog has a photo of Will tapping a maple tree on it. If not, Ben and I will go back to the drawing board tonight. I am determined to figure this out before Yessenia’s baby shower so we can post a photo of the event. I also have an award winning shot of the view over the abandoned TV dish to upload from my digital camera ( sounds like I know what I am talking about, doesn’t it?)

DOLLHOUSE CONSTRUCTION
Ummmmm maybe I never mentioned this project or the next one, but I thought you’d like to know. We have finished the outside of our dollhouse kit down to the very last log siding piece and roof shingle. Willy and I decided to temporarily rest on our laurels before decorating the inside and have moved in all our dollhouse furniture. The unfinished rooms sort of remind us of the first two, make that five, no better say fifteen years in this house.

WINE MAKING
Vintner Ben is on his third batch of homemade wine, made from several wine making kits. When he moved out of the house, I envisioned that his bedroom would be a guest room but instead it is a guest room/small winery. Jim’s mom really enjoys that fermenting smell when she visits. Its very, what can I say, pungent. We have ordered grape vines hybridized by the University of Minnesota for planting in part of our hayfield this growing season. This will really irritate, I mean, interest the farmer who hays our field. A small vineyard….. yet another obstacle to mow around!

We hope to spend the next few years figuring out what kinds of grapes will thrive in our a) inhospitable or b) bracing climate. Note: Half glass full answer is bracing. Half glass empty answer is inhospitable. Once we have established which varieties are hardy here, we will plant enough for Ben to entertain guests and foreign dignitaries. In the meantime, we are going to prune the heck out of our Fredonia grape vines in the Arbor Garden to see if we can bring in a crop of grapes large enough for a grape stomping vino making party.

SEED ORDERS
All here. I usually start a bunch of seeds around the time of New Hampshire town meeting. That would be next Saturday. Emily has her high school spring break this week. She sorted seeds all morning. Had a lot to say about the logic of my sorting systems. The seeds are now MUCH BETTER organized, alphabetized, and ready for us to start using. Thank you Emily! The green house is also ready. It’s a wonderfully hot, bright haven of blossoming tropical Flowers. Next week, there will be new babies in there too. Yahooo!

I never know what will spill out when I respond to your questions. Yesterday’s questions about resistance to Flower Essences took me in an unexpected direction. I found myself writing about what happens when we resist the gentle encouragements from the universe to change, be they Flower Essences or some other soft nudge. What happens when our personality’s desire for things to stay the same comes in conflict with our soul’s desire to move our lives along spiritually?

Whatever willingness I now have to let go and change is a consequence of traumatic events. Most big changes in my life were either precipitated by trauma or informed by them. Early in my life, I thought I would be spared pain, aging, bad hair days, and cellulite just because I was, well….. so special. Now…….let’s just say I laughed aloud as I typed that last sentence. Experience encourages me to let go earlier in a change cycle since I know that if I hold out longer, I am asking for those professors from the 2′ X 4’ school of learning lessons to come on back. Pain or memories of pain. It seems to take a lot to shake us humans loose from our cages, including the cage of wanting things to stay the same.

One seminal traumatic experience is my primary encouragement to let go and let change have its way. This was the birth of my second child, that dancing daughter, who was born deaf and with a cleft palate. Out of the pain, confusion, and grief of my experience during her early years came this life at Green Hope Farm. I credit her with jump starting my true life on True Road as well as being the mover and shaker of her own amazing dance.

Even as I have used this as a paradigm of trauma to encourages an optimistic, go with the flow attitude, I cannot say that I greet traumatic events at the door with a welcoming smile and a snack. It usually takes me months, sometimes years, to surrender to the truth that everything God does, even the latest trauma, is for the best.

With the latest big trauma in my life, the situation of death threats from a family member and the loss of connection to my family of origin as part of the fall out from these threats, it’s five years in and I am still accommodating the experience. I probably will be doing this for the rest of my life. When I try to explain to people the gifts I’ve received from this drama, they usually look at me as if I’ve been smelling a bit too many opium poppies. However, this trauma has made me a more loving person. It has helped me love God more. I may not return to joyful life with the same innocence but I return with a more sturdy and sillier joy. Odd but true. I begin to be able to hold this trauma with gratefulness, not just sorrow.

So, I acknowledge and continue to experience both the human condition of being comfortable with the discomfort of our cages of illusions and also a gratitude for the traumas that shake us out of our cages, even if I cannot always experience this gratitude during the traumas.

Sometimes, even with whatever willingness I have to let go and change, traumas hit broadside and require more than seems reasonable or possible. During these times, in fact during any traumatic time, Flower Essences are my steadfast friends, helping me feel confident I will survive and eventually even manage to process and move through the tumult.

When the brown stuff hits the fan, it is the vibrations of Flower Essences including Emergency Care, Anxiety, Grief & Loss, Feverfew, Sarah Van Fleet Rose, and Old Blush China Rose that become my constant companions. Depending on the trauma, I sometimes work with this crew of Essences for months or years. They help me feel physically safe and help calm my freaked out nervous system.

One of the wonderful friends I have made kindness of Green Hope Farm Flower Essences is a grief counselor who first connected with us to get Flower Essences for one of her Tibetan terriers. As the years have unfolded, she has helped me to understand that when a trauma occurs, we really cannot process the emotions or the spiritual underpinnings of the event until we get support to feel physically safe. This may be why the Angels said that Old Blush China Rose was the most important individual Flower Essence we had to offer to people after 911. It helps people feel physically safe during traumatic events. Her perspective has been very helpful in throwing out expectations about how I “should” move through any difficult experience.

I also reach for Essences such as Arbor Garden, Pink Tecoma, and Pink Water Lily. They help me feel comforted amidst the turmoil. Taking these Essences is part of that vital process of doing what I can to take care of myself. More and more, I realize that if we are all one, it’s crazy not to take care of the part of oneness close to home. That would be me. Bring on the Pink Tecoma.

Borage and Nuuphretia Lavarissa help me find the inner courage to keep on going. The Sunflower Spiral and Joe Pye Weed help me surrender my burdens to those there to help. Self care includes asking friends to help!

Later, often a lot later, I depend on all sorts of Essences to support me in processing the trauma and grounding its gifts into my life and consciousness. My water glass becomes pink with helpful friends such as Grounding, Yellow Water Lily, Corn, Maple, Eyes of Mary, and Shrimp Plant. I really love Yellow Water Lily. It’s a cheerleader that helps me feel rooted in my divine identity during very emotional times.

Eventually, I am ready for Essences like Phoenix Rising or New Beginnings to support me to orient myself in the terrain of my new life. One thing I have grasped more fully from my most recent big trauma is that grief takes time. When I first went to therapy after Elizabeth was born, I thought I was supposed to clean everything up really, really fast and then put a smiley face on. I would walk into my therapist’s office each week wearing a hundred watt smile and tell my therapist that I was all better. Three minutes later, I would be sobbing my heart out. This would continue until our fifty minutes were up.

It has been an experience of grace to accept grief takes time. My only job is to be present to where I am. Everything else, including my spiritual growth (whatever that is!) will take care of itself.

Like on most days, one of you asked us some wonderful questions yesterday. The questions came from a woman using the Essences in her healing practice. She wanted to know how to work with people who resist Flower Essences. She mentioned clients who want to take the Essences but are aware of their own resistance to the life changing support the Essences offer. She noted one client‘s comment that she felt more comfortable with the discomfort of being stuck than letting the Flower Essences help transform her situation. The practitioner asked us for Flower Essence suggestions for this situation and also our thoughts on this topic.

I ended up writing two blogs related to these questions. I will post one today and one that is sort of related today or tomorrow. Before I begin, it feels so important to advocate that we be really, really kind to ourselves as we see our resistance. Sometimes it is just really, really hard to relish being supported in the decision to jump off a cliff into the unknown (first blog on the topic) or to be thrown off that cliff by life when we resist jumping of our own accord (second blog on topic).

One consolation
Flower Essences support us even when we resist them, but our resistance can slow their support down or take their support underground.

It is difficult to quantify how much is actually happening when we take Flower Essences in a place of resistance. We may not know exactly what kind of crises the Flower Essences prevented us from experiencing or how they helped us even as we resisted their support. So much of the change may be out of view or marked only by a dawning realization that long standing problems have ceased to be problems, even as we did not completely want the Essences support on this issue.

One out of view change I experienced in my own early years working with Flower Essences was a shift from more than a half dozen bouts of bronchitis a year to only the occasional bout every few years. In retrospect, I think the Flower Essences helped me face some unresolved childhood grief that I had been reluctant to confront, but they did this in such a delicate way that I felt no pain during the process. The grief was gently released from its storage place in my respiratory system, and while I had no awareness of this release as I worked with the Flower Essences, I saw this radical improvement in my life situation after the fact. And of course now get to live in a more healed energy system.

One truth that grows faith
In startling contrast to the subterranean experience of many adults working with Flower Essences stands the experience of children and animals. To say children and animals have much less resistance to incorporating the healing information of Flower Essences is a very large understatement. Often, just one or two exposures to a Flower Essence gives a child or an animal the information to shift a pattern, heal an issue, or make an enormous turn around. Their rapid response suggests one possible reason why some world religions encourage us to become like children in order to grow spiritually. Children and animals help us remember how to surrender to the flow of life. And, if our resistance to Flower Essences has to do with a problem believing that something so simple could really offer support, the example of children and animals can make us a believer.

No kidding!
Kids’ ability to make the most of Flower Essences is perhaps why our Flower Essence combination mix Inner Child might be a good one for helping with inner resistance. Inner Child helps us hear the voice of our young selves who live on within us and remain steadfastly open to growth and change and the possibility that a bunch of Flowers really can make our life better.

Tossing the bindings
So much of our resistance is learned resistance. So much of the mind cargo we carry isn’t even our ideas. It’s stuff that is dumped on us by well meaning but mistaken adults. Later, we step in and dump more stuff on ourselves out of habit and training.

Our combination Flower Essence mix All Ego Contracts Null and Void helps us release ourselves from ideas that discourage us from going with the flow of spiritual growth or feeling it’s safe to let go and trust ourselves, the Flowers, or life itself. This combination mix brings together a number of Flower Essences that offer a blueprint for releasing the trash of collective unwisdom that we pick up from others. The Ego referenced in the name of the Essence mix is often the voices of our parents or other adults from our childhood that live on within us, tying us in knots of don’ts, no’s, and other judgments that don’t always serve our divinity.

Viva the Flow
Flow Free is one of my most favorite Essences for any situation of blockage, resistance, or lack of flow. This is one of our most dynamic sources of information for change, even we keep it listed in our Animal Wellness collection as a combination earmarked for urinary issues and other issues of flow.

The origins of Flow Free is a bit comical. The husband of one of the staff was having prostrate issues so we set about to make Flower Essences from what we politely referred to as P plants. Our understanding of the doctrine of signature led us to believe that P plants would help that part of the body.

On a trip to Bermuda with Lynn in search of P plants, we had a particularly funny experience when we noticed a long fuzzy Flower in the garden of a posh hotel owned by a childhood friend of Lynn’s.

We got the nod from the Angels that the Flower in question was high enough in vibration to make into a Flower Essence. Then, like the well oiled Flower Essence making machine we had become, we whipped out our jars and other Flower Essence making equipment and set to work.

Meanwhile, an ever so ever so British group had begun to notice our activity and was surreptitiously watching our machinations. Eyes boggled as we lowered this very long fuzzy Flower into a glass jar of water with a pair of tweezers. All Lynn’s training in good manners and NOT MAKING A SCENE clashed with her generous spirit about making Essences for an ailing friend. Thankfully for us and for Flow Free, her generous spirit won out over her Bermudian good manners and we continued on with our business of mystifying this crowd of observers.

Eventually, many Flowers later, we had assembled an amazing group of P plant Flower Essences and other wonders for the urinary tract . We then assembled Flow Free. It was only as we began to use this mix that we discovered it was such a powerful ally for all spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical issues of flow.

Feeling Safe
Another suggestion for all of us confronting our resistance to change would be to try and take care of the frightened part of ourselves without shaming or judgment. Flower Essences like Old Blush China Rose, Golden Armor, Broccoli, or Pink Tecoma can help us feel safe enough to accept the inevitability of change and even work with this dynamic.

Finally, I would encourage most everyone to consider working with The Sacred Feminine Flower Essence combination remedy right now. Not only are we all going through our individual rebirth processes BUT humanity is birthing a new paradigm for life on this blue green orb as well……. That TEAM EARTH thing I was writing about yesterday. This Essence combination is there to midwife us through our individual births that will bring about a collective rebirth for all humanity. I cannot recommend this Essence too highly.

And now, if it seems I haven’t answered any of the questions raised, you can pretend that you think I will answer them in the second blog on this topic!!!!!