After a string of warm days melted most of our snow and just when it looked like we were going to reclaim the lovely green and brown earth for good, we got another really big snow. The one good thing about massive quantities of snow in late March is that it leaves lots of time for knitting (because frankly I can drum up no enthusiasm for actual outdoor winter activities at this point other than walks up and down the road with the dogs).

The first fifth grade afghan got finished with a two color border. More importantly it got road tested. Bella settled right in only to be moved off by MayMay who felt she had the right to test it for a twelve hour night shift.

With this rigorous testing process behind it, the afghan went back to where it all began, the fifth grade classroom at the Plainfield school. Now it’s time for assembling number two afghan. With high temperatures in the twenties today and a predicted fifteen below tonight, the snow won’t be melting, the sap won’t be running, the earth won’t be appearing and I will get a lot done on the next afghan (which I might add is going to be another beauty!).

Heather tells me it’s a good thing that the assembly line is moving along because the fifth graders are still knitting! Yahoooooo!

Here is but one shot of some of the beautifully knitted and downright gorgeous squares created by the two fifth grade classes of the Plainfield school. Their squares are piling up as the fifth graders continue to knit every spare moment. Already we have enough squares for at least three or four afghans with more in the works. I am so impressed by the quality and quantity of squares knitted by these hard working fifth graders.

As you may recall from an earlier blog, the fifth graders read a book about a girl their age struggling to survive in modern day Afghanistan. When they heard about a project called “Afghans for Afghans” in which hand knit wool blankets are sent to families in Afghanistan, they ALL learned to knit and began to amass an enormous collection of hand knit squares for afghan families.

The last couple of afternoons Heather Gallagher, their teacher, and I have begun to piece all the squares together.

First we take similar sized squares and knit them together into one long strip and then we knit the strips together into one big blanket. We hope to knit an edge on each afghan to finish them off, but so far we are just piecing the squares together.

Here is the first assembled afghan with loose ends not knit into the blanket yet and seam side up.

Fortunately Mrs. Gallagher has the toes for this work. And to keep it fresh, yesterday I dragged her out to collect sap in between sections of afghans.

Here Heather is checking the buckets on one of the grandmother maples we tap while Lizzy empties a bucket of sap into our 125 gallon holding tank. Yesterday was our first boil. Usually we are a third if not a half done our syruping season by now, but since we had the warmest December on record followed by the warmest January on record followed by the coldest February on record followed by the coldest March days on record, is it any wonder the trees are reluctant to get started?

Yesterday was suddenly in the fifties. We found ourselves full tilt into mud season, with the snow piles receding like fast action photography, the roads a wild mess of muddy ruts, and the birds and people singing about spring.

Before Ben left on a two week school trip to Costa Rica, he brought us an upgrade on our extremely low tech boiling pan. “Your going to love it” he called out to us as off loaded the new pan and jetted off to Yessenia’s hometown with nothing but flip flops, a few pairs of shorts, and a grin on his face.

Here is the new set up in action, after a couple days of effort to get it on line. The new set up is a pan divided into three long channels with a sap pre-heating pan on top. The pre warmed sap drips into one side of the boiling pan without affecting the temperature on the other side because the sap must go up and down and up the pan through these channels to get to the other side. The pan is set on a barrel cut especially to hold the pan with the firebox inside this barrel. Our former system was a big open pan set on cinderblocks with a fire on the ground underneath. A lot of the heat got lost on its way to the bottom of the old pan and sap coming into the pan cooled the whole pan down.

PLEASE ADMIRE COPPER VALVE ON RIGHT SIDE OF PAN ABOVE AND ON LEFT SIDE OF WARMING PAN BELOW

As Ben departed for Costa Rica, only Jim focused on Ben’s comment there was “some assembly required.” Before use, the pre warming pan and the main pan both needed to have valves plumbed onto them so that we could regulate adding sap to the boiling pans and regulate pouring off nearly finished sap from the big pan. The stovepipe hole in the barrel proved not to be the right size for the piping so that also proved a bit of a fiddle.

I knit but I do not plumb, so this work had to be done by Jim. In a now famous Sheehan family dynamic, the ideas person ( usually me, but in this case Ben) wildly underestimates how long it will take to translate “Let’s put in an orchard” into actual fruit bearing trees or “Let’s get a new syrup pan online” into actual finished syrup. I consistently underestimate how long things will take as opposed to Jim who usually can predict so accurately that it is postively scary. Nowadays, if someone ( me, Ben, or Jim’s brother) suggest we need a new storage shed, someone else immediately riffs ” We should be able to slap that puppy up this afternoon.” And then of course, when the laughter has slowed, Jim gives us the accurate timeframe for our project, an assessment which usually snaps us out of our delusions of grandeur.

However this time, the sap was running and that puppy HAD to be slapped up that afternoon……. So long suffering Jim spent most of Sunday bringing the new boiling pan online. What with two trips to the hardware store, a crappy new butane torch, and an expedition to the town sheds to get sand to fill the bottom of the barrel because we had no fire bricks, it took, well, as long as Jim thought it would take.

Fortunately Ben was in mid flight over Mexico so it was not wearing heavily on him. And me, the underwriter of this whole venture? I was thinking how to say thanks. I came up with a plan, a simple plan, one that I can actually implement myself.

Jim will need, no he will DESERVE the season’s first syrup, maybe on a nice stack of pancakes. And if I boil all day today, a pitcher of nice hot syrup for his pancakes should be a realistic goal, and that’s not just the ideas person in me talking!

As with all the mixes born here, this one was not created in a vacuum. The support you asked for, your stories, and what I was trying to figure out in my own life created a synchronicity of events that suggested it was time for a new mix. When I asked the upstairs staff if this was so, they kicked in immediately with this mix to support us.

I love your stories and I am lucky to hear a lot of them. Right now, many of your stories hold a common thread revealing a common struggle a lot of us are having. Right now, many of you describe feeling deeply tired of your ideas about life. It isn’t that you are tired with your life, but you are tired of your approach to your life and your view of your life.

You note that your ideas feel like confining thought loops that cut you off from genuine experience. The specifics thought loops leaving you exhausted and numb are deeply varied. Many of you describe being weary of ideas about how much you have to do to feel like enough. Many are weary of a belief system that leaves you feeling anxious and afraid. Others of you are tired with your ideas about what success looks like. Some of you want to be done with the pervasive notion that you must rush yourselves through life as if it is a race to the finish. Others mention being weary of patterns of relentlessly judging both your own and other peoples’ confusions and decisions with a values system that no longer feels right. You describe being sick of shoulds built on convictions and opinions that feel claustrophobic and limiting. I hear a collective weariness with the limitations of our own points of view and the ways we each respond from within these views.

One commonality in your stories is the depths of your weariness with long held core beliefs that suddenly feel wrong. You describe a wrenching emotional process to own these feelings of discomfort with long held ideas. You recognize these long held ideas are constricting, even claustrophobic filters keeping out the world and narrowing your experience of life. They are inhibiting your ability to see and binding you from genuine experiences of being here now. You agree it is discard time, but how?

At first I considered each confining thought pattern you mentioned and offered specific Flower Essence suggestions for the specific binding. As I heard a flood of stories about this pervasive weariness with old frames of reference, I realized it was the whole pattern of holding onto thoughts as right, true, or important that is the gist of the difficulty. Yes, it was important to support the release of specific ideas with specific Flower Essences, but it also felt important to support the dynamic of releasing long held beliefs in general. This is really what Carry Less is about.

A few years ago, in the middle of some difficulty, the Angels told me that I needed to decide between picking through my trash as I threw it overboard or simply throwing it ALL overboard. Ah yes, what a habit us humans have made of holding onto our garbage. But lately there seems to be a collective desire to throw it all overboard in one swift motion. And without sorting! This remedy will help us with this process of efficiently dumping it all, hence the Angels’ name for this remedy, Carry Less.

My habits of picking over the garbage on its way to the dumpster leaves me wondering why this dumping feels so necessary right now. I really don’t know, but it appears to be a pressing need. So many of you have connected with us to speak of uncovering core ideas that are strangling the lifeblood out of you and your lives right now. Perhaps the rising vibration of this beautiful planet makes thoughts that might have fit our lives not very long ago feel downright uncomfortable now. Perhaps there is an entirely different reason why so many feel an urgent need to let go of their burdensome ideas right now. All I know for certain is that the discomfort felt by so many of us galvanized me to want to make a new mix and when I went to ask the Angels what to include in the mix, I was given the formula for Carry Less with a clarity and speed that made it apparent that this remedy’s time was now.

CARRY LESS AND SANSKARA RELEASE
Sanskara is a word used to describe these filters clouding our experience of reality, the filters that Carry Less offers support to unbind and release.

Sanskaras are imprints left on the subconscious mind by experiences from this or previous lives. They influence our nature, behavior, responses, state of mind, and experience of life. According to Meher Baba, sanskaras are impressions or trace memories accumulated through evolution and over the course of the evolution of consciousness in human reincarnations. They are not a substance nor a force or energy but are best understood in more psychological terms. For Meher Baba, consciousness, not matter or energy, is the intrinsic substance of reality. Thus sanskaras, as the smallest building blocks of consciousness, could be described as ways of experiencing.

By their very nature sanskaras narrow our ability to experience fully, being themselves a kind of filter limiting full perception. It is not that sanskaras limit reality so much as they limit our experience of reality.

This is because sanskaras, once acquired and accumulated, form a sort of multilayered lens through which we perceive our experiences. They are filters that block us from experiencing what really IS in this now. Sanskaras are useful in that they create a bridge to consciousness, but then they serve no further purpose. They are actually a hindrance to full consciousness and God realization. The goal for humans is to be rid of our sanskaras through a process of unwinding them from our consciousnesses. Life experiences can unwind sanskaras as does contact with perfect God realized teachers, but often life experiences add, rather than remove, sanskaras.

FLOWER ESSENCES AND SANSKARAS
Flower Essences unwind sanskaras. By their very nature they ARE about sanskara release. While so many things and experiences clutter our consciousness with more obscuring data, creating more sanskaras, Essences unburden us and set us on a course to simply BE. Each Flower Essence supports a release of a specific illusion or sanskara. Each release moves us towards an experience of self beyond bindings.

Over the years we have created combination mixes that pool the gifts of many Flower Essences to unbind certain bigger sanskaric themes. For example, your requests for and my need for a remedy that would help unbind us from illusions of tribe and family led to the creation of the family river trio of Bloodroot, Black Currant and Borage. Your requests and my desire to disentangle myself from counter productive bindings to other people, and find freedom from concern about the opinions of others or even the opinions of myself led to the creation of our mix All Ego Contracts Null & Void.

The need to unbind and release emotional scars led to the creation of Abandonment & Abuse. Many of the combination remedies of the Animal Wellness collection as well as the other combination remedies were created to support the unbinding of specific groups of sanskaras.

Fro example, each Venus Garden concerns itself with a shedding of a group of sanskaras. From the first Eight Garden that helped us shed sanskaras about what could be healed to the latest, Don’t Worry Be Happy, that helps free us from the illusion that worry not happiness should be our daily fare, all of the Venus Garden Essences have supported our pursuit of freedom from filters, illusions, in a word, sanskaras.

Carry Less supports the whole dynamic of sanskara release. It helps expedite this release process much like a bowl might make mixing a batch of ingredients together easier or the right tool for the job might make a repair go much faster. Carry Less helps you make the most of the support you are receiving to let go of sanskaras into a greatly expanded experience of self.

I AM my true self revealed

Alfalfa, Batchelor Buttons, Bay Cedar, Bee Balm, Box Briar, Box Elder (Ashleaf Maple), Comfrey, Coralita, Daffodil, Easter Lily Vine, Eyes of Mary, Flowering Quince, Flow Free, Grape, Joe Pye Weed, Lily of the Valley, Love in a Mist, Meadow Rue, Mehera, Orange , Osmanthus, Paper Birch, Pavonia Spinifex, Pink Water Lily, Pumpkin, Purple Leafed Chokecherry, Rosa Glauca, Ruby Moon Hyacinth Bean, Scarlet Pimpernel, Spiderwort, Turk’s Cap Cactus, White Water Lily, Wild Yellow Lily, Yellow Mullein,Yellow Water Lily

The Angels suggested I start our seeds for the season a month earlier than usual. This sounded reasonable during December when we were having 63 degree afternoons and all the crocuses were about to bloom. Now that there is three feet of snow on the ground, it’s a bit more of a stretch of the imagination to think we’ll have an early spring. None the less, I did start a bunch of seeds.

I have flashed you a picture of the flat of tomatoes mid sowing. We grow a lot of different tomatoes in a staggering variety of colors. I did pass on last year’s white tomato variety aptly named “Cream Sausage.” It really looked as unappealing as the name. Frankly, none of us got past the appearance of this tomato enough to even notice if it tasted any good. This year we will just have to suffer through with only purple, pink, yellow, orange, green, striped, and red tomatoes to harvest.

No sooner had I made the most enormous mess in the kitchen sowing all these seeds when our water pump died. I had to melt snow on the stove in order to finish the project and then melt some more to flush the toilets, and clean up all the oil mix everywhere. It is amazing how fast things get complicated without running water.

Because our greenhouse is already full of tropical Flowers, I start the seeds on heating mats outside the greenhouse and then move the tropical plants into the house as I move the flats of germinated plants into the greenhouse. By the time the greenhouse is packed full of seedlings in April and May, the rest of the house and office is full of tropical plants pining for their greenhouse. When summer comes, everyone goes outside and recovers from less than ideal conditions. Another greenhouse remains a project on the horizon.

Speaking of projects, we tapped the maple trees last Sunday. The sap didn’t run much this week, but we went out yesterday to collect what was there and stomp down paths to our buckets. Where the plow had piled snow it was not unusual to sink in almost to our hips. After entirely too much time indoors this winter I am completely thrilled to be outside with something to do! Yahoo for sugaring!

I am not much of a rules girl. For all the fact that I grew up in a family with so many iron clad rules that members of the clan saw it as a call to arms if someone suggested using a different brand of mayonnaise than Hellman’s, well the graft didn’t take very well.

And when I threw off the family rules in a smooth twenty five forty fifty year ongoing process of soul searching, tears, journal writing, manure shoveling, and messy choices, I did my best to throw off the idea of rules in any form as well. I am not talking “its okay to steal a car because I want to” sort of break out from rules. I am just saying that my only way forward to escape the tyranny of my family’s rules was to learn to trust my own heart over their rules and this led to trusting my heart over other people’s rules as well.

Once you conquer the big enchilada of throwing off tribal rules, it’s downhill from there and a natural progression to trust your own heart’s voice over the voice of anyone else.

And one more caveat before today’s growl about one rule in particular. It’s not that I don’t learn from other people’s ideas, because I do or that I don’t like groups, because that’s not true either. It’s just that I prefer groups brought together by love or curiosity. I just am not crazy about groups brought together by rules, such as ideological groups that want to impose their rules on everyone in the group and everyone else besides.

This reluctance to be a rules girl with family rules or any other set of rules set me up well for my life and work with Flower Essences because as far as I am concerned FLOWER ESSENCES ARE NOT ABOUT RULES!

Hence begins today’s growl.

On Monday, I got an email from a lovely woman who is teaching a series of classes about Flower Essences to a gathering of healers in Georgia. Those gathered wondered why some companies had iron clad rules about how many Flower Essences to work with at a time and she wondered what I thought about this. She also wondered if the fact that Green Hope Farm literature said the more Flower Essences the merrier while other literature from other lines said just three or just seven reflected a difference in strength.

When Janice’s email arrived, I was in a bit of an ornery mood due to all my technology learning lessons so when I answered her I wasn’t perhaps as politic as I sometimes am. The bottom line, and this is what I told her, is that this “too much” rule is my biggest bone to pick with information presented about Flower Essences by other people.

THIS KIND OF RULE, make that ANY KIND OF RULE, about how to work with Flower Essences is UNNECESSARY and COUNTERPRODUCTIVE!

If we were talking about dosages of weapons grade plutonium or even a chemical remedy like aspirin, rules would be vital. But FLOWER ESSENCES ARE NOT CHEMICAL! FLOWER ESSENCES ARE INFORMATION!

In truth, I simply do not understand why people continue to SCARE people about Flower Essences with this illusionary idea about “too much.”

Yes, I am a broken record about this, but it bears saying again and again. Flower Essences are vibrational information. They are something your electrical system reads then decides for itself whether to use the pertinent guidance. Any change made after working with Flower Essences is a change your electrical system initiates. Flower Essences do nothing. They can only offer your electrical system possible solutions to it’s difficulties.

They are not chemicals imposed upon your body chemistry like all the Febreeze being sprayed around America. They are information offered to your electrical system in a completely “take it or leave it manner.” Your electrical system decides what to do with the information of Flower Essences. Yes, your wise, life affirming, health seeking, electrical system makes its OWN decisions about what to do with the data of Flower Essences.

The same could not be said of a close encounter with Febreeze.

Okay, so I am also having a moment of growling about Febreeze too, but isn’t anyone else worried that if the EPA says that 80-90% of human cancer is caused by exposure to toxins in our environment, then maybe it’s not such a hot idea to spray so many toxic chemicals about the house?

This makes the fear mongering about a product made from a member of the mint family, vinegar, water and the electrical pattern of a Flower and one that doesn’t have to be ingested to share its helpful information all the more bizarre.

Here is my email to the lovely woman in Georgia,

“This is how I have come to explain WHY I DISAGREE with the old guard; All day long we are exposed to good, bad, and indifferent electrical information in people, places, things, nature.

For example, as we pass people on the street we get exposed to a lot of the information of their electrical system and often we read all this data even as we just walk by them. This is because we are always on a search for good data for our electrical system to learn from. WHY? Because our electrical system is wired to seek upgrades, improvements, and better health. Our electrical systems want to read and learn from everything we are exposed to.

THEREFORE on any given day, we read a lot of electrical information. In fact, this is the primary way we learn. The Angels often remind me that 75 % of what happens in any situation is an exchange of vibrational data done silently. For example, a spiritual teacher with a great vibration can read the phone book to an audience and the audience can learn a lot. Whereas a spiritual teacher with a low vibration could read the wisdom of the ages and not as much would get accomplished as with the telephone book exchange.

Flower Essences are excellent, high vibration spiritual teachers! When we choose to work with Flower Essences we are self selecting GOOD electrical data. We are setting ourselves up to read good and possibly extremely helpful information for our health and spiritual wellbeing.

I have NEVER had an Angel say that a lot of good electrical information is TOO MUCH. I also have never experienced that in myself or with someone using a lot of Flower Essences. NEVER!

If we were unable to process tons of electrical data each day of all kinds we would have to live in isolation from community. We actually would not be able to be in a body!

I have never understood people creating fear in others about working with many Flower Essences and all their good data at once. Frankly, I think the times call for it and our electrical systems are up to it.

And as far as whether other companies Flower Essences are “stronger.” I am sure people can answer that question for themselves! Our bodies know what we hanker to tune into and learn from! I need make no comment here for the truth of this to be self evident. I trust each person working with Essences to KNOW the answer to this for themselves!

The whole discussion is a RED HERRING that I simply do not understand people sticking with!

Sorry to be so heated but you can well imagine how often I have to work to dismantle this idea in the world!”

Thus did I answer this email. Thus do I tilt at the windmill of this rule in the world.