If I had to pare down the spiritual path to the simplest notion I would say, “Be loving.” Why? Because there is Divinity worth loving in everything and everyone.

Simple to say “Be loving” not so simple to do. People and groundhogs piss us off. We encounter the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s personality crap, and it’s tough to find our way to love. It’s also tough to figure out when other people’s personality crap makes it appropriate to back off and love from afar. We would not embrace a porcupine without being careful, and sometimes people require the same careful approach.

A person who betrayed me in a big way a number of years ago recently seemed to make a slight overture to redress the wrong. I found myself softening and opening my heart once again. Then it turned out the gesture was not genuine, and the person had no intention of following through with making things right. What is it they say? “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” That’s a bit harsh, but I felt that I was getting a lesson to be more cautious with my heart. I felt I was being shown that sometimes we have to see and accept the nature of people’s personalities and be careful.

How is this about love? How do I choose love in this circumstance? Well first of all there is need for me to bring forward love for my own tender heart. Maybe it just doesn’t need another stomping from this person. That’s on me to show enough discernment to expect people to be who they are. That’s on me to proceed cautiously or not at all.

Maybe it is an odd kind of love, but accepting where the person is and leaving the person to learn their lessons in their own way is love.

Giving a person the space to learn their own life lessons the way they need to learn them is honoring the person’s own process.

We may wish the pace of their learning was different or that they had wisdom that made our lives better, but sometimes we have to let go to where they are in their spiritual journey and let them learn things in their own way.

What Flower Essences support us in this work?

All Ego Contracts Null & Void clears out our confusions about what we owe others and what they owe us. If we have relationships where we are expected to be there regardless of what the person is doing to us, this Essence helps us release this often unconscious mindset of obligation.

Carry Less helps us remove our filters that have us see things a certain way when maybe it is not that way at all. These filters build up over time so that we don’t always see a situation or person accurately and fall into habitual patterns that do not serve us.

These two Essences help free us from underlying assumptions, unconscious biases, societal and familial expectations. There is freedom in unwinding these from our electrical systems. We are free to take better care of ourselves and free to love others appropriately.

The religious template of my own childhood has been one of the things I have had to modify to find a better balance of love and self care. Raised in a family of selfish people all telling me that good people are always selfless, I came to think it was my duty to fall on the sword for them over and over and over again, taking care of them in their irresponsibility and recklessness. This became the habitual way I handled others outside my family who were similarly self involved.

Flower Essences and my guidance (which always have been more appropriate than my childhood training) have both helped me in this very big project to find balance and a wiser path of love. I have needed to learn to serve the divinity within each person not their personality demands. Sometimes this means love up close and sometimes love from afar. Both of these Flower Essences combined with events in daily life lead me to a different more flexible way to love than the self destructive submission to personality egos that I was raised to pursue.

Today I posted a photo of Elecampane, a beautiful late summer herb that works as a Flower Essence to help us assimilate the gifts of the sun. And gifts there are!

According to the Schumann resonance data coming out of Russia and Italy, this past weekend saw a big influx of light energy into the planet. One source of this incoming energy is solar flares which is why I posted the photo of Elecampane. It helps us absorb this light into our bodies

In December of last year I wrote a blog about the Schumann resonance, what it is, what it is telling us about our planet and how we can work with the high vibration energies it shows us are entering Earth.

What I want to underscore here today in this blog is that these spikes in incoming energy are a coordinated effort to lift the vibration of the planet, an effort we can be a part of. It helps us and helps the planet if we make room in our lives to assimilate this energy.

Surprisingly, the energy often calls us to do less versus more. This kind of energy influx can definitely tire us out, and we may need more quiet time and more rest. We may also need to work to move the energy down through our chakras which is something discussed in the earlier blog.

This brings me to the topic of INTUITION which was discussed in this blog On Saturday during the peak of this energy influx, my seven year old grandson Henry was complaining his legs hurt. I mentioned to him that there was much light pouring into the planet and if he wanted he could check his body and see if it was flowing all the way through him into the ground or stuck in his legs. Without missing a beat he swept his field and moved the energy down. No one trained him how or even explained anything more about the process. He just knew what he needed to do.

We all know what we need to do to take in this energy and move it through our systems. May we all give ourselves permission to do what we need to do (which might mean doing absolutely nothing but sitting there!).

You know things are bad when even Reginald Montgomery “Chuckie” Hogbottom, Order of the Woodchuck, Recipient of the medal of honor “Marmota Monax” September 2019, Groundhog Knight of the Realm, May 2022, and Recipient of the Order of the Garter July 2023 is MIFFED.

To explain Chuckie’s distress, let us recap this season in our vegetable garden. Despite an 8 foot fence circling the perimeter, deer and groundhogs have frollicked so thoroughly in the inner sanctum of this garden that little is left but Hollyhocks and Nasturtiums (well sprayed with garlic spray) and an onion crop. There might be more if us humans liked garlic sprayed vegetables, but we don’t.

Any time a grandchild visits the first thing we do is go down and fill in the groundhog hole in the CENTER of the vegetable garden. Several hours later, it is a sure bet we can go fill it in again. The groundhogs shamelessly redig the hole as often as we fill it in. It is fair to say that until last night Chuckie and co. were getting the last laugh about everything to do with the vegetable garden.

However, this morning when I went down to begin to mulch over sections of the “garden” with mulch hay, it was hard to miss that the damage had escalated. In fact, the eight foot fence had been destroyed on three sides of the garden. Lizzie was with me as we surveyed the scene. There were metal fence posts bent to the ground as well as sections of heavy duty fencing droooping on the ground. This seemed a little much for a Groundhog celebration or for that matter a gala event with the Deer community. Even the deer prefer sailing over the fence versus destroying it.

This week Lizzie has run into so many bears on her early morning woods walks that the whole office crew has been reading the bear section in Animal Speak while simultaneously scratching our heads in wonder. So it was only right that Lizzie found the smoking gun, I mean steaming bear poop left as a memento to commemorate whatever bear activity occurred last night in the vegetable garden.

While this intruder has Chuckie and co. annoyed, I really feel the most sorry for the bear which must have found NOTHING tasty in the garden. As in truly NOTHING! Chuckie and co. are not known for their sharing skills, and they have truly left nothing for anyone or anything else to nibble on.

Needless to say we await the arrival of the man we have hired to build us a serious garden fence with bated breath. Good news for him is that now there is virtually nothing for him to dismantle and no planmts for him to worry about damaging as he sets to work to build what we now hope will be a Groundhog, Deer and Bear proof fence!

All I can say as I close this post is THANK GOODNESS FOR THE LOCAL FARM STAND! Oh and the picture I took of the poop? I will spare you the photo but may share it with the under seven set of grandchildren who do like a bit of poop talk.

I abandoned our FB back before COVID. There was so much going on in my life that something had to give, and it was FB. The decision seemed set in stone when I lost my passwords. Yes, passwords because FB made me have to have two accounts to have a GHF account. Lasy week, upon hearing ( yet again) my pathetic story of not being tech savvy enough to figure out how to revive our connection to FB, techno wizard and staff Goddess Jen got us back in. So here we go, giving FB a whirl again.

My first post back into the fray was a photo of a new Rose, Lady of Shalott part of the Lady Rose trio ( and eventually to be given its own tab).

Wow! The sweet messages from you dear GHF beloveds from the 35 years we’ve been here just melted my heart, and most certainly brought tears to my eyes. To say I was really touched by your messages just doesn’t begin to suggest how I felt. Thank you all for your love!

PS As if! I haven’t posted the photo because FB won’t let me post anything. I guess I need to await the return of our techno wizard and staff goddess Jen to sort this out!

Ireland calls to many of us. We recognize its ancient magic as offering true healing, its rocky shores and green hills to be just the place our spirit craves. On trips to Ireland, I found even the most prosaic activity (such as hanging laundry out to “dry,” in the steady drizzle) to be exhilarating and soul satisfying. The green fed my soul. The wind and rain fed my soul. The lovely people fed my soul. And of course the FLOWERS fed my soul.

But sometimes even when a place calls to us, we are not meant to go there or can’t go there because we must stay put in the place we live. This is one of the great consolation of Flower Essences. I may never get back to some of the places where we have made Flower Essences, and some of the places like Taiwan and the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, I have not visited in this life. Yet the Flower Essences from these places bring the vibrations of these places to us. I feel a deep connection to Sicily from having worked with its Essences, even as it was Emily Sheehan who travelled in Sicily to make these Flower Essences, not me.

We can balance ourselves as global citizens with Flower Essences even when traveling to these places is not in the cards for us right now.

Take for instance precious Ireland. My husband is watching the Open golf tournament today. It is taking place in Portrush in the north of Ireland. I overheard an announcer mention the vast numbers of visitors returning to Ireland after the quiet of the covid years.

If you find yourself craving Ireland but grounded here in your current place on the planet, look to our Irish Flower Essences made on many a heartfelt journey to the west of Ireland. I look to them myself in these times for the way they show us how to endure what has to be endured, and how to keep the flame of our eternal spirit blazing despite depredations and challenges.

To mention but one Irish Essence offering pertinent, consoling wisdom for these times, let’s consider Omey Island. Made from all the Flowers blooming on this tidal island on a lovely July afternoon, the Omey mix restores us when we feel our lives have been pared down or nipped in the bud with our dreams perhaps also pruned unexpectedly.

When the worldly world has trounced us and left us battle weary, the Omey mix helps us anchor in our true eternal self which is unlimited and free. Yes, we may be in this world but we are not of this world, and this Essence reminds us of this truth.

Existing as it does in a place where its shifting definition as an island is regulated by tides, Omey and its Essence turns our focus to aligning with our own natural, inner rhythms and to a reality more true than surface events.

As we come in touch with what is eternal and internal within us, we can come to terms with what is happening in this passing show of daily life. So our daily life may be a shit show and so too the worldly news. When we anchor in the eternal beyond this temporary drama, we find the steady beat of belonging to an other enduring reality of goodness and light. And this consoles us.

Right now, the Angels say I must stay at the farm and not travel to Ireland or anywhere else. Most days I am at peace with this, grounded in my life with all its beauty and complexities, but sometimes, when I feel restless even homesick for Ireland, Omey and its Essence helps me trust the flow of my life. Omey whispers, “This path you walk, even when it seems to go no place right now but the compost heap, is for the good of your eternal soul. No matter how unexpected or strange or confusing in its twists and turns, hold on. Trust the tides. Trust the inner voyage. Trust that you are loved and that light prevails.”