Emily recently learned in an environmental science class that if there are two cars and one bicyclist on a stretch of deserted highway, there is a greater likelihood than there should be statistically that all three vehicles will meet on the highway simultaneously. Coincidentally, Lizzy had just been to a physics lecture that explained why this happens. It happens because we all have a slight gravitational field pulling us towards each other.

Of course because I am me, I have to run with this fun fact way beyond what either the environmental science teacher or the physics professor had in mind.

So, I have begun to think of each of us as planets with our own gravitational fields. We each have a physical body with unique surface contours and the invisible inner terrain of a planet. We have an emotional field extending out from our physical body and also interpenetrating our physical body. We also have a mental body and a memory body interpenetrating all these other fields. It’s like we have an atmosphere, one that may be clogged up with emotional and mental pollution or lit up by great love.

Why dwell on this delightful notion of all of us orbiting each other in a wild dance of planets?

People often ask me where to begin with Flower Essences. Something happened this week that made me realize it doesn’t matter AT ALL where you begin. Pick any situation or any symptom. Then pick some Essences. Or visa versa. No matter what you pick, any Essences you choose will bring a skill set so dovetailed to supporting your multi dimensional energy system, your multi faceted planet, that the Essences support is rarely going to be a straight forward tale of Essence A helped only Problem B, end of story.

The story is going to be way better than that!

The process of healing with Flower Essences is not a linear journey in which the issue you wanted to heal with your choice of Essences resolves ONLY that issue. Any Flower Essences you work with address all your different energy fields and therefore offer support on many levels for many different issues. Whatever issue you started to work on will rarely be the only thing that got healing support.

Why are Flower Essences so outside a linear and limited healing framework?

Flower Essences are not man made tools, so they are not limited by the human mind.

Flower Essences are not creations of a limited consciousness. They are schematics of successful divine systems offering the wisdom of their evolution. Their blueprints offer electrical information to help unravel every possible kind of knot within our equally complex though often not as evolved matrixes. The electrical solutions are as multi faceted as our electrical systems and therefore go in all directions in our systems to offer support.

It’s not that all Flowers have finished their evolutionary work, because many are still evolving. Flower Essences’ strengths as healing tools come because Flower Essences more completely relay their healing information than other modalities of healing.

With a Flower Essence, no wisdom needs to be left behind because it was squeezed through one person’s limited understanding during its creation. Let’s say, I was trying to make a vibrational remedy in a lab. Even if I had Einstein’s brain, I would never get as far as a Flower gets naturally. Maybe I could drum up one vibrational frequency that would help one small facet of a problem, a tool for one issue.

I would say this is the problem with man made healing tools. The tool can only be as good as the limitations of the mind that conceived it. And we got limitations! But Flower Essences come to us as a transfer of electrical information. Flower Essences are a system of healing coming from the divine mind of Nature not the limited human mind.

It is the divinity of Nature and divinity of the Flowers that creates the multi dimensional healing electrical pattern of the Flower. It is Nature and the Flowers that transfer this pattern into the Flower Essence. The only limitations of a Flower Essence comes from how the humans CONTAIN the Essence. This is why we spend so much time and effort to provide the highest vibrational container we can for Green Hope Farm’s Flower Essences. This is why we use Red Shiso. This is why we try to do everything with love, as well as bottle everything to the specifications of the Angels of Flower Essences. We can’t make these great tools in any real sense of the word, but we can get out of the way and not mess with their perfection.

Back to that initial experience of picking an issue then choosing Flower Essence support. One analogy for this is to think of any problem we are aware of in our energy field as a strand hanging out of a knotted ball of string. This hanging strand gets our attention as a problem to be solved, even though it may not be our most serious problem. Not to worry, the irritating strand gets things started. We want to untangle this strand from the knotted ball and unravel the issue.

With Flower Essences this impulse can start a long chain of healing events. With other modalities, given their narrower focus on the single strand issue, the possibilities for radical healing are more limited.

If we can start in with Flower Essences and then let ourselves be led on this journey from Essence to Essence without necessarily understanding exactly what is going on, then we free up the process to heal ourselves in profound and unexpected ways. When we surrender any need to control, we let Flower Essences work in their powerful albeit mysterious ways. We open to receive the enormous, multi faceted gifts of divine mind. The whole knotted ball can become looser and looser until not only the precipitating issue and its strand of string unravels, but many, many other incredible knots unravel as well.

This is the difference between a divine tool and a tool created from the limited framework of a human mind. The Essences are a divine gift from the divine mind. We need not try to control or even understand what Flower Essences give us or what our own divine energy system makes of them. We just need to go along for the ride and see the wonderful things that unfold as knots fall apart and unravel.

This is why, despite all my words and descriptions of Flower Essences, I really hope you just wander with them in a construct that has nothing to do with what I have written. My mind is as limited as the next mind and so when I write about Essences I have profoundly narrowed the description of their gifts! Fortunately, that doesn’t narrow their actual gifts!

In my own personal process with Flower Essences, I try to surrender my ideas about what Flower Essences to work with to the Angel’s guidance, messages in dreams, what my hands pull off the Essence shelves, unexplained hankerings for this Essence or that Essence, and other approaches that sidestep my mind’s more analytical and limited approach. Yes, for mundane strands from my knotted ball like poison ivy, I use Healthy Coat, but I also try to avail myself to the suggestions that make no sense. These are the ones I suspect often do the most profound unravelling of my knotty ball of string.

As I have mentioned before in the blog, the Angels recently asked me to put drops of Flow Free, a combination remedy from the Animal Wellness Collection, in a quart jar of water each day and to drink this without fail. Often I add other Essences, but this is the backbone of the jar of water. One morning this past weekend, I grabbed a few moments of quiet to work on Will’s afghan ( YES! It is done! Photo soon! ). I was knitting in a spot where I could see a patch of sunlight shining through my sparkling quart jar of Flow Free Essence in water. I wasn’t really paying much attention to the scene when suddenly I noticed there was a brilliant patch of pink light in front of me. I have never had any training in seeing auras, but sometimes, through no volition of my own, I see colors around people or see color in the skies over Green Hope Farm. I often see pink in the Green Hope skies and I have come to think of this as yet another way the Angels make their loving presence felt in my life. So as I knit, I enjoyed this companionship. I reached for my Flow Free water and after a sip, I put the jar down in a different place and the light moved. As I moved my quart of water around so went the pink light. The pink light was part of the Flow Free water.

This startled me out of my limited linear mind. Yes, I slip into it all too frequently. In this case, I had settled on a mind idea that I was taking the Flow Free to help me adjust to going from a summer household of six big bodies to a fall household in which everyone but me is away with activities elsewhere. This pink light threw all my assumptions into the air. I had to face a richer, more mysterious truth. I have no idea what the Flow Free is for in my life or why it would have this brilliant beautiful pink light with it.

But mercifully, if I have learned anything on this journey with Flower Essences, it is that I don’t need to know what an Essence is doing, that I can truly rest in the truth that this divine and safe tool is helping my energy system in ways only a divine mind could fathom. All I need to bring to the table is a willingness to follow the process and go with the flow, so to speak. Love and gratitude for these tools may not be necessary, but it floods forward anyways.

And so I took another sip and considered this. We certainly are lucky planets, each and every one of us. So much love offered by divine mind in such ordinary ways. That Flower Essence water you are sipping? Who knows what gifts it brings? And that Rose you smelled on the way to work? No doubt it flooded the atmosphere of your own personal planet with the grace of its divine love. We are lucky planets that meet and greet all creation in this dance of gravitational pull. And the gifts of our daily orbits are something only divine mind can understand.

I am grateful though that our hearts are not as limited as our minds. Our hearts can flood to the full and thus receive with gratitude these gifts of divine mind. What good news that is.

Yesterday, Baby Ramos-Glew was a week old! A week! And he is so cute!

Here is Augustin with his mama and his grandma Carole, who drove out from Illinois for the festivities.

Here we discuss the ins and outs of clothe diapers.

Lizzy is home to do contact improvisation dance work with local college students this next week, so she got to hold Augustin too!

Finally we had to leave, but here’s one parting photo of this lucky babe, snuggled in arms of his mamacita.

It’s cold and dark at nights now. This means I am back to knitting during the cosy evening hours. William’s afghan, predicted to take the three weeks of the Winter Olympics, has taken thirty seven weeks and counting, BUT I am closing in on the project. Really. I am down to the last side of knitted edging. I would show you how close I am, but this would take the surprise out of the amazing moment of triumph photo in which you see William wrapped in the finished product, a photo I will be taking really soon. Really.

As this afghan project draws to a close, thoughts drift to the next project. For some bizarre reason, I am drawn to doing another afghan. Usually I am so sick of afghans when I finish one that the very word afghan makes me shudder. I need to knit a veritable flock of socks to recover.

But this time, an afghan pattern in a book called Mason Dixon Knitting keeps calling. The pattern is called Curve of Pursuit and was created by a mathematician in England. Way back when I first saw an example of the afghan in the book, I emailed the address given in Mason Dixon Knitting to start the process of buying the pattern. Then I waited with baited breath. And waited. Then I emailed again. And again. Then waited. And waited. My pursuit of Curve of Pursuit did not go well.

So, I gave up for awhile. I know what can happen when you get mentioned in a book or magazine that people are reading. You can get REALLY BUSY! At one point, a mention of one of our Flower Essences by a specific healer more than doubled our volume of orders overnight. I have been told by an MBA toting cousin that more companies fail because of too rapid growth than for any other reason. I remember to say this fun fact a lot during negotiations with the Angels about growth. Oh the Angels! They probably recognize me by the way my heels are dug into the ground so I as to slow things down. For many years we doubled in size every year. I am happy with the more moderate growth of the last few years. I enjoy this more moderate size growth because it allows us to do every order with love and makes it possible for me to bring on new people to work here in a more orderly fashion than say, that year of the famous overnight bump when we made nine year old Will pack orders when he got home from grade school. Here’s some milk and cookies and that pile of invoices is yours!

Anyways, back to Curve of Pursuit. Yesterday it occurred to me that I could google this pattern and when I did, I found myself on eBay where I was promised I could Buy It Now! I have been avoiding eBay for a couple of years, mostly because I couldn’t remember my user ID or password. Also there was the eBay cautionary tale of Kevin Ramos-Glew getting caught up in someone else’s snowblower scam, an experience in which he found himself listed as the purveyor of six snowblowers for sale with all payments sent to the scam artist. Then there was my brother in law’s eBay adventure with the nonexistent Kubota tractor he almost bought from someone in Bulgaria. Anyways, there seemed some sensible reasons to remain the only American not shopping on eBay, but in the face of my growing obsession to get this pattern, I was suddenly willing to jump through all the eBay hoops to find out what my user ID was and reset my password. This proved a lively little pre dawn half hour in which I sprinted back and forth between this computer where I had started the whole eBay re-entry process and another room of the building where I had to go to pick up all the cryptic email that eBay sent me to move along this re-entry process.

Having been prompted by eBay to remember who I was, I was ready to Buy It Now! But sadly, eBay both send me a heart message of congratulations that I had purchased this pattern on eBay and my life would be forfeit if I didn’t stand by my obligation to pay for this product while simultaneously telling me that because I had not filled in the shipping and handling fee with what was owed in pounds sterling, I could not proceed to Pay Pal to pay and therefore could not receive my pattern. I did not know how much shipping in pounds sterling it was going to cost to send me this slim life giving pattern, but it was a moot point, because for the life of me, I could not figure out how to get back to my mid process transaction.

Suffering this agony of defeat, I sent the English mathematician a note via eBay email telling of my heroic but unsuccessful efforts to buy the pattern. Miracle of miracles, I received, the next day, an email from the mathematician himself who reported also having trouble with Pay Pal. We agreed that I would send a check by mail for the pattern and he would send the pattern.

So, my pursuit of Curve of Pursuit may or may not be drawing to a close, but Will’s afghan will be done this weekend. Really. I am certain I will finish it this weekend. Certain. As Will would say “Famous Last Words”, probably while giving me tips on packing an order. He really set a high standard for the rest of us!

With no new dishwasher on the horizon and frankly few dishes to be washed, Rhino continues his search for a new life purpose. He tries a spiritual approach. He reminds himself he already IS everything and doesn’t need a sink of dirty dishes to be someone in the world. But it’s not easy to be a rhino without a mission.

Sometimes he goes out to the greenhouse and tries to call his old housemates on his cell phone. They are all on his family plan so it’s free, or at least he thinks it’s free. His former housemates are constantly getting him embroiled in new calling plans involving new companies and new numbers all offering fewer dropped calls. Worrying about dropped calls at the farm is a little silly because there is only cell phone coverage when you stand on a greenhouse bench and point your cell phone in certain directions and even then, somedays this doesn’t work.

Here Rhino gets some bars, but it doesn’t help because no one answers. He tries not to think of his former housemates out there making dirty dishes in other sinks. He is determined to be upbeat. To console himself, he stops to smell the Flowers, this time, a lovely Tuberose.

Molly can see Rhino is feeling a bit woebegone. So she tries to get him to help her strategize about where to put all these bulbs she ordered. She has lost her mind master plan that noted where she was planning to put the 47,000 new daffodils, crocus, allium, and lilies bulbs she purchased earlier in the summer.

Placed on one small pile of bulbs while in such close proximity to all that orange, Rhino’s mind drifts from the topic of bulbs to the topic of pumpkins. He stops to consider what kind of faces he’ll carve on this year’s pumpkins.

Molly tries to interest him in another project, making the day’s Red Shiso tincture.

But Rhino is a philosopher and so his attention is drawn away from the brewing of Red Shiso to pondering the big question on the label of the coffee filter’s Molly uses.

Of course he cares. He’s a Rhino for goodness sake! Seeing his ecological soft spot, Molly suggests another project.

Recycling the week’s used cardboard at the town recycling shed. She tries to sell Rhino on the idea. She tells him it would be a chance to drive the truck! Molly’s never met a Rhino that didn’t love using gasoline powered engines while simultaneously saving the planet. But Rhino’s attention wanders yet again as he sees all that wood Willy and Jim stacked this summer.

Rhino can hardly bear the thought of the coming weather that will make it necessary to burn this wood to heat the house. Solar gets you a long way, but not ALL the way on a cloudy thirty degree day. Like this coming Saturday. Snow flurries are predicted

Rhino does the only sensible thing for a self respecting Rhino to do.

He wraps himself in his Bayern Munchen football club scarf, settles himself out on the porch, and thinks next spring.

While Vicki got to know her new baby, while Deb kayaked the cold waters of nearby Grafton Pond, while Patricia learned how to play Mah Jong, while Jane visited with her daughter and new grandpuppy Josie, and while Rhino loafed atop a dead dishwasher, I was out with the potatoes. They were proving slightly more labor intensive than my breezy words on Friday. I hornswaggled Jim and Lizzy into helping me on Sunday morning. By noon, we had the rest of the potatoes dug up, sorted, washed, and put to cure in the open air potting area of the barn. It’s so true that thing about many hands make light work.

Lizzy looking for any rogue potatoes while May May tries to convince her that potatoes are meant only for games of catch.

Jim sorting and cleaning various piles while I take the cleaned ones into the barn to cure in a windless, sunless, frost free spot.

Was this the attractive butt shot Lizzy asked me not to post?

There was even time for some bulb planting in the afternoon. And then for supper……

SPUDS!