I am my own best customer. The focus of the Flower Essence mixes and the very Flowers that I am drawn to have at least a passing connection and usually a very strong connection to what I am trying to learn. When I felt drawn to make a Flower Essence from a new Flower friend, it is almost always because I have something to learn from this Flower and it’s time for that lesson.

This is consistent with everything I know about Flower Essences in general. Each of our electrical systems recognizes its own dilemmas and snafus and seeks solutions. Flowers have solved a lot of electrical difficulties on their way to evolving into masters of their environment. Therefore Flowers and their Essences hold a lot of problem solving skills. Our electrical systems recognize this and welcome Flower Essences with “open arms”.

Today I am thinking about things I am meant to control (my attitude) and things I am not meant to control (pretty much everything else).

Most Flowers flourish in less than ideal conditions . Many flourish in extremely challenging inhospitable conditions. Flowers Essences holding the electrical data of these Flowers thriving in less than ideal conditions are of great value to us. They offer us ways to thrive in difficult circumstances when things aren’t going our way. They help us accept what is not ours to change and bloom with abandon even when we can’t get what we think we need. The Flowers know how to bloom without enough topsoil, without enough rain, without enough sunlight. They have adapted gracefully to less than ideal conditions and are happy to share with us how they did it via the wisdom of their Flower Essences.

This is a lot more helpful data for us than, say a book that promises if we think positively, only positive things will happen to us. Last time I checked, I was only in charge of my own attitude and had limited control on what the rest of the universe did. There is so much energy involved when we try to control something we really are not meant to be in control of, say the movement of the stars or the social choices a best friend makes. Some of the recent mixes I have been working on like Carry Less are really to help me see the areas where I am trying to control something that isn’t mine to control. Come to think of it, many of the earlier mixes were for this too.

My eldest daughter Lizzy finished up her work in Bennington, VT and after a month dancing in NYC came home to decide on her next move. This was a time in which I needed a lot of support from Carry Less and Flow Free to remind me moment to moment that Lizzy’s next move was Lizzy’s decision, not mine. There are probably a lot of people for whom this balance of support without any opinions would come more naturally, but for me it has been a learning curve to try to be present without an agenda.

My role models for being present without an agenda were not good. I had a famous, powerful, and charismatic grandfather who felt very comfortable redirecting a person’s life completely, even after a short acquaintance of only a brief few minutes. I have heard dozens and dozens of people tell me some variation on, ” I wanted to be an airline pilot, but after a conversation with your grandfather I decided to be a Geology professor instead.” Longer exposure to the man only meant more iron fisted direction.

I hated being micro managed by someone who confused himself with a deity. I went into my own adult life swimming in this bossy gene pool and needing role models for doing something other than bossing myself and other people around. My efforts to find a new way explain my attraction to Black Currant and Bloodroot and my years of focused work with the family river trio of Black Currant, Bloodroot, and Borage Flower Essences. This also explains why I wrote a two hundred page Guidebook without specific directions for using Flower Essences so as to encourage you to be your own guide with Flower Essences.

Ongoing efforts to find a way to be a loving presence, not a controlling presence, led to All Ego Contracts Null & Void in addition to the family river trio. So many Essences helped to continue the excavation and release of bossy tendencies. The Carry Less continues this tradition with its focus to help root out and release opinions, both those continuing to drive me nuts because they have hung around way after the party is over and those opinions that are nearly invisible, like a crocodile on a river.

As Lizzy launched the next part of her life I had to wrestle with some well hidden crocodiles. For example, I realized my ideas about what it was like being in my twenties during the 1980’s were not truths about being in your twenties now. I had biases about chronologies and priorities and even, let it be said, geographies. I tried to let go of all ideas that I knew best about anything that was to be in her life.

When Lizzy said she was moving to Seattle, a city nearly three thousand miles from here, I felt an enormous weight fall off my back, a big mother crocodile. My heart knew this was such a wise, heart felt decision on her part. I could stand up tall, let the crocodile of opinions fall away from me, and give her a big hug of encouragement. It felt good to carry less, even as I knew how much I would miss her.

Another part of my family, my maternal grandmother’s side, was from Seattle. Going to Seattle was a going forward into the unknown for Lizzy, but for me it was a little bit of grace from the part of my family that had been all but silenced by the flashy overwhelming dynamics of my famous maternal grandfather. In the bewildering and oppressive terrain of my childhood, my maternal grandmother had been a shining light. Despite her own struggle with this oppressive situation, she lifted her head from her own difficulties to let me know she loved me. She did not ask me to be something else than I was, like everyone else in my family, but simply enjoyed me for who I was. No small gift. I credit my grandmother’s love with helping me get to the point where I could begin to create my own life on my own terms, away from the controlling opinions of my family.

As Lizzy got ready to go to Seattle I found myself asking my grandmother to be there for Lizzy as she began a new life in Seattle. Despite my grandmother’s challenging situation, she had a knack for fun. I hoped she and her joie de vivre would be with Lizzy.

In one of those lovely synchronicities of life, as I kissed Lizzy goodbye at the airport, through my tears, I saw a sign over my shoulder that read Milltown grill. Milltown is what my grandmother called me. I knew Grandma was on the job.

Lately a lot of you have been sending me articles about the mass death of honeybees across our country. Thank you for sending me these articles and for sharing a concern about the fate of the honeybees.

If you have been reading this blog long you know how passionately I love honeybees and how concerned I was already about their survival. When William’s “Time for Kids” makes the mysterious death of honeybees their cover story, it’s clear that a lot of other people are worrying about the honeybees too. One statistic I read last night said that honeybee pollination results in 14 billion dollars worth of food each year in our country, food that would not form without honeybees’ pollination. Just as a global economic community helped stop the arms race because bombing the Soviet Union was bombing American economic interests, perhaps this terrible situation will be resolved because of economic pressures. I hope so.

Many theories are being floated out as to why the bees are leaving their hives in droves and never returning. Some think it is pesticides which disorient the bees. Some worry about an x factor in GMOs. The recent scourges of varroa mites are not being blamed. No one seems to know for sure how to explain this mass death.

This is one of those moments when I wish more people grasped what Einstein was saying. It’s not that I have grasped it, because I haven’t. But everything I have learned about Flower Essences suggests this world is not a chemical cause and effect dynamic but an electrical, vibrational dynamic. If I were one of the scientists studying the bees right now I would look for what inharmonious vibrations could be causing this massive bee death, as well as looking at the pesticide problem.

As I searched the media for any reassuring data about the possible survival of any bees, I was heartened to read about how organic farms were the one place where colonies of native bees as well as some honeybees seemed to be surviving. In a wonderful full circle moment, I read how Full Belly Farm, anorganic farm in California, has been working with scientists to create native shrub hedgerows that help the native bees flourish. It was a full circle moment because one of the women who farmed here in the early years, Shifra Levine, also worked for many years at Full Belly Farm.

As of several days ago, our bees were alive. They spent a slightly warmer afternoon cleaning their hives. While this is heartening in a small way, I wondered what was up in our country for all the bees and asked for a message from the Deva of Honeybees. Here she speaks,

“The situation is dire but not without hope. The factors behind our disappearance are myriad and form a chain link that is impenetrable at times. As the matrix for our existence is vibrational, we receive the loving vibration of your thoughts and the outpouring of concern as a healing balm. This is a great help to us. So send us love.

The focus of the groups who stand to lose money because of our demise helps us slightly, but love does much more. As far as the GMOs, they are, of course, a problem. They represent a manifestation of a collective disharmony and schism between humanity and the natural world. It is not so much that the pollen of GMOs make us sick, but that the disharmony of the whole direction of agriculture makes it nearly impossible for us to do our work of harmonizing the land. We die of exhaustion with too much to rebalance, as well as from the effects of pesticides.

Along with your loving concern, another specific thing you can do to help us is to do land clearing. This eases our burdens as without your support we must work ourselves to death to clear and rebalance the land. In this way, we are like so many animal species right now. Our service to the world is land harmonizing as well as pollination. Honey is our fuel to keep going in our work. As the land of this country falls into deeper and deeper disharmony, we still strive to do our jobs. We will do our jobs until we drop dead. That is who we are. Because of the extreme disharmony, we are dropping dead in a way that threatens the very survival of our hives and our species in this country.

As you work to clear the land, you ease our burdens and allow for a more balanced appropriation of our energies to land harmonizing. As you share the responsibility to clear land with us, you leave us with enough energy to keep our hives going. We are just one of many species which will die in droves if greater responsibility is not taken by humanity. Each person who involves themselves in land clearing lifts a great burden from the yoke of many animals. That is the hope of which I spoke.”
I AM the Deva of Honeybees.

Directions for Land Clearing
If you can do this every day for the land that you live, work or care for that would be a wonderful gift to bees and all creation. Even sporadic land clearing is a help. It only takes a few minutes. I have built land clearing into my morning meditation routine so that I do it each day. This is the only way I can keep myself organized, but if this is not feasible for you, it is truly better to do it whenever you remember than never at all.

Humanity’s role in land clearing is to invoke the clearing. The Angels and Elementals of the land will do the actual clearing but they cannot do it without you asking for their help. When we do not get involved it falls to species like the bees to fill the void created by us. Extreme weather will also occur to clean up extreme negativity.

I begin my clearing work each day by grounding myself and the land I am going to clear. I ground us to the heart of the Earth and then I anchor both myself and the land to the heart of God. I ground myself to the HEART of Earth not Earth in general because Earth itself is having a hard time with only its heart being solid ground, so to speak.

When you invoke the divine beings connected to a piece of land to help you, you can be specific ( I list a specific group of beings that will help you at the end of this description) or you can simplify the process by just asking for help from the divine beings connected to the land. You do not need to list specific names to get help. Any genuine request for assistance will get assistance. Right now, the Angels are telling me, “Make this as simple as possible so people actually do this process. We need help.”

After you call in this group, however you do it, ask this group to cleanse, clear, rebalance, and illuminate the land you are clearing. Ask them to clear the emotional, mental, physical, and etheric bodies of the land of everything that is not pure light or divinity.

Ask that the negativity be released through a christed grid. This is not a religious thing, it is simply the name of a filtering system that will not let the specific negativity you have cleared return to that specific piece of land.

You can visualize things getting clearer but visualization is not necessary . The land will be cleansed no matter what because you have asked that it be cleared. It does help to ask that the land that has been cleared be filled with divine love and light. This is a good thing to do because it means that new negativity won’t just sweep in and fill the void left by the cleaning. Instead the void will be filled with love.

That’s it! Thank everyone involved and you are done with the cleaning.

In a few minutes you can easily clear an area that would take several hives of bees to clear and rebalance. That is no small thing!

Lots of people ask me how to figure out what land to clear. People ask if they can clear the whole earth? Can they clear someone else’s toxic home? Can they clear their local Wal-Mart? These are questions that only your own heart can answer. In general, you have every right to clean your own living space and working space and the land around you. When I want to clear other places, I try to ask myself if it is my heart asking me to do this or some other part of me. I trust my heart’s guidance to clear a place, but also trust when I get a heartfelt feeling that a piece of land is someone else’s business. My land clearing assignments change all the time. I will get asked to work on a place every day for several years and then I will be told to let go. There are factors here which are beyond my understanding, but one thing I do believe is that sometimes there are other people who must take responsibility for a piece of land I have been clearing and I must step aside to let them either rise to the occasion or not.

Please email me at green.hope.farm@valley.net with any questions. As always when talking to a Deva, I experienced the Deva of Honeybees as a being of immense loving calm. However her message is as clear a call for help as I have ever received from a Deva. May we all rise to the occasion and help save the honeybees.

Here is a list of divine beings that will help if you want to request for help very specifically.
The Overlighting Deva of the piece of land you want to clean. This Angelic being holds the divine plan for this piece of land
Other Angels working this piece of land
The Elementals of the land
Pan, head Elemental of Earth
Any Ascended Master or God realized being connected to this piece of land
Deva of the Earth’s atmosphere, Lunaria
Deva of the Earth’s surface, Sapphalo
Deva of the center of the Earth, Darndella
Our Sun, Helios and Vesta

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!