Season's Greetings!

Hello dear friends! Happy Winter! The gardens at the farm are laid to bed with mulches of hay and compost. Now snow covers them as well. After an extremely mild fall, these arctic temperatures are quite a shock. Bitter winds and sub zero temperatures keep us bundled on our lunchtime walks with the dogs.

Seed catalogs have begun to arrive but the Green Hope Farm Angels' plans for next year's gardens will not be available to me until after the Winter Solstice. Right now these catalogs are sitting in a colorful pile, waiting for that January morning after the holiday whirlwind when the time is right to find out the themes and specific plantings for next year's gardens. With this information seed ordering will be able to begin in earnest.

This year the Winter Solstice will happen at 6:36 pm on December 21st. Waiting until after the Solstice for garden plans is one of many the rhythms of our years here. In the fall, I can ask the Angels to factor into their design plans support for any issue I would like help with. The Angels take my input into consideration as they plan what needs to be born here. Mostly I do not really request much because they always deliver the most impeccably times and profound gifts of learning even before I am aware I need to take their course! In any case, the fall is the time in which the Angels plan the curriculum for our next growing season together.

At the Solstice, their plans are ready for me to receive. This night always feels like a celebration and a new beginning. Often my children and I go out into the cold and dark after dinner with every candle we can find in the house. We stick them all somewhere in the snow, always trying to find some spot sheltered from any wind that is blowing and then we light every candle we have gathered. Then we sing every joyful song we can think of or sing until our toes are just too cold to stay out any longer. We leave the candles burning into the night, our way to welcome the return of more light for this half of our precious Earth. In the spring, when the snows finally melts, we find the tiny remnants of our cancles amidst greening grasses. The night is one of gratitude for all the Angels who hold the divine plan for all creation, not just our gardens but though we thank legions, it always feels like an intimate and happy affair.

We had much to be grateful for in this past year's gardens designs. They were lovely and bountiful, bringing us a particularly spectacular potato crop. One garden was particularly stunning, this year's Venus Garden, which the Angels called The Alignment Garden. I will put the description of this garden and its combination Essence at the bottom of this news flash.

The potato crop was symbolic of another incredible gift which 2005 brought us. This was a trip to Ireland in June and July, My family and I visited with a wonderful clan of cousins living in the west of Ireland in Connemara. We stayed on a tidal island off Connemara called Omey, a spot the Angels chose for us. This proved to be a thrilling and deeply restorative place. The descriptions of the timely and wise Flower Essences made on this trip in partnership with a marvelous group of Irish Elementals are up on the web site in their own section. You will also find photos of almost all of the Flowers we made into Essences.

This is a photo of the four Sheehan children on the top of a hill owned by their cousins Maureen and Patsy O"Toole. Below and behind them is Bundouglas, the place where their great grandmother, Catherine O'Toole was born and raised before coming to America and settling on Jamestown, Rhode Island in the early 1900's.

After I returned from Ireland, the Irish Elementals encouraged me to get busy and transcribe their explanation for all the Flower Essences they asked me to bring back to the new world. Their Essences proved timely as many of them were for consolation after loss or flood times. Many hundreds of bottles of these blessed Irish Essences have gone to animals and people suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the other floods of this fall.

After the irish Essences were described and flying out of here in all directions, the Angels turned my attention to revising our Guidebook. In October it went to the printers. We expect to have the Guide ready to share with you all in January! As always, I was grateful to have a chance to add new Flower Essences to the book, tighten up our descriptions of some tried and true friends, and share more of your insights in the book. The Angels chose a beautiful Flower for the cover. I can't wait to share this and the whole enchilada with all of you!

These writing projects put me a bit behind on writing our annual fall newsletter so your "greenie" from us did not get lost in the mail! It never got written. I hope to do better next fall! In the meantime, web master Ben Sheehan and I are hoping to keep this section of the web site full of current news from the farm.

Early December saw the group of here in the office down at Deb's house helping her get ready for the marvelous party she puts on each holiday season for friends and acquaintances who come see her husband's pottery. This year we gathered to help her make the dozens of mince pies that are a traditional part of her parties. Yessenia's mother ran a bakery in Costa Rica so before long Yessenia was rolling dough for the mince pies so fast that it took all the rest of us to keep up with filling what she had rolled out. I smle every time I remember Yessenia's pink cheeks and sparkling eyes smiling at us as she shared her Costa Rican holiday memories with us while all the rest of us were madly filling tray after tray with her rounds of pastry.

The sky was a deep gray blue with rain imminent. The garden had been redug to make as near a perfect circle as Kathy Fitch Smith and I could make. Kathy, a former staffer, had flown in from Colorado, at the request of the Angels, to help plant this garden. Hundreds of seedlings had been moved from the cold frame in anticipation of finding a new home in the garden. Moving in a clockwise direction, we began to plant the seedlings. The center of the garden was planted in a spiral of White Cleome, underplanted with an unusual variety of red carrots, the only vegetable in the 2005 Venus Garden. The spiral was encircled by a ring of many varieties of white Flowers and bejeweled with a stunning Yellow Marigold. The rest of the garden was divided into seven large wedges. Each wedge was planted from the center out with the most colorful and diverse collection of annual Flowers ever grown here. When everything was planted, a soft rain began to fall.

Way back when, God asked the question: "Who AM I?" How else to answer the question but to divide into the maya or illusion of separation in order to see oneself in the illusion of other. This is our journey. To experience ourselves as other so we can find the answer to the question and remember "I AM God."

The vast diversity of Flowers in the outer ring of this year's garden represented this amazing creation, maya. It was an honoring of the illusion, this beautiful glorious play of form so necessary to God realization.

The White and Yellow Marigolds in the ring of white Flowers towards the center of the garden represented the Love and Gratitude that fills us on out journey inwards to knowing ourselves. The White Cleome spiral at the heart of the garden represented the return to conscious Oneness and held a vibration of reunion. The carrots represented the consciousness that is now grounded in Oneness because of our journey into maya. During the many week period when the Essence was being made, I was asked to bring a blooming Tuberose into the center of the spiral next to the Essence water. Tuberose is a jewel of the crown chakra. It holds a vibration that helps to open the floodgates of God realization. Tuberose represented the kiss of God at the moment of God realization.

The Alignment Garden Essence supports us to honor maya without enmeshment. It helps us love maya but also let it go. It helps us stay aligned with our path towards God realization, loving the stage set of Earth but also flowing into the greater consciousness beyond the set.

The Alignment Garden Essence helps with other kinds of alignment as well. It helps smooth and align the emotional body into an expression of the Divine. This Essence helps empty the mind of its own agenda into alignment with God mind. This is a particularly fine gift as the mind is the biggest monkey wrench to God realization.

Alignment to Divine will on the path to God realization is a physical process as well as one involving the mental and emotional bodies. This Essence supports the alignment of our physical vehicle towards this destination of God realization as well. Specifically this Essence helps keep a smooth steady flow between the etheric body where life force energy enters our system and the physical body. This connection between the etheric and physical body has been a particular focus of the Angels this season.

The Angels explain: "Alignment grows increasingly important. As the vibration of this planet increases, events occur faster. This means that if you are out of alignment, you feel the consequences of this much faster. The big picture of this Essence is support to stay aligned with the Divine plan for you. One knitty gritty gift of this Essence and its daily function is to support you to keep your four lower bodies, mental, emotional, etheric, and physical, in alignment with each other and with the Divine plan for you. The alignment of your etheric and physical has a particularly strong effect on overall health. If life force energy is not moving smoothly between the etheric body and the physical body then the physical body feels the effects immediately in terms of less voltage and life force moving through it. This obviously has an effect on the vitality of your physical system. This Essence not only supports alignment of the etheric body and the physical body but helps maintain the health of the connective etherial fluidium that is the actual matrix through which the physical and etheric body are connected."

My own experience working with this Essence has been wonderful. I find it helps me turn off my mind and just be happy. Problems do not seem such a big deal. I feel amazingly less attached to my opinions. They are all just relative ideas and I am happy to part with any or all of them. If my mind creeps back in with its insidious worries, rules, judgments and goals, I just take a sip of this mix in water and I melt back into happiness. When things go differently than expected, I know it isokay. I see how it is my mind's opinions about everything that has caused most of my stress, worry, and self judgment. I do not feel inclined to take my mind so seriously again! This is much more FUN! I plan to keep on taking THIS ONE until I learn how to hold this vibration in my system for good!