I have been away this week at the home of a ninety year old friend. Her husband took a swift turn into the very worst of health and is in the neuro-intensive care of a nearby hospital. My friend is deaf, unable to drive, and suffers from memory issues. She was coping in her life situation mostly because her husband was a little bit younger and a little more spry. Once he fell so ill, the situation called for someone to move in with my dear friend. So I decamped from Green Hope Farm knowing that Deb, Elizabeth, Sophie, and Jess would carry the day in the office and with all the dogs and that Jim and Will would be fine on the home front.

My friend’s family doctor made a house call right after I settled in to help me sort out the pills ( which no doubt tells you how far out in the country and in the last century we are that a doctor would make a house call). The doctor asked that I not leave my friend unattended for more than a few minutes. Because my friend set off her smoke alarm three times with burning pans within the first few hours of my arrival, the doctor did not need to say anything more. I knew it was an excellent call.

Me arriving and then not budging was a more difficult challenge for my friend than for me. There was much organizing, sorting, cleaning and other housekeeping and cooking to keep me busy and I enjoyed taking care of my friend since I like mothering. For her, there was great distress about her husband and a new life where all her routines and comforts had abruptly gone out the window.

The one problem for me was that I knew I had to eventually return to my own responsibilities and her four very adult children were resistant to coming to relieve me. Each had their own spin on why they couldn’t be there. Since I have known my friend for a good thirty years, I had seen her move heaven and earth to do anything and give everything to these four children. I also knew that all four of them had the resources to be there for their mom. Instead, they were telling me in our daily, sometimes hourly calls how marvelously their mother was coping in the situation without them. Since I was actually WITH their mother and KNEW FOR A FACT that this was not true AT ALL, our conversations were complicated.

Green Hope Farm Flower Essence remedies seem to always get created by the Angels when I need them most, and never was this more true than with our great new mix Pack Leader.

During the last week, I have needed Pack Leader’s vibrational support to be a calm assertive leader to support my friend in this extremely out of balance situation. While my experience was one of meeting with immovable objects again and again, I found myself able to respond to the behavior of my friend’s children and to other challenges with a measured calm and a detachment which was an enormous help to me. I felt immeasurable grateful for every bit of serenity this remedy afforded me, because in the past, I have gone through similar crises in a way that was a lot more exhausting, taking on useless emotional battles and keeping a more fevered pitch. This time, for a number of days, I felt calm as I spoke calmly.

Nonetheless, Pack Leader is a remedy I have more to learn from. As I got more tired- my friend was up each night at 3 am in a state of worry- I began to find it more challenging not to respond to the children’s excuses with emotion. I definitely lost my cool when the eldest son started to dictate a message in french to me about someone at the Sorbonne. Like I could give a hoot which way the accent went on the guy’s name! Yes, I am a bit testy STILL about that one so Pack Leader has more to teach me!

In any case, I kept at it with these phone calls, kept the cups of teas rolling and one day when someone else arrived for an hour I had a most Zen experience taking my friend’s very anxious dogs for a long walk. I knew it would help them immeasurably to get to have a real walk to release their tension and I looked forward to it myself, Having never walked four on a leash at once, I found it a mystical experience to get them all moving at my side, one with each other and me, their temporary pack leader. What a difference it made the rest of our time together to have me know the dogs in that way.

Last night, a week had passed and I finally wore one of the children down enough to have her agree to come and relieve me. I passed the baton to her at 8:40 pm with grateful thanks to divinity and Pack Leader.

These Flowers from the Gratitude Garden have given way to the cold grey skies of November.
Is it any wonder that in these chilly months with nary a Flower outside, we fill our world with bright boxes

and daily chocolate.

As we bring Gratitude, the new Venus Garden combination mix, forward to share, I find myself tongue tied about how to inspire folks to work with this marvelous new remedy.

In draft after draft of blogs, I sound like Pollyanna. In fact, just call me Mollyanna, because I am going to sound like Pollyanna here too.

But regardless of my tone problems, this mix deserves to have its praises sung. So, I am going to wade in. After all, Pollyanna would! And please, feel free to imagine sending me to my room like Aunt Polly did, if this sounds too much like the glad game.

In some ways, Gratitude is like other Venus Garden remedies. Several of these remedies address concerns that seem straightforward, but not terribly pressing. Take for example, Don’t Worry-Bee Happy. This remedy may seem trite since conventional wisdom suggests we can settle into happiness and leave our worries behind whenever we want, but for now, there are more important things than happiness to concern ourselves with.

The pursuit of gratitude can seem a lot like the pursuit of happiness. We all know what it is, but we think perhaps we can just save it for a rainy day- or for that gratitude holiday, Thanksgiving.

But then, Thanksgiving gives us lots of chances to spin out about stuffing recipes or brining our bird so even on gratitude day itself, the topic can get lost in the organic cranberry, citrus, and pomegranate compote with toasted pecans and star anise.

Yup. Gratitude has a marketing problem. And I doubt I will fix that, because if I looked in the mirror right now I would probably look like Hayley Mills meets Grandma Moses.

But before I give up, I will share one tidbit about gratitude that encouraged me when I realized it this afternoon.

I was out in the perennial beds cutting back plants for winter and I remembered this story of Meher Baba trying to give a blanket to the gardener at a place where he was staying. The gardener lived without any possessions. No bedding, no lamp, no furniture, nothing. But when offered the blanket, the gardener kept saying ” I have no need for this. God has given me everything I need.”

At first, I thought this was a story that left everyone with too enormous a gratitude gap, but today it occurred to me that one of the marvelous things about gratitude is that gratitude is gratitude.

Maybe all of us are a lot more materially indulged than this gardener and perhaps a lot less grateful….. BUT if we dive into gratitude we are in gratitude like a fish is in water. There are no gradations. When we plunge into gratitude there is no need to aspire to anything greater, because gratitude is gratitude.

And we can be in this state immediately without any equipment but a willing heart and perhaps a nudge from this Flower Essence mix that can show us the way to this state of being.

But why bother?

In addition to what Pollyanna would say, the truth is that gratitude is alchemy at its most miraculous. It turns our experience of our situation on a dime. No matter what is going on in our lives, gratitude takes us to that grateful and joyous state that the gardener lived in.

This little face. The ones with the soulful eyes. Sweet Reina, a name which in spanish means queen.

Only it was clear from hour one that what she needed was not to be Queen of us, but to have us, her new people, be calm assertive pack leaders to her and our burgeoning tribe of dogs, cats, and other creatures working and living at the farm.

Yes indeed……. Necessity is STILL the Mother of Invention. And this meant, as Reina entered our household….

it was time to make Pack Leader, a new combination Flower Essence.

So I sat with the Angels and had them compose this wonderful new Flower Essence mix to support us to be calm assertive pack leader to the tribe of animals and people in our care.

And how fast did this remedy come together? Lightning fast, as they always do when the time is right.

And I am in awe and wonder at the perfection of the ingredients. Take the ingredient Flowering Dogwood for example. The name is, of course, wonderful for a mix about being pack leader, but then so is its vibrational wisdom; “Flowering Dogwood Essence helps us express ourselves with measured calm, proportional reactions, emotional restraint and balance.”

That is being a good pack leader! And this Flower Essence is just one of the many helpful ingredients.

Typical of the Angels, they had people call immediately for this remedy, the very moment I had written down its ingredients!

But what always astounds me about this flow is that the reasons people need a new remedy are always so diverse. For example, the first person whom the Angels recommended I send Pack Leader to was a college professor dealing with a very unruly class.

The Angels describe Pack Leader as supporting us to anchor in our own inner authority and find within us the calm and confident assertive energy necessary to handle the animals and the people in our life with appropriate boundaries, clear expectations, and from a place of emotional balance. This made it PERFECT for this classroom situation as well as the more obvious pack leader situation in my life right now, the need to be pack leader for the three marvelous and spirited dogs here at the farm.

Reina with her number one pack leader, Elizabeth, in the rain at one of Will’s soccer games.

Pack Leader is made with grateful thanks to Cesar Millan who clarified for me the nature of a good pack leader. This new mix contains:
Ageratum “Red Sea”. Beech, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cardinal Flower, Cat’s Claw, Celandine, Chives, Corn, Cosmos, Delphinium, Dill, Dogberry, Eyes of Mary, Feverfew, Flowering Dogwood, French Grass, Ginger Thomas, Goldenrod, Gratitude, Indian Pipe, Lantana Involucrata, Lobelia Spicata, Maple, Orange Hawkweed, Partridgeberry, Red Chestnut, Teasel, St. David’s Rose, Snapdragon, Sunflower, Wintergreen

And it is ready to serve YOU and the pack in your care!

Since I last posted news, we’ve gone from a gray sulky fall to what feels like full blown winter, all in a snap of the fingers.

Late summer Flower in all their subtle glories

overnight frosted

And as I rush about outside doing jobs I thought I would have weeks more to get done, all I can say is, “Thank goodness for puppies! How they lift the spirits no matter the weather!”