Anyone wondering if we are all connected would have plenty of food for thought after a week or two shipping orders at Green Hope Farm. We have about a thousand Flower Essences on offer but in any given week, there will be particular Essences from our enormous array that fly off all over the world in a flood of independent orders. Lately one of the Flower Essences that has been rushing out the door is Indian Pipe.

There is so much to say about this beloved Flower Essence!

Indian Pipe was used by Native Americans as an herbal decoction to calm querulous and restless children especially those with fevers. It was also used for pain relief. As a Flower Essence, Indian Pipe helps people remember the abiding reality of peace beneath tumultuous events. As the Angels describe it, Indian Pipe helps us experience the ocean of God’s love ever present beneath the surface waves.

With its profound connection to Native Americans, it comes as no surprise that Indian Pipe Essence also holds a template for balancing the four winds and the four elements. Domesticated animals particularly love it for the support it gives them to regain this sense of elemental peace and unity with nature whenever this awareness has been lost to them.

Many animals can benefit from Indian Pipe right now and thankfully, their people are ordering it for them. Animals are part of the Elemental kingdom so they see their job assignment as absorbing and rebalancing the vibrations around them, but right now, there is too much for them to absorb and stay balanced at the same time. The accelerating vibration of the planet leaves many animals absorbing the chaos of their people’s reactions to the changing planet as well as other chaotic vibrations around them. This is one of the reasons we suggest Golden Armor for the animals as it buffers them from all this extra dissonance.

Indian Pipe is also extremely helpful for the animals in the present circumstances. It eases them back into a primal experience of self, an experience that by its essential nature is peaceful. In the wild, animals know how they must live. They do what they need to do to survive, but they maintain an experience of unity with their world throughout all their daily activities. Domesticated animals can lose this experience of unity and fall into the illusions of the human community of otherness, separation and loss. This tends to happen more when their people are stressed, and the tumult on the planet is leaving a lot of us stressed. While Golden Armor helps animals not take on our illusions in the first place, Indian Pipe helps restore the animals to their natural state of oneness with the natural realm if they have temporarily bought into our vibrational confusions.

We shouldn’t be so surprised that animals might need a roadmap back to their natural state. They find themselves in worlds that are not of their creation and in the energies of dissonance that would never be something they would create. They have no natural roadmaps back from a place they never would have created. Fortunately, Flower Essences can show them the doorway back to their own balanced self.

Us humans need Indian Pipe just as much as the animals for we too need support to cut through the sway of illusions of separation to come into an awareness of the seamless unity and abiding peace of all that is.

I had a very Indian Pipe healing this past summer that reflected this Flower’s deep kindness and ability to help us snap out of our mind funks. To back up a moment, Cranberry Lake, the place in the Adirondacks where I went to every summer of my early life, was always my favorite place on Earth. As a child and young adult, I couldn’t really imagine life without this place, and it never occurred to me that I would have to imagine this. I am still having a hard time completely wrapping my head around the truth that the place is gone from my life.

My love for this place was all about my experiences there of feeling one with the natural world. As a very small child I felt a kinship to the rocks, trees, waters and most particularly the Flowers of the place. It was no surprise that the Adirondack collection was one of our first collections of Flower Essences. To meet with Adirondack Flowers along a trail or at the water’s edge was to visit with friends, so of course these friends were the ones I turned to first when I began making Flower Essences.

On a practical level, when the place in the Adirondacks fell away from my life, I had to figure out other ways to source the Flower Essences. For a number of years, my kids continued to visit Cranberry Lake, and they took on the responsibility of making needed Flower Essences but this was always a bit touch and go as Flowers don’t always return to exactly the same spot from season to season. I could tell the kids to look for Yellow Water Lily in South Flow or Small Woodland Orchis in the swamps of Cowhorn Pond, but the Flowers were not always there. Nonetheless, we made do until last summer when the kids were told they couldn’t visit the family camp anymore either. With this full stop to visits, I had to get more serious about finding all the Adirondack Flowers near the farm.

The problem was that while I knew where some of these Flowers grew around here, there were several Flowers I had never seen in local woods or fields. So this summer, every woods walk was a search for some of the missing Flowers. There were two that I was particularly concerned about: Titan and Indian Pipe. As a wild orchid, Titan can’t be grown from seed or transplanted, not that I knew where to transplant it from. I really had no idea where to begin with my search for this one. As far as Indian Pipe was concerned, I was certain it grew around here, but it was another one I had yet to actually find. I map my world by where Flowers grow, but this one had eluded me, and my inventory of its Essences was low low low.

One August afternoon I was fussing over an enormous potted Dombeya Wallichii tree that spends the warm months outside the greenhouse in a place right by our front door. As I plucked untidy leaves and tied up leggy branches, I suddenly noticed two Titan orchids growing just a few inches away from the Dombeya’s pot . Not only were there two healthy Titan plants, but they were about to bloom. Three feet from our front door!

You can imagine my gratitude, joy and relief. The arrival of these orchids was truly the answer to a prayer. I was still glowing a few hours later as I took a woods walk with the dogs. As I went over the discovery of the Titan orchids in my mind, I was in a glow, but a tiny part of me was still concerned about finding Indian Pipe.

As my mind began to turn this niggle into a full blown worry, I glanced up into the woods ahead of me. A shaft of brilliant sunlight illuminated a patch of earth under a hemlock tree, and there in this swath of sunlight grew a glorious clump of Indian Pipe, the first I had ever seen in New Hampshire!

Sometimes no matter how Flowers try to disguise themselves as just beautiful props on stage set Earth, their intense love beams out and envelops us in greater realities. In that moment, I bathed in the peace of Indian Pipe and in an awareness of the immense generosity and tender love that is the natural world around us. In that moment, I could feel myself, at long last, lay down any burden of worry about finding Adirondack Wildflowers for our ongoing collection.

Back twenty five years ago, there were a lot of Angel groups in our valley and at one of the meetings I went to where a bunch of us were seeking Angelic guidance, an Angel gave us all a piece of advice that stuck with me. This Angel spoke of the vibration on the planet increasing as part of our spiritual evolution and described the pressing need for all of us to stay centered in our hearts and inner divinity as the vibration increased. This Angel used the analogy of an LP record. This is now a very outdated analogy, but I liked the analogy then and still do. So I am going to share it, because just about now it seems like a pretty helpful image.

The Angel explained that at the center of a record, the spin was manageable. If we were placed there at the center, we would be able to handle the movement even as the record got spinning faster. The Angel said that as the planetary vibration rose, it would feel like a record spinning faster and faster. This Angel suggested that as events and vibrations sped up, being centered in our hearts was going to make all the difference and was going to be like staying in the center of a record while the record turned. The alternative of being in our personalities was like trying to stay on a record at the outer edges. It would be a crazy if not impossible ride and one that would keep going until we remembered to go to our hearts and the Divinity anchored there.

Of course, this analogy is an obscure one for those young people who have never seen a record player spin a record, but for me it somehow caught my attention. So much of what the Angels said to me back then sounded so dramatic but also stuck in the back of my mind. In so many of the messages I began to receive internally and that I heard from others, the Angels encouraged us all to learn how to stay centered and grounded to our own inner guidance and Divinity so that no matter what was going on around us, even a volcanic eruption, we would be able to stay calm and hear and act from our inner guidance clearly. I remember being quite startled by the volcanic eruption reference, but now it doesn’t seem quite so nutty.

It was good to get this Angelic advice back when the vibration was slower and begin to work on this centering thing, because it feels to me that we are in that time the Angels spoke of. So many radical changes are happening so fast that any capacity for the mind to mull endlessly over any situation before deciding what to do has been lost. We have all needed to do a sort of moment to moment improvisation from the heart as we deal with so much stuff flying at us. And I for one am finding the focus on staying centered and receiving comfort and guidance from within my only way through. There has been so much change in my world this last month that the habit to stop and center, pray, listen and be still for a few minutes every hour becomes a life saving habit.

Back when the Angels gave me those first in-services, they also gave me the heads up I would be disinherited by my family or as they put it, “not get anything from my childhood world.” At the time, I really couldn’t wrap my head around this bit of information. When I wasn’t doubting my inner listening skills, I could only imagine that what the Angels were telling me was that there was going to be a flood in coastal Connecticut that would take out my family’s home. I was far away from understanding the family of origin dramas that were about to explode around me. However, this month, after over a decade of family of origin explosions, the last ( I hope) shoe dropped in this drama. My mother (who never liked me) died, and I learned that her threats to cut me out of her will had become fact. The place in the Adirondacks and everything else is not to be part of our family’s ongoing lives. Then a series of other deaths, losses and illnesses among beloved friends followed my mother’s death to the point where last night Jim actually had to remind me I was also dealing with her death as well as all that had happened in the weeks since.

I am not feeling sorry for myself or feeling unfairly burdened with this kind of turmoil. Just about everyone whom we talk to or email or visit with through the mail is going through as much if not more. The animals too are having a time of it. We are, quite simply, on a planet in the throes of major change and that means change for all of us. I am grateful for the way the Angels have been part of our preparations for this time and grateful for the unceasing ongoing support of Divinity in every moment. To go to our hearts is to be filled with an experience of not being alone in all this turmoil.

Divinity not only prepared us with hints of things to come and ideas about how to adapt, but Divinity has sent in other tools to support us. Right now I feel the focus of the Angels and Elementals work with our Flower Essences is to help our physical systems to adapt to the higher frequencies so we can ride out these changes more easily. For example, Linden and Pink Magnolia, described two blog posts before this one, are focused on helping upgrade our electrical circuitry to accommodate these higher vibrations.

They are also offering new Essences including Cape Fuschia “Moonraker” that help us go to that centered place within us, the center of the record so to speak. Someone told us yesterday that there is a book on the market right now called “The Storm Before the Calm”. The title alone brought a lot of comfort to us. We will adapt to the heightened vibrations. These are good changes for us. It is going to make for a planet where love prevails, but it is a bit of a rocky ride to get acclimated to this change and so good to know we are not alone and help is available and ever within us.