We all receive  gifts of many subtle and not so subtle messages from Nature and the vast intelligence in Nature. We can choose to notice these gifts and take them to heart as significant or dismiss them as random events.

For example, just now, I took an early morning walk through the hay fields with the dogs and saw very fresh bear poop (as in still steaming) right by one of our bee hives.  It’s the only hive that is not out of reach of bears on the second story of our barn. For that reason this hive is vulnerable to bears. This poop felt significant to me.  One possible message is that the bears are CHOOSING not to toss around the beehive to get the baby bee grubs as they sometimes do.  After all, this bear came by and left a sign he had been there but not messed with a hive that he or she could easily have messed with. I thank this bear and all visiting bears for this restraint!

I love how many of you share with us tales of noticing and finding deep encouragement in signs from Nature, even odd ones like bear poop.  We really ARE co-creating this dear planet together, and it helps so very much when we tangibly know our partners are present with us, sending us messages of one sort and another.  To feel this partnership is to find deeper wisdom and more evolved choices.

(Plant based exhortation edited out here, but you can imagine it if you want)

This morning there was a gorgeous turkey feather smack dab in the middle of the Venus Garden. How did it get exactly there?  I will never know, but I saw this gift as encouragement to keep going with the projects of the summer and in particular with this year’s Venus Garden which has BALANCE as its theme.

For three decades, the Venus Garden has had a new purpose and a new design each growing season.  The Flower Essences made from these unique garden mandalas have become some of our most transformative Essences. Often the designs are extremely complex, requiring  math skills borrowed from better math minds than mine, many hands for planting and hundreds of seedlings raised in our greenhouse. This year the plants grown were some of our most beloved Flowers, but not too many, and the garden design was very simple.

At the time of planting, I thought maybe I was throwing in the towel by planting such an easy design.  The winter and spring were brutal, and the gardens sustained so much damage, that I am still cleaning up.  In the flurry of the May clean up, I worried I would not have time to plant the usual complex Venus Garden design. Then when I was given this simple design, I wondered if the mandala was too good to be true.  Now I wonder if this design is creating an energetic template to support us to pare away all that does not matter and find a better balance in the give and take of life.

I won’t really BEGIN to understand this garden or its energetic gifts until the close of the growing season, but I am grateful for this turkey that dropped a note of encouragement with his feather. The feather suggested to me that this simpler garden, one I am very happy with, is right for all creatures not just me.

This feather also reminded me of the version of the Venus Garden which we called the Phoenix Rising garden. The season we grew a mandala of fiery blossoms that would give birth to the Phoenix Rising Flower Essence, dozens and dozens of birds dropped feathers in the garden, and you too, unsolicited, sent us feathers in the mail  from all around the world, even before we knew the theme of the garden was the rebirth of the Phoenix from the ashes of a burnt life.

This season there has been another sign from Nature that has deeply encouraged me.  I’ve been wanting to sit down and write a blog for many weeks to share about this, but as I mentioned, this gardening season has been quite challenging for me with so much pruning of damaged trees and shrubs and other challenges from the winter.

My good news is about the honeybees.   Over a year ago, I received the guidance to step up my energy clearing here at the farm to a whole new level.  I have done a general housecleaning daily since the mid 1980’s with the process evolving over time but, last spring, as I shared in this blog, I was encouraged by the Elementals to ask them and the intelligence in Nature to clean the energy grid of the farm with more specificity.  I used to say, “Please remove all negativity from the earth, air, fire energy, water and ether energy of the farm grid.” before asking for this negativity to be transmuted. For the last year I have been meticulous in following guidance to ask for the Elementals and all the guardians of this land to clear the grid daily of anything that seeks to disturb including toxic heavy metals, other toxic chemicals, toxic plastics, toxic radiation, toxic pesticides, herbicides, moldacides and fungicides..

To begin with, like most projects  here, I had to go on faith that this would make a difference, yet now it is the honeybees that have made it clear that this is helping.

We have had honeybees here since 1987.  To begin with, the honeybees needed almost no care to thrive.  The world was an easier place for them. Then came many, many years in which we lost all the honeybees every winter no matter what we did to try and protect them. Sudden Colony collapse was very real to us even on our organic farm since rain and snow bring so many toxins with them.

We would purchase new honeybees each spring because the honeybees do so much to help the energy of land that beyond the issue of pollination, I cannot imagine life without honeybees in the garden, but it was always so sad to clean out hives that had once again not made it through the winter.

We began last winter with two hives.  We wrapped them well for the winter, but as noted, our winter was extraordinarily brutal.  It was very hard to imagine the honeybees would make it through to spring given how usually the toxins in the environment weaken their ability to deal with our climate..  Each day I would work with the Angels and Elementals, asking them to clear the land of all these things that menace honeybees as well as life itself, but still I was stunned and overjoyed that both hives lived and prospered..

This was my first sign that the energy work and the specificity of my clearing requests  was making a difference.  Soon these two hives were thriving so much that we had several swarms that settled agreeably into new hive boxes we offered them, and our bee population was up to six hives.  Speaking of signs,  the swarm below even looked like a heart!

These six hives are so vibrant.  I know that doing this land clearing and in particular asking for the removal of pesticides, herbicides, moldacides and fungicides along with other toxic chemicals and toxic radiation is helping these bees.  Because the clearing is done by asking for this negativity to be transmuted, there is no dumping somewhere else.  It is win win for the bees and all Earth.

Please consider doing this on any land you feel called to take care of. I try believe that if we do our part to stop our damaging behaviors and we seek the help of the Elementals and the intelligence of all Nature to cleanse the Earth, we can restore the Earth.

Here is Jim, positioning a hive box to get one of the swarms to choose this as their new home. They did!

One more comment about  signs of another sort!  You may have noticed the  technology problems we have been having.  Several shut downs on our site were part of shut downs that included hundreds of thousands of sites.  Webmaster Ben explained them to me with mysterious terms like Cloud flare and even gave me a link to an article about what had happened (one I read but did not understand except for the general idea that there is a lot that can go wrong and increasingly will).

We have also had some shut downs on our site alone due to Ukranian hacking with Ukranian bots trolling our site.  Let’s just say it has been a busy month for webmaster Ben who attends to all mishaps. Thank you Ben!

I just want to remind you all that in the case of these shutdowns, we can be reached by phone, mail and email if that is working..  We began sharing our Flower Essences in an era before the internet, and somedays it feels like we will need to dredge up all those pre-internet skills again just to outfox the Ukranian bots trolling our site.  All this to say, if our site is down, it does not mean we are gone, it just means that we are experiencing the nuttiness of this enormous technological network,