From the President: Strength from the Smallest Seeds

The experience of wonder and awe that arises when I hold seeds in my hands has been consistent throughout my life.

As a small child, I would collect honey locust seed pods and tuck them into the soil of my mother’s plants, delighting as the baby trees emerged in pots around the apartment. I have blown dandelion seeds in the name of wishmaking over the years, both for the joy of it all and for the sake of the bees.

When I had the privilege to serve as interim minister at our UU Church of Fresno, California, I learned how 300-foot-tall Giant Sequoias in nearby Yosemite National Park grew from seeds just ¼ inch in size, and every year it is my role in our family gardening extravaganza to start plants from seeds—some as small in my hands as particles of dust.

Each seed with its potential for new life teaches me something about needed conditions for the miraculous. Each parcel of DNA and food and possibility holds me accountable to my role in the wonder of things. It also serves as a reminder that connection, awareness, attention, and care allow me to participate in reciprocal relationships with the life in our garden that holds me when I falter and reflects beauty back to me every day.

Beloveds, we are in a time when these reminders of the possibilities of life feel ever more vital to showing up in our fullness and our values day to day. As this issue publishes, we are mere weeks from confirming the leadership of this nation at the highest levels, and well into the ongoing struggles for justice and basic freedoms around the globe.

In these pages you will be reminded of the myriad ways our communities and congregations model a Unitarian Universalism that chooses again and again to invest in the goodness of human living in relationship to our planet. Our interdependence matters. Our pluralism invites us to embrace our differences and commonalities with love, curiosity, and respect. The love at the center of our faith holds us even in the face of the unimaginable. It is a love that abides.

In this time when holding fast to hope can be a struggle, may we draw strength from Beloved Community. Let us remember that the smallest seeds of our investment, our care, our embodied faith in the face of a world on fire can in fact bring forth the miraculous. May this freely chosen faith, and all that we hold in common cause, strengthen you in the days to come. My gratitude in advance for how we hold and bear witness to our values in the world together.