A Handful of Peach
scibblings of a flower essence producer
In March 2005 I flew to Barcelona, hired a car from the airport and headed off in search of peach flowers. In a way it was a reluctant trip because after seven months of the previous year traveling around the Mediterranean in search of flowers to complete a ten-year Mediterranean flower essence making project, my appetite for such adventure had been satiated. Prior to booking the flight my mantra was, “I’ve gotto go, I’ve gotto go,” It was imperative that I found the flowers of the peach tree because I had included this essence in my latest book, “Oil and Water - mediums for 38 flower essences”, which contains the repertory of 38 flower remedies and parallel flower oils, but I possessed the mother tincture only in oil and not the traditional water/brandy mix. I also did not possess a photograph of the flowers. There was a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, which dear Henry had to fix.
Three years previously I had made this essence down in the Alpujarras of Andalucia, Southern Spain. In order to get my hands on the flowers, I first had to drink a glass of wine. The old man, whose peach flowers I was eyeing up, was not going to miss an opportunity to crack open a bottle of his home-brew, at nine in the morning, when a stranger approached him. Since the Alpujarrians don’t speak Spanish, they only grunt, I think he was telling me that he walked down the mountain-side to his terraces everyday to tend his beloved vines and get away from his missus (and obviously drink in peace). So the making of this essence was done in an alcoholic haze, which explains why I did not take my usual picture of the flowers but not why I only captured the essence in oil.
At that particular stage of the project I had come to the realisation that the flowers remedies I had been making needed to be prepared in oil so they could be used in massage, added to a base-oil as one does with essential oils. So I gave up preparing them in the traditional manner, floating the petals in a glass bowl of water, and instead placed them in a glass bowl of the local brew, olive oil. However, I subsequently realised that it made more sense to have them in both mediums, oil and water, and consequently went on to solarise essences in two bowls at the same time, one containing water, the other olive oil. Peach was made at this transition period when I thought the set of 38 vibrational essences would be exclusively captured in oil.
So here I was driving the hire car down to a peach orchard, somewhere in Catalunia, with a guy called Markus at my side. The previous evening he had been a guest at a wedding celebration and obtained permission from a local family to go and pick the flowers from their orchard. Needless to say he was seriously hung-over but considering the way I had made the remedy on the previous occasion, this seemed perfectly fitting. We also had a very interesting conversation about cannabis on the way to the orchard.
One of the uses for peach essence is for those who have a strong desire to escape reality by the use of drugs. They do this because they have insufficient interest in the affairs of this plane of existence. The peach folk appear almost unaccustomed to the hash nature of life in the physical form. They often seem in danger of fading away and have yearnings to experience higher or altered states of consciousness. They are drawn to the artistic and mystical aspects of life. From this description it is not difficult to see that the folk who resonate with peach leave little mark on life and are mostly overlooked by others. However, at the core of their suffering is a painful division between their ideal and real worlds.
Peach is a constitutional remedy for this type of personality because it has a powerful impact on the etheric body, that part of our aura vibrating just above the physical. It draws the life force down into the deepest levels of the etheric and therefore facilitates flower remedies (or other forms a vibrational medicine) that have been prescribed for emotional, mental or spiritual suffering, release their therapeutic potential in the physical. For example, it is not uncommon for anxiety to create physical discomfort, such as stomach pains. From the Bach repertory, aspen is the remedy to prescribe for the apprehension but peach could also be given because of the physical pain. In someone else the negative aspen state may create headaches and again peach could be given for these physical symptoms of the mental tension.
Although there are many influences that inform me of the uses of a new flower essence, in the case of peach the events surrounding its initial making gave me insight into its therapeutic uses. Bach worked in the same way, using the energy of those around him to point to a flower’s healing. In Nora Weeks’ biography of him she writes that one day Bach was busy making furniture outside Mount Vernon when he cut himself. Just at that moment some people came out of the cottage: Bach saw them shocked and distressed by the accident. Behind them was a red chestnut tree in flower. Bach then knew that these flowers would provide him with a remedy for those who display an over concern for the welfare of others.
There was a lovely moment of madness at the orchard when I had my handful of peach. I had come all this way, traveled nearly one thousand miles over four days to sprinkle these petals into two small glass bowls. “How exquisitively insane”, I thought. For that moment I was a crazy player in a crazy play. Such moments I relish as validiction of my work for the wild madness, or illogicality of it all, can be the trigger to flip my consciousness into that magical realm which allows me to sense the syncronicity, feel the weird of that moment and commune with the spiritual nature of the flowers.
Simon France
