A friend told me about a dream she had last night in which every relative in her life came to visit. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, cousins, siblings and parents were all looking for beds in her home which abruptly turned into the home of her great grandfather. In the dream she was trying unsuccessfully to appease the demands of this hoard of family.

Holidays can feel like that, even if we find ourselves alone. Holidays bring up old family business, and sometimes it can feel overwhelming to process all the material surfacing.

Ours was a holiday stretch almost devoid of traditions, company, big family meals or any activities from years past. My dear husband had vertigo, and that kept things simple. Yet even as our holidays were very quiet, I too felt my house was occasionally invaded by unexpected guests. Big personalities in my family of origin stamped holiday activities with their mark and insisted on how even the smallest details of the holidays should be done. So even as these traditions are gone from my life, old opinions of “the right way to do things” occasionally rear their ugly heads.

I have spent decades sweeping these old chestnuts from my life, but housekeeping remains necessary, especially as I run into the same dogma coming from new directions.

And why am I surprised that the same dubious holiday ideas have sprung up like mushrooms again? One has only to turn on the TV for ten minutes to see the collective brainwashing we all endure this time of year. It’s no wonder a dismantling has to be done again each and every year. After all, the cultural pressures to conform to holiday dogma assaults us from Halloween onwards.

Thank goodness for Flower Essences. Here are a few that were in my holiday spritz bottle that might free up more inner and outer space in our lives if we use them in January and beyond!

The Family River Trio is a threesome of Flower Essences that helps us clear out old family baggage so we are unburdened. The Black Currant in the trio helps us release many generations of counter productive habits, opinions, traditions and anything else that is stuck or obscuring truth or not serving our light. The Bloodroot reveals the core strengths of our family line, because underneath all the mistaken ideas there is always something of value. The third member of the trio is Borage for courage to do the work. To sort and discard is tough. It is ultimately freeing, but it can be exhausting.

This time of year there are so many voices in our heads and all around us telling an old story about how things should be done. I appreciated the back up of my Flower Essence spritzer bottle to support me in what felt like saner choices. For example, we had a Christmas without the giving and receiving of presents. This felt like a big relief. However I needed to be vigilant about the occasional voice encouraging guilt that I had let go of this tradition so central to my childhood. Hyssop helped with the guilt. And Flow Free helped the Family River Trio with the whole letting go process. Flow Free remains an essential ally, here amplifying my efforts to be free of old holiday shoulds.

My mix had many other Flower Essence friends in it, but I think I will stop there as these seem most centrally supportive to the work of finding inner freedom from the cultural demands of the holidays.

PS When I went to ask the Angels and Elementals if they wanted me to add anything else they asked me to mention one other Flower Essence in my mix: Don’t Worry-Bee Happy. They have been talking a lot to me about how worry does such damage to the tranquility of our inner self and never accomplishes anything. They note, “The cultural pressures about the holidays leave everyone worried they are not doing enough, and we want to say to you, let go of your worries, you are always enough.”

If you have been a part of the Green Hope Farm community for long you may remember former staff Goddess Sithembiso Mulhauri or Thembi as she is called. Thembi joined our staff after leaving her home in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her husband, a famous soccer coach, was put on Mugabe’s hit list, and the family had to flee the country.

Today I learned that a movie is going to be made about Thembi’s husband, Charles, and the Zimbabwe soccer team he founded, AmaZulu FC.

If this was my movie, I would turn the camera to Thembi.

Here some scenes that would be in my BioPic.

Scene at the US Embassy in Harare: When Charles departs Zimbabwe, it is in a big hurry. Thembi is left behind with their four young sons ages 4 to 14. She spends months gathering the paperwork to be able to join her husband in the US. Things like DNA tests are required. She has done this on her own as her beloved mother has recently died.

Thembi enters the Embassy with all the necessary documents. She shows them at the gate and fortunately this moment is filmed by the Embassy, because by the time she crosses the lobby of the Embassy to go into the right office, she has been robbed of all documents. Her plane leaves in a matter of hours. Will she be believed that she had the documents? Will she and her boys make the flight? They do, but it is a miracle.

Scene as Thembi and the boys get off the plane in Boston Thembi is wearing heels and a beautiful dress. The boys are looking sharp. Bundled into a car, city girl Thembi looks briefly at the skyline of Boston before she finds herself on a long drive north to the deeply wooded hills of New Hampshire. Harare and her city life are seriously in the rearview mirror. As she gets out of the car in front of her new home, her heels sink deep into the grass. It may be the last time she ever needs heels in her new life in northern New England. She is shocked by the trees. There are so many of them. This is an alien world and not just because no one is speaking her language.

Scene as Thembi cuts her dreads. Thembi’s beautiful long dreads hold all the memories of the life she has lost. Her family and friends are beyond her reach. She cannot go home. As she gets her boys settled into their new lives and begins to work at Green Hope Farm, she needs all her energy to move forward and not look back. She cuts off her dreads and lets go of all she can no longer hold onto. Her new haircut reveals her beauty even more so than the dreads. In the movie, she should play herself.

Scene at a Green Hope Farm party. Thembi has brought her favorite foods and brought the fun. All the too serious New Englanders find ourselves dancing all night with Thembi. She’s always made us laugh, now she gets us dancing.

Scene in Thembi’s kitchen Her older kids are playing soccer now at Kimball Union Academy, and her husband is coaching legions of elite soccer players. Thembi’s kitchen has become a hub for college and prep school soccer recruits from Africa who need a taste of home. The kitchen is packed and will remain so for many years.

Scene when Thembi’s house burns down Early one wintry morning, Thembi’s house burns to the ground. Everyone gets out safely but all their possessions are gone. Thembi collects her family and the soccer players staying with her, and they camp out at the Kimball Union guesthouse. While the town community kick in to help, it’s really Thembi who does the lion’s share of rebuilding their lives. In short order she finds them a new house and elegantly furnishes it on a shoestring budget.

Scene yesterday I text Thembi to tell her I think she should be the star of the movie. Lots of laughter emojis, then Thembi tells me she is starting another business. Since she arrived in America a dozen years ago, she has gotten her business and hospitality degree. Two of her children have graduated from college and are off in the world teaching and coaching soccer. Two more are going to college next year and Simba, her fifth child born in New Hampshire, is happily launched into kindergarten. Thembi runs this household of boys and men and also runs two Airbnbs, one in her home and one in the house across the street that she bought. She also owns and runs a daycare center. She tells me yesterday that she is going to buy a children’s gym.

With or without the movie, Thembi will remain one of my personal heroines. And yes, when the movie about her husband comes out, I will greatly enjoy it, but I will also be thinking of the movie that should have been.

A few wintry days ago we made up more Mother Flower Essence for one of our bespoke combination Flower Essences, Hesperides’ Gift.

Some combinations are created in the garden. The Arbor Garden, for example, is created in the Arbor Garden each growing season from all the Flowers in blossom there on the day the Angels choose to make the mix.

However, most combination Flower Essences are mixed by us from Flower Essences Mothers in our collections. We have about a thousand Mother Flower Essences in our Mother Essence room. Combination remedies like Hesperides’ Gift or Golden Armor are created from these Mothers. Building from the resource of this Mother Essence inventory means our mixes can have much relevant Flower wisdom. For example, they can include Flower Essences from many geographical locations as well as Flowers that don’t bloom at the same time.

We are guided by our Angelic partners about the Flower Essence ingredients in these mixes. It’s an ongoing process in which we check in when making new inventory to see if the combination remedy needs tweaks. The Angels recipe and subsequent tweaks result in combination remedies that have great depth and complexity as well as a vibrational strength revelant to this precise time.

When we work with a combination Flower Essence, we may just feel the overall vibrational effect of a combination. When I mix the mix I get to see why a combination works in such a deep way. As I add one Flower Essence after another, I get to consider why the Essence was chosen in the mix and how it supports the overall braid of Flower Essences.

So let’s consider Hesperides’ Gift. This Flower Essence was originally created two decades ago for a group project at a school for energy workers. A healer asked for a Green Hope Farm combination Flower Essence to be created to support the extensive healing community of her school for a specific healing project.

Our charge was to make a mix that would support healers who were feeling burnt out, overwhelmed by the gravity and volume of work they were doing, feeling in need of restorative love and new inspiration as well as support for the boundary work so necessary for all healing tasks.

After we created the mix, many hundreds of healers both current students at this school for healing as well as graduates took Hesperides’ Gift simultaneously to activate a group healing. It was a joy to send hundreds of bottles of this mix off across the globe each day, imagining the web of light Hesperides’ Gift helped to create and sustain in this wonderful community.

Twenty years ago, one thing I puzzled over as I created the mix with my Angelic partners was their choice of the name, Hesperides’ Gift. Even after looking up the mythological references, the name felt a bit obscure.

Twenty years later, I wondered about the name once again. Was there more that could be said about this name? Why this reference to the goddesses who protected the apples of immortality? And another question came up for me. We have continued to send this Flower Essence out for many years to so many. Was there anything the Angels wanted to say about who this mix might serve in this current era? I was asking the Angels for their thoughts on who are today’s healers.

After framing this question here, I got called away from the computer to do another task. This gave the Angels the opportunity to answer my questions in a different way.

While doing this other task, I was considering how I define healers in a much broader sense than when we first created the mix. I think of healers as anyone who brings love and light to any situation. As I was thinking this, someone across the room from me read out this Charles Dicken’s quote:

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another.”

How I love the way Angels support us in such unexpected ways. This quote felt like the Angels affirming the idea that we are all healers, each in our own way.

I wondered a bit if this was taking the idea to far to say, ALL of us, then I paused and found myself glancing at the December calendar on the office wall. I hadn’t really noticed the calendar’s Meher Baba quote but read it then:

“The unfoldment of the divine in life is a common enterprise and not an exclusive achievement.”

I felt this supported my conviction that we are all healers. As I returned to the computer, I asked the Angels to share more. Here is what they said,

“This mix, Hesperides’ Gift is protected by us and is our gift to you. You are both the gift giver in your work as healers and you are the receiver of our gifts as you do this work. All to say, GIFT in this name is not an accident.

Today we call a spade a spade. The Hesperides were a group of women goddesses who guarded Gaia’s gifts of life force energy. In mythology these gifts were described symbolically as golden apples, gifts of an energetic nature brought down into form.

Existing in the realm between the unseen world of Divinity and the seen world of earthly life, the Hesperides were guardians of these energy gifts. Our intention in invoking this mythological framework is to suggest the significance of this remedy and to honor you who do healing work.

Like the Hesperides, healers bring the unseen world into the seen world. We are talking about how you bring light energy through the veils to offer to those in need. Words cannot contain the multitude of ways you healers do your work. We see it all and help you all.

There are so many kinds of healers and places of healing. If you count yourself out because you are not working in a conventional healing milieu or doing what others would say was healing work, please don’t. A smile can save a life. We want you to know you matter. Yours is sacred work. Love is total significance. Your efforts are total significance. Healers deserve to understand themselves in these terms. Healers do sacred work. It is not like other work. When a healer opens to receive love and light to direct it to another soul, it is a great gift.

We felt in giving the Flower Essence this name that we indicate the sacred and invaluable work of healers. We honor you with this name. We also want you to understand there are no boundaries between you as healer and us as healers. You and we are not we but one. We work in oneness.

With this name we share that in this Flower Essence mix and in so many other ways, we bring you gifts of support. ALWAYS and CONTINUOUSLY. Together with you, we bring to earth a golden light of love that heals all. We kid you not.