From the beginning, healthy hair (and fur for that matter) has been a focus of our work with Flower Essences. Yesterday, when Thembi, our new staffer from Zimbabawe, came to work shorn of the dreadlocks she had worn for 15 years, I knew it was time to ask the Angels to help me with a post about hair.

Thembi’s dreads were beautiful but very heavy. Hanging to her waist, they seemed always a complication and a burden, something she had to continually fuss with to keep out of her way. I could not quite imagine how they didn’t cause her headaches.

When she came in with her dreads gone, she looked as beautiful as ever, but she also looked unburdened, and her energy sparkled. She was so much lighter in spirit. Had I known her language I would have sung her a song of celebration. As it was, we all hugged and cried. It was a great moment because all of us knew the haircut represented more than just a haircut.

Last week the Angels nudged me to send Thembi off at the end of her work week with some Grief & Loss, Alex Mackenzie Rose and Borage Flower Essences. I have lost places deeply loved, but the places I have lost are dwarfed by the places she has lost. What must it be like to lose a whole life of places? I hoped this trio would help with her mourning process and all that was being demanded of her as she helped her four sons adjust to a new life here.

This winter, as the snow piled up and the temperatures stayed bitter, all of us could see Thembi struggling to remain upbeat. There is truly almost nothing of Africa in the landscape and community that now surrounds her, and her losses felt palpable to all of us. When I think about my own experience losing the place in the Adirondacks, there is a narrower band of smells, sights, landscapes, activities and people gone. And sometimes, I am fortunate enough to stumble into an evening of song that feels like a night at Cranberry Lake or blue water that feel like a north storm day on Cranberry Lake. But for Thembi, Meriden is truly a moon landscape.

What must it be like to lose the ALL the smells, tastes, sights, colors, air, dreams, landscape, community of a whole continent, the one that had been yours from birth? And what does all this have to do with hair?

From the moment we made our first Flower Essence for healthy hair, the Angels have linked hair with memories, explaining that our hair is a physical manifestation of our memories. For Thembi, her hair was a record of her African life. To begin with, these memories probably sustained her and gave her a feeling of continuity and connection to something familiar, but as she explained to us, this winter she had begun to feel the weight of her hair. She told us that her mother always described dreads as a tangling of memories. That was something the Angels had long told me about tangled hair. I was fascinated that her mother had told her this too and that now this wisdom had encouraged her to unburden herself of memories that were weighing her down, literally.

And I was never more happy for her or more in awe of her than when she walked in yesterday shorn of her hair. I knew it meant she was saying goodbye to what was and turning to commit herself more fully to the divine plan for herself and her family in this alien land. She was burning her boats after arriving in a new world.

We now have two staff people who have lived in Africa. Sarah Callaway lived in Port Elizabeth, South Africa last year while working for Grassroots Soccer and of course Thembi has always lived in Africa, first in South Africa and then in Zimbabawe. From both of them I have heard a lot about how people make the best of things through song, dance, celebrations and just plain being together. As we have heard tell of the kinds of singing, dancing and visiting with friends and family that filled Thembi’s African days, New England has seemed a very poor substitute. So Thembi’s courage to let go and go forward with this unexpected new life feels pretty amazing.

As she explained it, between when she left last week and when she returned, she had a profound moment of surrender to God’s plan for her and her family. We all shared in her feeling that the haircut was a significant way to cut herself free to dive into her new life without as much energy tied up in looking back and trying to recapture the impossible, a life now gone from her.

To some degree we all struggle with these issues. I certainly do. And I was so very glad that the Angels’ choice of Flower Essences helped give her the courage to do what she needed to do. Borage and Alex MacKenzie Rose are both about courage with Alex Mackenzie’s particular gift a wisdom about finding the courage to do what we need to do. In this case, she felt it helped her finally make that first snip after months of standing in front of the mirror trying to find the courage to go for it. How right it felt that her moving forward in her new life here was marked by letting the old life fall away with the cutting off of her dreads.

THE ANGELS ON HAIR HEALTH

“Hair health is a reflection of many things, but the events unfolding in your life are as much a factor as nutrition. Flower Essences for hair work on the etheric or memory body first and foremost to help people organize their memories, sort and release them. The result is healthier hair. This is the crux of all Flower Essences and other vibrational work. The healing work is done on the non-physical energetic fields of the body before the physical body can reflect this work in greater vitality and well being.

When assessing the health of your hair, know that no energetic changes can be made in the structure of existing hair. This is why haircuts can sometimes be a great help when the energy of your hair holds memories of difficult times or traumatic loss. This is also why sometimes keeping your hair can help anchor within you a supportive vibration. If there was a recent time in which you felt close to divinity and aligned to your purpose, this energetic alignment will be manifest in your hair and keeping this hair can help you stay tuned to this higher vibration.

This offer a general guideline for when to cut your hair, but we suggest you always follow your own heartfelt promptings as almost everyone will evolve beyond the wisdom of their current hair and benefit from an occasional haircut.

Using Flower Essences to untangle emotional, mental and memory tangles will result in healthier hair but more importantly, your electrical system will work with more efficiency, clarity, vibrancy and radiance. Beautiful hair becomes a bonus, a nice one we know.

THE ANGELS DISCUSS SPECIFIC FLOWER ESSENCES FOR HAIR
COTTON ( photo above)- You might ask why Cotton Flower Essence offers such excellent information about healthy hair. Cotton is a plant that has been refined and hybridized by human intention for thousands of years. The intention of this hybridization process has been to create a plant that can produce the most luxurious, generous and healthy fiber. This wisdom is embedded into Cotton. As a consequence, Cotton knows more about manifestation of healthy hair than any other plant including Flax. Cotton is an example of profoundly successful cooperative endeavour between the nature kingdom that holds the divine plan for all plants and humankind which in this case worked in concert with nature to align to this plan. When you work with Cotton Flower Essence you tap into everything Cotton learned during its evolution in harmonious partnership with humankind and the divinity in nature.

BOG COTTON– While this plant has not been hybridized by the human community, it offers excellent vibrational wisdom as a Flower Essence because this plant has had to manifest its cotton fiber in a micro-climate so extremely inhospitable that its wisdom offers anyone within a difficult gene pool or with constraining challenging circumstances to manifest the healthiest hair possible.

CEDAR– Cedar Flower Essence offers information about how to cleanse the mental and etheric/memory bodies of the human electrical system. These are the energetic constructs linked to the physical body that wire the human body to think and remember. Cedar knows how to clear out anything that interferes with the full manifestation of the purest most evolved version of each person’s mental and etheric body. The end result is not only clearer mental capacities and an untangling of confused memories but also healthier hair. This is because hair is memory made manifest and therefore a clearer thinking and a clearer memory system will result in healthier hair.
HEALTHY COAT– Created as part of the Animal Wellness collection at Green Hope Farm, this combination helps people and the animals in their lives with hair and fur related issues. The recipe used for this combination mix was created by us, the Angels overlighting Green Hope Farm, in the hopes that this mix would serve animals and people with all challenges of skin, fur, hair, allergic issues and inflamed tissue of any sort.

Many people ask the staff at Green Hope Farm why we would combine so many Flower Essences in one remedy. It is important for you to fully understand the profound capacity of your electrical systems to read, learn and otherwise be affected by large quantities electrical data. Your entire life experience is a moment to moment reading of complex electrical data. In Nature this data is largely in service to your spiritual evolution and growth. In the creations of your modern world, there is much dissonant and counterproductive electrical data. No matter the quality of the data, your system is reading this data all the time. In sharing our perspective on this matrix of complex electrical data we want to reassure you that you are well equipped to read and learn from a Flower Essence combination remedy that holds many strands of electrical data from many evolved Flowers.

The second thing we would like you to understand is that because of our involvement in the creation of Healthy Coat, we can bundle Flower Essences offering the optimum healing vibrational wisdom to serve issues of hair, skin or fur. Because the people at Green Hope Farm look to us to guide them in which Flower Essences to use for each combination remedy they make, this is true of all the combination remedies that are offered. We guide them to Flower Essences that we know will offer the most helpful information and unbeknownst to them, we often create remedies containing significant healing wisdom that will serve in evolving ways as the needs of humanity shift and change.

Our overview of the electrical wisdom available from Nature and the needs of an evolving humanity put us in an advantageous position to create the best possible Flower Essences for humankind. We continue to design gardens at Green Hope Farm holding the plants we know will be needed in matrixes that make these plants particularly vibrant. We continue to send staff of Green Hope Farm on necessary Flower Essence making missions. The partnership we have with the humans at Green Hope Farm combines our strengths. In the case of these remedies for hair, this
means that we can offer you Flower Essences with a refined wisdom that your electrical system can read and use to clear and revitalize your etheric/memory and mental bodies and thus help you in the manifestation of beautiful healthy hair.”

When it comes to birthdays, some of our gift giving has become as ritualized as a court dance at Versailles.

For example, when Ben’s birthday rolls around in November, I elaborately wrap up two movies for him; “Torn Curtain”, an Alfred Hitchcock thriller with Julie Andrews and Paul Newman and “My House in Umbria” starring Maggie Smith. Then, when my birthday occurs in January, he returns the favor and gives these movies back to me.

Usually at some point during our birthday galas, we pop “Torn Curtain” in the machine and watch the infamous bus chase scene. It is perhaps the most ridiculous chase scene ever filmed. Not even old Alfred could make one bus racing after another across 1950’s East Germany seem anything but absurd.

With “My House in Umbria”, we don’t even watch the movie. It’s not a bad movie, but that has never been the point of this gift. The point of the gift is that it gives us a few moments of complete silliness as we all talk about…….. what else but……. My House in UMMMMMBRIAAAAAAAA.

Ben in particular can roll this phrase off his lips with particularly pomposity and can keep us all laughing about said house for a good twenty minutes.

Which brings us to the topic of today’s post. Today I broke with tradition and defaced the “My House in Umbria” video cover then anonymously popped it in the mail addressed to Ben.

You may or may not care to ask why, but I plan to tell you anyways.

Before I explain my grievous break with tradition, I want to back up for a moment to talk about last year’s gardens and in particular, the Eight Garden.

The first time we planted an Eight mandala was 1993. Three friends joined me in creating about a dozen gardens of vegetables, herbs, flowers all planted in unique mandalas. Each garden had a different name and a different energetic purpose. Each brought its own gifts, but the garden that had the most radiant energy and caused the biggest stir when we opened the gardens to visitors was the one we called the Eight Garden.

From the beginning the Angels told us this garden was about moving things in and out of manifestation ie moving energies that no longer served out of manifestation and bringing in new healing energies and experiences. As the summer unfolded, there seemed no end to the wonderful healing experiences people had in this garden. As far as Green Hope Farm was concerned, the garden appeared to jump start our mail order business in a big way.

We began the garden season with no mail order business and no thoughts of a mail order business yet ended the season a few short months later with daily UPS pick up for orders we were shipping all over the world. I know there are so many factors involved in the manifestation of anything, and I have certainly seen things I hoped to have manifest not happen, but somehow the Eight Garden came to represent to me the magic of when we step into something we are well and truly meant to do, and everything flows.

As the years unfolded, I have loved how generously the magic of this garden has continued to share itself. The vibration of the Eight Garden lived on in many of our Flower Essence combinations that contained some of the original Eight Garden Flower Essence in them. Via the Flower Essences the garden continued to support radical transformative and healing change in so many lives.

As 2010 began, it was with considerable regret that I saw our stock of this remedy dwindle down to a cherished few bottles, and I wondered what our remedies would be like without the Eight Garden vibration informing them.

I didn’t have to wonder for long as the Angels told me then that it was time for another Eight Garden. This was thrilling news. Not only would the Flower Essence combinations get to keep their Eight Garden wisdom, but a new version of the garden after a seventeen year learning curve might hold even more evolved information about transformative change. Plus, I suspected this new Eight Garden would mean magical changes were coming to the farm, the same kind that had happened in 1993.

Would these changes come out of the blue as so much of the change here had or would these changes have a meant to be feeling? I wasn’t sure what form the Eight Garden magic would take.

A year later and one piece of manifestation has revealed itself to us. Green Hope Farm just got a whole lot bigger in a farm sort of way. It’s been a bit of an out of the blue thing but also a meant to be one.

Hence the reason for defacing of the “My House in Umbria” DVD cover…..because Ben’s riff is about to change from My House in Umbria to My House in MERRRRRRRIDENNNNNN as Ben has just bought the farm next door.

Okay, so maybe the house is the size of the tool shed at Maggie Smith’s place, but it is a house and it sits on some beautiful land!

And its a joyful full circle moment for all of us as 25 years ago I would sit in this tiny little cottage with my dear friend Teddy and look out across the field where our farm now sits and dream of living next door to Teddy and her husband Malcolm.

Now Teddy is in her 90’s and is living in Kauai with her son Kalani while her husband, our dear friend Malcolm is in a nursing home. This fall we have watched their house sit empty and wondered what was coming next. It was quite a surprise to all of us when in a big whoosh of activity, it was suddenly possible for us to help Ben buy this house and the beautiful 37 acres that come with the place.

When we planted last summer’s Eight Garden, we knew it was going to bring change as it had the first time we planted the garden in 1993, but we didn’t see this coming. As things fell in place, we were all so happy that it was Ben that was meant to live in this house. We knew it would feel right to Malcolm and Teddy, and we knew it felt incredibly right to all of us.

So now Ben has a house in Meriden right next door. He takes over the helm of the place in March but is already enjoying homeowner activities like shoveling three feet of snow off the septic tank top for a septic inspection and now I hope it will be practicing his riff on his house in MERRRRRRRRIDENNNNNNNN.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday- Earlier today, Jim heard John Tesh on the radio suggesting that people look over the buffet spread at their Super Bowl parties then chose just one snack and THEN have only one bite of that snack. Apparently John chose as a likely snack choice, pigs in a blanket but then had a difficult time describing exactly what this was.

We have all enjoyed a belly laugh about his radio commentary. We also got a kick out of his midweek suggestion about improving our diet by eating in occasionally.

It’s not hard to imagine that John has a more lively social life than mine. For example, he probably would not describe eating a granola bar outside while shoveling snow as eating out. He also probably doesn’t need to shovel out his car for forty five minutes then drive on snow clogged roads for another forty five minutes to eat out. A man who can rent a whole restaurant and also an orchestra to play in the restaurant when he proposes to his wife probably doesn’t have the same constraints on his eating out options that most of us do whether it’s been snowing or not.

Which is why I need to comment a little more on his Super Bowl suggestions. I have to wonder if John has ever actually BEEN to a Super Bowl party. Clearly he has never prepared snacks for one because he has missed the point of the whole event. It’s volume. Plain and simple. The men folk are setting off now with their contribution to the Super Bowl party they are going to. They have so much to carry, it looks like they are moving out. Jim’s parting words? ” I would rather eat no snacks at all than eat just one, therefore I am planning on eating everything.”

Frankly, this is one Super Bowl where Jim probably NEEDS to eat everything in sight. He spent the entire day shoveling snow. First he shoveled snow off the roof of the house and office. Then he hacked off the ice build up under the snow on these roofs with a hammer. Then he shoveled the myriad paths around the place and then he cleared off vehicles so that tomorrow all things Green Hope Farm can whirl back into action. Like pretty much everyone in America except John Tesh, Jim’s pre-Super Bowl week involved a lot of snow, a lot.

Quite simply, it was the kind of week in which one pig in a blanket just isn’t enough.