How did the Bermuda Flower Essences come to be? I owe it all to Lynn Tidman.

I met Lynn at a party in 1991. She was a willowy blonde, fifteen years older than me and very put together in a rather patrician sort of way. After being introduced, I expected to only briefly chat with Lynn, but the host of the party, Malcolm Grobe, asked me to tell Lynn about how I gardened.  I started in with a vague description about fairies and the like.  I expected the conversation to go nowhere, yet an entranced Lynn kept asking more and more and more questions.   

The party was next door to the farm.  The hostess, Teddy Grobe, didn’t have the food organized, so she asked me to take the guests for a tour of our gardens.  As we wandered the gardens, Lynn had a million more questions. I remember her leaning in to me, sporting her signature light blue cardigan and asking again and again, “WHAT did you just say?”  At the end of the tour, she wrote her name and address on a piece of paper and told me she wanted to learn more and would take ANY class I gave. This was followed by a postcard in the mail bearing the same message. The woman was on a mission!

All this surprised me very much, and Lynn would continue to surprise me.  Right away, she had her own connection with the Angels and Elementals, and she took at once to life working with them.  After Lynn took a class with me, she created an astoundingly beautiful and magic vegetable garden with her new partners.  Then with time to spare, she began to spend several days a week here at the farm.  She was, in fact, my first hire which meant I had no idea what I was doing and Lynn had to patiently wait for me get my sea legs as an employer. 

When Lynn came aboard there was no office.  We ran the business out of my kitchen which meant Lynn was suddenly in the middle of my life with three then four little children. She loved the scene, every funny moment of mess and chaos. Her own children, who became beloved friends as well, were older, and Lynn missed little people. 

As our first bottler, Lynn bottled our Flower Essences with a measuring cup. However by the time we built our first bottling machine, I had discovered her lovely handwriting.  From then on, she was our “Lady of Labels.” Lynn would go on to write literally millions of labels for us over the next two and a half decades.   

Lynn had no problem working in the middle of our family life.  In fact, when we finally built our first building dedicated to the Flower Essences, she was devastated to be removed from the kitchen.  Almost at once she had become a grandmother to my children and a dear friend to me.

From the beginning Lynn could see the Angels, especially the weather Angels with whom she had a particularly deep rapport.  Lynn’s extremely preppy looks made her like a secret agent in the worlds she travelled in.  No one expected her to work with Angels to move clouds around or stave off storms, yet she had these abilities and was happy to demonstrate. 

Over time, people would call her to make sure their daughter had good weather on her wedding day or a graduation wasn’t rained out. She always delivered.  At one wedding, I saw her hold off the most enormous cloud bank for several hours.  Sometimes we would discuss the advisability of messing with weather this way, but she was fearless about the consequences.  She and these weather Angels were ever simpatico, so what did I really know about it? Nothing. 

Because she looked like a lady who slept with her pearls on, she opened spiritual doors for all sorts of people who might otherwise not have listened.  She was a new Age seeker without a whiff of patchouli and very happy to tell people at the meat counter at her local grocery store ALL about what she was experiencing.  When Lynn was sharing her experiences, you could almost see the wheels turning in her targeted audience.  People were both wildly surprised that seemingly conventional Lynn was talking about gnomes and also a little bit intrigued. Her credibility went to a good cause.

Lynn also had an incredible rapport with dogs. All dogs. Our goldens, Cody, Riley and MayMay would greet her when she arrive for work with moans of adoration. Cody especially went nuts. “Lovers in a past life”, Lynn always said. With her connection to canines, Lynn helped us sort out what was going on with countless beloveds and always knew the Flower Essences that would help most. She was an animal communicator before we knew the name for this calling. Needless to say, her life at home was filled with rescues devoted to her.

Before we even knew each other Lynn invited me to go out to Bermuda with her for a week.  She later said that it had surprised her when the invitation came pouring out.  How glad I was to be the recipient of a very rare Lynn blurt.  She had grown up on Bermuda and had very British manners so this sort of spontaneous invite was unknown to her.  During the decade preceding Lynn’s invite, my main trips had been to either the diaper pail or the compost heap , so I was thrilled to leave the children in Jim’s care and hit the skies with Lynn.

How I loved Bermuda from the moment we first landed.  The houses were playful bright colors compared to drab New England’s barn red and white, and each was capped by a serene whitewashed roof.  The whole island was one big garden with Flowers blooming everywhere in orderly profusion. The beaches really did have pink sands, and the water was as beguiling and luscious as any water I had ever encountered.  I was in bliss. 

Lynn’s childhood had been a wonderful one of motor boats, sail boats, tennis, dogs, dances, ferry rides to school and one crabby teacher named Mrs. Cuppleditch whom she and her classmates called Mrs Cupplewitch.  Lynn’s mother still lived on Bermuda, but she was in poor health.  Lynn came out to Bermuda frequently to check in to see how things were going for her mom and to sort out any problems. I was happy to go along for the ride.

While Lynn had grown up in a house on Hamilton’s harbor, her mother had later moved out to a house adjoining Mid Ocean Golf Club. This was a more rural part of the island, providing plenty of places for us to walk.  Most mornings we would roll out of bed and onto the golf course for a brisk walk around all the holes. Sometimes we went out to Frick’s Point where Ross Perot was blowing up a coral reef.  Then after an enormous bowl of oatmeal, always oatmeal, we would set off on errands and visits to Lynn’s many friends. All of them had beautiful old Bermudian houses AND GORGEOUS GARDENS.

As far as I could tell people we met fell into two categories.  They were either lifelong friends of Lynn whom she had always called Aunt and Uncle or they were women who had been in her enormous Bermuda wedding.  As I recall, there were seven horse carriages that took Lynn and her attendants to her Bermuda wedding.  All of her friends were more than open minded about our adventures with the Angels and Elementals and equally happy to have us wander in their gardens, chatting to the resident Angels and Elementals.  Lifelong Bermudians all seemed to have had their own close encounters with things on the other side of the veil, and our stories seemed to confirm what they already knew.

Almost from the first blossom we saw, we knew it would be fabulous to make Flower Essences from these new tropical Flower friends.  We sourced canning jars and got to work.  Lynn’s friends were incredibly interested and supportive.  If a Palm tree was in bloom over an al fresco luncheon, our hostess would find a ladder so we could pluck its blossoms.  Phone calls would come from friends telling us of a Flower we just had to see.  No matter when we stopped in, Lynn’s friends would take us at once to see Flowers they thought we would be interested in.  So many Flowers were hidden in grottos and old gardens we never would have found on our own.  Once we were taken to a grove of ancient Grapefruit trees well off the beaten track.  That was a sacred encounter.

I had so much to learn about the tropical and semi-tropical Flowers of the beautiful islands that made up Bermuda. There was so much vitality and life force in these Flowers.  Pomegranate Flower Essence proved to be a powerhouse for women. Avocado and Loquat brought deep healing energies to the digestive tract.  All the citrus including Lime, Lemon, Orange and Grapefruit had strong cleansing and healing energies.  Cotton was fabulous for hair. These new Essences found a place in our collection immediately, and it was hard to imagine life without them.

As we wandered in the gardens, plants would call to us.  Sometimes it was dizzying how many new friends we met.  Shell Ginger spoke of cooling firestorms as did so many of the Aloes we found including Aloe Ciliaris, Coral Aloe and Aloe Vera.  Kangaroo Apple lit up the chakras above our heads.  Chinese Hat Plant centered and calmed.  Clitoria surprised us with its dramatic energy that zipped up our chakras like a kundalini rising. And the Palms (including Date Palm and Chinese Fan Palm)!  There wasn’t a Palm we met that didn’t offer a profound healing energy. 

The gardens we had access to were curated gardens that included the very best tropical and semi tropical Flowers all waiting for us to discover.  These beloved gardens had often been in the same family for several hundred years and had been lovingly cultivated all that time. Some gardens felt like something out of a fairy tale, others had energies I had never encountered anywhere else.

In between visits I read everything I could about tropical and semi tropical Flowers.  One of Lynn’s aunts had literally written the book about Bermuda gardens.  Her book remains a treasure in my life.  When we were in this aunt’s gardens she would sit with us and identify all the Flowers we had found, often leafing through her book to share more information about a specimen. Her twenty five acre garden was one of my most magic and wonderful places I have ever visited.  I was stunned by the wise and ancient presence of the spiritual beings we encountered in all these gardens, but I especially hold dear the experiences I had with the Nature Spirits in this particular garden.

When I developed photos from my trips, the Nature Spirits were often visible as big bold spots of light obscuring the scene.  Not all Nature Spirits could fit in a photo. Some of the guardian spirits towered over us and their garden sanctuaries, rising several stories high.  Bermuda is a special place for Flowers AND Nature Spirits with deep links to the very best of Atlantean Flower research and development.

We always ended our Flower filled days with tea at one of the old fashioned and wonderfully comfortable resorts on the island.  Lynn of course would know everyone, so we were always welcomed everywhere.  During one tea time at a resort run by a friend, we noticed a particularly dramatic Flower and set to work lowering its long dangling blossoms into our ready jar.  Looking up from our task, we noticed we had gathered a shocked crowd of Brits wondering exactly what unseemly thing we were doing with tweezers.  We hardly got to Lynn’s car before bursting into wild laughter. 

Lynn invited me along on trips several times each year until her mom died. This meant we could make different Flower Essences during different seasons as even on Bermuda, Flowers didn’t bloom year round.  We also read up on Flowers in between trips and created a master list of Flower Essences we wanted to make on any given trip. 

As we learned about the strengths of various tropical Flowers we began to seek out specific Flowers for specific things.  The scene at the resort had been part of our project to finds Flowers that would help Lynn’s husband with his prostate, kidney and bladder issues.  We called this our search for “P” plants.  We found that plants with long fuzzy blossoms like Monkey Tail and Screw Pine or Flowers like bottle brushes including Bottlebrush and Calliandra helped open up passageways in the urinary tract.  Later we would learn these Flower Essences got things flowing everywhere, and they would be key ingredients in our powerhouse Flow Free Flower Essence mix.  These “P” Flowers were much more prevalent on Bermuda than in our more temperate climate.

Lynn as a proper Bermudian would never have been more graphic about things than discreetly saying “P” plant.  In fact, once I had a very mysterious and magical encounter at night with some Bermudian Angels and Lynn, though asleep, was with me in this out of body tour of the island.  She only believed the story when I told her that her main preoccupation during the evening was whether her nightgown was sliding up while the Angels were flying us around the island.  “That sounds like me.” She laughed.

Laughter was the main ingredient of our trips.  For so many reasons these adventures on Bermuda filled us with joy and laughter.  We climbed on top of buildings and stood on the roof of Lynn’s car to look at blossoms.  We went out in tropical storms to look at blossoms.  We leaned way, way over rocky cliff edges to look at blossoms.  And all the time we were laughing.

After a long illness Lynn died last week.  I am so glad for her release from a very difficult situation.  I am also so very grateful that she listened to that little voice within pressing her to find out more about gardening with Angels and Elementals and pressing her to take a chance on an unknown houseguest at her Bermuda home.  We had so much fun, and we made an amazing collection of Flower Essences together. Not a bad legacy for a friendship.  Thank you Lynn.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent email I received and some thoughts about the questions this GHF friend, Trevor, raises.

“As we know, the new energy has been flooding into the planet recently and yet I and my community have been feeling impatient for the last few weeks. (I should explain that I’m an empath coach and energy healer).

The image I am getting is of the desire to paddle a canoe downstream to get going in the right direction yet the effort would be futile because the upstream dam is getting ready to burst. When it does, we will all be carried downstream way faster than we could ever paddle under our own efforts.

We know The Shift into 5D is getting very close. I wanted to ask if this image of paddling downstream resonated for you (although I am sure the metaphor of the dam bursting sounds more catastrophic than is intended).” 

MY THOUGHTS

I found this a fascinating and timely metaphor.  Thank you Trevor for sharing.

The first thing I want to discuss in regards to Trevor’s email is the balance of Effort and Grace required of us right now.

There is a tremendous amount of Grace in the higher vibrational energy pouring into the planet.  We have much to be thankful for, as this energy floods our world through no volition of our own.  What we are being given is precious beyond measure.

So where does Effort come into the picture?  I feel it is vital to make the effort to consider where we need this light to flow in our lives and to ask Divinity to help it flow there. Trevor describes this as pointing the canoe in the right direction. I do not feel this effort is futile in the face of big waves coming but extremely important BECAUSE big waves are coming.

Events in our lives, our dreams, even our daydreams illuminate our logjams. If we look for patterns in what we are experiencing, what we have experienced and even what is happening in our dreams, we can grow clearer about tangles and road blocks we personally face.  When we are cognizant of our logjams, we can ask the incoming light now and later to illuminate these places within us that particularly need the incoming light.  This does not have to be a complex request process.  We can simply ask that Divinity’s light and love be directed towards issues X, Y, and Z. 

The light flooding the planet is going to help us all and carry us all downstream, but it can be used more effectively if we are aware of where we need it most. I would call this one of the ways we can balance the Grace of this light with our Effort.

To riff off Trevor’s canoe analogy, as we flow with the current energy wave and prepare for other blockbuster waves, our canoe paddles of awareness, intention and requests for help all assist us to get the most out of the current flow and help prepare us to be poised to ride future waves in the most productive way possible. This relieves any sense of impatience or futility as we wait for unfolding events. It also gives us plenty to do while we wait for the bigger waves.

MORE FROM THE SUMMER OF 1993 GUIDANCE

As with so many recent blogs, I include again a channeled message from Divinity given during the GHF community building summer of 1993.  During that summer a collective of very diverse women created a baker’s dozen healing gardens here at the farm then shared them with a large and diverse group of visitors.  Throughout this venture, we received very specific guidance from the God within us all.   

These messages encouraged us to see all visitors as immediate and equal members of the community we were building.   There was no common religious ideology among the four founding members or in the thousands that visited, yet the messages referred to all groups at the farm as God community because of our joint efforts to grow our relationship with the Light while also being present to support other people to do the same. 

All this to say, when the guidance below describes us as God community it is not referring to us as a conventional religious organization.

WHY THIS SELECTION

This is the entire message received on July 23, 1993. While this excerpt of the guidance only gets to a paddling up and downstream metaphor at the end, I still felt the whole day’s message was relevant to Trevor’s email.  All of us are finding our way as individuals in a unified energy field.  This is a complex dynamic requiring patience with ourselves as we individually and collectively seek to ground the full consciousness of 5D energy on earth.

Let me explain one other thing about the messages that may help this excerpt make more sense.  Throughout the guidance, God describes the filters, illusions and misunderstandings we have as EGO BLANKETS that blind us so we stumble into each other and also fail to see the light in our situation, in ourselves or in each other. The guidance repeatedly suggested our many ego blankets were our personal responsibility to identify and remove with community interaction described as an excellent way to accelerate the removal. As you will see, this is not so much because other community members should point out our blankets or try and remove them, but because community illuminates our blankets and gives us examples how to remove them.

July 23, 1993

Today we will talk about the nature of community since it is something which everything (that) you are doing involves.  One day this week you wrote down the sentence “Community is not about getting it from each other.”  I would like to elaborate on what that statement means.

There are many misconceptions, ego blankets tucked one on top of the other, when it comes to community.  You have dealt with some of the most obvious blankets, but now you are dealing with some of the most insidious.  These are some of the blankets that are applied with crazy glue and peel off extremely slowly.

First, most egos want to find a community where they get to hide out in peace and quiet.  The goal is to find a group that agrees with you so you can avoid the fires of change.  This kind of community, if it exists, is a stagnant backwater of paralysis and putrefaction.  It is not something that you should be glad to have found, for it freezes you where you are and lets no life force enter. 

I AM by nature the energy of change.  My light by its essential nature constantly changes and expands and is the illumination of all things.  A community where the members agree on a set values system and the correct way to process everything is a community running from the light, using their combined muscle power to create a structure which shuts out the light and keeps everyone in the dark.

When people are called into community in my name the point is never stagnation or complaisance.  The point is an acceleration of the growth process through joint efforts to come into the light.  One way this happens is through the friction of old ego patterns rubbing up against old ego patterns.  In what way would something any different serve you in your journey home?  Would it help to be in a self congratulatory group that told each other there was no need or room for change?  It would feel like death or at the very least stagnation. 

When you gather into community in my name and let go and let ME take charge, I see exactly how to tumble you one against the other for the maximum blanket removal.  The intention isn’t just to bruise you one against the other.  The intention is to help you remove all that is left which interferes from a direct and complete relationship with me.  I tumble you over and over again in the same way when there is a place in which the blanket is particularly stuck to you.  This is why you experience the same set of dynamics over and over again until you “get it”.

Because God community is more clearly oriented towards “Letting Go and Letting God,” I can much more efficiently remove blankets, because everyone can be a force of light in various situations.  The blankets are revealed not so much because someone is pointing them out to you, but because you are in a place where I have been able to bring more light through many more people so all of you can see better. 

It is not always comfortable to see your blankets so clearly unless you remember that I AM there to help you remove them.  I AM not going to reveal the blanket for the sake of humiliating you and then walk away.  The light is there to help you see yourself better, and the tools are there to remove them faster, because not only do groups bounce and jostle their blankets off of each other, but (groups) can learn from each other exactly how to remove a blanket.  In the bright light which results in God community, you get to see your own blankets very well, but you also see how other people pry off the ones they wear.  It is a little bit like how a child learns to take off a pullover sweater.  He watches some adults, and then he tries it. 

This will be a good metaphor for some of the other things which happen in community.  The bright light of many God beings gathered in my name illuminates everyone.  Just as it is easier to see one’s own blankets, it is easier to see everyone else’s.  Consider however how you best learned to take off a sweater.  You might have witnessed someone taking off a sweater and for a while your parents might have done it for you, but you only learned how to do it for yourself when you did it for yourself. 

Let this be a reminder to all of you to stay in your center removing your own blankets and help to remove other people’s blankets only when they have expressly asked for such assistance.  When the blankets which other people are wearing push your buttons, see only the God in them which wears the blankets and know the person will remove the blanket when he or she is ready. 

Your goal in community is not to fix each other but to learn faster from each other, because you bring together so many more ideas about blanket removal.  The way you can best communicate your ideas is to just do them and know that I AM illuminating everything so that the good ideas about blanket removal are seen as well as the blankets. 

It is a waste of the momentum of the group to arbitrarily stop your process to tug at somebody else’s blanket.  Even if (a blanket) covers their eyes and they can’t even see that they have stumbled into a place of light, know that unless they specifically ask for blanket removal help, you are best to go about the business of increasing your light and removing your own blankets. 

Remember that there will come a point in your own blanket removal that you will have removed so many layers that you will be such a bright light that no one else’s blankets will totally shut out your light.  Have confidence in the powerfulness of your own healing process and keep focused on that.  When the time is right, each of you will be a great force of illumination just by being present, not because you are telling people about their blankets or trying to pull them off.

It would be a disservice to all of you to have the structure of God community created to make you dependent on that community for love or praise or guidance.  All God community should be constantly focused on returning you to a direct relationship with me where you can get all the love, praise and guidance you need.  When a community is clear that everything comes from within, then a certain amount of harmony can exist.  However so many of your blankets are about thinking you have to get it from outside yourself that most God community still exists in a place of quite a lot of friction right now. 

The collective vision of the (GHF) community is to Let Go and Let God come forward from within.  As people stray into deeply ingrained patterns to do otherwise, they are bumped around rather unpleasantly until they return to that focus.  It is a little like going downstream with me and having old ego conditioning about needing to paddling upstream.  Whenever you head into the old habits of paddling against the current you go until you are tired and realize it is not helping.  Then you let go and let Me take over again.  Eventually you get the drift that this old approach doesn’t work.  You don’t get downstream by paddling upstream away from me. 

When you are paddling with a group you tend to learn to go with the downstream flow faster because when you try and paddle upstream in your ego, it is much more difficult.  The flow of Me is stronger in community so that there is more resistance when you try the old upstream tack.  The flow of God community also carries you faster towards reunion with me when you “Let Go and Let God” because there is more downstream momentum. 

Whenever you are feeling stuck or confused about what is going on in you, ask to be shown what you are doing in the flow.  See where your boat is and what you are pushing it to do. 

When you head upstream in the midst of community, it is more difficult than when you head upstream on your own.  Consequently, it is easy to rage and say that the group is the problem.  The energy of the group is simply illuminating the problem with going upstream for you that much faster.  You realize faster that it is not a productive direction and that you are stuck and not getting what you need.  This is a great gift, to be disillusioned faster.  Celebrate this and let yourself turn the boat around. 

Sometimes the process may feel like a very public time in a pressure cooker, but I tell you it is a great gift to have found yourself a faster way to pull off the blankets.  Be grateful that you do not get the opportunity to go upstream away from me for more than a few minutes without realizing that you have headed out against my flow.  Be glad that when you turn around you get the momentum of all the brothers and sisters in this community who are working to come home.  You turn your boat around and you don’t have to wait an instant to be moved forward in your return to me.  You blast off with the speed of all those around you.  Everyone has their moments going upstream, but on each person’s return, they all get the gift of the combined forward momentum.

Community is not what your ego wants.  It is not an easy, restful experience for any of you right now, but it is extremely productive one.  It returns you home to me all the faster, and that is what matters most of all.  I love you very much dear ones and send you my love in the waters that swirl around your boat as it journeys home to me.

This spring we welcomed a new hoop house built by Rex Miller and Jim Sheehan. Tomatoes and cucumbers were the first crops planted in the hoop house. They have liked the heat in the hoop house, and we have liked the early bumper crop of these hot weather vegetables. As I visited with the tomatoes and cucumbers this morning, I remembered the lesson tomatoes gave us in 1993.

As you may recall from my last blog, 1993 was the season when the gardens were opened to visitors and we needed continuous guidance in order to handle the unexpected arrival of thousands of precious guests. I thought you might like the story of the season’s tomatoes and the guidance we received about them. It was one of of the most visceral experiences any of us had ever had in a garden.

Because we were planting over a dozen gardens each with complex mandalas of plants, we needed to grow thousands of plants.  While we could start most seeds in the farm’s tiny greenhouse, all the young plants needed new homes after they were transplanted into bigger pots.  In the end, we had our young plants growing all over the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont…..basically wherever we could beg or borrow greenhouse space.

The tomatoes volunteered to go to a solarium at Kimball Union Academy.  This space appeared to be sunny enough in March when we put the tomato seedlings there, but as the trees around the solarium began to get their leaves, the space became much too shady for the tomatoes. In the hubbub of watering plants all over the valley, none of us noticed exactly how badly the tomato plants were doing. 

When we went to get the tomato plants to put them in the cold frames at the farm to harden them off before planting, they were whispy four foot long plants. Each was limp, almost branchless and a very peculiar almost white green. They looked more like lifeless threads than actual plants.  We were horrified.  None of us had ever seen such unhealthy tomatoes.  Here was what the God within had to say about that:

Let us consider the nature of tomatoes.  They have a very robust energy.  They bring vitality and pizazz to many dishes and most situations.  It is no accident that women have been referred to, even if in a derogatory way, as tomatoes. The heart of tomatoes is a very strong life force and a ripe, visceral connection with the earth.  As a Flower Essence it is a cleansing Essence because it offers to blast the weak places in a system with its robust energy, almost hosing out what is not strong in favor of its own vital energy.  This is the nature of tomatoes. 

What was happening to your tomatoes during their sojourn to the solarium?  Tomatoes have this energy because they are connected to me.  They are free to express themselves because I provide the life force energy for them to be their true selves.  These tomatoes were temporarily cut off from an appropriate connection with me.  They did not get the light of the sun, my way to bring them my energy.  They did not get the breeze, my way of continually whispering to them my love and guidance.  They were sealed off from a complete connection with me.  They would have died had they been sealed off entirely, but there was enough of a break in the flow to reveal to you what happens with my creations when they are unable to work with me moment to moment.  All of this was a metaphor for you. 

When you asked for volunteer plants to go to the solarium, the tomatoes went in service to you, knowing that it would be a lesson in what happens when I am not with you every moment, when your ego illusions wrap around you and create separation.  You are like those tomatoes in the solarium.  You are like the tomatoes returning to the light of a greenhouse.  You have all been cut off from everything I can give you.  You have received enough to live but not enough to be your true whole vibrant selves.  I call you to let the example of the tomatoes motivate you to open to a full connection with me, your source.  You are a planet of tomatoes in a dark airless solarium.  The way out is there, and together we can find the vibrant wholeness which is your birthright and your destiny, but only together.

This experience with our tomatoes shook us deeply. First there was our regret about how we had neglected these plants. Then there was the moment of truth when we learned we were like these tomatoes. It was shocking to look at these sickly plants and take this truth to heart. The experience motivated me to try much harder to stay connected moment to moment to God.

A week or two later, we planted these strange creatures in the gardens by laying flat the entire four foot branch on the dirt then covering the whole plant with soil with only the last tiny bit of sickly leaves above ground.  We had no idea if we would have a single tomato to offer at our vegetable stand.  We tenderly nursed these sad plants, wondering if our ministrations would be enough.  In the precious sun, they found vigorous health and beauty. We were astounded.  The tomatoes’ recovery was a constant reminder we too could find this life giving connection to source.  The tale of the tomatoes became one of the stories we shared with visitors.