The Story of me and Flower Essences
In the beginning, when I was about 29 and living in Boston, I was introduced to flower essences by my Astrology teacher Amy Klainer and her husband Bill Moss. I was going through an emotionally difficult time and they offered me Chicory from the Bach repertoire. It helped, and I was deeply grateful. However, when Bill told me that I could make the essence of Chicory for myself in a neighboring vacant lot I became a bit skeptical. Then he told me how to do it - and lost all credibility. He told me to pick some flowers in the early morning, put them in a bowl of clean water in the Sun for 3 hours and, voila, I would have a flower essence. I knew for sure that there was something really powerful in these essences, but his explanation was just didn't make sense to me. It just couldn't be so easy. Consciously my attention went elsewhere, and unconsciously I carried forward a charge of confusion and disappointment about flower essences.
Over the ensuing years my husband and I moved our young family to Peaks Island, Maine and my Astrology practice began in earnest. I would often find myself explaining to my clients that the twelve Astrological archetypes are the building blocks of everything in our world .....not just people's personalities, but even the form and nature of plants, animals and minerals.
I have always loved to garden, and our yard on Peaks gave me space to play. One year I grew a Sage plant from seed. I was proud of my little plant, but I put it in a shady damp spot. Luckily my sister's dear partner Colleen wandered into the yard on a visit and rescued that Sage. She found it a beautiful sunny, sandy spot where my walkway met the street. I planted it there, it was very happy, and that seemed to be that.
In Maine we usually have precipitous Springs, and the very next year was even more so for me because I discovered Machelle Small Wright's Perelandra Garden Workbook in May. I became completely excited about communicating with the plant Devas and creating an energetically balanced garden. Between clearing the invasive species from my garden plot, learning how to use muscle checking (and, more difficult, choosing to trust it) and organizing myself through the Perelandra system, it was early July when I got to the part of the book that explained the whole point of the Perelandra garden process. It was actually to produce optimal plants for the creation of flower essences! I felt shocked and deflated, almost tricked. Hadn't I come up to this door before? I closed the book and turned down my walkway to the street, heavy with disappointment and confusion about flower essences.
Then I saw it....my sage plant was blooming! It had never even occurred to me that sage would bloom. I just stood there, and I looked at it, and then I said "yes"... right out loud.
I made my first flower essence the next morning with flowers from my sage plant. It was a powerful glorious process that transformed that summer, and every summer since.
After summer was over I had a lovely group of essences, and I knew some things about their qualities, but there was no coherent structure.....until a stormy November Saturday. My husband was napping, my children were at friend's houses. Left alone with my essences, pondering how to see an inherent order, something that I had been saying for years came back to me. Plants, and their flowers, are, in fact, expressions of the Astrological archetypes. It was a simple easy flow to identify the astrological elements and signs that corresponded with my essences. My muscle checking carried me when my intuition faltered.
That was more than thirty years ago. I continued to create Peaks Island Flower Essences and they became part of my astrological practice and an integral part of my own self care, as well as that of my family. We eventually moved off the Island and right into the center of Portland. I continued to make essences from plants I grew in my tiny urban yard and deck and also found in wild places. The process has remained a magical and spiritually fulfilling blessing in my life.
In 2013 we settled into a New England farmhouse just outside the city. We found the yard overflowing with flowers and trees that have welcomed us, and opened us, and inspired a profusion of creativity.