Spring Weather

On Saturday, 32 inches of fresh fluffy snow fell here at the farm. This was the official measurement for our town according to the local tv station. We got more snow than any other town in the state. FYI this was one record I could have done without. Maximum snow volume is not exactly what one hopes for when getting ready to get out in the gardens for spring clean up.

Traditionally these late season snows are called “poor man’s manure.” I think that phrase is just an attempt to keep us gardeners from succumbing to a more extreme cabin fever than we already have.

It could be problems loading photos of the storm here that gets me too. Right now, it’s a toss up which is more irritating, but as I just managed to get a photo loaded here, I think cabin fever is winning.

Fire Burn and Cauldron bubble

This time of year sees me from dawn until dusk out by our woodshed near our dirt road, stoking the big fire underneath our maple syrup evaporator. The hotter the fire the better as it heats the big stainless steel pan of collected sap. If I am attentive, I can add wood every twenty minutes or so to keep the fire really hopping and the sap boiling hard. A container on the back of the pan warms the sap before it drips into the boiling pan below. Early season sap stays light in color as it boils down but late season sap is a rich brown . This is because the early season sap with its higher sugar content needs less boiling to become syrup. The average is forty gallons of sap makes a gallon of syrup but the ratio is less in the early season. But you know what? The late season sap has a lot more flavor and depth. There’s a message in that.

After a long winter and too much time inside, I find it exhilarating to boil maple sap all day and into the night. I also love the collecting runs when we empty sap buckets from the hedgerow of maples across the road from the farm into our big tank on the back of the farm truck. Once again I am outside with a glorious purpose!

Here are a couple images of previous sugaring seasons- the tapping, the trudging through the snow, the collecting and the sap itself. We no longer have access to these trees with that amazing view, but we have some wonderful maples across the road from the farm.

The sap runs when the nights are below freezing and the days warm enough for the sap to rise up into the trees before returning down again when the temperature drops. Cold winds, bright sun, snow cover also affect when the sap is running. It’s on these up and down journeys that the sap drips into our buckets. If it stays cold the sap stays in the ground. If it stays above freezing the sap stays up in the trees. We never know which days the sap is going to really run. On what seems like the perfect day, the buckets may be almost empty. Then for reasons unknown, another day they will be full of sap in a matter of hours. I like this reminder of nature’s own intelligence.

We always under tap the trees, putting no more than two buckets on any tree no matter how old or big the maple is. Our own property is a cautionary tale about overtapping as the previous owner allowed a man in town to overtap our maple trees until they all died. When we first moved to town and before we knew we would live on this land, I was shocked to see this man crowd up to ten buckets on maple trees all over town. By the time we moved here, the maple trees that lined the road and our property were dying or dead from his overtapping. It still makes me upset to think about what this man did to so many beautiful old maple trees.

When I tap, I ask each tree for permission to tap it, then I ask where the tap should be put. A couple years ago a neighbor who is a vascular surgeon helped us tap. He picked great spots to tap. I guess he had a good sense of the flow of sap as well as blood. Jim has a drill bit just the right size for our spiles. That’s the name of the spouts that fit in the hole in the tree and from which a sap bucket hangs. You know me. Everything I do with the trees involves hugging the trees and thanking them profusely for sharing their sap with us.

Each maple sugaring season is peculiar in its own way. Sometimes the sap runs early in February then stops completely during typically bitter cold March weather only to come on gangbusters in April. This year the sap ran very early in January in a couple of unexpected runs. We missed these runs because we’ve always tapped our tree during the February school vacation. Once we got the trees tapped and buckets hung, the sap ran for about two weeks in the end of February and beginning of March then stopped. All the indications were there that our season would be brief. End of season signs like red wing blackbirds and crocus in bloom arrived very early in mid-March. Now we are having a stint of perfect sugaring weather, but the sap has gone up into the trees for good, and each day our buckets are empty.

As I boil away, the witches in Macbeth come to mind with their famous “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” I think often about how older women are viewed and treated in the modern world as well as in Shakespeare. Bland, boring, invisible, ugly as hags, and useless. It’s ridiculous. In fact, it’s tragic that women who hold such hard earned wisdom from a lifetime of experiences are ignored as worthless because of the natural course of aging.

I’m reading a book called Hagitude by Sharon Blackie about embracing the enormous gifts of post menopausal womanhood and empowering ourselves to acknowledge our value. Keeping this raging fire going outside at the maple sugaring evaporator echoes the raging fire within me as I read this book and consider the way vital, wise, sparkling women are dismissed by our culture.

Maybe it was the long winter of pop ups on my computer, but I’m feeling fiery about being reduced in the culture’s eye to a potential consumer of every pharmaceutical on earth and Depends diapers. Is this really what knitting while watching knitting podcasts earns me? Even before the sugaring season, I noticed that the main emoji I was using in texts to friends was the fire emoji. Yes, finding my Hagitude has required and will continue to require fire and FIRE EMOJIS! That and some howling to the moon.

Serious.

My maple sugaring set up is near our dirt road. The shift in weather that affected the sugaring also gave our road a mud season the likes of which I haven’t seen in many years. Multiple ruts wove up our very steep hill, many several feet deep. This made it impossible to safely navigate the road in any kind of vehicle. For several days, cars could neither go up or down our hill without getting stuck, yet people kept trying anyways.

I would watch from my cauldron of fire as people reeved their engines for long periods of time, pushing deeper and deeper into the mud in an effort to go up or down the road. Before my eyes, cars and trucks slid off the road or became so mired in mud that being pushed back down the hill became a necessity.

Here at the farm, we went down the hill once then parked at the bottom for a couple of days until the town could come through and bring needed gravel and the grader. The wise staff also parked at the bottom and walked up each day. The only other person in the neighborhood who did this was another woman with Hagitude like me. Other neighbors drove by me so fast there was no time to even wave, heading right into the disaster of mud. Sometimes being a hag with Hagitude is exhilarating. I relish boiling my big cauldrons of sap. Sometimes it’s hard. Had anyone bothered to rolled down their window and ask me about the hill, I would have had some wisdom to share. But even with my raging and smoking fire only a few yards from the road, I was invisible to them. Even with my knowledge of the hill after four decades on this road, I was invisible to them. Perhaps I will remain invisible no matter the fire I stoke or the wisdom I have, but I am going to keep stoking the fires of Hagitude and I expect I will enjoy it no matter what.

Multiplicity in Unity

Today one of you reached out to us to ask if we thought it was a concern if Green Hope Farm’s spiritual frame of references differed from your world view. Would our Flower Essences be helpful if our belief systems were different.

An excellent question which got all of us in the office talking, because even in the relatively small Green Hope Farm office, we all see the world very differently and have fundamentally different spiritual beliefs.

Most of the writing is done by me which might suggest one world view, but actually we all believe different things and often find ourselves discussing our differences. That’s the fun of office conversations! Rubbing up again our differences of opinion about so many things makes me reconsider my ideas about so much. I like that.

Had I wanted to gather like minds to the office (which I did not) I don’t think it would have been possible. How could we possibly share an identical spiritual frame of reference? We are part of a multiplicity, each a distinct spark of creation, so of course we all see things differently. Looking for same-same is impossible and not something I want.

Knowing that everyone in the office has a very different spiritual frame of reference, I asked them what they thought of the question. One staffer suggested the woman ask that her Flower Essences be cleared of any energy she is not aligned with. This felt like an excellent approach.

Another staffer commented that this was a great approach for practically everything as every exchange of goods and services involves something created by someone who might not have been in a good mood when making the product. Asking for any energy that is not in alignment with you to be cleared from anything you purchase seems like a good idea.

Another staffer keyed in on the person’s concern that something about the Flower Essences was alien because my language about Flower Essences was outside her belief system. This staffer suggested that the person consider the possibility that everything is part of Divinity no matter how we parse it with language. Could she just think of the Essences as a creation from this unity? I liked this way of holding the question.

Here are some of my thoughts. Green Hope Farm Flower Essences stand energetically separate from my beliefs. It is not necessary to agree with ANYTHING I believe for the Flower Essences to serve you. I would hate to have this otherwise. The Flower Essences have their own integrity and energy separate from my point of view or ideas about anything. And that is a very good thing!

What a disservice to the Flowers this would be if people had to in any way share my world view to work with them. I am so sorry my language choices can alienate people. Flower Essence exist beyond my limited language choices and always will.

So why do I write so much about my partnership with the Angels and Elementals when I know this might alienate people? One reason is that these beloveds are the meat and potatoes of my life. I am not sure what I would write about if I left them out! Additionally, writing about them is one way to thank them for their boundless generosity and loving companionship. Another reason is that I want to make it more acceptable for people to acknowledge numinous experiences.

Back in the 1980’s when Green Hope Farm was born, the culture of northern New England was very affirming of Angels. This encouraged me to look at my life differently and both remember childhood experiences as well as open to more experiences with Angels and Elementals. No one had been very interested in a spiritual perspective on life in my childhood, so I learned to shove my experiences away from me as unacceptable and irrelevant. Angel talk helped me remember parts of myself I had shoved aside. It was a reintegration of lost parts of myself to own my numinous experiences.

As I consider this question, I have one other thought. I encourage people to decide if some Flower Essence or some experience or some relationship is right via a nonverbal, nonanalytic process of letting ourselves know what we know. WE REALLY DO KNOW WHAT WE KNOW! One of my main goals in all I write is to empower people to trust their own experience of things and just feel what they feel. Please don’t let my frame of reference or choice of language every deter you. I know you know what is best for you.

Healing Mother Wounds through Nature and Flower Essences

As we deepen our relationship with Nature and our Mother Earth wherever we have been placed on her, we heal our mother wounds.

Why? Because Mother Earth shelters us, gives unceasingly to us the gifts of food, comfort, beauty and so much more. Mother Earth is a loving mother.

If we find ourselves aware of mother wounds within us, recognizing the gifts from Mother Earth can help us know that there is a mother that loves us. But the healing possibilities go further than that.

My own relationship with my human mother was difficult. It was not a comforting or loving connection. I felt different that others who spoke of their mothers with unabashed affection and a feeling of safety. My mother was not a safe person for me.

As a young child, I pursued friends who had mothers that I experienced as loving. In my teenage years I chose my first boyfriend because I adored his mother. I was always thinking much more about the mothers in people’s families than other people seemed to. When a mother is loving, perhaps it is easy to take the relationship for granted. Isn’t this what we have done with Mother Earth until now?

Finding families with loving mothers and books in which either there was a loving mother or a loving mother substitute gave me hope that this could come to pass in my own life. It restored my faith in the mother archetype. Loving mothers I found in books and real life proved mothers could be loving.

My gravitation to Nature as mother was instinctual and not something I learned in a book. It has been the most profound and healing relationship with mother in my life. Nature was my comfort and solace from the beginning, and she has never let me down. Books like The Secret Garden affirmed my approach to finding the love I needed in Nature, but I would have found myself there in Nature anyways.

Did you read The Secret Garden when you were a child? How I loved that book! In The Secret Garden, a motherless child named Mary is sent from India where her father has died to live with her uncle in Yorkshire, England. She is a sickly, unhappy child and no one in the household knows quite what to do with her, so the housemaid Martha sends outside to explore her new world. While going outside horrifies Mary, her explorations in Nature begin her healing journey. She finds her place in the world and her sense of belonging when she discovers and helps restore a secret garden. She finds this garden when a starling leads her to the long forgotten door into the garden.

Having found this connection to Nature as a way to heal my mother wounds and bolstered by books and experiences in other families, it was inevitable that I would make Nature the center of my life’s work. Specifically the gardens around me both wild and cultivated and books like The Secret Garden brought to light my deep affection for Flowers. And the rest is a Flower Essence herstory…..

Given my experience with my mother, is it any wonder that I sought out Flowers for Flower Essences with a distinctly motherly energy of sheltering, consoling, unconditionally loving, healing, abundantly sharing and seeing the very best in us?

Here are some of those Flower Essences that will mother us when we need this compensatory and deeply healing energy in our lives.

Dombeya Wallichii, Cacao, Redwood– A trio of sheltering mothers so profound to even put their names together is like a song of mother love. Choose one or choose all three, they are wonderful mothers.

Old Blush China Rose– This ancient rose is the mother of all modern roses and that is saying something. She offers her strength, protection, wisdom, perspective and love.

Heritage Rose– This Rose helps us break free from the limitations of our earth family definitions to know ourselves to be eternal, unlimited souls of a much bigger tribe. A release from the mother wound of being viewed as not enough.

THE ENTIRE CRETE COLLECTION– Here is what is written under the topic Matriarchy in our Flower Essence suggestions for Common Concerns list: “Matriachal cultures know we are all born one with Divinity and remain ever so. This means our value is an absolute imperishable truth of our existence. Patriarchy is an alternative values systel based on the idea that we must earn our worth through proving ourselves through accomplishment, acquisition and perfectionism. The Flower Essences from Crete help us break free from patriarchy and refind the experience of Divine Self Worth. Please check out this whole group of Flower Essences listed in the Mediterranean Collection

Wound Healing– Sadly, the high degree to which we carry mother wounds is reflected in how we as a culture treat Mother Earth, but as we heal our individual wounds, we will heal our dear Earth too.

Pink Flowering Almond– Many years ago I made friends with a Flower Essence practitioner in Spain. She sent me my first bottle of this Essence, and it rocked my world with its immense healing vibration. I felt it was transmuting painful memories of my earth mother and flooding me with an experience of our Divine Mother that loves us always. I found a Pink Flowering Almond Tree that was hardy to northern New England and planted one so I could offer this Flower Essence to others. I consider it a most sacred tree, Flower and Flower Essence and am so grateful to have this Flower Essence to share.

The Sacred Feminine– As mentioned, patriarchy, still so dominant in our world, tries to enforce a values system based on ideas of productivity, goal orientation, intellectual and spiritual perfection at the expense of being human. This powerful Essence floods us with vibrations releasing, unwinding, transmuting this old garbage and restoring a deeper more expansive truth.

Motherwort– This Wildflower helps us experience a true accounting of the value of mothering and womanhood in all its diversity without sentimentality or discount so that we see all the ways we mother in the world as significant and eternally imperishable.

Queen of the Night– Not all gifts from Mother Earth are Betty Crocker matter of the fact gifts. In fact many of them are inexplicable. This is a Flower that welcomes us into deeper relationship with the great mystery.

This is not a complete list of Flower Essences for healing the mother wound. Every Flower brings a gift of mothering and healing the mother wounds as all come from our dear Mother Earth. However this is the bouquet of Flower love that called out today to invite you into relationship with it. May these Flower Essences help to heal your mother wounds.

Introducing Flower Essences to Support Groups

Today a Green Hope friend and mental health counselor asked us how we might explain Flower Essences to mental health support groups dealing with great challenges and very much in need of support from Nature. She wanted to know what Flower Essences we might suggest she share with the fifteen groups she leads each week.

First of all, to this woman I want to say thank you for the precious work you do. Running fifteen groups a week sounds like a very full plate. I salute you.

I went for a walk to ponder her questions. At the beginning of the walk, I thought mixes would be the way to go because they offer so much support. Then I thought about how Flower Essences are like music. I considered that in an introduction to Flower Essences it might be helpful to hear a few individual notes of several Flowers’ music before hearing a blend of Flower Essences.

I also thought it might be a good idea to choose individual Flower Essences from different kinds of environments. Each would have very different strengths because of where they come from. I liked the idea of folks savoring the healing energy of every distinct Flower. I wondered if there could be one Flower Essence blend at the end of the sessions to deonstrate a sense of the music of the blends, and I wondered which blend would be good to include.

Before I offer suggestions for what these Flower Essences might be considered, I have a few other things to offer.

I am going to encourage this counselor get a bottle of each Flower Essence she settles on and an empty 2 ounce spritzer bottle for each of these Essences. Then she can put a few dropperfuls of each Essence in an empty bottle, fill the bottle with water and then let people spritz themselves to their heart’s content with the Flower Essences they want to try.

This counselor asked how I would explain Flower Essences in simple, clear language. Whew! That’s the question of questions. I might begin by saying that Flower Essences are a way to experience the loving and healing energy of a Flower when it is not in season or when we don’t live where the Flower blooms. If we could always be in a garden soaking in the love of the Flowers around us, we might not need Flower Essences. However when we live in a climate with winter seasons or in an environment where there aren’t many Flowers, Flower Essences are a great way to get Flower love and healing energy when we want it.

I might add that sometimes we might want support from a Flower that doesn’t easily grow in our part of the world and Flower Essences are a way to solve this problem. I have made Flower Essences from Flowers all over earth and these are now available all the time to people. I often think of our Flower Essence inventory as a global library of healing energies.

If anyone wonders if it is possible for Flowers to share loving and healing energy, I would ask them to consider any experiences they have had with Flowers. Sometimes as adults we have forgotten the joy of Flowers. I’m not thinking of the weird commercial bouquets of half dead Flowers imported from South America that we see in the grocery store. I’m thinking of Flowers we brush by in a meadow or see in a cluster on a river bank or even those coming through the cracks in the pavement. I would encourage people to think back to their childhood and see if they have any memories of Flowers from that time. Even a weed like a Dandelion is recognized as a uplifting friend to a small child.

If someone has no points of connection with Flowers then they could imagine how they might feel about the energy of receiving an enormous bouquet of beautiful and fragrant Flowers versus the energy of receiving a bowl of rotten fruit. By considering these two experiences, we can begin to feel that Flowers have a more positive energy than many things and can uplift and support us more than we might think.

For Flower Essences that might deeply serve a community that has seen more than its fair share of suffering, here are a few possibilities. I would encourage the counselor who knows these groups so much better than me to follow her own guidance in choosing Flower Essences if these don’t feel right (and maybe even if they do).

Sunflower– A Flower that helps us know our own inner strength and know our ability to stand tall even when we face a lot of challenges. This is a Flower that most of us recognize and have some experience of as sunny, bright, strong and empowering. That helps us link to its energy as a Flower Essence. It doesn’t seem, like a stretch when I say that a Flower Essence made from 14′ tall Sunflowers helps us be the super heroes in our own life.

Rosa Mundi– As with Sunflower, most people know what Roses look like. They may however feel shut out from the whole Rose thing because the commercializatin of Roses make many of us feel that Roses for special people on special occasions and that doesn’t include us. Rosa Mundi wants to remind all of us that we are ALL included in the Rose Love fest. This Rose supports those who have been through the wringer of pain and suffering and are having a hard time keeping on going. This Rose is ancient, at least 700 years old, yet looks incredibly fresh and young. It carries this energy of refreshing the most world weary among us. It is a consoling, comforting friend.

On the search for Wintergreen Flower

WintergreenWintergreen is a good one for explaining that Flowers grown in different environments have different healing strengths. Wintergreen grows in very cold climates in very harsh conditions. Think exposed mountaintops in the coldest places in our country. Wintergreen helps us be tough when the going gets tough. It also helps us stand up for ourselves no matter how much circumstances or other people seem to be intent on getting us down.

Calliandra

Calliandra– This is a tropical Flower. Flowering plants in the tropics don’t have to struggle against the climate as much as cold weather plants. This means their Flowers can really take off in dramatic ways. They are like spark plugs of energy and help us find our sass and zip as well. Calliandra has a Flower that is a ball of brilliant red threads. It looks like a fireworks burst of cleansing and clearing energy and that is just what it is. We have found it helps a lot when there has been a lot of painful experiences in our families and our hearts have closed a bit to protect ourselves. This one helps us let the light into our heart again and opens up all those rivers of love that we might not have felt safe to express. We describe it as good for the circulatory system but it is so much more.

Dombeya Wallichii

Dombeya Wallichii- Here is another Flower from a tropical location, this time Madagascar. When it blooms Dombeya Wallichii smells like baking cake. Our Dombeya spent many years in my husband’s sixth grade classroom where students called it the “Cupcake Tree”. When it bloomed all the kids in the school would come visit it. It has beautiful clusters of pink flowers as well as a wonderful fragrance. Its gift as a Flower Essence is to help us feel sheltered and comforted like the most loving mother embracing us with unconditional love.

Teasel

Teasel- I like how Flower Essences help us find energetic balance. Yes, Calliandra helps us let the love flow, but Teasel helps us let the love flow appropriately. It keeps others from violating our energy boundaries and taking energy from us that belongs to us. We own our energy system. It is no one else’s, and no one else should be in our energy system. Teasel is a wildflower that knows this. It is all about protecting our energy. You can see this when you look at Teasel‘s Flowers. That is one of the interesting things about many Flowers. They look like what they are for.

Gorse

Gorse– One of the great things about Flower Essences is that they give us the opportunity to work with Flowers that grow in other places on earth. This helps us balance ourselves with energies from all parts of the world and thus become balanced global citizens. Our Gorse comes from Scotland. Here is how it is described on our website:

Gorse is a Flower Essence that floods us with uplifting light and hope. It is particularly supportive in situations of transition and challenges such as illness, despair or heartbreak. Gorse helps us have a steadiness of hope and optimism within ourselves even in situations in which we are being battered by the winds of change or find ourselves in an environment of pessimism. It is an excellent ally when a feeling of all is lost is prevalent because Gorse knows all is never lost.

A typical Scottish summer afternoon

People who live in certain climates tend to suffer from the same challenges both physically and emotionally. In Scotland the weather is chilly, damp and overcast most of the time. This can lead to a similar inner climate of wet, gloomy heaviness, so it is perfect that this Flower of optimism is right there in the fields of Scotland to uplift with its bright yellow blossoms.

In Crete many keep a pot of Dittany right outside their door. It is considered a sacred plant.

Dittany from Crete– Sometimes a Flower Essence will hold the energy of the place where it was made as well as the Flower itself. With this Dittany from Crete there is a healing energy from the Flower that holds the energy of ten thousand years of healing work done by Cretans, especially Cretan women, to bring values of selfless love, generosity, peaceful coexistence and many values that prevailed on Crete before the rise of patriarchy. When we work with Flower Essences from Crete we get deeply rooted support from across time to be our most evolved selves.

After working with individual Flower Essences, I would love to see these groups get support from blended mixes but to work and play with individual Flower Essences first might be a memorable way to open the door to energy healing with Flowers. I asked the Angels to pick one mix for the group to consider and they chose Boundless. I loved this suggestion and this Flower Essence combination made from all the Flowers a garden called Boundless. This Essence has been cropping up a lot as an Essence that reminds us no matter what is going on in our lives, we are eternal spirit having a physical experience not the other way around.

After I wrote this I went back to check the counselor’s email to see if I had answered all the questions she had about offering Flower Essences to her circles. She had asked about how to explain the safety of Flower Essences. Here’s my thought on that. We are out in the world all our days. Some places we go and some people we encounter feel heavy on our spirits and make things more difficult. We keep on keeping on even when we have had that kind of low vibration experience. Flowers however always uplift. They offer the brightest most uplifting vibration of the plant because they are the most evolved part of the plant. AND they wish us well. When we work with Flower Essences we are inviting in the companionship of fellow travelers on our planet who only want to help us and carry only the best intentions. At worst their love and energy feels irrelevant, offering healing love we don’t need, but so often Flowers and Flower Essences are the very gift we most need, reminding us WE ARE LOVED.

As a community of Flowers, Angels, Nature Spirits, Dogs, Cats and even some People, Green Hope Farm can be a funny place……and I love telling you all about it!