When Emily lived in Sicily and created our Sicily and Santorini Flower Essence collection from some wonderful Mediterranean Flowers, she made several Flower Essences from Flowers native to Tunisia and also travelled to Tunisia which is only one hundred and five miles from the Sicilian coast.

We have been listening to Emily’s stories of Tunisia again and asking different questions than we did the first time when we focused on descriptions of Emily riding a camel. We have actually been thinking of Tunisia a lot this last year because Jim’s best friend, Jake Walles, is the ambassador to Tunisia for the United States.

Tunisia is next door to Libya and this was just one of many reasons that Jake was very good friends with Chris Stevens, the Ambassador to Libya who died last week in Benghazi. Jake and Chris worked together during several State Department postings and this spring, they actually shared a Senate confirmation hearing to become Ambassadors in the neighboring countries.

Jim took a rare trip down to Washington DC this summer to see Jake sworn in as the Ambassador to Tunisia. The ceremony was at the State department, and it took Jim about two months to get clearance to attend the event. For this country mouse with a love for all things history, it was a really big deal for him to be there to bear witness to Jake’s career milestone.

When Jim returned home, the thing he mentioned again and again was how Secretary of State Clinton spoke about Jake at the ceremony in a very personal way as a compatriot she knew well and genuinely respected. Jake has worked tirelessly for many presidents and Secretary of States. After a first posting in Amsterdam in the early eighties, Jake switched focus to the Middle East, and since then, he has had State department postings all over the Mediterranean and Middle East, including a posting as the charge d’affaires in Greece and consular general to the Jerusalem Embassy. He was posted in Tel Aviv when Saddam sent missiles into the city and has often been right in the middle of some very upsetting and dangerous situations. Since his early twenties, Jake has given his life to trying to help this region of the world. This week we are earnestly hoping he won’t literally lose his life to the conflict.

Late Friday night, we were relieved to hear briefly from Jake that he is safe. We wonder what more we can do than pray.

This morning I felt encouraged to turn my attention the Sicily & Santorini Essences again. Flower and their Essence wisdom speak exactly to the healing concerns of the region in which they were grown and made. Feelings of disenfranchisement, powerlessness, separation and fear of our differences are issues which all humanity shares yet they are coming to a head here in this part of the world, and the region’s local Flower Essences address these issues.

The Angels went deeper in explaining this link. They reminded me that while our tendency is to make explosive problems like these we see on our televisions something outside ourselves, what is happening in northern Africa is happening within all of us. As each of us own our own shadow parts and work to bring them into the light and heal these wounds, we help the whole planet. This is, in fact, a planet without boundaries so as we heal ourselves we heal the whole world.

As I pursued my fall weekend activities including harvesting winter squash in an idyllic and peaceful country setting, it seemed a long way from the scene in front of the Tunisian Embassy where Jake works. But when Emily and I spent some very heated hours trying to sew book bags for her first grade classroom with a sewing machine with a mind of its own, well……..I was reminded that greater calm and emotional balance is ALWAYS possible even in a quieter life, and I was encouraged to just take the Sicily and Santorini Essences again in the hopes that every little bit we all do from our quieter eddies will help to lighten the load of the whole planet.

Here are some of the Sicily and Santorini Flower Essences that felt particularly helpful right now:

Ramping Fumitory offers wisdom about self articulation with good personal boundaries but without defensiveness.

This elegant Flower sets an example of shifting the intense explosive color red into centered contained pale pink and white. It also suggests that balance of maintaining our own boundaries without losing ourselves to this concern. This has been one of the most popular of the Sicily and Santorini collection and no wonder. A longer description of this Essence is on the Sicliy and Santorini collection page of the website and in the new Guidebook too.
Seaside Flower from Taormina helps us be optimistic and positive in the face of harsh circumstances.

Flowers that flourish in extremely exposed terrain have to work so hard to express themselves. What a wonder it is that they express beauty and expansive welcoming good cheer despite the way circumstances make it so difficult for them to flourish. Such a lovely energetic reminder to us all!
Red Flower from Santorini supports us to thrive again after things explode in our lives and helps us to respond to radical change with creativity, strength, fearlessness and adaptability not further violence.

There is almost no soil on the caldera of the volcano in Santorini, yet the entire slice of land is covered in this Flower. For me this Flower Essence reminds us that there are always resources for us to flourish if we only remember to go inward.
Tree Medick helps when external forces have made our lives heavy and we feel bogged down by helping us flood our energy systems with divine light and then hold and radiate this light as a natural state of being.

Maybe it was the name or maybe it was some old friendship we had but Tree Medick called to me a long time before we met, and I was so very happy when a Flower Essence friend in Barcelona sent me some of this remedy. When Emily returned from her trip with this Essence in tow, I was delighted to have it to share with all of you. Tree Medick really does help us fill with light, hold this light and share this light in such a friendly inclusive way.

Sicilian Wild Sweet Pea‘s affirmation explains its energetic strength so well, I AM open to the truth of my situation and ready to begin a process of harmonious change.


Sweet Pea from the Green Hope farm gardens is our number one remedy for sleep issues, but Sweet Pea also has a component of helping us with issues of community. Here, the original Sweet Pea from Sicily- the grand dame of all Sweet Peas- helps us get to the root of our issues and understand where things went wrong and what we can do about it.
Scarlet Pimpernel from La Rocca– I have always loved how Emily and the Angels expressed the wisdom of this Flower Essence, “Being one with God means that none of this work can be bigger than us- We can do it.”

And this little powerhouse can remind us of that- no matter what the situation!
Flower from La Marchesa support for when our journeys take us into the unknown or into places in-between. It also supports us during times when our ideas of who we are have been stripped from us and we aren’t yet sure where the whole process is taking us or who we will be on the other side of the experience.

La Marchesa mean marsh and this Essence has cropped up a lot for people in those marshy situations of betwixt and between- in-between careers or jobs, in a state of transition from one role to another, in a place where everything has fallen away and the way forward is not yet clear. It helps us feel at ease with all these unknowns and supports us to relax in this place of unknowing, confident that new life and new direction will come. I love this Essence perhaps because so many of us need this one right now.

Italian Sainfoin holds wisdom about constructively managing our emotional response when something explodes in our lives or we experience violation or violence against us. It helps us find a balance in our emotions neither a passive response nor a reactive one but a creative transmutation of the energies. I love it’s I AM affirmation, I AM the creative transformation of all violence directed at me.


This Italian Sainfoin Flower Essence was made in the west of Sicily on Motia, a tiny island that once was a hub of ancient civilization for the Phoenicians and Carthaginians until its destruction by the Greek tyrant Dionysius the elder of Syracuse in 379 BC.

This Flower is found throughout the Mediterranean, but Emily making the Essence from Flowers at Motia brought an extra oomph to the Essence as this is a place that had to find its self identity after being violated. It is now the site of small art museum of very rare antiquities with the rest of the island left in a natural state.

It is interesting to note that the ruins of Carthage, where the Carthaginians that settled Motia were from, lie in a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia. Carthage’s most famous citizen was Hannibal who tried to conquer the Roman empire in the Second Punic War (218-201 BC). After several surprise victories and a famous march through the Alps with elephants, Hannibal was defeated by the Romans in 202 BC and Carthage became a client state of Rome and her fourth most important city. Carthage was destroyed in 698.

Tassel Hyacinth– If I had to pick one Flower Essence that most profoundly holds the vibration of peaceful co-existence as a global community, it is this one. Its I AM affirmation is, In the diversity of creation, I am the Unity of Life.


I am going to close with this beautiful Tunisian native plant, Tree Germander, which helps us find within ourselves our unique soul qualities then express these with great finesse and beauty. May this plant encourage us all to find what is true and beautiful within us and express it gently!

September means different things to different creatures.

As mentioned previously, for Ben, Jim and Emily, September brings a return to school as teachers or teachers in training. Not so for Will who remains a student with no choice but to read what his teachers slap in front of him. He showed me his pile of books for English yesterday. It is an understatement to say this is about the most dire, depressing pile of English books ever assembled on the planet.

The stretch when he gets to read Waiting for Godot, The Stranger and Heart of Darkness should be particularly fun. Maybe it will be during mud season when we’ve had eight months of bad weather and it already takes true grit to get out of bed in the morning.

For our wonderful new son-in-law, Miguel, September means finishing his job with Americorps doing work to help victims of Hurricane Irene and joining the team at Green Hope Farm.

Today was Miguel’s first day at Green Hope Farm. It started at 4 am when a bear tried to destroy our four beehives.

Jim and I heard the bear ripping off the lid of a hive, leapt from our bed and yelled our heads off to try and scare the bear away. Apparently our imitation of Maori warriors worked because the bear ran off after knocking over only one hive.

By the time Miguel arrived a little after seven, we had put the hive back together, drunk a lot of coffee (Jim) and tea (me), and made a big batch of chills rellenos for Miguel to give him a taste of home on his first day in the saddle here.

The garden landscape was also meant to comfort Miguel as it is flooded with a marvelous Mexican Flower right now, Mexican Torchflowers and a zillion pepper, tomatillo and tomato plants that I planted in a section of the garden I have called Calle Miguel ( and not without controversy as my own children want to know why I never named a part of the garden after them- boo hoo.

In any case, it was wonderful to welcome Miguel aboard.

We also welcomed new staffer Alli Howe last week, so we now have three of our new people with us: Tom Cardew, Alli Howe and Miguel. They are doing a great job learning all the different jobs. I have finally written a training manual for new staff, and all of us are editing this document to try and improve it before next week when another new person, Lilly Callahan, arrives.

In the meantime, getting the hives through the night is the next goal.

In just a few hours we will know if it was just September 5th that was all about honey for the bear or if September is going to be a month of honey maneuvers.

Ironically, Miguel was very focused on bears when he moved here. Would he run into them in the woods or in any way be in danger from a bear? We laughed him off, explaining that he would be lucky if he EVER saw a bear around here. Since moving here last September, he has had a bear at his and Lizzy’s back door, a bear in his and Lizzy’s garbage and now today a bear almost greeting him on his first day of work here.

Who is getting the last laugh now?

This afternoon, Jim and I tied a string of bells in a ring around the hives and cinched three out of four hives together with canvas strapping. The bees in the fourth hive that got knocked apart are so mad they wouldn’t let Jim protect them with the strapping. He gave up after he had a couple dozen stings through his suit. The idea behind the strapping is that by tying the hive boxes and top and bottom together, the bears can knock the hives over but they won’t fall apart as the one did last night.

I really hope we don’t have to find out tonight how this protection method works. Like a fireman, Jim has taped the boots to his bee suit so he can don the garment extra fast, but I would be happy to have this suit molder on the vine and everyone get a good night’s sleep- except maybe Will who will be up reading one of his happy books.

Yes this really is a shovel covered in Morning Glories! I left it there what seems like yesterday when I was digging carrots….. How on earth did this happen?

In the face of keeping up with the new indoor order flow we seem to have dropped the ball or make that dropped the shovel in the vegetable gardens!

When I noticed this silliness yesterday it cracked me up- I’ve seen faked up design elements like this in magazines, but believe me, this was pure serendipity in the face of basic vegetable garden neglect.

Fortunately, the field of Red Shiso that you can see a bit of in the background of this photograph is doing very well- We can’t neglect that blessed crop as it’s key to every bottle of Essence!

Love Live the Red Shiso and Bless the Elementals who know how to make a point with humor and beauty!

As we welcome new staffer Tom Cardew and the return of Kelly O’Leary, we also bid ALOHA to various Sheehans who held the fort this busy, busy summer.

First I would like to thank Emily who has worked full time here for the last year. Emily has just started a graduate program to get certified to be an elementary school teacher. We will miss her in the office but know this was a heartfelt decision and one that takes her on a path of genuine passion and joy.

It was great to have Emily here this last year for many reasons. Emily knows an awful lot about Flowers and their Essences. Anyone of you who connected with her in the last year got her insight from a surprising number of years of work with Flower Essences. Basically she has been advising me about Flowers and their Essences since she was five!

Emily also brought great creativity to all the organizational tasks she took on here. She did an incredible job keeping up with the bottling during a year when bottling became a more and more consuming job. She also was the one responsible for all the Facebook postings this growing season. She would start her mornings with a cruise around the gardens to take photos then get them up on the Facebook page if and when our internet connection was cooperating. In everything Emily did, her humor and zest shone through. I think this photo she took last week reflects her creative fiery spirit. We will all miss her in the office but also celebrate the lucky first graders who are going to have Miss Sheehan as their student teacher this fall.

We also saw Ben depart back to the classroom, leaving me most bereft in the kitchen. He does all the website stuff and as mentioned in a previous blog, he made my summer by cooking dinner each night for the ever shifting group around the kitchen table. Ben’s meals were imaginative and delicious almost to the end. However at his last scratch pizza extravaganza, he established that he was still human and not yet a culinary god by serving us a very strange dessert made from agar agar.

These coffee/ coconut things tasted fine but had the consistency of tires. Ben, I am missing your brilliance as a chef so much, but this last dessert helped everyone else return to my more seat of the pants “what on earth can I drum up for supper tonight?” cooking. Thanks for all the fabulous feasts and this parting disaster.

Jim also has begun to spend his days back in his classroom, getting ready for the arrival of his students next week. This morning, however, he volunteered to stay home to help unload a truck of bottles. Thank you Jim for this and all the jobs you do for GHF!

Here Jim is in orange, handing off a box to Kelly. We always seem to be unloading something into our overstuffed barn! In a wonderful piece of Angel serendipity, the darling man delivering the bottles today, here in the blue t-shirt, is married to a Green Hope Farm friend who has been sharing our Essences with her clients for twenty years at her business Angel Star in Newport, New Hampshire. Linda, it was such a fun surprise to meet your husband in this Angel orchestrated way!

Will is the last Sheehan to take flight. Not yet able to choose teaching as a career like so much of the family, he returns to the classroom as the teachee. Now a senior in high school, his year has begun with his soccer team going to Maine for team prep camp. As his summer was rather uneventful, this adventure is well deserved. While Will did a little bit of everything inside the office as well as outside this summer, I am particularly grateful for his meticulous work making Flower Essence mixes for us. Each of the many combination mixes including all the Animal Wellness collection remedies have to be mixed from individual Flower Essence inventory and Will has proven himself very careful with this task. Thank you Will for setting us up with so much inventory to keep us going the fall.

Fortunately the cats and dogs can’t take teaching jobs! They are happy to stay here and hold down the office with Elizabeth, Sophie and me as we welcome aboard all the new staff!

If you’ve called the farm recently, you’ve heard the answering machine message about our order volume going through the roof this summer.

It was a sudden shift from one week to the next. For no apparent reason, one week our order volume was as it had been the last year or so and then suddenly on Monday alone we had as many orders as we usually had in a week with each day of the week much busier than ever before. And so it has continued all summer.

I have always felt the Angels and Elementals have a lot to do with the order flow here. As you may recall from previous blogs, I never imagined my life much beyond weeding a garden, smelling the Roses and keeping the home fires burning so much of this business, maybe all of it, has been a big surprise to me. The Angels and Elementals would probably describe me as the brakes in the operation and them as the gas, and this would be true. Each time they push us to some new level of activity, I go through a period in which I can’t believe we (or rather I) will be able to make the uptick. After each of these shifts, hindsight is 20-20 and I can see what a good plan the changes were. During the shifts, I take my Flow Free and talk smack to the Angels.

After a number of weeks at this new volume, my smack talk has died down. We have come into equilibrium with this growth spurt, and the new flow feels great. We are connecting with a lot of old friends and a lot of new ones too. During this uptick, it took some extra effort on the part of the two legged Sheehans as opposed to the Sheehans with four who refused to alter their summer vacation plans.

Even without the support of the feline and canine population (who remained adamant that the Dog Days of summer were for naps), we rode the wave until now when we begin to welcome new staff to help us keep the orders flowing. Each Monday for the next month a new person will be starting here and then two or three more are slotted to begin later in the fall. This week we welcomed long time Staff Goddess Sophie’s brother Tom. His first days were a whirlwind of packing orders but he hung in there wonderfully well. We are happy to have him aboard. Well, the people are happy. The cats remained focused on getting enough ZZZZZs.