Touching Summer: Making Healing Balms

The upcoming growing season is on the horizon and it's time to make sure that everything from the previous season is realized.  

This week we hand painted and labeled all of our 2013 honey jars.  Here is a photo from 2012's honey batch on a previous post.  

And we decanted all of our calendula oils and made balms.  As herbal medicine is the medicine of the people, the process of making balms is totally accessible and relishable. I wanted to offer a simple recipe which you will find below.  If you have questions let me know!  

Calendula Flowers

Calendula in Oil Sitting Sunside

A bit of strained Calendula Jojoba Oil                                   

Balm Making Session with the Lovely: Karen, Trevor & Jen.  Thank you!!!

  

Last bit of heart shaped beeswax melting in Calendula Oil

Step One: Gather Calendula Flower

Calendula flowers have beautiful seeds and take to the earth very easily.

Step Two:  Lay flowers out to dry for a day.  

Calendula's moist healing properties can lend themselves to encouraging mold.  

Drying them out a bit helps reassure a mold-free process!

Step Three: Place calendula flowers in a clean and dry glass container.  

Cover flowers in oil.  Let sit in a sunny spot until ready to use.  

If you were to look in a book for how to make an oil, it might recoommend to put calendula oil on a heat mat for 2-6 weeks.  

But before the time of heat mats, we had sunshine and I like the method of placing jars in a spot where it receives both the sun and moon.  

A greenhouse is a nice cozy spot as well.

There are many types of oil options. The oil you choose will be determined by your final product's intended use, 

as well as what oils happen to be in your home.   

In this batch I used a blend of cold-pressed organic olive oil and wildcrafted jojoba oil.  

Olive oil is highly nutritive, stable and an all-around good option and jojoba is a very stable oil, 

easily absorbed into the skin and a bit thinner than olive oil and so a nice option for a face balm.  

Step Four: Strain Oil into Clean Dry Glass Jar 

Don't forget to squeeze out the oil from the flowers

Step Five: Heat up Oil 

A double boiler system is fantastic, with a glass bowl over a pot with boiling water.  

Heat the oil on low heat

Step Six: Add beeswax & dissolve into Oil

I like to use for every 1 cup of oil, 1 ounce of beeswax.  If you don't have a scale you can slowly add beeswax, melting it in the oil, and taking a spoon to test samples to gauge if you need more wax.  We didn't have enough beeswax this year from the farm so we supplemented with wax from Healing Spirits  Herb Farm.  Thank you!!

Step Seven: Take off heat and add anything else.  

This blend will cool and solidify rapidly so this next step I like to do with some haste.  

Some ideas: Essential Oil: 5-10 drops to 1 ounce

Vitamin E

Step Eight: Pour into containers and let cool before sealing

Share & Enjoy!

Our Love as Everything

Hours before sunrise, we are shoveling and plowing
Bountiful Snow ~ waist high, thick, white
Everywhere.

The sun now showing, we recall it is another day of Love.
Today, Love meaning Space.

Space for the intense surge of devotion's pulsation,

rippling in waves and thunder and paradisal song. 

Space for mind's residing momentarily distinct,
and patient hearts waiting for remembrance of there,  
being no separation.

Space for sweetness & laughter and play.
Space for unknown karma.  The light and the darkest karma ~ so deeply personal, we can never explain entirely why in flashes our fires ignite~

This space we speak of is generous
It gratifies instantly
offering limitless potential to hold loves power.
How marvelous! to hold loves power!

& if love's energy is overwhelming ~ we extend.

Space for seeing our love as Everything.

Living Life from the Great Inside

I have been studying a lot over the years.  Bundles of glorious information on the vast capacity of being, as well as botanical medicine.  In the process I often devalue my innate knowing.  There is a place for knowledge passed down and shared, and a place for asking within for direction.  

Since the beginning we have asked for guidance.  When we have been at a loss, thrown, overwhelmed, we have asked Spirit, Goddess, God to show us the way.  We have laid our heads down and asked our dream world to offer us wisdom.  Nothing has changed.  This path of inner wisdom is eternally ours.

Since the beginning we have asked our plant world for guidance.  We have asked what is needed to bring back wholeness to ourselves or someone in our nation.  We have communicated from our soul to that same soul within the plant kingdom.  The deep inner to the deep inner.  Plants communicate through chemicals, light wavelenths and contact - putting out and receiving information from their environment.  From what we understand, they emit sounds waves through audio acoustic emissions.  And there is a world of plant communication, the mystical, the unknown that we cannot conceptualize. Yet our intuition recognizes that the universe of greenery works in subtle and powerful ways.  Many believe that when we step into the woods with a yearning for medicine, our clear intentions communicated can change a plants chemical compounds to make the perfect remedy requested.  I do trust this is possible, as plants shift their chemical make up for survival all of the time.

I am remembering this relationship.  The days when I am bewildered by my life decisions, bewildered by an imbalance in my system, I am remembering to ask the Great One to show me the way.  I am holding both the books of knowledge at hand as equally important as this inner world of knowing ~ connected across all beings:  land, human, animal, flora, bacterial and so on.

We often know what we need more than we allow ourselves to believe.

Now let us remember.
Let us step back in tuit
Asking spirit to guide the way.
Let us live life from the inside
Where the root and heart reside.

The New Year of Ceremony

I have been preparing all week for the New Year.  I deeply cleaned the house and wrote up my Vision for 2014.  The general focus being to live in love.  Make decisions from my truth.  Live a nourishing and flowing life & to live abundantly and generously.  I could say so much about this, but more importantly, What is Your Vision?

Just give yourself 10 minutes to sit with this and write down whatever comes to mind.  This is the time to begin freshly.  What do you want your 2014 to be?  What can you do in terms of energy and attitude to make this happen?  There is no need to know how you will logistically make this happen (for now at least).  Dream HUGE.  Our thinking mind is too small to know how the universe works and how our path will unfold.  Then each morning first thing, come back to what you have written.  Intentions work in mysterious ways.

{Space here to take a pause and begin your visioning}

Part of my vision has been to have more seasonal ceremony in my life.  And my vision is already taking place!  Today we are marking the New Year, by doing our farm's first New Moon Wassailing.  It has been a traditional ritual in England for pear and apple trees, but has also been a ceremony for the good health of all on the land.  We will go from each garden and to each pasture and offer up an elixir and a rhyme (see below) and will make noise, shake bells, roar in laughter or chatter.  We will burn sage and clear the old and make way for the new.  Awakening the cold stiff world to become familiar with it's future of fertility, vitality and resilience.  We will end the ritual in the garden by a fire.  

Here is our Flyer for those who will be partaking in this.  And all of the earthly, heavenly and water spirits are warmly invited!  

The Farm At Locusts

1st Annual Wassailing

January 1, 2014

May our Growing Year Be Abundant & Healthy

May We Coexist in Harmony & Gratitude

From Somerset comes a most powerful rhyme for calling blessings down on beasts and crops:

Good luck to the hoof and horn 


Good luck to the flock and fleece 


Good luck to the growers of corn 


With blessings of plenty and peace

Wassailing

By Rowan (Originally Published at Samhain 1996)

On the bitter cold and frost of a January night, with the stars sparkling overhead in a clear sky, small groups of people, muffled against the chill, process down darkened paths into orchards or to lone apple and pear trees. Some may process in silence, others with as much noise as they can muster. Some may carry torches or burning brands, others drums and shotguns or pots and pans. In each case, one of their number will be carrying a ceramic vessel filled with a steaming brew of beer or cider, carefully trying not to spill it, the steam from the bowl mingling with the cloudy breath of the participants ......

This is the popular image of the traditional folk custom of wassailing fruit trees - a ceremony intended to begin the process of waking the fruit trees from their winter slumber and the first fertility festival of the folk calendar.

The word wassail derives from the Old English words wæs (þu) hæl which means variously 'be healthy' or 'be whole' - both of which meanings survive in the modern English phrase 'hale and hearty'. Thus this is a traditional ceremony which seeks to start off the first stirrings of life in the land and to help it emerge from winter and to ensure that the next season's crop of fruit, especially apples and pears, will be bountiful.

The most common date for this custom to take place is the eve of Twelfth Night or Old Christmas Eve, ie 5th January, just at the end of the midwinter period when the Wild Hunt rides and chaos traditionally rules as the otherworldly horde broke through into human realms. In some cases, however, the ceremony takes places a little later, on 17th January, depending on whether the celebrants prefer to follow the old or new calendar. Either way, we might see this first fertility ceremony of the year as marking a return to human "normality" after the dark and dangerous days of midwinter. Either way, the date on which wassailing takes place is at least a couple of weeks before Imbolc, the festival which for modern pagans is generally as being the first fertility festival of the year.

With all the thick and thin that life holds, 2014 is going to be a bright and fruitional year

Love and Light to you!

Investigating our Aliveness

Don't be afraid to be a mystery to yourself.  So many times we do things or take certain directions that we don't understand.  It is only much later that we see how that action fits perfectly and inevitably to the overall pattern of our life.  That is why it is so important to be willing to take a chance on our inspiration, our intuition, our hunger.  When we override our deepest desires with 'practical, reasonable' considerations we are not only wasting our time, we are passing up precious opportunities that will not come again.                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                    Reginald Ray



Unfurling petals.  Continuing to breath open to see.  Blooming further into myself, I can't seem to lose this intense itch.  Like decaying flowers -- falling open, or falling about somewhat awkwardly, free from agility, but free and true.  I keep pulling out that string from that unfurling hem.  Pulling out stitches, knowing that my dress is falling apart, but I just can't help it.  I want to see what will happen.  I have been staring for a while at this string and turning away, allowing my ideas of what should be, stop me.

***

I am seeing where my hunger leads.  Making small shifts so I can live in "free"dom all the time.  Serving our peoples and animals with the wild flora and elemental world ~ inherent to our well-being on so many levels.  Practicing listening and being here.  Being creative and loving.  Being decadent and raw.  Being chaos and order.  Sharing.

Learning how to be alive on my terms.

What are your terms of being alive?  
What do you need to feel alive?  

from my boundless heart to your boundless heart . . .

                             

I Love Myself, Therefore...

I have been really loving up positive affirmations.  Louise Hay is the inspiration.  Her book, You can Heal Your Life.  With every page I feel loved.  

I Love Myself, Therefore...has been so good when I start to tell myself I should be doing something other than what feels right.

Like, I Love Myself, Therefore I can go to yoga today and take care of everything else later on.  I Love Myself, Therefore I can wear my long underwear everywhere, even for meetings with strangers, because it feels right on for me and I am cozy.  I Love Myself, Therefore I will stop what I'm busy doing and drink a glass of water or make a nutritious meal. 

Snowy December Greenhouse

The other one I'm into these days is:

I deserve to be.... (fill in)
& I accept it now.  

I have been saying that I deserve to be in healthy and loving relationships and that I accept it now.  I can't say enough goods things about how it is transforming my relationships.  When I start to fall into my old patterns of thinking, old patterns of creating unnecessary drama or tension in my life, I come back to this simple affirmation.  And then I'm back to feeling alive and heartful and feeling so grateful to be a part of it all.  Her book covers all the genres in one's life if this doesn't resonate with you.

Crystallization & Glass Greenhouse Windows

My bedside reading has been poetry from the mystic teacher Kabir.  Born during the fourteenth or fifteenth century in India.  He often wrote on all beings having the capacity to find their own salvation and finding liberation solely through our own immediate experience.  It is within us, someone else does not hold the key to ourselves.

I read this bit the other night on forgetting our inner lover, our truth.  Getting wrapped up and entrapped by a delusional reality ~ by taking on the views of our childhood, our environment, our culture, as our truth.  Even when living is fantastic, this delusional reality lends itself to a subtle or not so subtle tinge of ickiness.  Some tinge of something not being right.  Even when we have the most radiant and blissful of days, there is something in the gut that whispers, "You are not radiant and blissful.  You must worry."  This only small part of the poem is a glimpse of that:

I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?  

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and ants -- 

perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb.  

Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone.  

Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,

and that's why everything you do has some weird failure in it.

                                                                                                                     Kabir

Bunny, in all of his Playful Goodness

Joyful Winter Solstice to You!
May the darkest day of the year
help us see what we are ready now to let go of.
What we no longer need to carry from long ago.
What is not even ours to bear.

And May we welcome the New Light
with deep, unwavering self-love that is always there, complete, no matter how far we stray.

Soul Mate

Sunset, Staatsburg NY.  Getting Ready for a NEW DAWN of being.

Today is the day.  We must empower ourselves to be the ruler of our minds, the person that is in charge of our beliefs.  We need a new language of mental self-love.  We need a language that reminds us that we are in command.  Nobody makes decisions in our minds.  Not our ancestors, not our partners, not our children, not our bosses or friends.  WE ARE IT.

Let us behold the luminous light of each other and ourselves.  And the boundless, radiant, indescribable light that we are ~ will certainly become familiar once again.  We will remember our dearest of friends.  Our true soul mate: our light.

When we connect with other light beings, it will be filled with awe.  We can connect with each other from this place and simply feel good.  Feel life's depth, life's wildness, feel life's aliveness.

May we walk this path together and inspire each other 
to walk in our own unimaginable light and in deep love.