Sheba has been with us for almost a month. Life with this four pound bundle of mischief is an adventure. Here’s my first report on what I am learning.

When it comes to Flower Essences for Sheba, all I can say is thank goodness for spritzer bottles.

Sheba is a rescue puppy. She needs Flower Essences but doesn’t exactly sit in front of me and open her mouth like dear old MayMay and Riley learned to do. There is just no other way to get her Flower Essences to her other than spritzing over her as she races by. This is actually quite fun as I enjoy her little dance as the Flower Essence spray hits her fur. You know you love it Sheba!

A fifteen month old baby girl and a three month old puppy take mayhem to a whole new level. Sheba and Grace are quite the combination. They think as one. If I turn to see what on earth Sheba is chewing, Grace will dump over a 25# bag of bird seed and begin to spread it all over the kitchen floor. The quieter these two get, the bigger the mess. When both of them are not in the same area, I have to chose my target priority and Grace always wins. Sorry about that Miguel. They were nice shoes before Sheba got a hold of them but Grace heading for the flour bin had my full attention.

Here they are trying to break out of their controlled environment to join Reina in a romp for the ages. Sometimes they work the perimeter like the raptors in Jurassic Park.

Puppies like yarn as much as kittens and frankly they do a lot more damage than kittens AND a lot faster. This is the before picture. I will spare you the after one.

There was a reason people suggested that getting a puppy in winter was not the best idea. Think 5 am trips outside when it is 20 below and dark! Really dark! On the bright side, I have been seeing a lot of the moon.

As so many of you told me, terriers have a lot of personality and I love it.

No regrets.

Well maybe some regrets if you are Ben and it is your sweater with the strange holes.

It has long puzzled me that the people who work the hardest to be a healing force on the planet are also the ones who get slammed first by the rising vibrational energies of the planet. Somehow I have never been able to quite wrap my head around the fact that those who try to be the most loving actually feel the rising vibrations before people who aren’t so occupied with trying to be their most loving selves.

Finally a healer friend shared an image that helped me understand the why of this. Caretakers, healers and those involved in trying to be their loving best are like the head geese in a formation as the formation flies into new territory.

Situated at the head of the formation the head geese shelter others and take the brunt of the headwinds. Like head geese, caretakers take the biggest battering from any shift in energies as they literally push into new territory first so it is not so hard for others to follow.

There has been a big amp up of energies on the planet in November and now December. This means caretaker head geese are feeling both tired and perhaps a bit perplexed by the radical contrast between the old energies and the new energies we have all flown smack into.

There is something incredibly exhilarating and alive about this new energy we’ve all flown into, but it doesn’t always feel great. At least , not yet.

This new energy can feel very disorienting. All activities not grounded in selfless love feel lifeless, while on the flip side, when we are in our hearts and acting from this place of love, everything feels radiant and amazing. But it is a challenge to stay in that love place. We need to be gentle with ourselves when we slip into the disorienting zombie place of old dead illusionary and habitual preoccupations.

Let’s face it, this flight into spiritual freedom is probably going to happen in a messy, bumpy way. We are all used to slipping back and forth from heart felt love to ego activities without feeling such an enormous difference in the two states. One always was a state of sleep/illusion and one was always a state of awakeness/love/reality but NOW it suddenly feels that way. There is just no confusing the two states of being. But the thing is, its disorienting to suddenly experience this divide so clearly.

Per usual, a big wave of interest in the same Flower Essences by all of you underscored our own sense of this dramatic transition. It reminds us that there are a lot of us trying to creatively and lovingly make sense of this new terrain.

The rise in vibration has been quite alarming to many and never before have we sent out so much Red Clover to help people stay calm and not panic. Understandably, if habitual activities and pursuits suddenly feel completely dead to us as in ZOMBIE DEAD, it’s a strange new world.

Fortunately, everything is solved by the same activity- centering in our hearts and living and loving from that place- and not only are there are Flower Essences that support us to go there, ALL CREATION supports us to make this leap because our planetary home is now holding this higher vibration.

Our Venus Garden Flower Essence combination for this season, Love It and Leave It was created by the Angels and Elementals before we knew we would need this support, and I appreciate the grace of this. We must really let go of all that was and embrace what is.

The Angels’ Flower Essence creations for 2013 are just one of many reminders that we are not alone as we deal with this bewildering if amazing territory. We have wise helpers and each other. And the particular helpers from the Angelic and Elemental realms remind us that being a force of love is our only way forward and show us the way through such models as the Flower Essences.

Love is the only real thing and in this brave new world, it is definitely feels that way!

Q: First of all, what is in this cookbook?

A: It is two hundred recipes for everything from breads, soups, salads, stews and casseroles to cakes, cookies, pies and celebratory desserts. I am all about celebrating just about EVERYTHING so there are lots of fun recipes for parties. It is not a vegetarian cookbook, but it does include lots of recipes for fruits and vegetables from the garden. It is not a fussy cookbook or one that sticks to any dietary dogma. These are my favorite recipes for the scrumptious foods we cook all the time. AND every recipes shines because Alli Howe hand lettered and illustrated each page. One other thing in the cookbook is stories. I couldn’t help myself and had to tell some stories about the favorite cooks in my life. Funny stories.

This shot is meant to reassure worried meat eaters that there ARE meat recipes in our farm cookbook.

Q: What surprised you most about doing this Cookbook?

A: As we created the Cookbook, Alli’s art was a daily surprise. A THRILL really! I would hand her off a couple of recipes each night and she would come in the next day with the most extraordinary illustrations for the recipes. It was so much fun to see each day’s new drawings that I could hardly wait for her to arrive each morning. Every morning felt the way Christmas morning felt when I was a tiny child- there was that much happy anticipation and then complete delight in the one of a kind illustrations Alli had done.

Only Alli would have a reindeer tell you how many muffins a recipe makes!

I also found writing this cookbook unexpectedly healing. Like most everyone, I have had a lot of loss in my life, and this was a way to feel close again to some of the people and places I have lost. Telling the stories behind the recipes filled me with wonderful memories of important people in my life like my grandmother Kitty and places like Cranberry Lake in the Adironacks.

Q: Why is this a Green Hope Farm Cookbook and not just a Molly Sheehan Cookbook?

A; At this point, there is little if any difference between my life in the farm’s kitchen and my life at “work” fifty feet away in the Flower Essence wing. Farms are like that; everything is blended together.

While many of the recipes are from meals I have cooked for Jim and our kids, we now have three kitchen tables that get moved around the kitchen depending on our numbers. Often there is a crowd of farm helpers and friends at the tables as well as various family members. I love to cook for anyone who happens through the farm at any time day or night. I see pretty much every day as an occasion to celebrate with good food, so not only do we celebrate comings and goings, birthdays, weddings, milestones of all sorts but often just because we are together. These recipes are the things I cook for all these events.

Here are the three tables lined up for Thanksgiving dinner last week.

Q: Where do the recipes come from?

A: Lots are old family recipes, lots are ones friends have shared, many are recipes I made up and lots are from the lovely folks who have worked here over the years. I imagine most groups that work together share food. We just happen to have had a lot of great cooks here who have loved to bring in foods to share. Its been a multicultural group as well so there are recipes from the staff’s original homes in Japan, Costa Rica, South Africa, Lebanon and Cornwall, England.

Q: How would you describe your life in the kitchen?

A: My grandmother Kitty was a really fabulous cook with a lot of ideas about spices and unusual ingredients. She was the first one to teach me the adventure of food.
When I was a child everyone in my family made things from scratch, but as I learned to cook, I took this a little bit further. From a very early age I wanted to grow food in our backyard AND I wanted to find wild foods out in the woods and fields around our home. I made numerous wild harvested meals for my frightened family who just weren’t sure I had identified the plants correctly. I have included in the cookbook my recipe for Stuffed Grape Leaves which I make using wild grape leaves. That was one dish I made that my parents and siblings loved without fear!

I also loved crafty kitchen projects of all sorts like gingerbread house construction or making my own vanilla extract. When I was first married and teaching English to a bunch of hungry teenagers, I would make them snacks like homemade strudel with strudel dough I had hand pulled or french pastries with puff pastry I had made myself. The more complicated the cooking project the better. One rainy vacation in the Adirondacks, I made homemade croissants for a large crowd of wet relatives nine times in ten days. On the tenth day I made raised donuts.

As I raised our four children, I continued to have fun in the kitchen but also learned to streamline my efforts because no kid CARES that the puff pastry was made by hand if the dinner is four hours late. I think the kids would say almost all our food adventures were a success except for the two years I tried to make us into vegetarians. The kids still call those years “the seitan years” though this era did bring us some great recipes we still cook.

Q: Why a Cookbook right now?

A: For thirty five years I have had an enormous folder of tried and true recipes. A couple of times I have written up my favorite of these recipes and made a cookbook to share with ten or twenty people. My grandmother gave me the idea for these Cookbook projects as she made a Cookbook her two daughters. When Alli said she would love to illustrate a cookbook with me, I was excited to create a cookbook to share with EVERYONE connected to Green Hope Farm and beyond. It was a joyful project from start to finish.

One of my grandmother’s recipes- Her handwriting is very hard to read, so I am glad she typed her original Cookbook, The Copy Cat Cookbook.

This is the tattered and torn cover from the first Cookbook I did. I only made about a dozen copies and someone stole my sister’s copy from her car. At this point, the stolen copy is probably in better shape than my copy! Jim put all the tattered pieces into a three ring binder for me one Christmas. I seem to be hard on Cookbooks!

Q: Any more Cookbook creation in your future?

A: I hope so! Right now we are basking in the glow of this gorgeous book. Over Thanksgiving my copy got a workout as we made numerous items from the Cookbook for the crowd of sixteen we had for dinner. I was so glad to have all my favorite recipes under one roof.

As far as other Cookbooks. I would love to do another one with Alli. It was a blast to work with her! We have talked about doing one focused completely on the fruit and vegetable bounty of the farm. Today I realized it would also be really fun to get all our Green Hope Farm friends to send in their favorite recipes for a Cookbook created by all of you. It would be so fabulous to taste test all your submissions! We had quite a delicious summer re-checking our own recipes!!! Time will tell but in the meantime, we are so happy to share this Cookbook with you all!

My quest for data about what everyone has on their Thanksgiving table knows no bounds.
As those of you who have read this blog over the years know, I love the quirks in everyone’s menus for this wonderful inclusive feast- and there are ALWAYS quirks!

Some are regional like the white bread stuffing/ cornbread dressing divide that splits the country.

Some are cultural like the fried okra served at staffer Bryan’s Thanksgiving meal. To be accurate, this afternoon it is 15 degrees out with a bitter wind off the arctic so perhaps the okra at Bryan’s southern family’s Thanksgiving table is also a regional difference as well. Today, I can only wish the okra in the garden hadn’t been dead for several months, whereas Bryan’s family is still harvesting okra and tomatoes!

Anyways, not only are there these kind of regional and cultural differences, some menu differences are just plain inexplicable. This would be the ONLY possible way to frame my childhood Thanksgiving meals which included my mother’s choice of dishes including curried fruit, rice, frozen peas, no pie and no gravy.

I never tire of researching this meal! I also can never say it enough that I am glad I married into the Sheehan family where Thanksgiving dinner includes pie AND gravy.

Yesterday at a hockey game, I asked the man standing next to me what was on the Thanksgiving table in his childhood. He looked very startled when I asked the question. He wasn’t a complete stranger; he taught both Will and Emily at the same school where Ben teaches. I haven’t quite gone beyond the pale with my research as to accost complete strangers yet, but his expression made me realize I was getting close.

After all, weren’t we supposed to be at the hockey game to watch hockey? None the less, he rallied, and soon we found enthusiastic common ground in the lunacy of wasting space on the Thanksgiving table with the New England traditional appetizer of a cut glass dish filled with celery sticks, carrot sticks and canned black olives.

I mean YUCK! Carrot sticks on Thanksgiving?

This reminds me of the Boston school where Emily is now teaching. Up until this year each class in the school cooked a traditional dish from the pilgrim dinner and everyone in the school enjoyed this feast on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. This year some bureaucrat at the school decided to make the meal into a more healthful and politically correct version of itself- a meal that involved no food wastage or sugar. Corn muffins are now a 1″ cube of corn bread and turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and pie are now turkey soup WITH CARROT STICKS. How to buzz kill a perfectly wonderful holiday meal…..This bureaucrat must have known my mother.

On a happier note, I was lucky enough this summer to have a whole new group of people to quiz about their Thanksgiving menus: Miguel’s family. On their trip up from San Antonio to the north country this August, things were a lot more relaxed than the year before when we were all putting on a wedding. As we lounged around watching Miguel and his brother JR cook us one amazing barbecued brisket after another, I asked JR as well as Miguel’s parents about their Thanksgiving menus.

Miguel’s mom explained how her mother-in-law had taught her many amazing dishes like tamales and empanadas. She noted that these dishes had been the backbone of the family Thanksgiving ever since. I have had Maria’s empanadas! YUM! Salsa is also a staple. I have learned from Miguel that salsa is a staple at every self respecting meal in Texas. Miguel gave us his family’s basic salsa recipe for the new cookbook so we can begin to learn the art of salsa. Here is the page from the cookbook. This recipe may seem simple, but it is salsa that even people who don’t like salsa really love.

Miguel’s brother, JR’s contribution to the conversation was an all time winner for me as he is married to a woman who is Cajun- Not only were there some Tex-Mex twists to their meal but they also serve blackened alligator as well as boudin. Wow. That really rocked my world! Blackened alligator!

I have already made two trips to the market to begin to organize for our rather more tame meal. Going now means that the people I pass with equally laden carts still appear to be calm and collected. When I go get the turkey on Wednesday I know things will be a bit frenzied. This is a complex meal to pull off no matter what anyone serves.

So to all of you out there who are cooking a Thanksgiving feast, I wish you well as you prepare and serve this wonderful meal. As always, I would love to hear about what you are cooking- Just send your menus to green.hope.farm@valley.net ! I won’t hold it against you if you are serving curried fruit.

I promise.

The Angels work so literally and they also work so metaphorically- This is very true of their definitions of the Flower Essences.

Sometimes I forget exactly how literal as well as metaphorical their work is.
I never expect the Spanish Inquisition. It is one of my defining characteristics- I am always surprised by what everyone else seems to have expected forever.


Maybe this is a good cluelessness. This summer, for example, it was probably best not to know that test driving LOVE IT AND LEAVE IT both as a Flower garden and as an Essence was going to take me beyond the theoretical practice of detachment to a fair share of leaving it as well. This was what the Angels literally said about the Essence and the garden, but me, I expected it to be a metaphorical experience. I will spare you the gnarly details of the literal losing game of this season but at this point, I am feeling glad I still have my head attached. Some days I felt that might be lost as well!

All in all, when it comes to what the Angels have to say about each new Flower Essence, the descriptions are packed with literal and metaphorical specifics I only see in retrospect.

What often happens is one of you calls to ask for help with specific issues. When the Angels suggest Flower Essence old timers in our collection like Borage, I feel a sigh of recognition and understanding. I have been thinking about Borage and working with Borage for thirty years. I usually grasp why they made the suggestion.

When the Angels suggest the new Essences, I go to reread the definitions to see why the Angels suggested these Essences. This helps me learn the new Flower Essences’ nuances.

Additionally, as we share the new Essences, I find out other things I need to add to the definitions to keep up what I am learning about the Essence from you, your experiences and insights, from my own experience of taking the Essence and from new information the Angels give me as you ask questions.

The good news is that no matter how far short my initial grasp of the Essences falls or how flawed my initial translation of what the Angels say into words, it doesn’t seem to stop any of you from going with your own guidance and intuition and gut feelings about what you need. You all seize the day- or in this case, seize the Essences!

It is such a reminder to me of every person’s wisdom in regards to Flower Essences and every person’s oneness with the divinity of creation.

Here are two examples from yesterday to explain what I mean about learning more about these new Essence friends.

For a young man feeling extremely deflated as well as isolated by a life lived largely playing computer games, the Angels suggested some tried and true Essences including Alignment Garden and All Ego Contracts Null and Void.

The Angels also suggested the new Colorado Essence Astragalus to help him lift up and out of his preoccupation with these games. I love how the Angels describe Astragalus as loosening the hold temporal pleasures have on us so we can experience more deeply our spiritual identity. Yup, we ALL got one!

How wonderful that the Essence doesn’t just help us break free from one compulsive activity to take up another, but moves us towards a connection with the eternal verities of our being. This seems to me much like cutting the Gordian knot.

The Angels also suggested Woad to help him find a new purpose beyond computer games and a state of mind beyond the blues.
I also loved that the Angels wanted him to consider the Hummingbird Garden to help him find a bead on expressing his creativity and his dreams with passion and confidence.

Each generation faces new challenges, and I am grateful that the Angels and the twenty somethings here are bringing forward support for today’s young people. I can’t understand exactly what they face, but the Angels know and the twenty somethings here are also on the job searching for just the right Flowers to help.

For a young woman struggling with an eating disorder, the isolation this brings and her harsh self judgments, there were a number of suggestions from the core of our collection but the New Essence suggestions included Woad again, Sneezeweed, Redwood, Queen of the Night, Fragrant Ladies Tresses and Pink Pillar Rose and the Hummingbird Garden.

You have already read about my love of Woad, but I still find it worth mentioning AGAIN that this Essence is proving a very versatile source of support. Here, I think it offers the same thing it offered the young man: support to find a new purpose beyond starving herself and also help to soak up the light, wisdom and sunshine within her situation so she can release her blues and come in touch with her true blue self. This Essence is all about radical transformation.

Sneezeweed was a straightforward offering to help her with her pressurized self-judgment, an almost allergic reaction to self that has her in a self destructive pattern of choices.

Redwood is cropping up for just about everyone. It helps the old feel young beneath their weathered bark. It helps the young feel grounded and know the fiber of their beings. Redwood’s gifts just don’t stop. Maybe this multitude of strengths is because Redwood has such practice in holding itself in form. Whatever the reason, it is a dynamo. Here, I feel it offers to solidify this woman’s experience of herself in a body in a positive way, a strengthening and sheltering way.

Queen of the Night lights the path forward with a laser beam of illumination. With this light she gives us courage to keep moving through the dark places on our path. This light also helps us pinpoint exactly what is distressing us. In the nights of our lives, so much is mysterious, but she illuminates our way forward as a flashlight in the pitch dark. Sometimes the brilliant illumination of a narrow beam is all it takes to go forward. I hope it will support this woman to leave behind the dark place of her eating disorder.

Fragrant Ladies Tresses brings comfort, “I am not so much a promise of how resolution will look but I am a promise that resolution will arise.” Is there anything more important than knowing this? That mighty forces WILL come to our aid? I am not sure there is.

A favorite new Rose in our gardens this year was Pink Pillar Rose. I like the way the Angels talk about this Rose, “obsessive, fanatical or unbalanced emotional attachment to another person, an idea or an activity can become softened and transformed into a balanced, centered and creative love with the support of Pink Pillar Rose.” There is something in this Rose that acknowledges the wisdom gained from suffering through our imbalances. It helps us see that what we’ve learned leads naturally to deeper self kindness and self love.

This is a gentle and loving Rose friend but also a strong one. That’s almost always the thing about Roses; they are so loving and offer such total support but they are tough and don’t mess around about their calling. They stick to their loving intentions immune to anyone hassling them and show us the way to do the same.

No surprise another twenty something would benefit from the Hummingbird Garden.
So even in these two instances, the new Flower Essences showed their versatility, joining the ranks of so many Flowers and Essences offering their healing loving wisdom to us all.