IN A NUTSHELL
Is it ethical to not worry and be happy? What binds us to worry and unhappiness? Illusion or truth? Can we unravel this dynamic and find a freedom to love ourselves just the way we are, accept the world just as it is, and know that happiness is a moral as well as joyful choice?
This is the arena and offering of this year’s Venus Garden Essence. After a growing season of work and play in this garden, it was time to make the Essence. With the Flowers plucked and in the water, I lay back surrounded by Flowers humming with bees. It was the Autumn Equinox. A beautiful soft day. For many months I puzzled over the theme of this garden. Not once had I guessed its name. Don’t Worry- Bee Happy. The Flowers, the bees, and our beloved creator pulled back the curtain to reveal the divine order in all things. Let Go? Why Not! Let God! Of course. Don’t Worry- Bee Happy!
If the weight of the world’s suffering feels yours to heal, if you are a person who does too much, or if you know your life calling, but find yourself awash in guilt as you let go of things that are not on your path, this Essence may hold helpful information for you. If it is hard for you to accept your own essential goodness without a marathon of proof, if the very phrase “Don’t Worry- Be Happy” pushes your buttons, or if worry is the bread and butter of your days, not happiness, this Essence may bring gifts to your weary self. It supports an unburdening, an unraveling, a letting go of the mind ideas of worthiness, duality, rules, shoulds, and judgment. It supports a return to spontaneous happiness and a state of being in which you joyously know your immutable divinity in an ocean of divinity.
USEFUL IN A TRIO
Don’t Worry- Bee Happy will be an excellent Essence to use in combination with the earlier Venus Garden Essences Love Prevails and The Alignment Garden. Love Prevails helps us know that love is the only abiding reality. Love Prevails helps us know that we are divinity safe in the arms of divinity no matter what the surface appearance. Love Prevails helps us know that everything else but love is a passing illusion, necessary for our learning, but not real.
The Alignment Garden helps us know our precise work in world. It helps us align with our divinity so that we can live this purpose. It is not about mind ideas of life purpose but soul truth. It sorts this wheat from this chaff so that we are clear about what is and isn’t our life work and who we are.
Don’t Worry- Bee Happy supports us to let go of that which is not our work. It helps us let go of the self judgment and guilt that would make us feel responsible for most of the planet’s woes. It helps us to know that being who we are, living the life divinity created just for us, and enjoying this life is not just enough, it is what is meant to be. The concept of judgment is left behind in an experience of grace. And happiness. Did I mention happiness? We can know happiness, at long last, as a guilt free experience.
THE ESSENCE SERVED UP WITH A LONGER EXPLANATION
I loved this year’s Venus Garden. Still do. From winter planning to spring planting to a fall harvest, this garden rested easily and joyfully in the green arms of the farm. The Essence from this garden took seven days to make, beginning on the Autumn Equinox, a day of balance. Now the Angels have begun to send it out into the world. And they told me this morning that it was time to write about it.
Once, while flipping through a compendium about Flower Essences, I noted that the author put forth his theory that I lived through the healing dynamic of each Green Hope Farm Flower Essence on my way to making the Essence. It was a funny moment because until then, I hadn’t seen this pattern that way. How I might have explained it is that I am attracted to the Flowers that hold helpful information about something I am struggling to resolve, be it an emotional tangle, a physical issue, or a spiritual thirst.
For example, when I first began making Flower Essences, I was intent on resolving lung problems and the deep seated griefs at the bottom of my physically weak lungs. This meant that many of the early Essences I felt called to make offered helpful information about issues of grief, the courage to speak one’s truth, to find one’s path, to stand fearlessly in one’s truth and to know one’s right to breathe deeply and take in as much air as the next person. This was a bit of an unconscious process. I just made Flower Essences from the Flowers that called to me and that I loved. Because of the laws of attraction, these were the Flowers with the healing vibrational information I needed. My process first built a collection that would provide for such Essences as Breathe and Grief & Loss. Then, as I moved through this particular healing dynamic, other issues surfaced to be resolved. When they surfaced, helpful Flowers came into my ken. It has been a joyful and efficient way to heal.
In any case, what this author said in his book was true. I think about this truth before each growing season because when I receive the plan for the gardens from the Angels in January, I know I am getting an overview of my learning lessons for the growing season. For example, if there are a lot of Zinnias, Borage, and Calendulas in one of the gardens, I know I’ll be working on containing a dynamic of sturdy joy, courage, and faith even as events in my personal life challenge my abilities to do this. In living through my lessons while the Flowers grow, I help contain the Essence being born and make it strong in the face of difficulties. Often, others here help to hold the dynamic as well, especially in the case of the Venus Garden, the highest vibrational space at the farm and the spot where many of our most helpful Essences have been created.
Sometimes, the Angels tell me the name of the Venus Garden when they give me its design plan in January. This clues me in further as to the theme of our project. During the entire growing season, I see how the Angels manifest this idea in form. I try to focus on what I am learning about this issue in my life, in and out of the garden. Usually the strands pull together after the Essence is created.
This year, I had no name for the garden, but I was given the hint that it concerned the issue of forgiveness. When in the depths of last winter the Angels offered that this year’s Venus Garden and Essence would hold a vibration related to forgiveness, I both relished the project and felt unsure that I could contain the dynamic of the Essence. I have felt so confused and humbled by various notions and expectations of forgiveness that I sometimes refer to forgiveness as the f word. I wasn’t sure I had a single idea about forgiveness that was helpful and I certainly felt shamed by many ideas I have heard about forgiveness. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t admire other people’s experiences of forgiveness, but that my own process seemed so much messier. In my own personal family of origin drama, I felt like a pinball bouncing from one emotional response to another. Yes, there had been moments my mind defined as forgiveness, but there was a heck of a lot of other stuff going on as well. All in all, it seemed an unlikely project for me to undertake, but also a hopeful one. I felt that to grow this garden was to have my limited mind ideas of forgiveness washed from me in the face of a more complicated but ultimately more loving understanding.
The Angels gave me the design, indicated the plants to grow, and got things rolling in a very matter of fact way. No hand wringing. No suggestion they doubted my capacity to contain the garden. This was very reassuring. The design for the garden was a five pointed star outlined in Yellow Marigolds. The star was filled with many purple Flowers including Heliotrope, Aster, Chinese Forget me Not, Ageratum, Alyssum, and Nicotiana. The center of the star was a spiral of violet Cleome surrounding a spiral of Mehera White Marigolds. The tips of each star point also featured Mehera White Marigolds as well as White Osteospermum. The entire star was encircled in a thick band of white Sweet Alyssum.
When I planted the Alignment Garden the year before, the directions had been as precise as anything I have ever done with the Angels. Everything was orchestrated with one directional movement around the garden. If I needed a trowel three feet counter clockwise from where I was digging, I had to walk all the way around the circle to retrieve the trowel. No volunteer plants or weeds were left in the garden or allowed to grow up during the season. The focus was on alignment with EXACTLY what was meant to be.
This new Venus Garden had a different ethos. From the get go there was something relaxed, even forgiving about the creation of the garden. As I prepared the garden for planting, I was asked to leave several rogue Flowers including a gorgeous orange annual poppy and a patch of white Love in a Mist. This was a gorgeous star but a quirky one too. Lizzy, my eldest daughter, planted the garden with me. It was a happy occasion of silliness, laughter, and fun.
My first stumbling block of personal forgiveness came when I didn’t notice the slugs decimating half the plants in the garden. I was so focused on protecting the Red Shiso from the slugs that my slug patrol did not include the Venus Garden. By the time I noticed the slug damage there, many of the greenhouse transplants, especially the Mehera White Marigolds that I love so much, had been completely eaten. Many plants were dead. There were gaps everywhere. I felt badly about my forgetfulness and couldn’t imagine that this garden would recover from this slug fest.
But it did.
This was a gentle reminder that I am not responsible for everything, even in my own backyard.
This seems so much the thrust of the summer the last year the last six years most of my life. When I get clear guidance from the divinity within me, I need to stop with the second guessing myself when things go awry. In fact, I need to stop second guessing myself no matter the quality of my guidance or what happens. I need to remember I am doing the best that I can. Doing the best I can is the best I can do.
This truth needs to sink deep into me. Lots of quart jars of Flow Free and Don’t Worry- Bee Happy ahead. I need help to stop falling first into mind ideas a.k.a. self judgments and then on into various emotional reactions to my mind judgments. These mind ideas include the notions that I am not doing enough, that a good person would not let unresolved situations and relationships go, or that you work until the work is done even if that is never. The emotions? Guilt, worry, doubt, a lack of kindness to self. Frankly, even with clear guidance, such as the Angels giving me one word directions like REST, I can lose my way in my variation on humanity’s grab bag of mind rules and emotional reactions to my mind rules.
Ah yes, the time is ripe for Don’t Worry-Bee Happy.
This brings me to the bees. In so many languages, bees share the same word as the verb to be. In my timeless time with the bees this summer and in my skirmishes with literature about bees, I have come to sense that they move in time differently than most of us, that they experience doing and being with more unity than most of us, that even as we described them as busy worker bees, its not so much a doing as a being with each Flower they visit.
As the summer unfolded, I found myself with the bees more and more. I asked them to be part of this Essence. They gently told me that this was really already a done deal. They already were one with the Flowers and with all of Green Hope Farm before I asked and therefore are part and parcel of all Essences here, this one included. It’s typical of all the loving parts of creation here that the bees were so gracious when I belabored the obvious. I also laughed out loud when I heard the name for this garden for the first time.
Before I posted this description, I decided to go sit with the bees to see if they wanted to say anything about Don’t Worry- Bee Happy. I went down to sit six inches from one of the hives with my notepad. I felt a bit of trepidation. The last time I sat so close, the bees were explaining about a bee sting acupuncture point called “the reveal” and when the short lecture was complete, a bee came over and stung me right on “the reveal”. Anyways, no stings today. Just this lovely bee song, all puns intended.
A BEE SONG
To our human brothers and sisters
Honey, bee
Honey, please, bee
Just bee.
The Happiness of Flowers, the Song of Flowers. We sing it.
We breathe it. We bee it. We be it.
This is our song, our hum, our buzz, our golden honey.
To bee is to be.
Not worlds apart. No difference. To bee is to be.
So Full. So Everything. So Sunshine. So Cloud bank.
So Warm. So True.
The Everything and the Nothing.
Don’t Worry, Bee Happy.
This being
Your beeing
is a Honeycomb
of
Love
No more. No Less.
Perfection
Honey, bee.
AND FINALLY THE ANGELS ON THIS ESSENCE AND THE F WORD
It’s been helpful to Molly for her to refer to forgiveness as the f word because it has lightened her energy around this misunderstood topic. There are few words in your culture more loaded. May our words lighten your load as well.
We want you to understand the intent of this Essence. We did not call it Do This, That, and the Other Thing and Then Don’t Worry, Bee Happy. We called it Don’t Worry- Bee Happy, a play on Meher Baba’s exhortation.
In every moment you are love in an ocean of divine love. There is nothing to worry about. You are safe and loved and perfection just as you are. No proof necessary. No action necessary. So much of human mind ideas about forgiveness veer off into ideas of proving something through a big gesture, a dramatic moment, an avowal that all is forgiven. In truth there need be nothing done and no words spoken. This is the nature of Grace. Yes, it is Grace we speak of here. We created this Essence to help you cut through the illusions that keep you from knowing this Grace. For so many of you it is earnest notions of being impossibly good that spin you away from ever experiencing your essential goodness. The Bees and all beings of Green Hope Farm invite you to rest in this vibration of “Don’t Worry- Bee Happy” so that you feel the happy joyful truth of being you.
We love you so very much. Ainsi Soit-il. So bee it.
