Country Mouse Monday: Honey Sale, a sweet dream come true!
Monday, July 16, 2012 at 09:08AM 
It's funny how dreams can sneak up on you. How you can have a dream and not even realize it's a dream of yours until you wake up into it and it's unfolding and it's perfect.
Like how I only realized yesterday that having a Honey Sale was a dream of mine, and I only realized it as it was happening all around me.
It was apparently a deep yearning of my whole entire being, one I didn't know about until I made it happen, to have people in my farmlet on a beautiful Sunday, to have the chance to show them what's growing, what the bees are doing, and to sell the fruits of this labor.
The Honey Sale was a sweet dream-come-true!
In my preparations on Saturday and then Sunday morning, I had this feeling, and it kept getting stronger. I just kept thinking this one thought without trying to, it just kept floating into my head, over and over.
I am doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing: right thing, right place, right time.
Just Right.
I had that feeling at the party store where I bought the little bee -emblazoned flag that Joe planted outside our fence for me yesterday morning. I had the feeling when I was making the lip balm, and when I was bottling the last of the honey and labeling the jars. That feeling sat in my belly from the moment I had the Honey Sale idea last weekend, all the way through the Sale, and on and on til now.
Considering this feeling, I kept coming back to the yogic principle of guru, this word which means the weighty one, as I walked around with that feeling growing stronger, growing heavier in my center.
Just right.
As I wrote earlier, I did this harvest pretty much on my own, except for moving the frames full of honey from shop to truck to garage-turned-Honey-House. I stood out there in the heat and single-handedly cut and pushed and scraped all of that honey from the comb, helped it into the sieve and on into the harvest bucket. I prepped all the jars and bottled every last drop. Not because I didn't want Joe to help, but just because it worked out that way. And so it was fitting that yesterday, from about 9 until just after the proposed end of the Honey Sale, my husband was gone racing and I was manning the store on my own, the store I had myself invented. It was all me decorating the table with my veil and the smoker. It was all me nerding out with the decor, throwing in little bee-shaped chocolates I picked up at the check-out yesterday, goofy darling stickers.
And happy, so happy, the whole time the Sale was happening, never nervous, never uncomfortable. Just happy.
Just right.
So this little dream o' mine I didn't even really know I had, clearly involves inviting people into the garden, talking and teaching and selling, whether it's honey or produce or both. It's no coincidence that Trixie noticed that on the white board in our home office, I wrote these words a few weeks ago after all the categorized To Do lists:
theme: more $$ and fun from shit we love.
That really summed it up for me yesterday. Why shouldn't I be working on converting these activities that I love, that I'm practiced in and passionate about, into something that earns for me? How fun would that be! And how to be a Country Mouse, really, without that most Country Mouse of things: a farm stand?!
In two hours, I sold 12 jars of honey, 2 packs of postcards, 6 lip balms. I had a little honey tasting station, where people could try the rose-petal honey, the June harvest from the Canal bees, the Bitches Brew harvest from May, and even Reba's honey from Tiburon. I talked about bees, and used props, and walked friends old and new around the garden, showing off what's growing, sharing what's coming soon.
And into the Honey Money jar went $123, cash to be reinvested in the farmlet and its bees.
I'm so inspired by the Honey Sale, by how much fun it was and continues to be, as it reverberates through me, with the guru weight of it still sitting heavy in my belly. I still have LOTS of honey and soon will have greens and eggplant and tomatoes and melons and butternut squash and all manner of other delights.
In my belly I know that yesterday's Honey Sale was only the start of something, a something which I'll keep cultivating along with the rest, savoring it and celebrating it as it grows, then reveling in the sweetness of the dream realized, sitting in my garden in the sun as neighbors and friends wander in and out and leave with full hands, happy hearts. So good!
XX
12 oz jars, lots of 'em, thanks to my thoughtful/saver father
lipbalms and stickers
postcards, a peek at the tasting station!
Reader Comments (2)
So awesome! G U R U! Gee you are you!
Sooooooo right!