By Sandy Greene
May 6, 2024

Wow, what a perfect topic for this pollen palooza spring!  And for the flower communion.

(Pollen and nectar are like the sacraments!)

1.  Wind Pollination is the oldest and most obvious.

Oaks, hickories, grasses, willow, pines. The bulk of our entire ecosystem here in the Shenandoah Valley!    So much pollen just taking a chance that it might land on the right kind of dangly flower racemes so that an acorn or hickory nut can develop.  It has to be the perfect shape, size and chemistry to work.  And the rest just ends up on our cars, or in our noses and eyes! 

Climate change has boosted pollen production.  Since the 1990’s there is 21% more pollen, and the N American pollen season begins 20 days earlier. (Yale Climate Connections)

Pause here for Kleenex break!

All that wasted energy!  But wait, is it really wasted?  No. Nothing in nature is.  Pollen is  really rich in vitamins, minerals and protein ( up to 61% protein, when a steak is ~27%)..    It has been called the “Only perfectly complete food”, which also has anti-inflammatory, antiseptic properties.

(National Institutes of Health)  Pollen is actually eaten by humans and livestock as a dietary and therapeutic supplement.

 So pollen is nourishment on the wind, All those tiny little packages of protein literally feed the little critters that make everything grow.  It is hope for the future.

There’s a UU nature metaphor in here somewhere.  Let’s think of everyday greetings and smiles   as pollen – tiny in themselves, and scattered liberally around.  A few grains may land in the perfect spot, but we may never know about it. 

Just like pollen, our passing smiles can be hopeful food for the world.  But hopefully not allergy producing!

2. First Flowers:  the Magnolia Family

Ancient cycads were the trees that were around during dinosaur times.   Sort of like big ferns.   They had different cones with pollen and eggs and seeds.   Something like ancient beetles came to eat that pollen, and carried it around from plant to plant. 

But 100 million years ago, some ancient grandplant had an idea to put everything together on the same plant in the same structure.  And maybe decorate it a little with “tepals.”  To attract those beetles.  (There were no bees yet)  A flower! 

All our current flowers descended from that common ancestor.  

This ancient magnolia still has a cone, has giant pollen grains, can make a lovely inviting fragrance, even turns its leaves back to show their bright wide blossoms.  Even heats up the blossoms as much as 5 degrees above the air temperature.  It folds back up at night to trap the beetles, so they leave with fresh pollen for a new plant when they get out in the morning!  How hospitable can you be!  (Sara Stein, The Evolution Book)

Just like HUU:  warm, cozy, nice smells coming from the kitchen, with big potluck dishes full of pollen.  Flowers kept evolving, and so did insects, but the first flowers – magnolias are still with us.

(Introduce our own pollinators, Lorraine the butterfly and her friend butterfly.  She swoops in to get the nectar, (wax bottles of sugar water),and leaves with pollen (cheese doodles) on her fuzzy glove body.  They buzz several red fake flowers loaded with this nectar and pollen, getting cheese crumbs on their gloves in between.)

 OK, the bees – and today, let’s talk bumblebees.  They are furry, insulated, so they can come out earlier in the morning, and in the spring., native, 45 different species in North America.  Only the queen survives the winter, and when she wakes up in the spring, she has to find a nest (often an old mouse hole in the ground), lay the eggs, and go find the babies some food.  Sometimes only 50, The mama queen actually sits on her babies and warms them up when it’s too cold. (Instead, they make little balls of pollen for each egg they lay, and put into a little chamber for them. I once found a lovely nest inside a rolledup rug, and saw miniature bumblebee babies – which gave new life to the old children’s song: “Bringing home a baby bumblebee.”

Bumblebees can solve mazes, and learn to solve puzzles by watching other bumblebees.  Like pulling a string to take a cap off a nectar containers.  They can see ultraviolet, probably recognize human faces, and may even dream while they are asleep.  All with a brain the size of a poppyseed.  

Only the females can sting, and it’s hard to provoke them to.  They will raise a leg to warn you they might sting if you push them too hard.

Bumblebees are “buzz pollinators”.   They will bite a hole in the flower, grab onto the underside   and shake it up to 400 x/second to make a cloud of pollen fall out.  They are the main pollinators of tomatoes, blueberries, melons, eggplants. They are fuzzy all over, but some also have saddlebags to store pollen, and others have a special brushy spot on their tummies.  

Commercially there are even companies that take boxes of bumblebees to greenhouses of tomatoes to pollinate them.  (The Xerces Society, Journal – Nature)

Now we need a Unitarian metaphor.  Hmmmmm,   (Asked the congregation for their ideas): 

 “Don’t sting unless it’s really necessary”?
“Develop Hive mentality.”?
“Don’t harvest more than you need or can store.”?
“Get up early and work hard”.?

Conclusion:

So, Pollen is nutritious hope for the future, spread around liberally!.  HUU is as welcoming as the first magnolia flower, with pollen and warmth for all us beetles, and it turns out that bumblebees are pretty good role models for us humans.

Sandy Greene

Open source, US government publication

March 17, 2024
Presenters: April Moore, Barbara Moore, Lee Anna Farrall, Andrew Henry, Pete Rapp, Linda Dove

With the coming of light after long winter darkness, it’s a good time for us to look forward to the turning of our seasons. With this service, if a little prematurely, we contemplate Spring Meeting Summer. Poetry is an ideal medium for us to contemplate the various responses of human beings to seasonal changes, especially for us in the Shenandoah Valley blessed with all four seasons. Conforming with copyright restrictions, we focus mostly on poets from the 16th. to early 20th. centuries whose sentiments we 21st. century people can relate to. I’m grateful to the congregational folk who are about to share these poems with you, to April who researched some of the old-time poets we feature, and to all those the behind the scenes who put in the effort to make this service possible.

SPRING

The First Dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s closing emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
  calm as dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face. 

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892. Poem 1888 from Leaves of Grass

False Smile

March smiled and buds burst.
But the sun’s welcome was false.

The clear eye of the sky clouded today
to dull the blossoms of spring.

Temperatures fell.
So did my mood.

And now on this first April day
the ear of the wind
whistles
and thuds
and throbs
outside.

And I hunker down
once more
in dark,
interior,
silence.

Linda Ankrah-Dove. ©

To Daffodils

Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attained his noon.
		Stay, stay,
	Until the hasting day
		Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having played together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring!
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or any thing
	We die,
As your hours do, and dry
		Away
	Like to the summer’s rain
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew
Ne’er to be found again.

Robert Herrick, 1591-1674.

The Lamb

Little Lamb , who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee;
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee,
Little Lamb, God bless thee.

William Blake, 1757-1827.

Darwinian Pluck

Never plant a garden if you are squeamish.
At the cycling of each growing season
I cringe at the killing chores ahead.

Each spring I get down on my knees to peer
along long lines of sassy seedlings—
this year, the beets, the peppers and the chard.

I squint at seed packets to discover
how much space each infant needs to thrive.
The instructions prove sobering to read.

Thin. Space twelve or eighteen inches apart.

Thin. In small print. To think that one syllable
dictates I must decide on life or death
for slender stems of sappy, growing green.

So, for the sake of robust growth, I choose some,
pinch out others. Forefinger and thumb pinch,
pluck, and discard young life.

Linda Ankrah-Dove. ©.

Haiku

In the city fields
Contemplating
Cherry trees . . .
Strangers are like friends.
 
Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1828.

Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Houseman,-1859-1936.

Vixen

Among the taller wood with ivy hung,
The old fox plays and dances round her young.
She snuffs and barks if any passes by
And swings her tail and turns prepared to fly.
The horseman hurries by, she bolts to see,
And turns agen, from danger never free.
If any stands she runs among the poles
And barks and snaps and drive them in the holes.
The shepherd sees them and the boy goes by
And gets a stick and progs the hole to try.
They get all still and lie in safety sure,
And out again when everything’s secure,
And start and snap at blackbirds bouncing by
To fight and catch the great white butterfly.

John Clare, 1793-1864.

SOLSTICE

Turnings

Summer solstice,
summit of the year,
the longest day,
the shortest night,
horizon silver-lit
before the waning
down to winter
and all our future turnings.
 
Linda Ankrah-Dove.©.

SUMMER

Dusk in June

Evening, and all the birds
In a chorus of shimmering sound
Are easing their hearts of joy
For miles around.

The air is blue and sweet,
The far first stars are white,—
Oh let me like the birds
Sing before night.

Sara Teasdale, 1884-1933.

Bird Song

The bird piped long with unfettered song,
one high note repeating
in the canopy of summer trees.

Shaded in the valley far below,
I listened for each note repeating,
and
an
	ending.

The silence quivered,
	waited for
		an answer.

	It did not come.

So I piped my own unfettered song,
	one high note repeating,
		in praise for every bounded, sunlit
			hour I live on.

Linda Ankrah-Dove.©.

Haiku

My good father raged
	When I snapped
	The peony . . .
Precious memory!
 
Tairo, 1730-c.1788.

Daylily

Proud plant standing tall
in your tasseled robes,
your lustrous lips
a silky scarlet.

Your slender neck
holds high a petalled crown.
Swollen tongues stick out
for honey-pollen licking.

You pout with your blond buds,
plump and puffed,
poised for their skyward trumpet blast.

Unaware you are, dear Lily,
your brash brilliance is fragile.
It will fade tomorrow.
Or, the grazing deer
may behead you overnight.

Linda Ankrah-Dove.©.

A Thunder Storm

The wind began to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father's house,
Just quartering a tree.

Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886.

Hawks Still Soar

Fifteen years gone by since I moved to quiet pasture.
Now condos, townhomes, boxy single-families
with fenced-off patios all hide the sunrise promise.
Yarrow and flowering prickly lettuce, wet
with Weed-B-Gon or bleach, wither in cracks
between neighbors’ driveway bricks.

This summer, what must be must be.
But still I put out sugared water to tempt
a tawny humming bird or an insect’s corpse
for a trundling turtle’s snack.
Today, I stride out from my front door
to join the oaks and sycamores
on greener, less curated soil.

I steer wide of trucks hauling dirt,
cranes dropping roofs on walls,
machines spraying grass seed like tiny bullets
on granite rock and burnt brown clay.

I drive a few miles to a country lane
where buttercup eyes glint and wink.
Wild grasses wave from roadside banks.
Horses graze by a stream in a willow’s shade.
An old ash tree bends with the prevailing wind.
In blue skies of unfenced views, hawks still soar.
			
Linda Ankrah-Dove.©.

August Midnight

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hand . . . .

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang the lamp and fall supine.
‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse, Yet why?
They know earth-secrets that know not I.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928.

Green Valley Pastures

I bought a cottage in the Shenandoah Valley.
Wild daisies, knotty scabious, honeysuckles,
City blocks, the office, crumbled into memory.

March to October pink and purple plants paint the pastures.
Blossoms sing and roots feed the green that births new life.
Bald chipmunk babies frolic in the dew.

In summer, heat burns rolling landscapes golden.
Mustards wave their seedpods like fancy fans creating breeze.
Solidago blooms as the season fades to fall.

Appalachian peaks stand constant, solid gray.
Glowing embers fire the westward skies.
I live with the seasons as they come and go.

And now, in the long shadow of my winter,
I sing a green and gold and purple song of praise,
thankful for the inventings and recyclings of long years.

Linda Ankrah-Dove.©.

By Tom Hook
March 3, 2024

One of the Article II Revision’s Shared Values is:

Transformation.          We adapt to the changing world.

We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically.

Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect. (article II Revisions Shared Values)

__________________________________________________________________

It doesn’t matter how old we are. We all need stories to believe in. If there’s no storyline, no integrating images that define who we are, or give our lives meaning or direction, we just won’t be happy. I long for us to embrace a better story. One with the power to change our hearts and minds and even enliven our imagination.

Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, introduced the term paradigm shift. Kuhn held that a paradigm shift becomes necessary when a previous paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork fixes that a complete overhaul is necessary. That shift in thinking, which might have felt threatening at one time in our lives, now appears as our only way forward. I believe we are at one of those critical junctures again. May we be willing to adopt A new story, a new set of beliefs and systems that could change and maybe even save humanity and our world.

The Seven Stories

1. Domination (I will rule over you)
2. Revolution (I will get peace by over-throwing you)
3. Purification (I will get peace by expelling you)
4. Isolation (I will get peace by withdrawing from this world)
5. Victimization (My suffering is the most important thing about me)
6. Accumulation (I will get peace by having more things)
7. Reconciliation-Liberation (Partners in the Evolution of Goodness)

1.   Domination (I will rule over you)

Looking back over my years, the whole introduction to history was told in terms of domination. The mighty empires that dominated sent explorers from their home countries to dominate the world. Even my religious background was deeply rooted in the domination story because we Christians believed that our religion should dominate. Theologically, my early understanding of God was that God was the ultimate, and universal dominating force. Of course, my beliefs have changed over the years, but this remains a central belief for many Christians.

I believe there is no possibility for right relationship if one powerful group protects and sustains itself over and against all others. From there, it’s just too easy to construct binaries and hierarchies of human existence. Our group is good. All of you are bad. Other members of the human family become objects and tools to be acquired, controlled, used and discarded.

Sadly, we see this story being retold repeatedly in our world today.

[Read more…]

February 4, 2024
By Rev. Kirk Ballin

READINGS FOR LOVE AND ONLY LOVE

1.” Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives, and broken souls shows no marked signs of decline… We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not because we are sinful or indifferent, but because we still have so far to go before we know how to master that improbably complicated subject: Love… Love is a skill not an emotion…” – 18 different authors, “The School of Life: An Emotional Education”

2. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” – James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time”

3. “Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love ^“. Thich Nhat Hanh – “True Love”

4. Although some two hundred kinds of viruses are known to infect, sicken, or kill us, as the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has most recently hammered home, that’s only one part of the picture. Viruses also keep us alive.

“Despite the devastating effects of viral diseases, the viruses that count most in our lives are crucial not in disease but in health and in all aspects of life,” says Eugene Koonin, an expert on the genetics of evolution and viruses at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. – The Magazine, Harvard Medicine

[Read more…]

January 7, 2024

Rekindling the Light by Merle Wenger

I would like to open this sharing part of the service with a message provided by our UUA President Sofia Betancourt in a sermon we might air at a later date.  The sermon focuses on the seeds we are planting for new year and the expectations we have for their fruit.

(I paraphrase)During Covid we weaved our faith into community care. We built magical bridges and those bridges bring us into the present but require tending. When times are difficult it takes beauty and magic from unexpected places to hold us together–beauty and science and magic can weave together a path that leads us into hope–keep us connected when stress seems to pull us apart .  What is it that we most long to focus our energy toward for 2024.  What are you most proud of from 2023, what seeds are most precious from the last year in this congregation, that we can use as seeds for the new year?  She believes Unitarian Universalists are most ready even when ideologies of separation and hatred are lauded around the nation, even when the bridge of connection threatens to fall.  There is a power and hopefulness as each of us set our power and intentions for the New Year, without waiting for sunshine or better weather to do the work of new growth.

[Read more…]

November 19, 2023
by Linda Dove, Chris Edwards, Robin McNallie, and David Lane

Apple Communion

Beryl’s apples fall
for Kroger boxes to enclose and keep
till Sunday service-goers take and eat
as many as they will.

Through blue September
days they fall, through nights that darken, lengthen,
end all summer.  They fill one season, yes.  But 
empty first another.

Fall apples then, the windfall sign that times
and marks a season’s end -- that speak
their sermons not in stone, come down
all flesh and skin and stem as if uncursed

from ancient Eden.  Take and eat.
But first in every fallen thing, every
gift time takes and gives, like these old emblems
of a fallen world, see good.

David Lane 

Autumn, Sky and Earth

Above me this November day, I track
A thin contrail, stretched across the sky.
Like a clothesline it seems against the span of blue,
The sight so warmly domestic that the ground I tread
Becomes, itself, suddenly raw and derelict—
Fallen leaves, some strewn and curled, like conch shells,
Others plastered flat, as if tattooed
Into the roadway under my feet,
And scarecrow trees, a leaf or two still on them
Like dangling gloves, beckoning the complaining
Crows grokking somewhere by now
Beyond the circle of workmen, who are
Staring down a backhoe-dug trench, they are
About to fill in with a load of gravel.
The digger clown in Hamlet, if present now,
Would no doubt in dark drollery have
A punning word for that trench’s filler:
‘Grave-All.’

Robin McNallie

Emily Dickinson was a private poet of the romantic era and not appreciated until her many-back-of-the-envelope poems were discovered and published after her death. Many of her poems were about the natural world she watched from her window and about life’s big transitions such as birth, loss, mortality and eternity.

# XLV

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away.—
Too imperceptible, at last,
Too seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature. spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

Emily Dickinson. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

[Read more…]

November 5, 2023
©Rev. Janet Onnie

A few weeks ago the weather was unseasonably warm for the Saturday morning Staunton Farmer’s Market.  As I shouldered my way through a bumper crop of chatting adults, unleashed children, and many, many dogs, I remembered a column by Perry Bacon Jr. who was bemoaning his inability to find a religious community for himself and his daughter.  He wrote, “The Saturday farmers market in my neighborhood and a weekly happy hour of Louisville-area journalists provide some of what church once did for me: consistent gathering of people with some shared values and interests.  I’ve made new friends through both.  And there are plenty of other groups and clubs I could join.  But none of those gatherings provide singing, sermons and solidarity all at once.”

            Singing, sermons, and solidarity all at once.  This is what religious institutions provide: a framework for meaning-making, rituals marking the passage of time, creating and supporting communities, and inspiration to take prophetic action.  Through the pursuit of these four tasks, religious folks might also experience a sense of wonder, discover some new truth about themselves or the world, or even have an encounter with the divine. 

            We are living in a country where a significant portion of the population is lonely, anxious, depressed, angry, and/or frightened.  At the same time attendance our religious institutions – where comfort and belonging were traditionally found — are in freefall.  This morning I want to take a look into the impact of these times on our religious institutions and how responding with generosity will help propel us through these hinge times. 

Hinge times are periods in human history that happen every 500 years or so where everything social, economic, political, cultural, religious – you name it – is shaken to the foundations and comes out reconfigured.  Religious institutions are not exempt.  For example: 500 years ago the Great Reformation gave birth to the Protestant church and served to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church as well.  Now, 500 years later, social unrest in the 1960s ushered in the end of the Christian era in the Western world.  In the same way that the Great Reformation began with Dr. Martin Luther in 1517, we find ourselves living in a time of upheaval. Hinge times are not good news for hind bound institutions, but they didn’t then – nor do they now – negate the need for communities of inspired meaning-makers where one could bring one’s whole self without fear of censure. This deeply human need to belong to something larger than oneself is not going away any time soon.

[Read more…]