Thank goodness for the diversion of Maurice. He has taken to sleeping under the eaves of our small barn and there is perhaps nothing cuter than a sleeping moose curled up in the snow.

At dawn, we watch him wake up, swiveling his mammoth ears back and forth to listen to every noise in our household. When he gets to his feet, it is at once so graceful and so impossible to imagine how he has gotten those gangly legs under himself so fast and so artfully.

At night, we listen to him munch his way through every twig on the property. I have decided that for this year at least, the trade off of less fruit is worth it. Darling Maurice can eat those buds with impunity.

William is taking care of the neighbor’s chickens this week and as he heads off after dusk to shut the chickens in their coop, he scans with a big flashlight. He really doesn’t want to accidently run into Maurice. His flashlight has caught Maurice in its beam a couple of times. Fortunately, Maurice has just kept on with his meal and William has navigated around him.

This is all lovely diversion from tiresome February snowstorms and snowballing issues with our new labels. We now find ourselves hand gluing as well as varnishing each label because the glue on the label is not holding and the labels are peeling at each end.

The label company and I have come to terms and they are going to rerun the labels, but they want me to test other materials before they rerun the labels. This means a bit more time using these half baked labels while we try to figure out what constitutes testing different label materials.

Besides asking them to guide me in this test process, I keep asking for the label material we got last time that worked perfectly fine. So far no one has told me if that is available, or told me how to test the different materials either.

All this to say, thank you for your patience if you were one of the lucky folks who got either unvarnished unsticky labels on your Essences or varnished but not sticky labels- I am so sorry! Until this experience I had no knowledge or opinions about “paper memory issues” and frankly, I preferred it that way.

So Maurice is my favorite visitor right now.

And the varnish bottle and the glue stick are the visitors that are overstaying their welcome.

On another, happier front, the new guide is at the printers. I met with all sorts of people involved in the print process this morning, ever so grateful to have Jess at my side translating the printspeak. We don’t have an exact print date yet, but I don’t think we are more than a month or two out. In the meantime, we have a few extra boxes of the 2005 guides. If you would like some to share, we are happy to send you whatever you want. Please email green.hope.farm@valley.net or call us at 603-469-3662 if you want copies to share in any way. Thank you! And now, I have to get back to my craft activities……..

Morning, noon and night our new gentleman caller visits our fruit trees. We hear the crunch of his feet as he passes right in front of the kitchen window on his way from one orchard to another. Our neighbors named him Maurice.

He truly is Maurice, the gangster of love. He has completely stolen our hearts!

And there he goes on his appointed rounds.

My people miss the obvious. Sometimes they miss eight hundred pounds of obvious.

Take for example a couple of mornings ago. I awoke at the crisp hour of four. I could smell trouble and got one of my people to get up from his warm bed and let me out. Something was afoot out there and its my job to defend the gardens.

After a quick patrol of the perimeter, and a full id of the interloper, I took up my spot in the middle of the main vegetable garden and began my warning howl. In a word, I told that big shaggy creature to BACK OFF.

I continued this for a couple of hours. My people did not appreciate what I was doing. Rousted from their beds before the usual times, they gave me frosty looks and called out to the gardens to me, requesting in no uncertain terms that I cease and desist in my efforts.

Can you imagine? It’s just so hard to be me. Sometimes they so don’t GET what I do.

Finally, four long hours into my defense of the property, one of them came out to see WHY I would not leave my post and spotted the very beast I had been protecting them from since before dawn.

A moose.

It really irked me that when they all ran out into the gardens to look at him, their ruckus got the moose to leave, whereas all my howling had only kept him slightly at bay.

Then they had the nerve to grouse that they hadn’t really gotten a good look. I had been alerting them for what felt like a small eternity that the big guy was stripping all the apple trees of buds. They had hours to get a good look, if only they had LISTENED to me.

Fast forward to the next morning. I smell moose again so I get up for my dawn patrol and set up my howl center in the Cherokee Trail of Tears Garden, as close to the big guy’s razor sharp hoofs as I feel comfortable. My people come out to take a look, but it’s a cursory, careless one. They don’t see the moose. He is the size of a small barn and they miss him. I keep barking until my two people that go to school every day come out to warm up their car.

FINALLY they notice the moose right in the apple trees next to the barn looking for any buds he missed the last few nights. Again, the whole crew comes out to watch him, congratulating themselves as if they have just discovered fire or the electric turbine engine.

What am I? Chopped Liver?

One of them takes a picture of the moose. Not one of them thinks that maybe they should take a picture of me too after my heroic defense of the place.

This morning I am on strike. The moose can eat whatever tree buds are alive out there and I am just going to stay on my couch and let him. How it irks me that my people seem more pleased to see me asleep on the couch this morning than out on duty.

It is no easy gig to be a dog.

In our new world of labels, we varnish

and then we wait for everything to dry. In fact, I am waiting right now. Time for a cup of tea.

We live in a time of great opportunity, a time in which each day we get to choose whether we are going to identity with our little self or our big self, a time in which we get to take our values and beliefs out for a serious spin, a time in which we can choose to be generous in the face of prevailing cultural pressures to do the opposite.

If life is a drama with the same outcome for all of us, one that ends six feet under, what a blessing to be given this time to be heroic, to be bigger than we imagined ourselves to be, to put our money where our mouths are.

I don’t think this is going to require big gestures so much as a careful choosing about all the little gestures of our every day lives. We need to let each of these small daily choices spring from the heart, not from the mind with its fear mongering and laundry list of worries.

This is going to require discipline about what we listen to, our hearts or the voices around us that want to whip us into a cocktail of frenzy and despair.

It is going to require us to slow down and clear our energy field of run away emotions, before we react in response to their murky demands.

It is going to mean wandering a bit in new territory as we learn a new way or go deeper into the voyage of selflessness that we have already embarked upon.

Now more than ever before in my lifetime, we get a tremendously meaningful opportunity to identify with our oneness not our illusions of separation.

Big tall ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I know, I am always full of them. But no matter how lofty it all sounds, the good news is that every day in our ordinary lives we will get opportunities to live out these ideals.

Recently, I watched a PBS series called Foyle’s War about a British police inspector during World War 2 who spends the war on the home front, dealing with the unethical behavior of his fellow citizens. In my usual somewhat naive way, I had always divided the battles of that war into two more black and white groups. Oddly enough, the show reveals how much more latitude there was for everyone to make small as well as big self choices in England as well as everywhere else. For most everyone, it was a big mess of opportunity going both ways, just like right now. The show gave me a renewed appreciation for the big self choices of the heroes of the war. And these heroes weren’t cut from a different clothe than the rest of us. They were ordinary people often making ordinary choices as well. They reminded me that we all have a hero within us.

Near the end of my years out on the road giving workshops, I was invited to spend time at a righteous community of ideological purists. Of course they did not bill themselves that way and it isn’t fair of me to describe them like that either. Let’s just say that my life had thrown me so much into the world of gray that I found it quite a shock to immerse myself in an isolated community maintaining all kinds of dietary, ideological, cultural, and moral extremes. I think I have mentioned this place before and how the high point of my time there was when I found one of my kid’s lollipops in my car and sulked in the back seat between my talks, enjoying its sweet and forbidden glory.

Anyways, one particular moment I recall from this time involved me getting into a raging argument with the founders of the community about the movie Shindler’s List. I argued that because Shindler began his hero’s journey from a place of moral grayness, it was possible for him to be a vehicle for much more goodness than if he had started from a place of less moral ambiguity. This outraged the leaders of the commune and there was a lot of screaming involved as they attacked my belief that his flaws were the very reason Shindler saved so many people. Well, they were having none of it and as I have mentioned before, I eventually beat a retreat from this community with a terrible cleanse headache that was only eased by a big mac and fries eaten on my way home.

So my point is?

We don’t have to count ourselves out if we don’t have the bucks of a Bill Gates, or we wanted to throw up when we looked at what happened to our retirement portfolio last year, or we have a fear reaction when we watch the news. Yeah we are all gray. But the great thing is, every day is going to give us the opportunity to make generous and heroic choices and begin again from a new place, no matter what we did or didn’t do the day before. That is one of things I like about dawn. It always marks a new beginning.

One of my challenges is going to be putting aside my own righteousness so I stop ranting about people whom I think make bad choices. That is little self behavior. I need to just get on with my own choices and let them learn what they need to learn their own way. But really…… 18 billion dollars in bonuses for Wall Street executives last year?

And another thing. A lot of people are going to tell you that you are crazy not to worry yourself sick and hold onto every last cent to keep for that rainy day. Thinking about this made me remember how many people told me how wrong I was to not reconcile with my father before he died.

As you may recall if you have been reading this blog for awhile, my father chose to endanger my life and the lives of my kids by aiding and abetting one of my siblings who wanted to kill us. When it was clear that my father was not going to switch gears and come to our aid, I cut my ties with him. It was safer for us, but I also felt that the logical consequence of his endangering us was that we would not want to be in a relationship with him. I felt it was better for his soul and mine for us to part.

I cannot tell you how many people thought I was wrong wrong wrong not to broker some deathbed scene. Phone calls, letters, people I hardly knew, people who knew the story, people who did not. Most everyone told me in no uncertain terms that I was wrong, and that was the gentle description. I had to spend a lot of time going to my heart for the strength to stay the course. It was particularly hard to hear from people who had lost a parent who told me that I would never be able to forgive myself for not reconciling before it was too late. My belief was it was never too late, that my relationship with my father would continue after his death and that it was in the best interest of both our souls for me to listen to my heart, not the voice of anyone’s personality. But this belief was untested and that sometimes left me uneasy.

When I heard he had died, I was weeding in the Rose garden. I have probably mention this before too, but it was a big moment for me because of how at peace I felt. I did not regret my decision and I knew all was well. I had my own goodbye ceremony and was graced with a visit from a white hawk. At the time, I was still so mad at my father that I would not accept this gift was from him, but now I can accept that. Our relationship has moved on.

So my point here is? I suspect these times are going to call for choices that cut across the cultural grain in big ways. And you have my support and my appreciation and my awe for every moment your heart calls you to a choice in opposition to the culture. Let her rip!