During the pandemic, I heard someone say, “Every day is Blursday, because every day feels like the same day.” As I consider the landscape of Green Hope Farm Flower Essences at the end of this year, I feel like 2022 was morphed with 2020 and 2021 not so much as the same day but as an almost a continuous experience of constant change and adaptation for all of us here and everywhere.
When everything shut down in March of 2020, I found myself alone in the office doing all the jobs that five or sixth people usually did. I vastly overestimated my ability to do everything and dove into marathon days and nights in the office with misplaced confidence. By May I had a bad kidney infection that would not quit.
I always think of kidneys as being about feeling supported. Like so many, I found myself in a situation in which those who wanted to help me were tied up with their own challenges. The staff goddesses with grade school children found themselves home teaching school. There was no day care for the younger mothers so they too were home. I would have drafted the always helpful Jim, but he found himself running sixth grade from the kitchen table via one Zoom meeting after another. In retrospect that worked about as well as he expected. He is not sure his students learned anything except that they could go to the bathroom while on Zoom and enjoy the idea that they were sitting on the toilet while also in class.
After a couple months, we figured out shifts for Green Hope Farm staff to return to work. Vicki and Jen bubbled together and came in during the days. I worked at night. Lizzie bottled at odd hours when her kids were asleep. When summer staff goddess, Anna, chose not to attend college via Zoom in the fall of 2020 and took the year off, she came onboard and worked a full year with us. That was a fantastic help as Sam still couldn’t return to us. After about a year we were all back in the office with masks on.
The upheaval changed things here. I had run the business by staying a part of everything. Basically, I had a finger in every pie. For thirty years I spent my week days in the office and did the gardening in the early morning and on the weekends. One of the reasons why I didn’t ask myself if I could do five people’s jobs in March of 2020 is because I had always done too much. I felt so grateful to be working with Divinity, the Angels and Elementals that I was happy to do everything all the time. Not that they expected this of me. It was my idea to do too much.
When I got the kidney infection, I got the message that I had to do less. As we came back together, I knew it was time for me to let go of various responsibilities into the hands of the capable, trustworthy, sassy and lovable group of women who were here ready to take up the reins. I didn’t let go very gracefully. Frankly, it was disorienting to do less. One thing that really helped was specific inner guidance about what I WAS NOT supposed to do in the office. Being told “No! You don’t need to go into the office. The staff can do it.” over and over and over again helped me let go and settle in to a more humane schedule. Somedays though, it was very hard to follow my “nonmarching orders.” I really liked all the office jobs of visiting with people on email, writing notes on invoices and packing and decorating packages.
With more free time, I began to garden during the day when I fresh and energized. It was bliss to be able to keep going with a garden task when I wanted to versus having to stop until the next weekend. The guidance I received clarified my jobs as designing the gardens, planting the gardens, tending the gardens and of course, making the Flower Essences. The writing was also important. And now I had the time to think about the blog more and ponder long and hard what I wanted to write about. I could get really fired up about a topic!
I loved that I could rise at dawn and stay in the gardens as long as I wanted. I loved that I was still visiting with all of you via the blog. So many of you have been connected with us for decades. You are beloveds to me, and I think of you and your animals so often.
I kept one office job of making all our red shiso tincture, because I wanted some ongoing connection to the life of the office. Most days, I briefly visit the staff to check red shiso inventory, to catch up and to admire the enormous piles of outgoing orders. Order fulfillment is their ship to steer, and they are doing a fantastic job. When the staff goddesses took charge of this, they began to innovate. This has been wonderful. They represent different generations and that is so helpful to the ongoing life of the business. They also enjoy technology in a way foreign to me and love to explore new options for everything. This year, for example, they found a mail program that everyone likes better than Pitney Bowes. It’s called Pirate Ship. After too many years of beating our head against the walls with Pitney Bowes, everyone enjoys the sass as well as ease of using a company called Pirate Ship.
As I consider 2023, I know we will continue to incorporate the innovations of the younger generations of staff goddesses, and I am grateful for all the ways they are helping me go with the flow. I am also glad that there is still room for me to write long meandering blogs for those who still like to read something longer than a meme. In this way, I so look forward to continuing to connect with you in 2023.
These last few weeks it’s been challenging to keep all the winter storms straight in my head. There have been storms that brought heavy snows. One delivered 20″ of wet snow overnight. Then there have been storms bringing a deluge of rain and flooding. There also have been wind storms. And like the rest of the country, the temperatures have gone up and down like a yoyo. Since these storms and dramatic weather shifts have piled up fast and furiously, it’s been hard to remember which storm brought which difficulty.
When I went to the grocery store last week in between major storms, shoppers in long holiday lines bantered about how many days they had been without power. The mood was humorous even giddy. People seemed to have abandoned their holiday expectations in favor of just rolling with it. Like so many of us in so many places, the crowd was going with the flow and not taking plans seriously. Everyone seemed happier and more relaxed than in holiday seasons past.
This was a good thing as by the next day, the lights were once more out across the region with everything shut down. We felt fortunate to have our woodstove to heats the house and to warm foods pulled from the freezer. We were especially glad for our stash of staff goddess Emily MacNamara’s enchilada sauce which she makes for her family’s farmstand in the summer. We try to be prepared for these situations, but the dogs were messing with our preparations. They plundered our pots of back up drinking water under the kitchen table which meant these pots got downgraded from potable to water available to flush toilets. Not to worry. There was always snow to melt and eat (just not the yellow snow).
Out in the gardens, the storms wreaked havoc. Trees broke, limbs broke and thick branches broke as the heavy snows bent and snapped garden shrubs and trees everywhere. The lilacs in particular took it on the chin, though things like our gorgeous smokebush were also flattened. A kind neighbor came and chainsawed the broken birch tree blocking our driveway. This left garden paths impassable with broken branches and the gardens in general a bewildering mess. For a day or two I just looked out the window and girded my loins for the clean up ahead.
When a big rain melted most of the snow, I took my handsaw out and began cutting down broken branches. First I tackled the Lilacs in the Arbor Garden, a garden which had already seen so much change in 2022. I hauled enormous limbs out into open space above the main vegetable. I did this until I realized I was just making another kind of mess to clean up.
Jim can’t take these branches to the bottom of our hayfield where they get composted. The whole field is icy from one of the rain storms. He could get the truck down there on some sort of wild sleigh ride, but he wouldn’t get it back up the hill and back to the driveway…… until maybe April. Finally I threw in my hand saw and accepted I have to just wait for spring to clean up the mess.
I had wanted to clean up so I could get a sense of exactly how different the gardens will be in the spring. Now I must let go of that need to know and rest in remembering how resilient living things are in this part of the world. All these shrubs and trees will recovery and grow back. It may take a few seasons, but it will happen.
As I considered this, it made me remember why this is a great climate for growing Flowers and making Flower Essences. Consider the Lilacs. The Lilac Flower Essence we make is vibrant and strong because the Lilacs here, all twenty or thirty varieties, have to be really tough to handle the weather. Broken branches won’t stop them from sending up new shoots next spring which will rapidly become flowering branches.
I take comfort in the fact that extreme weather is one reasons our Flower Essences are so high in vibration. Weak plants just don’t make it around here, only the really resilient and determined ones do, and this translates into Flower Essences that carrying the wisdom of their Flowers and also their great strength, life force, resilience, determination and desire to live and thrive.
I have sometimes wondered why it was here on this land in this climate of so much extreme weather that I was meant to make Green Hope Farm Flower Essences, but these storms remind me why. And when this insight isn’t quite enough to make me completely delighted with our long and gnarly winters of daily wind, snow, ice and cold, I can always pull up closer to our woodstove and leaf through seed catalogues.
Even now as the winds howl, it’s time to start designing the new year’s gardens to plant. Somehow I know the newly “pruned” gardens and all their Flowers will be wonderful and brimming with life force. And I will get to be back in them, free of crampons and barefoot instead, happily making Flower Essences from their abundant blossoms.
In the meantime, Sheba supervises the damage with her usual panache.
One of the joys of working with Flower Essences is watching how children and animals embrace their gifts.
It has been my experience that children approach Flower Essences with enthusiasm, delight and confidence in Flower Esssences and in their ability to make the most of them.
Children like it when someone spritzes them with a mix of Flower Essences. They will dance around under the spray with joyful abandon. They also love it when they are set loose to make their own Flower Essence mix in their own bottle. They will select and mix Flower Essences with focus and clarity as if they have been making mixes from the beginning of time.
From babyhood, children will seek out Flower Essences when they feel in need. One of my children’s first words was “flower.” As a small toddler, Emily would say “flower” then open her mouth like a baby bird to receive drops of Flower Essences in her mouth. Now her children, nieces and nephews also reach for the Essences as do many visiting children.
Here Emily is using her skills as a second grade teacher to entertain the troops.
It is such fun when a new child visits, looks over our inventory of Flower Essences and then judiciously choses bottles. Children can read the energy of Flower Essences way before they can read their labels. If given a chance, they will flawlessly choose Flower Essences that address whatever is going on with them. I’ve seen so many children confidently choose what they need without a moment’s doubt. I have also gotten to read your many letters about children in your lives and how they use Flower Essences. We treasure all your stories.
I also remember so many instances when Flower Essences brought an immediate and noticeable shift in a child. Children’s work with Flower Essences is inspiring and aspirational. They don’t let ideas of limitation bog them down but recognize what the Flowers offer and embrace this fully.
Animals also approach Flower Essences with an attitude which both indicates they recognize the gifts of Flower Essences, and also that they know they deserve these gifts. Like children, they don’t limit their availability to the gifts of Flower Essences but soak them in fully.
Yes, I have witnessed sniffy cats who have to get used to the gifts of Flower Essences before cozying up to them, but in the vast majority of situations, cats, like other animals, make full use of the Flower Essences that they are offered. Animals recognize Flower Essences as healing energies they would have found in Nature if they were given full range to roam. When presented with these energies in a bottle form, they delight in their arrival.
Rescue animals sometimes take to Flower Essences differently than other animals because the damage done them by the human community has hurt their sense of the unlimited and supportive nature of life. This is one reason I am so grateful that so many of you and so many rescue organizations use our Flower Essences especially Abandonment & Abuse as over time, the shackles of these bindings can be dissolved and these dear ones can find a trusting relationship with life and with people again.
We do much work with the Global Sanctuary for Elephants in Brazil, and it is one of so many projects that bring us to tears of joy as these dear elephants find their true nature again after lifetimes of incarceration.
To come at this idea of moving from limitation to the unlimited, I want to talk about a book I reread and reread. The book is Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher. I reread the book during December each year and try to finish it by the actual Solstice. I have probably read it twenty times and practically know it by heart, but I have no intention of stopping.
I have no other book that calls to me in quite the same way, and I spend a lot of time wondering what possesses me to reread this book year after year.
My current theory is that it has to do with this topic of limits. I love all of Rosamunde Pilcher’s books including her best known Shell Seekers, but I believe this is her wisest book. There is no plot synopsis that could do the book justice, but I offer a short one anyways. The book is about a group of people who unexpectedly find themselves staying in the same house in Scotland during the cold, dark month of December. Some are related and others are strangers. Each person in the book has experienced a shattering blow in their lives. Rosamunde doesn’t belabor this nor do the characters. but each of them must find great inner strength and courage to rise above their personal pain to take care of each other during this unexpected house party. My description may make this book sound trite and maybe a bit grim, but it’s not. The story is told through all the different characters perspective, and the reader falls in love with each of them. Some characters even fall in love with each other, but unlike many of her books (all of which I love), other kinds of love join romantic love in this story.
The characters are plucky and don’t take themselves too seriously. They acknowledge their wounds but try to get on with it using humor as one of their survival tools. Rosamunde always has wonderfully irritating minor characters who do their best to selfishly ruin everything, but in this book these characters are dealt with and move offstage. The people gathered are flawed but trying to accept their fates with grace and selflessness. Again, this sounds BORING but it’s not.
As I dive into Winter Solstice again this year, I have been thinking how each character in the book has been given problems that could limit their outlook and approach to their unexpected new lives. They could rest in bitterness and even justify their bitterness because they have all been through the wringer. However, the difficulties they see each other facing bring out their desire to rise above their own situations and become a sort of unlimited version of themselves. Life has tested their faith and they have consciously decided to embrace life anyways.
I have made this sound much more obvious and reductive than the story actually is. Rosamunde is at her most subtle here, which may be why I have had to read the book twenty times to even begin to have theories about what makes this a magical book.
In any case, Winter Solstice inspires me just as the beloved children and animals do to not get so tied to what I think of as limits in my life or in “reality” or in my view of humanity and just know we all can and will rise above our limits to be more full of love than we ever imagined.
I don’t know about your household, but here at the farm this week’s focus is on turkeystuffingmashed potatoesgreen beansgravypumpkin piefootball soccer.
Most of those who will attend out Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday grew up with a soccer ball at their feet and for the entire crowd, soccer is the beautiful game and the odd timing of the World Cup during Thanksgiving week, a beautiful thing.
At the meal itself, I expect to walk on eggshells as I desperately search for benign topics to talk about. The flash points will not be politics but people’s deep and abiding affection for different soccer players. The Thanksgiving attendees watch a lot of premiership soccer, and all these soccer players have now scattered to the winds to play for the country they sometimes seem to have been born in. This leaves me 100 % confused about Thanksgiving attendees loyalties and 100% confident I will annoy everyone by liking the wrong player or the wrong team.
Will it even be safe to say, “How about that American squad?” Probably not because the USA team messed up their chances to get out of the group stage yesterday by earning a tie with Wales. And speaking of Wales, as I watched the game with some family members yesterday, I blurted out a comment about loving the Welch singing in the stands. Not a good moment. This is just the sort of annoying thing I am likely to do.
Perhaps my Thanksgiving should involve a vow of silence in order to avoid ruffling feathers. One thing is for certain, I will lighten things up with my usual “go to” of a Custom Flower Essence mix to spritz.
All attendees will get spritzed as they enter the stadium house. Seriously spritzed. The spritz will be heavy on Anxiety, the Letting Go Flower, Don’t Worry-Bee Happy, Arbor Garden, Indian Pipe, Fairy Rose, Grounding, Eyes of Mary and Gorse. We will need all the perspective, calm, peace, detachment, and humor possible because describing the Thanksgiving attendees as soccer fans is a cosmic understatement putting it mildly. This is a group in orbit passionate about the game.
Let’s just hope the spritz helps remind them soccer is a GAME (I swear I heard a voice shouting Soccer is Life as I typed that!).
But back to the Flower Essence spritz. As they always do, the little people in the crowd will dance around under the mist loving the spriz. The older ones will navigate through the Flower Essence mist without comment. Partly this is because they’ve experienced my spritzing for thirty five years and partly this will be because they will be DISTRACTED and not by the excellent cranberry sauce or pumpkin bread.
They will be concentrating on the day’s games which on Thanksgiving Day includes a 5 am tip between Switzerland and Cameroon, an 8 am tip between South Korea and Uruguay, an 11 am tip between Portugal and Ghana and a 2 pm tip between Brazil and Serbia. But I suspect the Thanksgiving day conversational fretting focus will not be on these games. Instead the gathered crowd will be doing the math about Friday’s game of USA vs England.
As I mentioned, the attendees watch a lot of the premiership games so they know a great many of the World Cup players. They love the English team. Frankly they know and love a lot of the teams, but still, the USA team will be messing with their heads absorbing their attention as they endlessly ponder, “Can the US overcome its heartbreaking tie with Wales yesterday to move out of the early rounds?”
Being the person responsible for four hundred forty of the last forty three Thanksgivings, I have my own reasons for spritzing with a mix that will help me detach and let go. I know what is involved in getting this feast to the table. I know how much advance prep and thought is required not to mention elbow grease. And this year for the second year in a row, I am not in charge.
Three serious soccer fans are responsible for the meal, and I am only in charge of the mashed potatoes. This is a needed refreshing and appreciated change for me. Let’s just hope I can really let go, because before this trio brings the meal to the table there will be 12 more World Cup soccer matches to divert them. Knowing how distracted this may make them, it will take my complete focus to NOT do any backseat cooking.
Yesterday I failed miserably at not interfering. I texted the three pillars of the meal- Ben ( lifelong soccer player and serious soccer fanatic ) Charlie ( lifelong soccer player and serious soccer fanatic ) and Emily ( lifelong soccer player and serious soccer fanatic ) to see if they “needed anything at the grocery store.” I am nothing if not obvious in my backseat cooking.
The trio is a group who keep their phones close so as to chime in immediately if someone shares a timely meme or gif on a group thread. The eight hours of radio silence led me to suspect know that the trio was watching glued to England vs Iran then Senegal vs Netherlands then Wales vs USA and also studiously avoiding my desperate bid to do some backseat cooking.
Radio Silence. It’s a special and rare thing in this era of cell phones. I should have enjoyed it. Instead I wondered if they knew exactly how limp the green beans on offer at the grocery store were and whether they had found better or were even thinking about green beans.
Frankly, after the USA vs Wales game I didn’t mind that no one was answering my texts. I knew they all needed to bounce back from the tie in their own ways. For me it was a wander through the produce aisle at the packed supermarket wondering if the chefs in charge of our Thanksgiving even CARED about green beans.
Hopefully today’s tips with Argentina vs Saudi Arabia at 5 am today Denmark vs Tunisia at 8 am, Mexico vs Poland at 11 am and France vs Australia at 2 pm will help them all get focused on the task ahead and take my mind of the green beans.
My confidence in the above statement has just been shattered. Its 6 am as I type, and I have already been informed the 5 am game is in CRISIS as Argentina is behind. This, I was told, is a serious problem because they all LOVE Lionel Messe. Apparently more than green beans.
Yup. I need to let go. On Thanksgiving day, I vow to join the grandchildren on the floor with the puppets, matchbox cars and play food and leave the cooks to their kitchen tasks. At worst we will have a meal of mashed potatoes. I will not care about the meal and if it contains green beans. If soccer is just a GAME then I need to remember that Thanksgiving dinner is only a MEAL. It’s the faces around the table that count and hopefully at least for a few moments they won’t be stewing about a thirty two polygon sided ball.
Fall has lingered here. Garden tasks are done, yet the gardens are still warm and inviting. Bulbs are planted (and eaten by the rampaging squirrels). Flower beds are tidied. The vegetable gardens are mulched with their winter coat of hay. In a region where fall often is a short season abruptly ending with the arrival of snow, this year is different. Each day I sit in the gardens and rest in the soft light and palette of still vibrant colors.
The word “becalmed” keeps coming to me as I simply sit
(sometimes knitting and sometimes not). According to the dictionary “becalmed”
means “(a sailing vessel) left
unable to move through lack of wind.” As
far as sailing goes, this sounds dire, yet the more I think about this word,
the more I wonder about its broader meaning.
Is being becalmed always a bad thing? There in the very word be-calmed
is the suggestion that to be becalmed can be a good thing too, bringing a state
of inner calm.
Rest is built into Nature.
Our long fall of good weather has provided me a chance to just be in the
gardens without a task list, but this time of year would bring rest even if the
weather was colder. In November, the growing season is over, and at least for
me, that means time to rest and let go and wait for the dream of the next
growing season to be born after the Winter Solstice.
Rest has taken on particular significance for me this fall. I have been inspired to rest more as a revolutionary practice after hearing Tricia Hersey, author of Rest is Resistance- A Manifesto, talk about the power of rest.
Hersey illuminates the truth that our system of
capitalism/patriarchy treats humans as machines bent to the wheel of profits
for a select few. Her lived belief is
that if each of us take back our sovereignty through the radical act of rest,
the whole system of exploitation and overwork will dissolve away, one nap at a
time.
Hearing Tricia galvanized me to rest more, but it also got me thinking about all the times in my life when rest has been transformative. Rest has always deepened my connection to our collective bigger self, and it’s often been a game changer in my life.
In case you are new to this blog, I continue by noting that my family of origin was a patriarchy with a capital P. This meant no one in the family believed in the power of rest. The primary patriarch, my maternal grandfather, wrote a book on the origins of French mercantilism/capitalism in the 16th century. This meant capitalism as the economic system of patriarchy was the mountain he lived and died on, and he expected us to die on it too. The family slogan was, “Work ‘til the work is done,” a grim even dangerous motto. No one questioned the legitimacy of this ethos, so family members either worked themselves to death or broke down in total exhaustion, depression, illness, unhappiness or addiction.
One therapist described our clan as a group of people all rowing very, very hard in a boat without the slightest clue where we were going. Throughout my childhood, human train wrecks happened in slow motion all around me, but no one examined why. We just kept rowing and rowing and rowing. Regardless of the pain patriarchy caused us, the climate remained one of endless criticism about not doing enough or not doing it well enough. In lonely isolation we each labored to become something, never resting in the truth of our innate wholeness or in the fullness of just being.
The woods, fields and waterways around my childhood home were the release valve from the crushing values of my home life. Nature was the saving grace in my life, but at home it was all about the patriarchal values of productivity, accomplishment, goal orientation and doing everything “perfectly.”
In musing about rest and committing myself more deeply to it, I recall how resting with two broken arms brought me to a new understanding of my wholeness. I also realize how all the built in naps and quiet times of rest with little children helped me birth Green Hope Farm and my calling with Flowers. I credit the rest, quiet, naps and the very slow pace of life with little people as giving me a spacious inner landscape to dream the dream of Green Hope Farm. In rest I found my passion for Flowers and the spiritual path.
One of my first transformative experiences with rest happened in college. My patriarchal grandfather paid for my college, and he expected perfect grades from me in exchange for his “gift.” During my freshman year, I studied night and day, yet my grandfather found my freshman grades unacceptable. They were truly the best I could do when living by his rules of constant, joyless studying, but they were not perfect as he demanded. Sad, angry, defiant and determined to just be me, I began my sophomore year with a different plant. I would stop chasing good grades. In fact I would stop studying. Instead, I decided to rest.
I did the required reading and went to class but then, before any exam, I would move my bed into the center of my dorm room and just lie there, becalmed. Once in the exam, I would turn over the exam to a part of my being that experienced its interconnection to all things and let that consciousness write the exam. My childhood time in Nature had given me a capacity to go into this consciousness and now it became my way to navigate college.
Not only did rest positively transform my daily life as a student, but the more I rested the better things went. This didn’t really surprise me as the stuff I was writing wasn’t from my limited consciousness.
As I rested and relaxed into this bigger consciousness more and more, I realized none of us needed to feel alone as separate test takers or separate isolated learners. The greater self we all share is ever there offering the support and insights we need. Rest and letting go were the doorways into this place of wholeness and expansiveness. All we had to do is stop listening to patriarchy and lie down and nap.
Rest made me aware there were plenty of ideas and as they moved through me, I didn’t need to claim ownership of them to feel like enough. It never felt like a less than experience to not see them as mine. Ideas were their own pleasure and didn’t need to be owned. I didn’t really care about the focus on ownership as I felt more whole and content listening to this bigger consciousness than I had ever felt leaning on “my own resources.”
My new approach to being a student threw patriarchy into the garbage pail. Patriarchy is built on the illusion of scarcity. It exhorts us to compete for limited resources against each other, yet here I was experiencing that we were all part of the same consciousness so all divisions were false, all ideas were shared and academic or any other kind of competition was like the left hand slapping the right hand.
This was just the beginning of many skirmishes with patriarchy. Another came much later when I began Green Hope Farm.
Out of enthusiasm, love and rest was born the business of Green Hope Farm, but business was a territory held by patriarchs and even in my tiny town, they didn’t welcome outside the box thinking. This meant that patriarchs who got wind of my tiny business seemed intent on caging me in with their rigid constructs or thresholds guardian of fear. Anything to stop me in my tracks.
Massive amounts of unsolicited patriarchal advice flowed my way the second I sold my first bottle of Flower Essences. One retired executive pinned me down at a party to drill me on something called the 80/20 rule and berate me that I had no business plan. I wanted to tell him I was lucky if I got the week’s grocery list written down on paper let alone a business plan. He leaned into me with questions like what were my short and long term goals? Ummmm. Grow more Flowers? Get the kids to school before I packed the day’s orders? Savor the fun of sharing Flower Essences with people and animals? Keep the cat from knocking over bottles of Flower Essences every day?
Thank goodness for my years being in the garden with children, the Angels and Elementals. As the patriarchs told me over and over again how little I knew and how screwed I was because of this, I listened instead to the ever peaceful and calm Angels and Elementals. They had been my partners in creating the gardens in the first place, so they were my partners of choice in this business too. With their input, we set the template of the business that broke with patriarchy. This group of advisors also solved problems for me before I even knew they were problems. They also respected my body and supported a humane and restful way to do business.
Not only did my advisors frequently speak to me about REST, but they built rest into the whole organization. We began our work days with meditation. Each day we would meditate for as long as we wanted, and this helped our work flow immeasurably. Our daily and weekly schedule was never a worldy one but one that was gentler and shorter. We ended our days at three or four because most of us had small children. If a staff goddesses needed to leave early or take time off for themselves or a child, it was not a problem. On Fridays, the office was closed. The Angels insisted we needed this time out from the pressures of the work week and the pressures of the modern weekend. How right they were, and how grateful I am that the Angels built rest into the very bones of the business. It made all the difference in how we moved through the next thirty five years.
Well I could yammer on and on about rest, but maybe that’s enough for now and I will just add, Long live REST!
I conclude this blog with some Flower Essence suggestions that support us to rest, help us dissolve the grip patriarchy has on us and sink us into experiences of our wholeness. Flower Essences and the occasional big drama like my broken arms have helped me keep focused on the reality of my wholeness and the ability of rest to remind me of this wholeness. Flower Essences have also helped me with the ongoing task of dismantling patriarchy and my inner patriarch (a.k.a. Goodbye Grandpa).
Patriarchal values reflect a values system based on ideas of
productivity, goal orientation, intellectual excellence and spiritual
perfection at the expense of being human with the underlying false belief that
we are not born perfect but must make ourselves perfect.
The suggestions given for dismantling patriarchy are:
As a community of Flowers, Angels, Nature Spirits, Dogs, Cats and even some People, Green Hope Farm can be a funny place……and I love telling you all about it!
