The Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice is an important moment for us here at Green Hope Farm. It is the moment when the Angels start the transfer of the divine plans for the next growing season into my consciousness. Until the Winter Solstice, these plans are completely unavailable to me. This is why when you ask me in the fall, “What’s up with next year’s gardens?”, I can only answer that I have no idea. This is why my seed catalogues don’t see any action until after the Solstice. This is why it’s January when my desk becomes a wilderness of garden designs, seed and plant lists, cut out Flower photos, rulers, garden books, and half drunk cups of tea.

To back up a step, let me share an earlier part of the dance through the seasons with the Angels and Elementals. The autumnal equinox marks the true beginning of the next growing season. This is the time when the Angels go into a kind of seclusion from the world of form to plan the next season’s gardens. I don’t know exactly the criteria they use for this planning process. For us at Green Hope Farm, the process includes deciding what Flower Essences need to come forward to serve a larger community of people and animals and how the Flowers behind these Essences should be grown in the gardens. I know it involves helping Green Hope Farm and the mandalas of our gardens be rose windows expressing the light of divinity moving out from the earth. I know it involves things I simply don’t understand. But I also know that it is a time for me to ask for help. I know that anything I say at the autumnal equinox is taken into consideration when the gardens are designed.

So, at the autumnal equinox, I harvest the Venus Garden Essence of the season, I give thanks for all that has been, and I float out my hopes for the next growing season. My requests to my Angelic companions used to be a much more elaborate list of specific requests than they are now. The longer I work with the Angels and Elementals, the more I know that I don’t need to ask for things in such a detailed way. I have learned that such an approach is actually counterproductive because it locks the gardens into the limitations of my understanding of how things work, whereas if I give a more general request, I can receive much more support in dramatically bold and unexpected ways, ways I could not have imagined or known to ask for.

Now, instead of specifics, I try to be really, really general. If I ask for help on the issue of acceptance, the Angels will know best what sort of configuration and ingredients should compose the gardens to help me with this issue. If I ask for the gardens to help me grow in love for God, the gardens as designed by the Angels can take flight in directions so far beyond my own conception of how to accomplish this task. And when the dust settles. after these plans have manifested in form as the gardens of that growing season, I can look back and be grateful. I can acknowledge that I never would have thought a plague of locusts or a vegetable garden of 114 Broccoli plants would have helped me that much to love God more, but they did.

If the autumnal equinox is a time of asking and letting go into the mystery, the Winter Solstice is a time of light and clarity returning. For the last two decades, I have celebrated this night by gathering every candle in the house, taking these candles out into the snow, and lighting them in the dark of the night. Whomever feels like joining in comes out with me and sings. We sing any song we want to sing, standing around this circle of beautiful candle light. In this way we give thanks to the Angels who’s night this is, to the return of the light, and to the divine that cradles us all and is our essential self. Plus it is just plain fun to light all those candles and sing our hearts out!

This year will be a bit odd. It’s still very warm here. The candles will sit in green grass, not snow. It makes me feel more now than ever, that we need the closeness of Angels and the wisdom of their guidance through these swiftly changing times. So as a warm breeze blows over us tonight, some group of us will be clustered out in the night, giving thanks for all that is and celebrating that we are all in this together, two footed, four footed, and winged ones. And I know I will be comforted knowing this. The Angels will see us through.

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