We purchased land for Green Hope Farm in 1986 from David Benson.  He was a very handsome gentleman in his eighties who had been farming on the land since the hurricane of 1938.  At the time of the sale, David kept a parcel of the farm with his house and barns on it, so our land was just pasture and overgrown pasture gone to pines and wild apples.

Though I had no idea what I would be growing here, from the beginning, there was a great deal of focus on finding the best water the property had to offer.  David insisted we get a dowser to check for water before we signed the papers. I had heard a bit about “water witches” but knew nothing more than that they usually used a stick to find water in some mysterious but effective process.  David repeatedly said he didn’t want to saddle us with land that had no water.  There was some reason to worry about this as across the street from the farm the neighbors had drilled over 400 feet yet still got less than a gallon a minute of water. David noted that they had not gotten a dowser in before drilling.

I knew with my whole heart and being we were meant to live on this land, and there would be water for us.  Somehow I convinced farmer David to let the sale go through in the late fall before dowsers checked it out. I promised to get a dowser to the property come spring. In the meantime, David decided to take me under his wing and teach me a thing or two about farming.    

David was the first person who believed I was serious about farming.  During that first winter when the deed had changed hands but we hadn’t yet started building, David took me to many farm meetings all over New Hampshire.  What an unlikely duo we made at these meetings of crusty old granite state farmers.  We had fun, but it was hard to miss how regressive farming was in the New Hampshire of the 1980’s. 

I remember one meeting where Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms tried to explain branding to a group of us.  I was the youngest person in the room by at least fifty years.  I think Gary probably had more luck talking to his cows about branding than to this crowd.  It has always struck me as strange that while Gary failed through no fault of his own to light any fires of change in New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River, Vermont farmers caught the fever to brilliantly brand themselves, their state and its agricultural products.  Meanwhile David and I sat in on meetings where the brakes were applied with vigor to any new ideas.

This stuck quality of farming in New Hampshire didn’t stop me, and one group of people that helped me go full steam ahead were DOWSERS. Some of them even lived in New Hampshire though all meetings were in Vermont.

How did I first connect with the lively dowsing community in these parts?  Before we broke ground for our farmhouse, I broke ground for gardens.  My rototiller guy was named Jerry Burt, and he was a well known dowser.  Jerry was happy to dowse the property.  In fact, after he dowsed it, he had six other dowsers come dowse the property as well.  The spot he chose for our well was marked by small rock.  No other dowser knew this.  In an open field of 7 acres, every dowser picked the exact same spot to put the well.

My husband Jim was mystified by this, so Jerry grabbed him a Y shaped branch from an apple tree on the property and taught him how to dowse.  Jim proved a natural dowser. The stick in his hands just about ripped his hands apart on its downward pull as he walked over “the spot”. This opened things up for Jim to dowse other places for other people.

With that magical synchronicity of dowsers all in agreement, the site for the well was chosen. When we drilled, the water proved abundant and refreshing in its taste. David Benson could finally sigh a sigh of relief!

Dowsers have a deep connection with the Elemental kingdom.  Heck, some of them probably ARE Elementals! In any case, I’m sure the Elementals here encouraged and celebrated as these dowsers tuned into the unseen realities of this land.  I am grateful to the Elementals and the Dowsers who found the right spot to drill.  They helped ensure that millions of bottles of Flower Essences would have the best water possible.

The gifts from the dowsing community continued after the well was dug.  Dowsers are fantastic networkers.  Before the internet, they connected people with common interests with astounding precision and generosity.  As I got gardening with the Angels and Elementals, the local dowsers took a great interest in what was happening.  They visited and then they shared news of what we were doing here with other dowsers. 

Soon I was invited to speak at the monthly meetings of the American Dowser’s Society which is headquartered in Danville, Vermont. My early years here, I asked the Angels and Elementals for answers with body kinesiology. Many dowser’s recognize this as body dowsing so they welcomed me into their community.  As the gardens grew, dowsers would come through with their own dowsing tools to check out what was happening here and how the energies of the land were shifting.  This co-creative endeavor really caught their fancy.

Fast forwarding to 1993, the one summer we were open, dowsers worked hand in glove with the Elementals here to get the word out to possible visitors.  While we only put up a couple dozen posters advertising we were open (and again, there was no internet or even mailings done) thanks to the Elementals and Dowsers we had thousands visit the gardens.

The Dowsers also invited me to speak at the annual convention where I met so many interested and interesting folk.  They also got me to write about my experiences at the farm and the creation of our Flower Essences for their American Society of Dowsers quarterly journal.  It was amazing how many people heard about us from a two page article in this journal.  The dowsers took exceptional care of all things Green Hope Farm.  To this day I smile just thinking of the warm welcome I received from dowsers in a world that was not all that ready for what I was doing.

Lately I’ve been called back to further gratitude for the dowsing community.  It’s hard to miss how many dowsers are doing innovative work to protect us from EMFs and all the technology that have flooded our world since the 80’s and 90’s.  I am not surprised only thankful for the innovative vibrational tools that current dowsers are inventing to protect us from this technology. Our Golden Armor has become one tool amongst others thanks to dowsers.

Dowsers have always helpied make the unseen seen. They create tools and techniques to bring the unseen into our awareness in measurable and apparent ways.  Water dowsing reveals the location of  unseen currents and reservoirs of water, but dowsers are tuning into so much more than water. Back in the day when I first spoke at the Danville meeting house, there was always a dowser on call.  They helped in so many ways.  For example, they would help find missing cats or find underground piping before bulldozers did.  Not only do they reveal what is, but dowsers help us creatively deal with what is when it’s problematic.  Now they are helping us neutralize all the unseen energies bombarding us from cell phones, cell towers, routers, ad infinitum.

Recalling all the incredibly helpful and kind things dowsers have done for Green Hope Farm, I am so delighted to see them turn their innovative but grounded skills to problems we face now.  While some feel I am silly in my hope, the dowsers empowering solutions to problems that have left others wringing their hands make me know my hope is justified.  Dowsers with their bottomless curiosity and complete dedication to understanding and solving energetic earth concerns make hope a sensible choice.  Gratitude too.  

I woke up this morning remembering what the Angels said to me about money when I was disinherited by my mother.  But before I get to this, I want to go back to something the Angels told me years before I was disinherited.

Sometime in my early thirties, seemingly out of the blue, the Angels told me, that I would inherit nothing from my family of origin. Some messages can feel sort of vague as if I could have imagined them.  This message was not like that.  It was clear, carrying weight and force. It felt like Truth with a capital T. 

When the Angels told me this, I was still deeply involved with my family of origin. I could not fathom how this could happen, yet there it was.  This unequivocal message.  To try and wrap my head around this message, I came up with all kinds of implausible scenarios.  I finally settled on the notion that maybe my parents’ home would be destroyed in a flood.  Their home was neither near a river nor the ocean.

The Angels don’t tell me much about the future.  Sometimes they share generalities as in the case of their constant reassurance that humanity will make it through this time. However they rarely offer up such a specific piece of information as this one. I have often wondered why they shared this. Like so much in life, their reasons remain a mystery, but at least one reason may be that it softened the blow when I was disinherited.

What followed this unexpected message were many years in which my husband, my kids and I experienced death threats from my tragically troubled younger brother and my family of origin reacted by distancing themselves completely from us and this “unsavory” situation.  Many times during these years, I recalled what the Angels said and somehow it eased my sorrow if not always my worry. 

My brother remained a threat until he died of a drug overdose.  By then the rest of my family of origin was gone completely from our lives.  There seemed to be a fated quality to all that unfolded.  My husband made many efforts to change the trajectory, and all of them failed. The situation devolved and never recovered.  And so there came the actual moment when my father then my mother died and I learned in the deafening silence afterwards that my mother had legally cut me out.

The biggest blow in this was the loss of the place in the Adirondacks we loved so much.  For my husband, Jim, this was a bitter pill to swallow as he spent two summers building a four bedroom cabin on the property for the extended family and all those summers that lay ahead. How we loved this place and how we miss it still.

There was also money involved. Wasps are generally very secretive about money, so I am not sure how much money I would have inherited, but I guess several million.  We’ve done fine without this money. My mother always kept the money tight so from the beginning of our life together, Jim and I depended on our own efforts to pay our bills.  Sometimes, especially during the college tuition years, that money would have helped, but we got through those years without it.

Being disinherited is a physical blow.  It’s casually talked about on screen and in books, but there is nothing casual in what it feels like.  It’s someone’s last word, someone’s final judgment about you and in this case the someone was my mother.  Over time, I could hear the Angels’ words of comfort above the din of my own reaction.  This was when the Angels talked to me about money, specifically that I had been spared by being disinherited.

 The Angels explained that money has karma depending on how it was earned and how it has been used.  They noted that inherited money is often more of a burden than a blessing.  The unfortunate ways money has been earned and used piles up in inherited money.  The more generations the money has passed through, the bigger the karmic pile up.  To bring this home to me, they had me look into the origins of the money I would have inherited.  They wanted me to understand that receiving any of this money would have been a very heavy energetic burden.

Avatar Meher Baba explained money in similar terms.  He noted that if we could really see money’s energy we would see that collecting  money was like collecting excrement. To receive someone’s money in a big way is to take on the giver’s bindings, sanskaras, their baggage and their personal spiritual excrement.

With these ideas swirling in my head, I looked into this money I did not receive. The money came down through my maternal grandmother’s lineage.  She was my favorite person in the world with a sparkling sense of humor, but I do not think she was a happy woman.  The Angels told me that none of the people who have inherited this money have been happy.  The money is a millstone of significant proportions. 

The money came from my grandmother’s grandfather. His name was Charles Jackson Smith. He was a bigwig in the building of many railroads that would form the second more northern transcontinental railroad route across America.  After a childhood in Kentucky he worked from 1871 until the 1920’s in the financial and management departments of many railroads. His early career saw him involved in every railroad running through Kansas City. At one point, he left Kansas City to become general land commissioner of the Union Pacific. Eventually he became the joint manager of the Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company, part of a group of railroads creating lines from California to Seattle as well as linking an east west route across to Lake Superior. The city of Seattle is where he settled his family and fortune.  At one point, he was one of the richest men in America. Most of this money was lost in the stock market crash of 1929.

I learned none of this from my family of origin.  Growing up I heard occasional vague references to the Smith money, but I did not learn anything about it from any family member. I searched on my own for information about Charles Jackson Smith.  No one discussed this fortune let alone the shoulders upon which this fortune was made.  There were stories of going down to the Seattle docks to buy valuables for cheap from immigrants arriving from China and Russia. Yet, there was no awareness that these were people that would go on to get exploited by Charles Jackson Smith and the railroads after their “warm welcome” to America with American capitalism at work in the “fair” marketplace of the docks.

There are so many disconnects. A couple blogs back I wrote about each person’s life force energy as their true wealth.  Here was a situation in which a group of robber barons, Charles Jackson Smith included, used other people’s life force to accrue vast fortunes for themselves while robbing the land, native people and all railroad workers.

What had Seattle meant to my grandmother, coming of age with this legacy? I don’t think she had anything but conventional thoughts about her family or their money. Hers was a gilded cage.  She told me she loved Seattle’s frontier roots. However, instead of getting to savor the expansive feelings of a new city, she herself was trapped in the ironclad social expectations laid on her by the social circle her rich family moved in. Pictures of her in the Seattle society page often show someone struggling to look pleased that going to tea every afternoon was a requirement not a choice.  She married a man from out east, maybe to escape, but his own brilliant career left her stuck in the same role she had played in Seattle as social hostess.

The spiritual heaviness of the money must also have been there for her but as an entirely unknown factor in her depression.  Additionally, there was complete silence when I was growing up about my grandmother having the money not my grandfather. We heard again and again about Grandpa’s financial prowess but there was only one shaming tale told about Grandma and money.  This oft repeated story was that my grandmother snuck out to an auction during the depression and bought a Spanish sea chest for $25.  Even though she is a grown woman when this happens, she is described as naughty and extravagant but also smart enough to buy something priceless for no money.  I understood this story to be about her spending my grandfather’s money without his permission and in a reckless manner, yet actually it was her money. 

Not that this money could bring a lightness to her being.  The Angels explained to me that money with this kind of heavy karma is best used in philanthropic endeavors in order to be cleaned. My grandmother had a big but wounded heart. In many conversations with me she revealed a deep interest in spiritual matters that she had to keep hidden in her confining social world. Had she known the karma of the money, I hope she would have given away the money with creativity and courage.  Without this information, she continued to plan cocktail parties with the butler.

Modern robber barons following in Charles Jackson Smith’s footstep join him in being like the emperor with no clothes.  Because they do not acknowledge the life force energy of those they use in their quest for big fortunes, they gather piles of excrement.  Others around them may say, “Oh how amazing!” but this is not the case. The money is energetic crap when it is earned through an unequal exchange and when those doing the actual work are not paid fairly for their contribution of life force energy.

The Angels note that in making and using money, it helps to think about the fairness of the transaction.  This helps keep the money as clean as possible.  If someone is making an enormous profit, someone is not being fairly compensated and the money will accrue negative karma.

Some final thoughts on the difference between money and wealth. Not only is true wealth our life force energy, but true wealth is what goes with us when us when we die.  It’s the energy of love, brother and sisterhood, the integrity we’ve shown and our generosity . It’s how we’ve experienced and expressed ourselves as beloveds in a sea of beloveds, part of cosmic oneness but sovereign unto ourselves.

After I finished this blog, I debated whether to post it or not. Was this all TMI? Then I stumbled on one of Anastasia’s insights from the Ringing Cedars of Russia series by Vladmir Meagre. Anastasia says that money distracts people from their true purpose.  This thought encouraged me to share this blog. Anastasia’s remark also felt like a continuing message from the Angels that I was spared a great burden by being disinherited.

In the early years at the farm, the Angels and Elementals supersized the vegetables.  I began my partnership with these beloveds with great hope, enthusiasm and love, but in the mammoth cabbages there was encouragement that I wasn’t imagining the power of our work together.  As visitors began to wander into the gardens like a scene from “Field of Dreams”, I grew to appreciate other harvests beyond big produce. The gardens felt happier and more light filled than any place I’d ever been. The garden and its Flowers were proving to be a source of healing light.

Thirty five years later, the produce is usually of normal girth though most years something is surprisingly supersized.  In general, I face the same dilemmas other gardeners face like weeds and slugs. Nonetheless, my partnership with Angels and Elementals keeps our work full of innovations and wonder.  For every mundane problem, my partners have a solution that often is both unusual but somehow down to earth.  When I get in my own head with my own (unfortunate) solutions, the Angels and Elementals have patience and humor.  Humor is one of their main ingredients in everything we do together (and I am sure my antics make their humor easy to come by).  Sometimes when I am submerged in a gnarly garden difficulty and I can’t get out of my own way to believe it when the Angels say, “All is well.”, the gardens themselves are the cure. To walk through them is to feel loved and uplifted by the beloved Earth and all beings connected with her.  

So why go over this territory about this partnership? In truth, this partnership is no special relationship available to only a few.  This partnership is available to one and all.  

Why did this partnership happen in my life?  I’d read several books about Findhorn, a community in northern Scotland where the humans worked consciously with the Angels and Elementals of Nature. I was so inspired that I wanted to do this too. I thought I needed to visit Findhorn to learn how to catch the magic, but I didn’t have the money for such a trip. At first, I concluded this meant I was out of luck as far as working with Nature the way they did at Findhorn. Yet a conviction arose within me that maybe I could make a Findhorn here.  After all, I loved everything about Nature, Angels and Elementals, and if they talked to me, I would listen.

 I asked to begin a partnership with these beings.  I asked for signs they were there.  I got so many signs I was tripping over them. Literally. Then I figured out how to ask them questions and get answers through the yes and no format of kinesiology.  As the path of connection deepened from daily even hourly communication, I began to hear and see these partners. I was on my way, asking questions about every aspect of gardening and life.  

In my enthusiasm, I shared what I was doing with other people. I even gave classes after a few years of astounding results.  Some people were really interested and joined me in gardening in this way.  Some felt I was delusional. I’ve always marched to my own drummer, so it didn’t much matter to me when others thought I had flipped my lid. After all, it is none of my business what other people think of me.  The vast love and kindness of this unfolding partnership was enough without validation from the world.  However, validation came faster than I could have imagined possible when other people and animals experienced the energy and vibration of our main harvest, Flower Essences.

I’ve always loved the feedback from the animals. Here’s a memory from the first season I had Flower Essences at hand. A  raging pit bull came roaring onto the farm from parts unknown. He circled the Venus Garden at a ferocious pace.  Quickly a couple of us working in the garden offered this canine visitor a dish of water with a few drops of Flower Essences in the water.  He drank deeply then abruptly settled in the grass to sleep peacefully for a few hours.  After that he trotted off never to be seen again.  This happens so often.  We are a destination for animal who have the volition to hightail it over here for a vibrational fill-up.  And we are so glad we can get our Essences to the animals who can’t visit.

One more thing about “garden problems”.  As my partners and I consider typical concerns like strange weather or poor germination, in addition to offering effective if unusual suggestions my partners also share the underlying energetic reasons for why things happen.  Slowly they have taught me a lot about balance.

My garden difficulties in all their forms are often metaphors for changes I need to make in my own personal life or in the life of Green Hope Farm.  For example, two summers ago I got a kidney infection right when I needed to plant the Red Shiso.  I couldn’t plant the crop on my own as I had been doing, so I asked all my adult children to gather and dig the garden and plant the seeds.  This was the first inkling for me that I would be passing the baton of the daily operations of the farm on to the younger generation that fall, and that doing all these things on my own was not a balanced way to go forward.

Our world is going through a process of finding greater balance.  It’s the death of patriarchy with all the sour, sticky business a dying age brings, but that doesn’t mean that the new world we enter isn’t being born right in front of us.  Because I have seen challenging situations turn around on a dime here at the farm, I know that will be the case in the broader world.  As our focus shifts to truly caring for our Earth, we will flow into a new way of relating to our precious planet and each other.  And yes, I feel that shift is well underway and we will get to this work in time to save our precious planet and ourselves.

It is always true that when there are endings, beginnings have already begun . We don’t always see them because we are so focused on the drama of the endings.  Working consciously with Nature is a beginning that is underway in many places including here.  The old way of ignoring, patronizing and destroying Nature is dying.  When we look up from the death of the old way, we will find so many new beginnings. AND our Angelic and Elemental partners will be there with us, grateful that we have made the collective turn.

I am excited at the prospect of being able to help more people to work consciously with the Angels overlighting Nature and the Elementals that bring it all into manifestation. My partnership with Angels and Elementals has been a central joy and purpose in my life. I know it can be a joyful path for anyone who wants it.  I see the Angels and Elementals standing ready to begin and continue with us all.

I asked the Angels and Elementals if the blog was complete and they said no.  They asked me to mention the Lion’s Ear in this year’s Venus Garden.  This is a beloved plant whom I first met in St John, USVI.  It’s a plant originally from Africa with deep connections to African shamanism.  As an Essence it brings so many profound gifts, but the one that the Angels and Elementals want me to mention right now is the gift of bringing us closer to the wisdom, love and guidance of our wisest ancestors.

The first time I saw this plant, I found a two foot specimen on the side of a St John road.  A speeding jeep sent me into the bushes and there I found this old friend.  Last year, I grew Lion’s Ear in the gardens here.  It grew to five feet in height nestled under the Tansy in the Rose Garden.  This year it played a major role in the Safe Passage Garden ie this year’s mandala in the Venus Garden.  It is currently eight feet tall and still reaching higher. The garden resembles a womb receiving the spark of life then giving birth to this new life.  The Lion’s Ear sits on either side of the birth canal of the garden where the energy is born and the birth is complete. 

Lion’s Ear lifts us up for this final push. Yes, we are almost there. And yes, our ancestors from time immemorial when harmony with Nature was the way of life are here with us, helping us, nudging us into a New Life.  It is a New Life that springs from a recollection of this ancestral wisdom then takes off into new territory more beautiful than anything that has gone before.

Light energy moves at an increasing quicksilver pace, yet the man made world sometimes appears to have an immoveable heaviness.  The new Light pouring in brings bliss and gratitude, but this bliss is sometimes shaken by what fills the frame.  Man made frames seem intent on slowing us down, filling us with fear and keeping us in the illusion that things can’t get better and we need to go backwards to handle the situations we face. 

Nature has a completely different message.  On the micro level it gently and persistently calls us to the truth and power of this incoming Light. It helps us experience this Light as transformative and creative, loving and omnipresent. It encourages us to let go and evolve.  On the macro level Nature speaks of the imbalances we must address, but this is always balanced with support to make the shift from the micro level of Nature.

Meanwhile “the forces that were” bring us a last bitter moment of chaos before the Aquarian age opens up for us all. And it will open up because Nature is with us, Divinity is with us and yes, we are with us. As Coach Taylor in the ‘90s show Friday Night Lights said, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.”

One example for me of “Us being with Us” is our local employment situation.  For many months, every box store and restaurant chain in the commercial strip closest to the farm has had enormous help wanted signs out front. Some big chains have cut back hours and even closed for stretches due to employee shortages. Post lockdown, local people didn’t go back to jobs that didn’t pay a living wage. Lockdown illuminated their own personal value, and people made different choices about returning to work. 

Recently I’ve noticed the help wanted signs mention significantly higher hourly wages. Sometimes it’s hard to see the power we all actually have in the face of corporate structures, but here we see it clearly.  If these enormous companies want to function in our region, they are going to have to pony up more money to pay employees. After all, these companies ride off the life force of their employees.  Isn’t it about time this becomes an equal exchange?

I love seeing people respect the value of their life force.  It’s the true power of the world.  I am heartened by individuals walking from jobs where their contribution of life force is not honored.

In a game manipulated by powerbrokers, a group of individuals have bested the powerbrokers. A supermarket clerk told me that the pressure in the system meant she had received a $4 an hour raise from $11 to $15.  As the bagger, also getting the raise noted, this is $8,000 more a year.    

Speaking of “the powers that were”, someone sent me an interesting You Tube video in which a person in the US military was talking about a long running project called Stargazer.  This project involved hiring many psychics to predict outcomes for various geopolitical situations.  If a high percentage of psychics predicted one outcome, the military would take that into advisement in figuring out their policies going forward. 

This person explained that when the psychics got to 2012 and beyond, they could pick up no data on any situation.  At first there was concern that this meant there was some catastrophic life ending planetary event in 2012, but later the people in the program came to feel that there was some sort of awakening event after 2012 that made everything so completely different IN A GOOD WAY as to make it impossible for anyone to imagine or predict anything from the then current framework.

There is more to what this person said that I will share in a moment, but I find it really interesting that 2012 was when the Angels began to use the phrase “The Great Leap” when describing the evolutionary leap in consciousness humankind was making.

Addressing the issue of how could it be 2021 with still no absolute sign of this awakening event, the person in the video gave this wonderful analogy.  If we were to watch two grandmasters play chess, we might get a general sense of how the game was going, but for most of us, we would not know who was winning until the very end.  However the grandmasters themselves would know maybe 30 or 40 moves out who was going to win.  The rest of the game would go on in a framework of both players knowing who was going to win. We might be in the dark about the outcome, but they wouldn’t be.

This echoes what the Angels say all the time. The game is over.  The Light won. The Earth and all of us on it will get our awakening. We help this process by welcoming the Light pouring in. And “the forces that were”?  We just have to deal a little longer with them as they muck about a bit longer.  But they will go.  It’s a done deal, and we’ll discover a whole new way of being in their wake.

To restock the Flower Essences in our Wildflower Collection I need to remember when and where I have seen the Flowers in the collection in bloom.  Some beloveds like Dandelion and Goldenrod are hard to miss. When they blossom, they fill the landscape.  This makes it easy for me to make more Essence, though you might be surprised by what a short season Dandelion actually has. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

In any case, it doesn’t make Wildflowers less important because they are common, but it does make it easier for me to restock.  Some Flowers like Bottle Gentian are much more rare, and I need to focus to find them for restocking.  

This is the time of year Bottle Gentian flowers.  It likes to grow in the scrubby terrain between deep forest and woodland fields, but it is relatively hard to find. This year as I walked to a spot where I sometimes have found Bottle Gentian, I came across a family of Bottle Gentian several hundred plants strong.  I was bowled over by this abundance.  I feel fortunate when I find one Bottle Gentian plant, and here there were literally hundreds in a place I had never seen any before.

I sat down next to this amazing community of plants to consider all I knew about this powerhouse of a Flower and soak in its vibration.

I first met Bottle Gentian in the Adirondacks when I was a child. From a very early age, I recognized it had strong plant medicine.  I was extremely happy whenever I met it in the woods. It was so regal with such presence. Later Bottle Gentian was prominently featured in a book of Adirondack Wildflowers a friend and I painted when we were teenagers.  I would not describe the Adirondacks as a Flower filled landscape, so when we made this book, we searched hard for every last Flower we painted.  Bottle Gentian was a standout. It communicated to us its strength of purpose and resilience. It spoke of power used well.

Decades later in the summer of 1995, I was reminded exactly how resilient this Flower is.   I found Bottle Gentian blooming undiminished in an Adirondack landscape that had suffered an enormous blowdown of trees.  The scope of the blowdown/ microburst was immense.  940,000 acres of Adirondack wilderness were damaged by the storm with 126,000 acres completely destroyed with nary a tree left standing. It is estimated that ten million trees were felled by the storm.  When later I went on a seaplane ride to see the destruction, I saw mountains far into the distance with all their trees leveled like matchsticks. 

The night of the storm, the skies had been a strange green color. We played cards, listening to the frightening sound of mammoth trees breaking all around our camp. During flashes of lightning we peered out into the storm. Never had I seen enormous trees do what they did that night, waving like palm trees before breaking in half or uprooting or doing both. We awoke to a landscape of trees fallen like pick up sticks. We felt grateful to be alive.

A few days later, in a completely impenetrable rat’s nest of down trees, I found a resolute Bottle Gentian blooming.  To have survived the storm and lived to flourish afterwards made this cluster of blossoms a dynamo of strength.  I knew this Bottle Gentian would bring a particular vibrational wisdom about facing anything life could throw at us, so I made it into a Flower Essence and added it to our inventory.

Bottle Gentian Flower Essence supports us to hold our energy in sanctity in any situation no matter how difficult or dire. It empowers us to remain poised and serene in the face of upheaval and forceful change.  It helps us see more clearly in any circumstance. During that storm it had shown its grit and courage. It helps us do so too.

In the 27 years since that storm,  I have continued to benefit from this Flower’s strength and learn so much from its Flower Essence vibration. I delight in every encounter I have with this Flower in the wild, so you can imagine my joy in finding so many blossoms this September.

I wondered what strength this family of plants would bring to our Bottle Gentian inventory. I also wanted to know why.  I always want to know the whys.  Not that I always get answers to my questions but still, I ask.  In this case I wondered why so many Flowers this year?  I was talking to the Angels about this as I enjoyed another visit today with this community of Bottle Gentians, and they said in answer to my why, “Ask Bottle Gentian.”

And so I did.

“Greetings.  We bring great strength with our show of numbers. We want to remind you how to be powerful and hold your strength in complete harmony with others.  No matter the size of the group, you can all be in your full power without violating anyone else’s energy system. Look how our Flowers cluster in perfect accord with each other, all given space to flourish and all rising in their full expression.  This balance of power and harmony is one piece of our relevant wisdom for right now.

We also want to support you in the right use of your energy.  Your world is rapidly firing up into higher frequencies, and this requires a lot of energy from you. It can be arduous work to let go and flow with these vibrational shifts.  

We suggest you consider without criticism or shame how you use your energy. This examination is to give helpful insight. There is no need to judge. Do you make space for replenishing activities?  Do you sometimes inadvertently drain away your energy with activities like scrolling social media platforms or watching the “news”?  Do you listen when your body needs rest? Your world so often pushes you to keep going when you are spent and need to rest and restore yourself. Do guilt buttons sometimes make you push past balance so you are left drained?  With kindness to yourself as you take this inventory, consider keeping a full tank as we do. You need energy right now to adjust to the incoming light.  If you have energy, cherish it.  If you are exhausted, arrange to rest if possible.  And remember you can ask for help from all the lightworkers in spirit here to help right now.  See how our deep blue coloring and closed blossom formation suggests holding one’s energy?  Call to us and we will help you do likewise.

We are not asking you to cut people off or being unloving.  Sometimes lightworkers on Earth worry that self care means not doing your lightwork.  Right now your lightwork is self care.  This is the best thing you could do for those around you and those you love; gather your energy so it’s available to support you when you need it.

We send you our love.  Avail yourself to our wisdom.  Call us in. Study our architecture. Take our Flower Essence.  Ask for our help.  We have much relevant wisdom and want to share it with you now.”