Jim has a brother  who has a lot of funny things happen to him.  Whenever he is around, the conversation veers towards a retelling of humorous moments in his life.  This brother has a self deprecating sense of humor, so he often tells these stories about himself with a lot of wit ( and with a very loud voice which seems to be part of being a Sheehan man).

There is the story of his college friends pushing him into the middle of the runners at the Boston Marathon. Much as he tried to get back to the sidelines, police kept moving him back into the mix of runners. When he faltered, fellow runners encouraged him on.  And so he ran the final miles of the marathon in loafers before being crossing the finish line to be draped in a blanket by race officials.  As he likes to say, “I’m the only one in the family to finish the Boston Marathon.”

Another much repeated tale took place back in the days when he and Jim worked the night shift at an ice cream factory. Co-workers    (sadly on this fateful night this did not include a sensible Jim) challenged his brother to put a five gallon bucket of fudge sauce on his head. After the bucket was in place, Jim’s brother realized a suction had formed, and he couldn’t get the bucket off.  Covered in fudge from his neck up and unable to breath, he contemplated his imminent death by fudge. Fortunately he decided to try and break the seal by forcing his fingers up the side of the bucket into the gooey mass of fudge. Soon he had a cavity in which to breath, and eventually his co-workers realized they needed to help him remove the deadly bucket of fudge.

Well, you get the picture.  We like to sit around and tell stories as a family, and there are some good ones we never tire of hearing.

Yesterday I heard someone say that the time period we are heading into will be a time of great stories.  Generations from now,  people will still be telling stories about us.  I liked this idea.  It felt true to me.

The stories are not going to be lame chit chat. They may not be as funny as the fudge bucket story either ( though who knows for sure).  However, they will be BIG stories of us awakening to our oneness.

Unity Consciousness.

I suspect it will be hard to go back to anything less after we experience this.  As babies we don’t forget those fingers are ours once we realize their connection to our bodies.  I doubt we’ll forget our oneness once we know it with every fiber of our beings.

And this time of realizing we are all one is going to be epic and make for epic stories.

This is our collective heroes journey unfolding. Every hero has a limitation or flaw when the story begins, and we have that.  We think we are separate.

Every hero gets a call to action and a job only that person can do.  The quest may feel like a bad idea and one that the hero would rather not do.  After all, Bilbo Baggins didn’t want to leave the ‘Shire, nor did Frodo want to be the ring bearer, but these were their quests and each of us has ours.

The call has gone out to humanity. Now we are deep into the the quest with all its challenges. There are adversaries that would like to keep us in the dark, passive and feeling powerless.  There are mentors there to help us. LOTS.  No doubt there will be moments of song and feast when we can celebrate a victory along the way before we have to begin again on our journey.

And no doubt we will make it. And when we do, we will know ourselves so very differently, and everything we know we will have earned. The journey will be our making.

I know I keep yammering on about Greta Thunberg, but she is an example of someone who knows she is the hero of the tale.  Not because she wanted that role, but because she heeded the call and accepted that much as she might have wanted to just be an ordinary teenager playing with her dog, she had to rise to the challenge.  She accepted that she is the only person who can do what she is doing.

And talk about epic! She is on her way across the Atlantic right now in a sailboat. She no longer flies because of the carbon footprint of flying.  And this boat she is on is no cruise ship.  This morning she described it as like “camping on a rollercoaster.”  Regardless of her fears, she is on the high seas coming towards us in America to see who has a role in her adventure.

What are each of our quests? Are our quests shifting with these times or are we in alignment with purpose?  In these late summer days, as I sit out under the lilacs, knitting for the babies in my life, I keep asking myself this.  I am trying to go deep, deep, deep into listening. What is my mission and what is not?  Are there course corrections I need to make?  Sometimes I make errors and get involved in missions that are not mine.  I am grateful for all the beings and my own oneness in Divinity that swings me back to my course.

Of one thing I am sure.  Flowers and sharing their gifts that help take us towards knowing our Divinity and oneness remains my mission.  As I move around the gardens making late summer Flower Essences, I am so grateful that there are so many people in this oneness rising to the call of the other quests taking us to unity consciousness. I salute all of you. I thank all of you.

Many years from now, I look forward to sitting around the campfire and hearing the tales of your heroic journeys that took us to a New Earth.  In the meantime. I am so glad for the mail and email.  Each day, I get to read about your heroic journeys in process. Yes, there are no campfires or ‘smores, but there is heart to heart sharing and that is bliss!

PS A shout out to Taylor Sheehan ( the daughter of Fudge Bucket Sheehan) Thank you for giving us yet another reason why we are grateful Jim’s brother survived the Fudge Bucket experience.  Thank you for spending your summer with the women of Green Hope Farm.  We deeply appreciate your humor ( especially about your dad), your zest for life (and all things computer) and your indomitable spirit. We will miss your wardrobe weather predictions.  Have a wonderful sophomore year in college!

One way to think about our chakras is to consider that the three lower chakras are the energy centers for our masculine energy in the world. These chakras hold the energies to ground, manifest, create/ procreate  as well as relate to our tribe of origin and all of the others we meet in our lives.

The upper three chakras are about our feminine energies with a focus on knowing our truth, living in alignment with this intuition, experiencing our oneness with all life and moving towards union with Divinity.

This leaves the heart chakra smack dab in the middle. It is the  place where the masculine and feminine meet in an expression of our unique soul purpose and love.

Here at the heart we balance the masculine energies of the three lower chakras and the feminine energies of the three upper chakras by moving and connecting all these energies through the divine transformer of the heart chakra.

While the individual chakras spin like whirling galaxies within us, the movement of energies between the upper half and the lower half of our energy system can be represented by a figure eight with its unceasing movement of all things into and out of manifestation.

Our first Venus Garden was called the Eight Garden. This garden helped us bring Green Hope Farm  and our Flower Essences into manifestation.

The summer of the Eight Garden was the one year the Angels asked us to open the farm to visitors,  During that summer we began each day in silence, sitting at the crossover point of the figure eight in the Eight Garden.  Any visitors and all of us tending gardens crowded into the spot for a blissful experience.

At the time, the center of the eight just felt like a great place to meditate,  Later I felt gathering there had helped us release what needed to be released, manifest what we needed for that  busy summer . This time also taught us about balancing the energies of our masculine and feminine energies into a constantly evolving dynamic  of receiving loving from Divinity and sharing this love with everyone who visited.

During the summer it became clear that  our mission beyond that growing season was to share our love and the love of the Flowers in the framework of Flower Essences. Sitting at the heart of the Eight Garden had helped us bring our masculine and feminine energies into a balance of receiving guidance, love and light and sharing what we had learned through the gardens and the Flower Essences.

When you go to the Find a Flower Essence page, it offers Topics as a way to search for a Flower Essences.  Chakras are one of the choices under topics. Under Chakras,  we’ve listed each chakra on its own page.  On each Chakras page we have listed Flower Essences we feel are linked to helping to solve the specific challenges of that chakra.

For example, the first chakra page  starts with a rectangular tab that has a brief descriptions of chakras in general followed by a tablet about the first chakra, it gifts and spiritual challenges then we have tablets of Flower Essences linked to the first chakra.

The new Elephant Trunk Loosestrife is an Essence listed on the First chakra list as it helps us find harmony in our planetary herd.

As each of us must balance our masculine and feminine energy regardless of gender, thinking about which aspect of ourselves needs support is one way to search through the chakra listings. If we have a lot of intuitive understanding of our lives but are having a hard time bringing these ideas into form, looking at the first three chakras might be a way to begin. If we are busy in the world but not clear about what our divine work is, the upper chakras might be a place to begin.

The information on the specific tablet for each chakra is detailed even though quite short.  When I have an injury or am ill, I try to run it through the filter of which chakra is involved and what the concern of the chakra is.  Each chakra tablet lists in brief the color, issues, spiritual task, corresponding part of the physical body and some of the physical challenges that may crop up when we are working to unblock or increase the light moving through a specific chakra. Here is the fifth chakra tablet for example.

The section closes with one called Alignment. This group of Flower Essences here  help us line up all the chakra into a smoothly running integrated system.

Snapdragon is one on the Alignment page. Its tall straight stalks reflect how it helps us align our column of seven whirling chakras.

A great deal of high vibration energy is coming into the planet for us right now. I find it helpful to consider that when we have a physical symptom somewhere in our bodies, it may reflect a temporary energetic blockage in a chakra that is making it hard for this energy to move through this part of our systems. By using Flower Essences connected to this chakras, we can focus on physical healing as well as support ourselves about the spiritual issues co-exisiting with the physical challenge.

For example, if I had a sprained ankle, this might be my process- Hmmm….a sprained ankle- this is a first chakra issue so what is going on with my  roots or relationship with my tribe of origin or the community I now live in?  Am I feelings safe and grounded in my life or wondering about my right to be me in my community or move forward in my life in the way I need to move forward? Having zeroed in on these concerns, I would look at the possible Flower Essences listed as focused on the issues of the first chakra and choose the ones that called out to me either because of their descriptions, their appearance or because something is pulling me to that Flower Essence..

To complicate things a bit, I also think of the left side of the body as linked to our feminine lineage and the right side of the body as linked to our male lineage, so if it were a sprained ankle on my left side I would consider what issues of perhaps guilt, worry, doubt or judgment I might have taken on from my maternal line that I need to work to toss while I take my Flower Essences. This layered approach would help me more confidently move forward, feeling secure in my connection to life regardless of how others experience my choices.

Right now, in so many situations, thinking about the chakras  is a very helpful tool for unblocking energetic blockages within us that are temporarily impeding the full movement of all this lovely light and love flooding into the planet to bless each and every one of us.

You deserve to fill up to the brim with this lovely light, and Flower Essences can help us do this!

This light is for ALL OF US and that includes you!

This past weekend I was part of a lovely wedding. The Flowers for the wedding came from the gardens here, and I made the vegan wedding cake. The bride wanted purple frosting, and so the cake was a tower of purple-ish glory with a frosting made from pureed blueberries. Here it is resting in the refrigerator before delivery.

The bride and groom worked extremely hard to create a weekend of happiness for friends that also would do no harm to the planet.  They borrowed. They up-cycled. They made everything by hand. They organized elaborate and wildly successful recycle systems.

At the close of the weekend when the last borrowed plate was scraped clean and deposited in a big washtub to be handwashed, the trash can for non-recyclables was a quarter full.  Sixty people had eaten and danced and celebrated up a storm for three days, yet everything used for the celebration but this modest pile of trash was moving on to be re-used again.

The guests were mostly twenty something friends of the bride and groom.  This gave the wedding a decidedly sweet feeling.  I was lucky to have conversations with many of the guests. We sat under the shade of the linden and birch trees where the wedding took place, and in the various hours before and after the ceremony,  those gathered shared about their young lives.

Unexpectedly, the conversations veered in the same direction over and over.  Independent of one another, these young people would tell me of their earnest plans to try to do some good in the world, and their desperate fears that there would be no Earth left for them to live out their hopes.

Since I try to bring messages of hope, I felt grateful for every conversation and every chance to say I felt humanity would wake up in time.

But really, is offering hope enough? Planetary heroine, Greta Thunberg said, “Adults keep saying, “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” I don’t want your hope. I want you to act.  I want you to act as if the house is on fire…because it is.”

I came away from the weekend thinking about how so many of my generation are not inspiring young people with much of anything but an example of bickering, fear mongering, fiddling while Rome burns and making plans to waste as many resources as possible before blowing town at our deaths.  This kind of behavior was summed up for me when a retiree said to my husband at a funeral last week that his plan for retirement was to spend every cent he had ever earned on fun trips and not leave his kids a penny.  Another person at the event said she was too busy with special plans for retirement to think about doing anything for anyone else.  Again, this was at a FUNERAL where one might expect people to think slightly bigger picture.

In any case, this total focus on retirement plans made me feel sad.  As Greta said, “Some say I should be in school. But why should any young person be made to study for a future when no one is doing enough to save that future?”

Is our generation’s behavior really the best us baby boomers can do? Personally I feel we are being schooled every day by this sixteen year old girl from Sweden. And we deserve it.

Self care has become just another way to say selfish. Maybe it is time for us to give up the idea that the Earth owes us a carefree retirement of unlimited treats because we worked hard for forty or fifty years.  Maybe our generation, like the generation facing World War II, has to sacrifice and inspire instead of sit back and consume.

Since the theme of the gardens this year is balance, I’m drilling down on the topic. Out in the world there is much talk of balancing caring for others with caring for ourselves when in truth WE ARE ALL ONE. This means when we take care of ourselves at the expense of others, we are doing so at the expense of ourselves too. Balance only comes when we experience everything as one unified energy field.

I’d like to see us all, most especially my generation, get a better plan for how to help.  To talk specifics, this week a leaked document from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, concluded that simply focusing on reducing or eliminating carbon emissions from fossil fuel industries, factories and vehicles will not be enough to avoid catastrophic climate change, and food production on the entire planet must change to plant based or minimally vegetarian to make the difference.. This month, a summit of top scientists meeting in Geneva is expected to use this information to call for a shift to plant based diets to keep the warming of the planet under the necessary 1.5 celsius.  We can no longer eat animals and keep the planet cool enough to survive.

Greta has said of us “adults”, “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is.  Even that burden you leave to us children…We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again.  We have come here to let you know that change is coming whether you like it or not.”

So, to my fellow baby boomers, let’s surprise Greta and all young people by becoming our most selfless selves. Let this be our shining hour.  Let’s be leaders of this change instead of ostriches with our heads in the sand. In my search for what individuals can do, it boils down to this: Not eating animals is the biggest single action we can make as individuals to help stop climate change. Only 2% of our generation is plant based, and we have the medical bills to prove it. Let’s change that today and fearlessly recycle, upcycle, re-use, reduce our carbon footprint and yes, go plant based.

A PS to all the lovely souls I met at the wedding weekend. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for inspiring me to do more and do better in my personal efforts. I promise to do everything I can to leave you a planet for your children and your children’s children.

This is a post from a wonderful Instagram site that shares much information about the things we can do to help all of us on our tiny planet.