It was a bitter cold March day in Meriden, New Hampshire, just the kind of bitter cold New Hamshire day we would learn to love endure in the many years ahead. Jim and I, age 12 22, sat in the headmaster’s office of Kimball Union Academy. Just prior to our interview with the headmaster we had survived a robust and lengthy tour of campus with winds roaring off the polar ice cap. This had been a particular pleasure for me as my winter coat got locked in the Athletic Director’s office before the tour. Not that it was a warm enough coat anyways, because Connecticut winter coats really don’t cut it in New Hampshire winters. As I sat perched on the seat listening attentively to the headmaster’s oration, my chattering was only half nerves.

The headmaster was a charismatic but entirely humorless man often spotted running the track with his tie on. Even in this first encounter, the intimidation factor was through the roof. Jim and I were college seniors, planning to marry on September 1st. Headmaster Mikula had just offered us jobs to teach Math ( Jim ) and English (me) and do four hundred other jobs related to life in a private school (like coach field hockey even though I had never played the game).

One would have thought we would be of good cheer (because it was our first and only job offer), but mostly we were feeling confused. The headmaster had prefaced his job offer by giving us a scathing review of our lives so far, wrapping up with the words, “You smile too much. The students are going to eat you alive.”

It was clear he did not want to hire us, but needs must. There was but one available apartment and the headmaster wanted all teachers to live on campus. The school needed an English teacher and a Math teacher so we fit the bill for the vacant apartment/teaching positions, but the real clincher was that the school needed a swim coach. Jim had swum competitively for twelve years, and there was not much he didn’t know about swimming. I was to be his side kick at the pool as I had swum in college for a year.

As we rose to go, the headmaster had one more demand. “You need to change your wedding date. I am not putting a couple who have been married 24 hours in charge of a dorm of 48 teenage boys.” Negotiations were short. We agreed on an August 11th wedding date, because after all, three weeks of married life would make all the difference.

We went back to our respective campuses to graduate then returned to our Connecticut hometown where we had met in fifth grade. Though we had done no planning, we managed to pull off a wedding on August 11th. It was a long summer and a motley affair. The preceding weeks, Jim ran the second shift at an ice cream factory, rolling home most night as 2 or 3 in the morning. I was teaching arts and crafts at a local summer camp. The only time we were both awake and available was lunchtime when Jim would come to the camp to talk wedding details. My mother wanted an Emily Post type affair which mostly seemed to involve her giving a lot of deranged directives to us, and Jim and I head scratching to implement these executive orders. There were many unpleasant conversations at our lunches. “My mother says your mother can’t ….” That sort of thing. Most memorably, a bunch of 11 year old campers delighted in throwing balls at us during lunch, yelling, “Do it on the lawn.”

Jim would probably definitely mention that the second topic of conversation at these grim lunches was about Skylab, a big satellite due to fall to earth moments before our nuptials. It was impossible hard work for him to convince me that in all probability Skylab was not going to fall on me and crush our wedding dreams. It is a wonder he showed up at the church

The best thing about the wedding for me was leaving with Jim. I also loved wearing my great great grandmother’s wedding dress from 1854. We arrived on campus the day after we got married. We had no money so needed to go right to our dorm apartment. Little did we know that miraculously we would survive triumph through a decade at Kimball Union and 46 years in the tiny town of Meriden (and counting).

Today, being the anniversary of the headmaster’s choice for our wedding day, Jim and I found ourselves trying to recall if we sat in his office with any vision for what was to come. We agreed we had no idea of the grand adventure that lay ahead of a magical farm, Flowers and more Flowers, precious children and grandchildren, beloved animals, Angels, Elementals, a wonderful Green Hope Farm community of you all and of course groundhogs. So thank you Divinity for this marvelous adventure and thank you Headmaster Mikula for picking a great day for us and for giving us a chance to come to this tiny town and meet our destiny.

Reginald Montgomery “Chuckie” Hogbottom, Order of the Woodchuck, Recipient of the medal of honor “Marmota Monax” September 2019, Groundhog Knight of the Realm, May 2022, and Recipient of the Order of the Garter July 2023 here. Sending my greetings to all of you groundhog kin who attended the great Tomatopalooza of July 31st.

Wasn’t that a night to remember?

To recap for those of you who missed the Love Fest. After taking down the vegetable gardens to the point where there was nothing but some sad little tufts of shredded lettuce, it was time to find better pastures. And boy did we find one! Once again all credit to the deluded human with her ridiculously lavish care of her hoop house of tomato plants. Didn’t she know we can break into anything? Didn’t she remember we LOVE green tomatoes?

Some highlights from Tomatopalooza2025 (registered trademark). ( Note to cousin Millicent: Can’t you get on it and get us some t-shirts? This event was t-shirt worthy).

First, I would like to pat myself on my plump and furry back about my media posts on FB, insta, tik tok and X. What a lively crowd these posts brought to the farm. It was a delight to see so many of you gathered for the assault.

Second, a little more congratulations are in order. We did a sublime job clearing the entire hoop house of every single tomato. I checked back the night after the festivities, and there was nary a red, orange or green tomato left. I am confident we took down at least a couple hundred tomatoes! Good work!

Third, I would like to address a delicate matter concerning groundhog manners. Some of you did not live up to our clean plate club standards but left half eaten tomatoes in a trail out of the hoop house. Please next time, remember that there are plenty of us to eat every last tomato and no need to waste a morsel of garden goodness.

I also want to reassure you that talk of a serious fence around the vegetable garden seems to be hot air. The person who promised to be there by July? No sign of him or his equipment. We can only hope that he “runs behind” (whatever that is) well into the next season too. In any case, I haven’t met a fence we couldn’t handle.

We do have some dramatic news to report. During Tomatopalooza you may have met one of the farm kingpins, my Uncle Bertram. He lives under the farmhouse deck just a few feet from the farm’s back door.

Last week he had an unfortunate run in with visiting dog Huckleberry, the grandpuppy of the farm humans. Huck got into a bit of a tussle with Bertram in the main perennial bed and took out a good bit of the garden’s Flowers. Not to worry! Bertram escaped and as for the damage to the gardens? We don’t really care that the destruction of so many Flowers leaves less for the deer to eat.

So here we are. August 6th and the whole community of us is fat and happy. I raise my glass to our wondrous season of plunder and delight. How we have savored the Swiss Chard, vast collection of Lettuce varieties, Chiogga and Detroit Dark Red Beets and their greens, Celery, Celeriac, many kinds of Shelling and Sugar Snap Peas, Hakurei Turnips, Cucumbers both the pickling and slicing kinds, Zucchini, Summer Squash, Borage, Nasturtiums, Italian Green Beans not to mention yellow, green and purple green beans, baby Pumpkins and most of all the bounty of 64 tomato plants. Such good work team. I am already looking forward to next season!

If I had to pare down the spiritual path to the simplest notion I would say, “Be loving.” Why? Because there is Divinity worth loving in everything and everyone.

Simple to say “Be loving” not so simple to do. People and groundhogs piss us off. We encounter the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s personality crap, and it’s tough to find our way to love. It’s also tough to figure out when other people’s personality crap makes it appropriate to back off and love from afar. We would not embrace a porcupine without being careful, and sometimes people require the same careful approach.

A person who betrayed me in a big way a number of years ago recently seemed to make a slight overture to redress the wrong. I found myself softening and opening my heart once again. Then it turned out the gesture was not genuine, and the person had no intention of following through with making things right. What is it they say? “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” That’s a bit harsh, but I felt that I was getting a lesson to be more cautious with my heart. I felt I was being shown that sometimes we have to see and accept the nature of people’s personalities and be careful.

How is this about love? How do I choose love in this circumstance? Well first of all there is need for me to bring forward love for my own tender heart. Maybe it just doesn’t need another stomping from this person. That’s on me to show enough discernment to expect people to be who they are. That’s on me to proceed cautiously or not at all.

Maybe it is an odd kind of love, but accepting where the person is and leaving the person to learn their lessons in their own way is love.

Giving a person the space to learn their own life lessons the way they need to learn them is honoring the person’s own process.

We may wish the pace of their learning was different or that they had wisdom that made our lives better, but sometimes we have to let go to where they are in their spiritual journey and let them learn things in their own way.

What Flower Essences support us in this work?

All Ego Contracts Null & Void clears out our confusions about what we owe others and what they owe us. If we have relationships where we are expected to be there regardless of what the person is doing to us, this Essence helps us release this often unconscious mindset of obligation.

Carry Less helps us remove our filters that have us see things a certain way when maybe it is not that way at all. These filters build up over time so that we don’t always see a situation or person accurately and fall into habitual patterns that do not serve us.

These two Essences help free us from underlying assumptions, unconscious biases, societal and familial expectations. There is freedom in unwinding these from our electrical systems. We are free to take better care of ourselves and free to love others appropriately.

The religious template of my own childhood has been one of the things I have had to modify to find a better balance of love and self care. Raised in a family of selfish people all telling me that good people are always selfless, I came to think it was my duty to fall on the sword for them over and over and over again, taking care of them in their irresponsibility and recklessness. This became the habitual way I handled others outside my family who were similarly self involved.

Flower Essences and my guidance (which always have been more appropriate than my childhood training) have both helped me in this very big project to find balance and a wiser path of love. I have needed to learn to serve the divinity within each person not their personality demands. Sometimes this means love up close and sometimes love from afar. Both of these Flower Essences combined with events in daily life lead me to a different more flexible way to love than the self destructive submission to personality egos that I was raised to pursue.

Today I posted a photo of Elecampane, a beautiful late summer herb that works as a Flower Essence to help us assimilate the gifts of the sun. And gifts there are!

According to the Schumann resonance data coming out of Russia and Italy, this past weekend saw a big influx of light energy into the planet. One source of this incoming energy is solar flares which is why I posted the photo of Elecampane. It helps us absorb this light into our bodies

In December of last year I wrote a blog about the Schumann resonance, what it is, what it is telling us about our planet and how we can work with the high vibration energies it shows us are entering Earth.

What I want to underscore here today in this blog is that these spikes in incoming energy are a coordinated effort to lift the vibration of the planet, an effort we can be a part of. It helps us and helps the planet if we make room in our lives to assimilate this energy.

Surprisingly, the energy often calls us to do less versus more. This kind of energy influx can definitely tire us out, and we may need more quiet time and more rest. We may also need to work to move the energy down through our chakras which is something discussed in the earlier blog.

This brings me to the topic of INTUITION which was discussed in this blog On Saturday during the peak of this energy influx, my seven year old grandson Henry was complaining his legs hurt. I mentioned to him that there was much light pouring into the planet and if he wanted he could check his body and see if it was flowing all the way through him into the ground or stuck in his legs. Without missing a beat he swept his field and moved the energy down. No one trained him how or even explained anything more about the process. He just knew what he needed to do.

We all know what we need to do to take in this energy and move it through our systems. May we all give ourselves permission to do what we need to do (which might mean doing absolutely nothing but sitting there!).

You know things are bad when even Reginald Montgomery “Chuckie” Hogbottom, Order of the Woodchuck, Recipient of the medal of honor “Marmota Monax” September 2019, Groundhog Knight of the Realm, May 2022, and Recipient of the Order of the Garter July 2023 is MIFFED.

To explain Chuckie’s distress, let us recap this season in our vegetable garden. Despite an 8 foot fence circling the perimeter, deer and groundhogs have frollicked so thoroughly in the inner sanctum of this garden that little is left but Hollyhocks and Nasturtiums (well sprayed with garlic spray) and an onion crop. There might be more if us humans liked garlic sprayed vegetables, but we don’t.

Any time a grandchild visits the first thing we do is go down and fill in the groundhog hole in the CENTER of the vegetable garden. Several hours later, it is a sure bet we can go fill it in again. The groundhogs shamelessly redig the hole as often as we fill it in. It is fair to say that until last night Chuckie and co. were getting the last laugh about everything to do with the vegetable garden.

However, this morning when I went down to begin to mulch over sections of the “garden” with mulch hay, it was hard to miss that the damage had escalated. In fact, the eight foot fence had been destroyed on three sides of the garden. Lizzie was with me as we surveyed the scene. There were metal fence posts bent to the ground as well as sections of heavy duty fencing droooping on the ground. This seemed a little much for a Groundhog celebration or for that matter a gala event with the Deer community. Even the deer prefer sailing over the fence versus destroying it.

This week Lizzie has run into so many bears on her early morning woods walks that the whole office crew has been reading the bear section in Animal Speak while simultaneously scratching our heads in wonder. So it was only right that Lizzie found the smoking gun, I mean steaming bear poop left as a memento to commemorate whatever bear activity occurred last night in the vegetable garden.

While this intruder has Chuckie and co. annoyed, I really feel the most sorry for the bear which must have found NOTHING tasty in the garden. As in truly NOTHING! Chuckie and co. are not known for their sharing skills, and they have truly left nothing for anyone or anything else to nibble on.

Needless to say we await the arrival of the man we have hired to build us a serious garden fence with bated breath. Good news for him is that now there is virtually nothing for him to dismantle and no planmts for him to worry about damaging as he sets to work to build what we now hope will be a Groundhog, Deer and Bear proof fence!

All I can say as I close this post is THANK GOODNESS FOR THE LOCAL FARM STAND! Oh and the picture I took of the poop? I will spare you the photo but may share it with the under seven set of grandchildren who do like a bit of poop talk.