The Winter Solstice is close. For Green Hope Farm, this is the time when the Angels begin to share with us the plans for next year’s gardens and to offer us an overview about the ongoing mission of the farm and how this will play out in the next growing season. This year, I find myself looking forward to the Solstice with particular excitement and joy. I feel a heightened sense of anticipation because this fall has been full of a growing awareness of sea changes afoot.

To take a step back, when working with the Elemental and Angelic kingdoms, the year’s cycle begins in the fall at the autumn equinox. This begins the year for us because the autumn equinox offers a time to give input about the next growing season before the Angels formulate the plan for the next year. At the equinox, I talk to the Angels and Elementals involved in Green Hope Farm and share with them what I am thinking about, what I would like support with in the coming growing season, and most importantly, affirm my willingness to be one of the humans working to take the farm and Green Hope Farm Flower Essences forward in alignment with divine will. Then the Angels compose a plan that takes into account my input, a plan that becomes available for me to receive in meditation after the Winter Solstice.

This cycle is one of the reasons I find it very off putting to receive seed catalogs in the fall. I could order seeds now, but only in ignorance of what will energetically serve the farm next year. I regret that this instinctual understanding of this natural rhythm has now been lost to marketing pressures that deliver seed catalogs to us before Thanksgiving. I don’t know about your garden, but even with snow on the ground, I am still harvesting leeks, celeriac, kale, and brussels sprouts. Nothing feels right on any level to be planning next year’s gardens yet.

But back to the topic of a sea change coming. I can’t exactly remember what the Angels, Elementals and I talked about at the equinox, but in the weeks since, I have been aware of a lot of old structures falling way and some new ones vaguely taking shape on the horizon. I sense a bold new chapter about to unfold. As nothing about this chapter is clear, I am just enjoying this feeling of anticipation. It will be exciting to actually hear the Angels flesh out the plans after the Solstice, but right now, it is fun just to know changes, unexpected but also wonderfully right, are about to be unveiled.

I am not really impatient because in many ways the hints of change have been quite exciting enough. A small example of one sign involves my ongoing challenges with slugs. After wrestling mostly unsuccessfully with slugs for a number of years, I have been told that next season we are going to set up the gardens in a new way, shifting in response to both the slugs and the imbalances that the slugs represented. I do not know what this means in terms of gardening techniques, but as the slugs represent an imbalance of give and take, knowing there will be a change in our approach makes me deeply happy. As I await specifics about how we will deal with the literal slugs next season, I have already seen some shifts unfold in how the farm is evolving to deal with other kinds of slugs. For example, a long term imbalanced arrangement concerning our hay field has come to a timely end with us now in the position to get more out of this resource for the farm’s benefit.

Another enormous sea change happening here that I am sure is part of the Angelic long term planning for Green Hope Farm is the much greater presence of a younger generation now at work here. I find myself so excited at the new directions the farm is taking and will continue to take as this younger generation begins to implement their amazing new ideas about every aspect of Green Hope Farm and Green Hope Farm Flower Essences.

Again, I have no concrete information about how the younger generations involvement is going to expand in significance in the coming seasons, but I am relishing what already is. Three of the main six staffers are now twenty somethings. That is a big shift for us. And there are other signs we are moving towards greater service to a younger generation’s spiritual needs. In the past few months, we’ve noticed many more young people seeking the specific support offered by Elizabeth’s two Camino Flower Essence collections. It makes sense that the person making Essences for a younger generation’s spiritual tools would be of this generation.

Just as the collections of Flower Essences I have made have been defined by what spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical issues I wanted to solve in my own life and the lives of people coming of age when I did, Elizabeth’s new collections come out of a search for solutions to the issues confronting her and her generation. It has been incredibly exciting to see how this plays out in young people “finding” Green Hope Farm Essences just when they need them, oftentimes this being within moments of Elizabeth’s new Essences going online.

This week, I connected with the mother of a young boy having difficulties learning to read. This mother explained that her son also felt he heard too much noise in his school classroom even when the classroom was quiet. This sent a shiver of recognition down my spine as I recalled how Elizabeth did not really learn to read until fifth grade and how she needed our support to not see the energetic challenges of everyone in her classroom as “her” problems to solve. She too “heard too much” in a quiet classroom. I recalled how we helped a young Elizabeth with Flower Essences to find energetic boundaries that worked for her. I also realized that her new collection of Flower Essences, the Healer’s Toolbox, contain Flower Essences that broaden and strengthen our Flower Essence support for this young boy. Out of her own pain and suffering in the classroom and then her own maturation process had come Flower Essence gifts that strengthened Green Hope Farm’s initial Flower Essence gifts.

It was one of those moments when I got to see a hint of the overview, the amazing way that over the past two decades the challenges, the triumphs, the pain, the mistakes, the ups, the downs, the learning, and the joys of all of us here have woven together into a stronger and wiser offering of loving support for others.

I hope it was reassuring to his mother for me to say that first of all, her acknowledgment of the legitimacy of her son’s difficulties was going to help him immeasurably to move through these difficulties without shame or feeling crazy and that in holding him with kindness she opened the way for him to not only heal the issues he confronted, but turn around and use what he learned in the crucible of his own suffering to offer gifts of his own creation to yet a younger generation of souls coming up behind him.