In our early years, we would send out a little green covered booklet each fall to everyone on our mailing list. In these greenies, I chatted about what was happening at the farm, and then my kids decorated all the pages.

I hate fake kid drawings like the ones always used on TV shows. A real kid’s drawing has a different and most wonderful feeling entirely. I was so lucky to have little people there to draw flowers, cats, dogs, owls, fairies, elves, gnomes, princesses and angels.

Back then, 5,000 of the greenies would get the job done. When the greenies arrived back from a local mom and pop printer, we would print out our mailing list in zip code order. Then we would sort the greenies into zip code bundles.

Some staff loved the sorting. William, even as a tiny child, wanted in on the job as somehow it made complete sense to his brain. Lynn Tidman, our long time label writer, loathed the whole process. She was from Bermuda where her childhood address had been as simple as, “Lynn Weaver, Paget, Bermuda.” Nonetheless, Lynn and everyone else would stick a mailing label on each greenie, then I would hand them another zip code sorted label group that I had cut out from the sheets of mailing labels.

This PROPER ZIP CODE SORTING was both required to do a bulk mailing and also saved us on postage. I was encouraged frequently by the postmaster general to attend “Sorting Workshops.” This sounded like as much fun as cleaning the grout in the shower, so I did not attend. Instead we leaned on my skills with the scissors.

My cut out groups of labels made up several different kinds of bundles. Two categories of bundles got us the biggest postal discount. When there were ten or more greenies going to the exact same zip code this kind of bundle would get a little D sticker. For bundles of ten or more with the same first three zip code numbers it was a lime green 3. These were the most fun to bundle, the least expensive to mail and also revealed to us where our GHF friends clustered.

Sometimes we would not know we had an enormous group of GHF friends from the same geographic area until we saw all the D’s and 3’s. We would be in awe that we had so many friends in far off places like North Myrtle Beach, SC 29597 or Sante Fe, NM 87501 or Boulder, CO 80301.

Most of the address labels were not in big zip code clusters and would have to be sorted in a rather time intensive way. Our post mistress would give me a list of regional post office distribution centers and the zip codes which each center was responsible for. These centers are called ADCs, short for Area Distribution Centers. Bundling by ADCs was harder to do because the zip codes for centers often jumped all over the place and our computer just spit out the mailing labels in numerical order. Perhaps if I had attended a sorting workshop I would have gotten a better zip code program. I will never know.

To give an example of the complexity of sorting by ADCs, our local ADC receives mail for zip codes beginning with 035-037, 050-054,056-059. To prepare greenies for mailing to our ADC I would have to hunt around all the mailing list sheets for all the mailing labels that fit this category and cut them into sections and paper clip them all together. Then happy staff like Lynn would apply the labels to the newsletters and bundle them appropriately.

Many ADC had considerably more bizarre collections of zip codes and so the paper clipped mailing labels would have a lot of pieces. These bundles would get a big fat A short for ADC when they were assembled together. We would also give ourselves A’s for a job well done.

After several days of sticking mailing labels on greenies and bundling CORRECTLY LYNN, we would get excited about very random things like the wonder of our postal forefathers choosing 01776 for Sudbury, MA or 10000 for NY, NY and 20000 for Wash. DC.

Since zip codes go east to west, so did we, and we would know we were close to the end of our mailing journey when we got to Honolulu, HI 96818 and Anchorage, AK 99501. Among other things, we would learn once and for all that AK was Alaska not Arkansas. We had blown through Arkansas DAYS before.

By the time we hit Alaska, our office would be piled to the ceiling with CORRECTLY SORTED, THANK YOU VERY MUCH LYNN bundles tucked into mailing sleeves. There was a certain satisfaction to filling the hundreds of mailing sleeves the post office supplied us with.

When we took the mailing to the post office it would take several trips in our truck to bring in all the sleeves. Since people in our village think we are up in the hills growing wacky tobbacky and dancing around in flowing gowns, there were always a lot of surprised faces at the post office when we dropped off the mailing. You could almost hear folks say to themselves, “What the heck, they actually DO something up there.”

I would have to give the postmistress the tally of how many newsletters we were mailing and exactly what kind of bundles we had made. She would have to weigh the whole mailing to check that I was giving her accurate numbers. It always felt like a party when the numbers jived. Once we actually brought champagne to celebrate with our postmistress!

I didn’t see the end of the greenies until it was upon us. Our mailing list got too large (it is more than 35,000 strong now), Ben’s ONLY conversation with me was about the need for me to start blogging and my other children no longer wanted to draw fairy pictures for me.

I still miss the mailings though. We had a fun time getting them to you. Well, every one had fun except Lynn.

The kids seemed to even know the names of the Green Hope Farm gnomes.

Emily loved frogs so they were well represented.

Here someone had fun illustrating a piece on holes.

Will got into the illustrating business when he was very young!

Lots of Angel art, of course!

Emily loved owls as well as frogs.

Elves apparently like ice cream as much as Sheehan children.

Here’s one perfectly expressing how Essences shine!

This was the time we got fancy and put a stamped postcard in with the mailing asking if people wanted to stay on our mailing list. Only problem? We didn’t ask people to tell us their name and address so we got hundreds of cards back saying “Yes I want to stay on the mailing list” but we didn’t know who the cards were from!

Lots of cats

and dogs!

Should have known the greenies days were numbered when someone drew a dog on the computer!

I went to a women’s college. I wanted to go to a co-ed college but I didn’t get in to any of the ones I wanted to attend, so I went kicking and screaming to an all women’s college.

I loved it.

My high school had been very crazy. It was in a university town so the school population was a lot of unsupervised faculty children with way too many bad ideas. Going to an all women’s college was restful and restorative. It was deeply innocent in some way that is probably not possible in 2013 but was possible in 1975.

Almost no gossip. Really.

No one paid any attention to anyone else’s social life, although there was one exception to this. When I was a freshman, one very proper senior named Irene stirred our imaginations. During the week Irene behaved as if there could be no more exciting an activity in her life than ironing her pinafores. Yes, she wore pinafores. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. And she ironed them. Often.

However on the weekends Irene had an endless stream of extremely attractive men coming and going from her room. The Friday guy would be leaving on Saturday morning just as the Saturday guy was being buzzed up. She timed them so precisely that they almost crossed in the halls as one left and the next guy arrived. As freshman, we never had anything more pressing to do on a Saturday night than sit in the hall and eat popcorn. But with Irene’s bustling social life, this was more exciting than popcorn at a movie theatre.

One Saturday night, a young man who had also attended my crazy high school dropped in to see me. My friends and I were baking cookies instead of popping popcorn. For some reason this freaked out my visitor in a big way. He made it clear he thought our harmless baking was weird even perverse. He left as fast as possible but not before he wondered aloud why we weren’t out at some mixer getting drunk on garbage pail punch. What was WRONG with us?

He was SO worked up that he got himself a newspaper column on his college paper and wrote a number of articles about me and that evening. Using my given name, he entitled his articles, “Lady Margaret Entertains.”

Really. I kid you not.

Anyways, all these years later, I still don’t know why cookie baking struck him as so creepy and elitist but it did. He now writes for TV shows in Hollywood. I figure I gave him excellent practice for this work since I offered him one of his first opportunities to spin drama from nothing.

More recently a college friend wrote a memoir about our college years. We lived in the same dorm for three years, and since we were both English majors, we also took a lot of the same classes. Let’s just say we ate a lot of popcorn together. I don’t know what I expected from her memoir but once again, I was painted into another strange corner.

In her present day life as a newspaper columnist, my friend has become known as someone who feels marriage is a prison that stunts women’s growth. In her memoir I was featured as the poster child for this issue, a soon to be stunted friend who was headed for a desperate life in an early marriage- a marriage that would keep her from self actualizing.
I have many flaws. My dentist tells me I don’t floss enough and for all my talk about clean closets, I still haven’t tackled the nightmare one filled with all my sewing crap. I still eat too much popcorn and bake too many cookies. But honestly, I feel pretty self-actualized. I haven’t done everything I want to do yet, but I am content with the dreams I have fulfilled.

The Angels have this expression, “Dogs but no dogma.” This is how I have always tried to live. I try to go with the genuine not the imposed rules of the social group I am in. It seems to bother people. A lot. I don’t exactly understand why.

So I was 18 and there were raging parties just a few miles across the Pioneer Valley at other colleges. Still not sorry I stayed in the dorm and watched Irene manage her men queue.

So I could have lived all the eras of my life in a more politically correct order and had some big enormous career before life in the country with Jim and the kids. Not sorry I went with the flow.

I know I should end this with a quippy quote, but it’s time to go make some popcorn. Or maybe some cookies.

Me circa 1975 not thinking about popcorn.

Woad was one of those Flowers I pursued like a love sick thirteen year old.

I saw its name somewhere. US magazine? TMZ? My high school year book? Gerard’s Herball?

The name rang some bell within me, and I was off to the races. I pursued the plant through seed catalogs and my trusty “Field Guide to Wildflowers”. I searched for pictures online. I was giddy when I landed a seed packet.

Why? Why? I had no idea. I just wanted it. Badly.

It took two years for my baby Woad plants to mature and blossom but unlike most of my teen crushes, Woad was better than I imagined it would be.

Yes, it was tall and gangly but those FLOWERS! When I went to take Woad’s photo my hands shook, but I convinced myself the photos looked dreamy and special. As special as Woad.

I could not understand it. Why wasn’t everyone growing Woad?

Well apparently everyone HAD grown Woad six hundred no make that six thousand years ago and they were over it.

But not me. I was in the first flushes of a crush worthy of my love object. Going by my Woad plants as I worked in the gardens was a thrill. Like seeing the object of my affection across a crowded cafeteria and knowing someday I might actually speak in to him Biology class if I dropped a pencil in front of him and he noticed or we got assigned to dissect a frog together.

I even enjoyed saying Woad’s name. Woad. Such a strange name but so interesting. Woad. We were MTB BFF.

As you can imagine, here in the office, stuffed as it is with eight zillion bottles of Flower Essences, there are many opportunities to try out the new Flower Essences. Once Woad was made into a Flower Essence on a glorious sunny day, I was all over it.

As I put Flower Essences in my quart canning jar each day, many Flower friends come and go as necessary. But Woad was something I reached for every day. I had no idea why. We weren’t talking yet so I had no notion how Woad was helping me, but I knew Woad was doing something. Something special.

Somehow, when I did talk to Woad to get a definition, I managed to keep my description sort of professorial and not too gushy. I loved that it’s brilliant yellow sunshine Flowers indicated a strength to chase away the blues. This was especially interesting to me after having read five hundred pages about the Woad industry in medieval Europe where Woad was used to make the one and only blue dye. I loved the drama of a yellow Flower that became a blue dye that also worked as a Flower Essence to literally chase away the blues. How I love when a Flower Essence’s purpose is so deeply resonant with its place in the world.

Only Woad had been dumped by the world. In like 1600. This hurt me on Woad’s behalf. How could those medieval folk have abandoned Woad’s blue dye for Indigo’s blue dye? It was like dumping the original crush for the new hunk in town. How could they let this Flower go? I didn’t plan on it.

But Woad spoke to this too. It said one of it’s particular gifts was to help us find purpose when our previous purpose has been lost to us.

As I adjust to my empty nest filled with buzzing iPhones, I too am accomodating a shift in purpose. I am so happy that I get to keep working with the Flowers in the gardens and the Flower Essences in the office. This part of my calling gives me a bit of an eternal summer and yahoo for that. But I was definitely looking for other purposes for myself. Especially for the quiet evenings. Maybe it was Woad or maybe it was the combination of Woad and Laura’s Oatmeal cookies that started the wonderful project of this Green Hope Farm cookbook. Whatever the reason, it’s been so fun to have this new purpose. Where earlier I was cooking for hoards of people, now I was writing about cooking for hoards of people in my empty kitchen.

Yesterday as Alli and I worked our way through the final edits from the printing press for a press roll beginning TODAY, we snacked on Pumpkin Cake, and I sipped my Woad water. As we were literally handing off the cookbook for good, I needed a new purpose and Woad was on the job. Suddenly we decided to shoot a picture of the cake were eating and post it on Facebook because after all, Pumpkin Cake was a recipe in the cookbook.

Oh Woad, was it you that called me to a new pursuit during the wintry month of November when garden chores are scarce? Was it you that whispered, “Food Stylist” in my ear. And you, Woad, be gentle with me. I am probably going to be terrible at this, just like I was terrible at getting the attention of that youth in high school. Yes, I DID marry him, but my goodness, it took five years to get a date. How many dropped pencils was that. A lot.

I had cleaned every bedroom to within an inch of its life. Beds were made with hospital corners, pressed sheets and the prettiest quilts. Pillows were plumped. A formerly occupied closet had became an official linen cupboard and now held all the sheets neatly folded and organized by size.

Forty five wet towels were no longer slung over hooks, rails and the bathtub but laundered and folded in a closet all their own. The upstairs bathroom had been polished as for a military inspection.

The freezer was sorted with no lingering freezer burned ice cream. The refrigerator was scrubbed with room on the shelves. A wandering child, through for a few hours, said its spaciousness alarmed her. Somehow the empty shelves did not scream welcome like the overstuffed ones of old. Then she saw the pantry, tidy for the first time in 25 years. What had happened to her mother who never knowingly under catered?

At my work station, I could see the wood top of my desk for the first time in years. Papers were filed and books reshelved. I was now able to find my Flower identification books because they sat in a neat row in front of me. I created a list of every Flower Essence in our inventory complete with latin names.

My personal clutter was sorted as well. My yarn inventory was under control. Each knitting project was tucked in a cosy basket all its own. Even my knitting needles were sorted by size and kind. In my closet, clothes had been sorted by season, style and color. Freaky was one way to describe it.

Yes…..Life with all four children out of the house was getting a little OCD. It was time for a fifth. It was time for an iPhone.

I know. I know. I probably complained here about my children’s obsession with their iPhones. I probably ranted about “people” who were on their iPhones instead of “being there.” I certainly got sniffy when my kids looked more at their iPhones during dinner than at me. I went on ad nauseum in a luddite sort of way about the decline and fall of manners and civilization because of iPhones.

Then our fifth child arrived, a cute little iPhone all our own. It was love at first sight.

Within moments of holding her, I was blissed out by texting. It was so easy and irreverent. I could bug my missing children but in a way that (maybe) didn’t drive them too crazy.

With the photo option I could send them silly photos of things that reminded me of them.

This was for Will of course.

I could keep them updated on Alli’s drawings for the cookbook and even send recipes from the pages when needed.

I could take gobs of pictures of Grace and send them to all her fans.

I could even laugh when Will, home for a long weekend, spent so much quality time with his iPhone.

At last I understood.

But then, like the sheets in my newly organized linen cupboard, I found wrinkles in paradise.

In the early weeks, I took care of our iPhone baby during the day and Jim got his quality time at night. The kids didn’t even need us to tell who was texting. They seemed to get that it probably wasn’t me when the topics drifted to the Arsenal-Liverpool game or Jon Lester’s pitching.

Yet now, several months in, we have run into some troubling dilemmas. Like right now. Jim is away for four days. Of course, it is sensible to have him have the iPhone while he is away from the land line. He, after all, NEEDS it. But I am missing my baby. I WANT it. Last night when he called me, I broached a new topic. With Jim and the iPhone baby gone, I had cleaned the last messy closet, finished off a sweater and raked the yard. Gently I asked him, “Honey, is time for Baby number six: an iPhone of my very own?”

How do you decide what Flowers to make into Flower Essences?

Most of the decision making is out of my hands. I talk to the Angels and Elementals everywhere I go and most certainly in the gardens here, and they point me in various directions. Sometimes they get my attention by having a Flower fill my heart with overwhelming love. That’s a nice nudge! In any case, I know from long experience that the Angels and Elementals have perspective about what Flower Essences are needed, so I follow their lead. Their guidance can be succinct, but there’s still a fair amount of mystery involved.

Often my partners don’t tell me too much about the whys of growing a new Flower for an Essence or the whys of a new garden design. From three decades working this way, I know one of the reasons for this is that I have things to learn as the gardens unfold, and it wouldn’t help my process if they said, “Okay this garden is going to harvest a Flower Essence about letting go and you are going to have a season of doing nothing but let go.” This kind of heads up might take the wind of out my sails for one thing!

For another, it really becomes shared wisdom through this process. The Angels and Elementals already know the vibrational strengths of each of the Flowers, but I get to learn this as I grow the Flowers and experience the gifts each Flower bring to the gardens and my life. I may not go to school each September anymore, but I feel the growing season is my classroom with a syllabus given in January, projects begun in February, great intensity of learning in the summer then a harvest of both Flower Essences and what I have learned in September and October.

When the Angels and Elementals ask you to make a certain Flower Essence, is this always a straightforward process?

Not at all. Sometimes it is hard to find the Flower. Sometimes it takes awhile to grow the Flower for the Essence. Some Flower Essences come completely out of the blue.

This year saw a couple of different examples of this. Some Flowers I had been trying to make into Essences for a number of years were finally landed. With Artichoke Flower Essence, I had seen beautiful Artichoke Flowers in Ireland on a number of visits. It was my first nudge to grow the Flower.



Artichoke Flowers are the edible chokes that have gone by and bloomed. An extended growing season, the kind Ireland has, is necessary to get a Flower. My first attempts to get the plants to blossom in our shorter growing season failed as I got artichokes but no Flowers. I tried numerous varieties and started the plant earlier and earlier in the greenhouse. Last year, the Artichokes went to flower, and I was euphoric.
However, after a day in the garden sunshine, the bowl of Artichoke Flower Essence was drained, and I could just see the tail of one happy neighborhood dog trotting out of sight after drinking the entire bowl of the Flower Essence! Those were the last Flowers of the season on my Artichoke plants so I had to start over again this season. This year, I hardly let the Artichoke Flowers out of my sight until the Essence was safely in the bottling room.

Woad was another Flower the Angels and Elementals suggested I grow several years ago, but I had never seen it before I grew it. The plant is a biennial, taking two years before it blossoms, but what a blossom! I was very happy with our Woad harvest this season and am delighted that the plant has now self-seeded throughout Ben’s grape vines for continued harvests down the road.

The Colorado Wildflower Essences were the “out of the blue” project of the season. Alli Howe, the GHF staffer who made them, has been working here at the farm with a great openness to partnership with Angels and Elementals. Alli has a lot of Elemental energy about her as well, meaning that she has a close connection to the divinity in the natural world through long association. When she went back this spring to where she had lived in Colorado, the Angels and Elementals encouraged me to encourage her to make Flower Essences. She had the momentum for this kind of work and was joyful about doing it. How grateful I am that she was willing to follow the Angels and Elementals all over the mountains to find such dynamic Wildflowers.

One of the things the Angels have always said about Flower Essences is that they are a way for those of us who don’t travel or can’t travel to fully experience the energetic gifts of other places and regions. These Colorado Wildflower Essences are such a wonderful example of this. They bring us the resilient, determined, focused, clarified wisdom of these high mountain Wildflowers. What a blessing that Alli has taken to working with Angels and Elementals like a duck to water as the quality of the Essence really depends on this communication. This was also true of the two Essences from northern California, Redwood and Sweet Annie. The Angels and Elementals asked me to ask long time Green Hope Farm friend Diane Chira to work on Flower Essences for Green Hope Farm and she committed to the project with such dedication and focus. She too was a natural, and I am most grateful for her work.

How does a New Collection come together each year?

The Angels and Elementals see to that in no uncertain terms.

After working on the Green Hope Farm Cookbook at a leisurely pace during the summer Alli and I renewed our focus on the project during September. With papers and supervisory cats spread out on several large tables in the kitchen, we wrote and illustrated this book, hoping to wrap the project in time for a fall printing. I had told the Angels and Elementals that I would get definitions from them for the new group of Flower Essences as soon as the Cookbook was finished and off to the printer.

Apparently the Angels and Elementals wait for no deadline! Suddenly Alli was like a whirling dervish. After staying up to the wee hours of the morning, she would arrive each morning with pages of pages of illustrated recipes. I think the Angels and Elementals were filling her with so much energy that she hardly needed to sleep. And her cat, Penny was supervising as well while our Bella worked the day shift here! With Alli setting this electric pace, we were able to finish the Cookbook very fast.

And just in time as even during the final days organizing the Cookbook for the printer, the Angels started explaining the new Essences to me at all times of day and night. I could feel them leaning in, like an energy at my back, pressing me to get the definitions they were giving me on paper and out to you.

I started to carry a book with me everywhere I went to write down everything they were telling me. Much of the year our conversations are more relaxed and they usually don’t interrupt me whatever I am doing (even when it is some extremely mindless and silly occupation that I am sure they know is a complete waste of my time). But they KNOW when the new Flower Essences are needed for humanity and they KNEW these were needed NOW.

Consequently, the process of transcribing the descriptions of this year’s new Flower Essences went incredibly fast. I mean, how hard is it to type dictation? And that was how these definitions were flowing. I think this is partly due to the number of years I have now been talking to Flowers and the Angels and Elementals and also partly because these Essences needed to be launched ASAP so I was given extra help. They even sent in data in crystal clear dreams! Sometimes it can take me MONTHS to delve into a Flower and hear what it has to say about itself- NOT THIS YEAR! This group was READY!

How do you view this new group of Flower Essences?

WOW! They are just so different than last year’s new introductions and for many reasons. I see this as most heartening. Last year’s new Essences offered wonderful support for fine tuning our electrical system especially our upper chakras. I felt we were getting help to receive new high vibrational energies and assimilate them. The New 2013 Essences couldn’t be more different in feeling or purpose. They have a roll up your sleeves and get going energy that is strong, practical and accessible. They have very specific gifts to help us with humanity’s overarching process of unity consciousness and their energy suggests the time for this work is NOW.

It is one thing to bandy back and forth this term, unity consciousness, in a world that feels a long way from unity anything. But I remember in the early ‘80s how the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war and how bleak that felt. I was a part of citizen to citizen peace exchange with folks from Russia. I made friends with some very sweet Soviet women who mostly wanted to go right from the airplane to JC Penney’s to get properly fitting bras and then sit back and talk about foraging for mushrooms on their weekends in the country. But could small groups of humanity like this really help keep the world from nuclear war? Yes and it was a movement of ordinary people living out the theory of the hundredth monkey.

So too with unity consciousness. Despite what seems to be happening on the surface, other forces are at work. I find these Essences extremely encouraging in this regard. They don’t suggest that we pay any attention to what seems to be the reality but instead, they help us dive into a new experience of reality. They also offer concrete support for moving beyond apparent differences and relationship roadblocks that break down unity consciousness. They are Flower Essences that seriously have our backs as we do this work, and they speak from a place of great confidence and certainty that LOVE AND UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS WILL PREVAIL. I for one am very heartened by all they offer us and the reality they suggest is revealing itself in our midst!