This week, a Green Hope Farm friend wrote me to ask if I was sure I was doing the most important work I could be doing right now. Didn’t it seem that there were many more pressing things to do than what I was doing? She asked if the complicated time we are in require that we do more or different tasks. What are the priorities during this time on earth? What is our work and what is not?  Is it okay to do what we are guided to do and not do everything we feel needs to be done?

When I read her letter, I thought immediately of guidance I received during the 1993 growing season.  This was the season Green Hope Farm was open to visitors, and the guidance received during this season feels as fresh and as relevant as the day I wrote it down.  In part, this is because I have yet to master the lessons of the guidance! It could also be that some guidance is timeless!  In any case, I am rereading this guidance right now.  It’s three hundred pages long!  Let me tell you how this guidance came to be. 

At the beginning of the 1993 growing season, three gardening acquaintances and I joined together to co-created gardens with the Angels and Elementals. We thought it would be fun to create the gardens together then share them with visitors.  

We called ourselves the Four Winds and each of us was assigned a particular wind. We didn’t immediately gather that this would mean we blew in different directions. We also did not understand the nature of our project.  We thought we were creating gardens to demonstrate what happens when you work co-creatively with Angels and Elementals.  We also expected no more than a few dozen friends we bugged to come to see our efforts and maybe some random visitors that, as in years past, had wandered into the gardens sensing their unique vibrations.

Instead of a few visiting friends, we hosted thousands of people.  And while the gardens were an incredible testament to co-creative endeavors, they proved to be just as much about offering people garden spaces to heal in as demonstrating of the benefits of co-creation.  Over the course of the season we witnessed many miraculous healings.  It was an amazing experience.  But to get there, we had to stumble, trip, fall down, face plant, then surrender everything to Divinity by turning every aspect of the project over to the God within us all.

Let me first tell you about our collective face plant.  As we began our work together early in the spring, our personalities clashed early and often.  While we all had serious gardening chops, our garden experiences were totally different. We had different ideas about how to garden and different expectations for what we wanted to accomplish in the gardens. We also had different ideas about what it meant to host visitors.  As you may have noticed, gardeners can be an opinionated lot.  We were no exception.

We also came from different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, world views, socio-economic backgrounds and points in the our journey as women.  At the best of times these expansive differences kept us open hearted and widened our world view, but in the heat of the moment our differences sometimes led to misunderstandings as well as big arguments about priorities. 

Somewhere in my journey through life I learned the expression “You can either be happy or right.”  In the beginning, we all wanted to be right.  It wasn’t very far into our work together when it was made clear that every last impulse to be right had to be abandoned. We could be the lucky gardeners in a project that belonged to Divinity, i.e. a project more wonderful than anything we could imagine, but this could only come to pass if we let go of control.

We learned this after an incident in early May.  A dozen gardens were underway, but we were not yet open for visitors. Even without the crowds, things were tense.  One afternoon we had an enormous fight in which we all dug in to defend our righteous opinions. I don’t remember the exact words said, but the gist of the fight was that we all felt we had too much to do in the gardens (let alone in our lives outside the gardens), and we didn’t agree on what the garden priorities should be.

It was a humdinger of a fight, the kind that leaves one shaking for hours.  Afterwards, it was clear we could not continue the way we had begun, but we had no idea what to do instead.

The morning after the fight, I was woken at five in the morning by a cardinal bird tapping relentlessly on my bedroom window.  For some reason this gave me the idea to go downstairs to my computer and see if I could get a message about how we might proceed.

Thus began a series of messages that came not from the Angels and Elementals as in years past but from the God within us all.  I was startled by this different voice and often disbelieving, yet I just kept on writing down what I heard, and the cardinal bird continued to wake me up at five each day for this divine appointment. I was to learn that my opinion I didn’t deserve to receive these messages was just one more thing I needed to let go of in this big summer of surrender.

The messages helped to dismantle my confusions about my worthiness to receive them.  In a hundred different ways, the guidance reminded us we were all part of God.  In fact, no one could be outside God because God was everything.  Our ideas that we were separate were just illusions that would melt away as we came into closer conscious relationship with the God within us. This project, these messages, everything in creation was to try and help us all come closer to God and to a conscious realization of our oneness with God.

We were also reminded again and again that oneness did not mean we were all the same.  Our differences were something to be respected as in perfect Divine order. Here was one pithy message:

I will tell you that yesterday’s meditation was to demonstrate that it is not your differences that prevent harmony and oneness.  You are a stronger force for my work in the world because you are each so different.  My hope is to give you so many experiences in which you see more clearly that unity is not homogeneity but the joining of differences through the common strand of love.

Over the next four months, I received specific guidance about every last concern the four of us brought to the table. Everything was surrendered to this guidance. When the gardens opened, visitors were free to read the messages and leave their own questions for me to ask. A well thumbed copy of the guidance sat in the barn shop where we served every visitor tea.

From the start, the guidance helped us immeasurably to put our superficial differences of opinion aside, come to consensus and find the common strand of Divinity within all of us.  Yet again, this didn’t mean we were encouraged to do the same thing or try to be all things to all people. In fact, we were frequently encouraged to stop trying to fix everyone and everything and trust in the perfection of our differences and our different assignments.   Given this perfection of differences, we were encouraged to remember that what we were called to do by Divinity was ENOUGH.

The guidance stressed that it was vital for us to trust in who we were and what we were called to do as well as what we were NOT called to do and be.  We were asked to trust that Divinity knew how to make our diversity of callings work.

Here is an example of the kind of message we received on this topic. To explain the reason for my question in the excerpt below, let me explain the situation. We hoped to make enough money to contribute to our four families’ finances through donations and sales of our Flowers, vegetables and various garden related products like our Flower Essences.  However when this message was received, we had not yet opened the gardens to visitors, and we had no idea if we would have any visitors or bring in any money to support our four families. This was one of many messages suggesting that financial contributions were not the only way to support our families, and that what we were doing in the gardens had its own value.

Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly enough, when I receive the letter from the Green Hope Farm friend, this is exactly the message I was rereading:

Question:  In our discussion about finances yesterday most of us raised some concerns about other people needing to help us financially in order for us to do this work and our guilt around this.  Could you give us an overview?

Answer:  All of you have a sense that you are in some way a drag on the family systems in which you find yourself.  Finances seem the most obvious thing to pin that sense of weight to.  I tell you that this is not the case in any of your lives.  You are much more the yeast in your family systems.  Consider yeast.  It raises the dough, an act of literally raising the vibrations of the ingredients.  In the process it does consume a certain number of ingredients within the dough. The sugars are taken up in the process, for example.  However without the yeast, you would begin and end a bread making project with the same thing.  There would be no transmutation from flour, water, sugar, salt and yeast into the beauty of a loaf of bread.  

You must all understand that like the ingredients in a loaf of bread, not all family members are meant to do the same thing.  Everyone serves in an important capacity, but they are all different.  The bread needs the flour, it needs some form of sugar, it needs the salt for a zesty taste and of course the yeast too.  You think that you are all supposed to serve all functions in a family.  This isn’t the goal and never could be.  You are not a grouping of clones.  You are together because of the way that together you form bread.  You must believe that I know what I am doing. 

As the baker, I have the right ingredients assembled.  Your job is to be your true essence and know that that is what you are there in the recipe for.  What if the yeast refused to do its work?  You know what would result.  Now your function in families is not eternally set, but I tell you right now that you do yourself and your family a disservice in second guessing your important work in your family units.  Let yourself be the yeast and enjoy what happens knowing it will result in a magnificent loaf of bread.

In the letter I received this week, the Green Hope Farm friend also expressed her concern that since there are so many enormous Human messes right now, maybe we all needed to step up and clean up more than our own messes.

Our guidance included many discussions about this topic. In fact, the whole series of messages could have been called “How Not to Be a Brother’s Keeper.”

While some of the messages explained that we couldn’t possibly do the work for someone else because it was THEIR work, some went over the territory of why it was not a good idea for any of us to get involved in someone else’s messes unless we were specifically guided by the God within to, in some way, support the person with their own mess. Here is one message about this.

I received this message right after I had come back from a few days off in the Adirondacks on Cranberry Lake. I had just shared with my partners a description of the violence of one particular thunderstorm on the lake and the South Wind, who was going through much turmoil in her life, latched onto the metaphor of thunderstorms as the process of shifting our lives upwards and releasing the old.  God liked this metaphor for the transmutation process and spoke about it in several messages including this one:

First, cast no judgements on yourself or anyone you witness in the throes of a thunderstorm.  If it is someone else, neither pity the person experiencing the thunderstorm nor try to fix it for them or force them to take the situation back into cover.  Understand that they are bringing the garbage to the surface for a release.  Understand that interference can hamper their efforts unless you are expressly asked by me or one of my workers to explain the transmutation process to them or aid them in the transmutation process such as with a hands on healing.  Unless you are given guidance (otherwise), remember that the God in them knows what it is doing.  This is not asking you to refrain from loving another.  It is asking you to love with detachment and appropriateness.  To love without your erroneous ego filters which see thunderstorms as bad.  Believe me, if you insist on keeping those filters about thunderstorms you will exhaust yourself in about 10 minutes.  There will be nothing but thunderstorms on your planet in short order.  Get balanced living in and amongst them.
 

If it is a thunderstorm in your life, there are ways to expedite the cleansing.  When you realize that for whatever reason you have embarked on a thunderstorm, stop whatever you are doing and go inward into your heart.  Stay there as best you can, for this is the place of balance and connection with me.  Ask me to move all the negativity up and out of you.  Follow my prompting about what it is you need to do.  No matter how peculiar the guidance, follow it.  Your choice is to wallow unnecessarily in your accumulated negativity or let me handle it fast and efficiently.  Let me handle it.  If I tell you to go to the 8 garden and do somersaults, go do it.  If I tell you to take a nap, do it.  If I tell you to drop everything and go find a pond to swim in, do it.  This is a complex time for all of you.  You need to follow your promptings from me immediately.  It will save you much grief and pain. 

There will still be pain and grief until you have transmuted all your karma and ego illusions (really the same thing),  but you can go through the process of release with me and come through it well on your way to your ascension or you can stick with your ego and leave the planet through the death process.  There is nothing in between.  I tell you this with gentleness and love, but I want you to understand the full significance of what I am saying.

To reiterate, you are not automatically to assume that you are responsible for how anyone handles the transmutation process.  Take your directions only from me.  Yesterday, Molly, you had a lesson in this.  You had no boundaries about whose transmutation you were responsible for and as a consequence you let yourself get walloped.  Let it be a lesson to you to respond to every request to help someone by asking me what it is I would have you do.  Then do only that.  You need to slow the pace so that you do not let someone set up a situation before you have asked me.

One of our volunteers who read the guidance each day found herself getting another thunderstorm message when she tried to fix a situation in her family. 

Your grandson is involved in a necessary transmutation process.  To stop this transmutation process would hurt him a great deal.  It would cause him to get ill.  The intentions of other family members such as yourself may be to help him, but (it is) not helpful.  Out of your ego illusions about thunderstorms you want to stop his thunderstorm.  You will not stop anyone on this whole planet’s thunderstorm.  If you try you will just add more thunderstorms to your own plate.  They will recreate another thunderstorm for themselves and you will be carrying around the last one you tried to take off their hands.  This could make everyone ill.  YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THE APPROPRIATENESS OF EVERYONE’S THUNDERSTORMS.  Let them have their thunderstorms.  Unless in the absolute quiet of meditation you are told clearly by me that it is your job to help transmute a person’s thunderstorm DO NOT GET INVOLVED.

You are all going to get hammered in this regard until you learn this lesson.  You need to learn this lesson or you will not survive on this planet.  (Another visitor) said something very true when she spoke on this during your talking stick circle after meditation.  You must learn to let go and let God in every thunderstorm on the horizon.

If you need an image for this, consider the thunderstorm that occurred on Cranberry Lake.  What if Molly had gone out in the middle of the lake during that storm, thinking it was her job to fix it and transmute the negativity.  She would have been struck by lightning and be dead.  Molly, you knew this was not appropriate.  It never crossed your mind to do so.  You respected the God in Nature as knowing what it was doing.  Every time you see another soul’s thunderstorm, respect the God in them.  Only get involved at my request or if the person expressly asks for help and information and this checks out with me as a good idea. 

This land is to be used as a transmutation tool by many people.  If you get involved in this you will get struck by lightning and get very sick from too much negativity that you are unnecessarily processing.  This land is set up to handle the transmutation process without your input.  When people ask questions or you get a sure prompting, know that for that particular person you are meant to be a part of the team.  Otherwise, stay in your center minding your own thunderstorms.

Learn this now or learn it the hard way.  The reason you got so exhausted Molly was because you got caught in the cross winds of another’s thunderstorm.  It was a “doozy” but a necessary “doozy”.  You had no appropriate boundaries and got pulled in.  It was electrically like going out to the middle of Cranberry Lake during the storm.  I hope you learned your lesson.  You are only going to be given thousands more situations in which you must be clear and appropriate.  You will have to learn this lesson, all of you.  Take this message seriously or get walloped until you take this message seriously.  

There will be so many thunderstorms for all of you on earth that it is a lesson all of you will have to learn in order to survive.  I would suggest that you practice this skill by doing the following.  Decide on a basic line to give people when they demand that you enter their thunderstorms and fix them.  Something like “I need to check with my guidance before I make any decision here about whether it will be appropriate or helpful for me to get involved.”  You must understand that as people’s thunderstorms grow in size and magnitude, people are going to seek out all you brother’s keepers out there to try to unload on you.  It won’t help you and it won’t help them, but that won’t stop them from trying.  You will have to take responsibility for being appropriate here.  After you have said your line, go inward into communion with me and follow what I say. 

If you respond to this (guidance) by saying: “But I don’t know how to connect with you and get that kind of information.” then let this message of today encourage you to crisp up our connection until you can.  There will be no other way to survive here on this planet unless you are in your heart in communion with me.

You must use discernment to see the very subtle ways people will want to pull you into their thunderstorms.  For example, Molly, when that garden group wanted you to speak, they wanted you to handle their group thunderstorm.  I know it was uncomfortable for you to say no, but it was very important that you did.  They need to transmute a big thunderstorm, and there is nothing you can do to help.  You would really have been walloped if you had gone down there and tried to fix it.  

When you gave your tour to the group of skeptics right before your vacation you also tried to facilitate a pleasant release of some of their personal thunderstorms.  It was not your job.  It left you drained.  You must see the various ways that you let yourself get into the brother’s keeper role.  Just because you see an imbalance doesn’t mean you are supposed to fix it.  Not even a dozen Ascended Masters could fix the thunderstorms that cross your path unless the Masters violated everyone’s free will which of course they would never do.  So stop assuming that because you see it clearly, it’s your job.  You will worry yourself to a nubbin with that illusion so GET RID OF IT.  

The group of you need to give yourself some credit for having brought into manifestation a place which automatically releases negativity before, during, and after people’s personal thunderstorms.  Do you see your partners the Angels and Elementals rushing around trying to fix everyone?  No!  So let them be your role model.  Immanuel remains in the garden as does Raphael but they only work with those who ask for help or open to receive their love. 

This was a very important talk to have.  You all need to work very hard on this in the next few weeks.  Otherwise you will have a very difficult time with the crowds that want to come here.  In some ways the crowds have been held off by me until you could get clearer on your boundaries because you truly would have been laid flat, all of you, if they had descended en masse.  As you get clearer, you free this place to be used by greater numbers.  It was a great gift for you Molly to see how much people enjoy the self tours.  That was a step towards appropriateness.

During the growing season, every month has its unique charms. The palette is mostly blues, purples and yellows in early spring. Somehow this feels just perfect. June continues this theme adding many shades of pink especially in the Rose beds. July steps it up to include the bold colors that will later dominate the fall palette of reds and oranges. In July, there is a lot of everything, and I love it.

I wish I could send you the fragrance of these Sweet Peas. They fill the entire “vegetable” garden with their scent. Vegetable is in quotation marks for while the garden includes many vegetables (including a current bumper crop of peas), I have also “filled in the gaps” with Borage, Nasturtiums, French Marigolds, Pom Pom Poppies, Sweet Peas and Morning Glories. I also let the Radish and Arugula go to seed because the honeybees LOVE their Flowers. Honeybees get the priority over everyone else here, so if it between someone eating the last radishes or letting them Flower, the Honeybees win.

Hollyhocks are also inside the vegetable garden fence as they get munched down by the deer outside the fence. Behind these magenta friends you can just see The Watchman, the wonderful deep maroon Hollyhock that is so important in our Flower Essence combinations Jealousy, Spraying, Neediness and New Beginnings

Scotch Thistles tower in the Arbor Garden. I once saw them in a photo of a garden in, where else, Scotland. I was determined to grow them for Golden Armor and for their gorgeous presence in the gardens. When I went to get the seeds, there were practically skulls and cross bones on the package as they are considered a serious menace (That’s basically what they call anything or anyone with good boundaries isn’t it?). Anyways, I got seeds and grew these biennials and now they move themselves around the garden from place to place. This year they are in a line in front of the Henry Martin Rose which doesn’t seem too fussed by this, and they are stationed here with Baby’s Breath, Feverfew and Rose Campion at their feet.

Over in the Red Shiso plot, I have let the Calendulas in the path grow up, because I just can’t imagine a summer without them. This deep purple Poppy (another Papaver Somniferum or Pom Pom Poppy) sprang up in the center looking very snappy.

One garden filled with Zinnias, Cosmos, Snapdragons and other annuals is beginning to really shine. I love these UCal Snapdragons. They come in such interesting colors and hang in there beautifully even in a summer like this one without much rain (as in almost none).

I have just come in from spraying the Day Lilies with garlic spray to keep off the deer. Unfortunately there was a bit of a wind, and I got sprayed too, so I won’t be too popular with staff goddesses this afternoon. Here are some of the Day Lilies on display so far. I am a bit nuts about Day Lilies so there are a lot of varieties. Now that I have discovered this garlic spray, they actually bloom too. I am sure the deer are quite miffed that I finally have a solution that works.

The Roses re mostly gone by but this lovely friend, Pink Grootendorst Rose lingers. With its I AM affirmation of “I AM a life raft of love.” it always throws out a blast of love as I pass it on my way to the vegetable garden. Today I hope it joins me in sending you heaps of love.

It’s hard not to wonder what happened to June here at the farm. How could it go so fast? How is it July 2 with nary a post in June?

One reason June went so quickly was because most of the time I had my head down trundling a load of mulch to one garden or another. If May is about weeding and planting, then June is about more weeding and mulching.

Thank goodness I love weeding because it is my main activity in the gardens. Take for example the Red Shiso crop. The whole crew helped plant it this year and we had great germination.

Since then I have needed to meticulously weed through the baby Red Shiso plants three times already and the plants are only an inch or two high. I don’t mind spending this much time with the Red Shiso. In fact, I enjoy my hours tending it. After all, Red Shiso is our one indispensable crop. I am so happy that the crop looks so healthy and strong this year. Last year was a near endless battle with slugs.

Weeding is necessary everywhere, even in mulched beds. Crab grass is relentless. Big weeding projects this June included the three enormous Rose beds running along the backs of all the perennial gardens as well as the Rose Garden itself. These places always get weeded, but this year I tried to dig up every last crab grass root ( or so I hope).

What have I noticed so far? The deer now enjoy the pristine weed free spaces to stroll on as they seek plants I have forgotten to spray with Deer Off. Some days I think I should just leave my Deer Off garlic sprayer on my back to spray everything all day. (Yes, I suspect I smell of garlic spray all the time anyways- thank you deer!)

Now I am weeding my way through the section of the garden that begins with asparagus then moves on to raspberries then red and black currants then gooseberries finishing off with the blueberries. I have finished with the asparagus, raspberry and blueberries, leaving the gnarly center section of currants and gooseberries. For the record, I am about a third of the way through this part of the garden.

I had 20 cubic yards of mulch delivered to the farm in two truck loads and most of that has been moved wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load to various well weeded gardens. Elizabeth gets all the credit for the blueberry patch mulch. After I weeded, she covered it in mulch. The blueberries are everyone’s favorite, so when I asked for help with the mulching, she was motivated.

Everywhere else I am the mulch hauler. Fortunately the mulch pile sits uphill from all the gardens so most of my runs are me controlling the wheelbarrow in a downhill run. Some routes contain a lot of twists and turns that keep me on my toes as I barrel along with my precious loads of native bark mulch.

Another reason June goes fast is that I need to make a lot of Flower Essences in June, especially from the Roses. I took the staff goddesses out on a Rose tour this week, and by the time I had finished showing them all the blossoming Roses, I am sure they were thinking that eventually every garden on the farm will be swimming in Roses. It is sort of like that already as this year I have even planted Roses out front of the vegetable garden.

So most days see me carrying bowls of water to points all over the gardens to make Flower Essences, especially Rose Flower Essences as this is when they bloom with such abandon.

One other thing which has been a bit of a project this month, especially for Jim, newly released from his eighth grade classroom, is the Arbor Garden. After thirty years of glory, the Arbor collapsed in a high wind. We knew it needed to be rebuilt this summer, but the wind confirmed this.

By the time everything was cleared away, the garden was a big mess. It will now have a chance to recover its mojo in the remaining summer months. I have started to mulch it like crazy. Let’s just say, I am glad I made Arbor Garden Essence before the Arbor collapsed and when the garden was in its full May glory.

So heading into July, there will be more weeding, more mulching, more Flower Essence making and more stopping to smell the Roses. I hope your July is peaceful and full of Flowers.