All Posts

June 30, 2024 Upwellings © Linda Ankrah-Dove As if in unchanging tidal currents solitude brings me me quiet soothings in my peaceful home. My body floats, my mind calms, spacious with the lulling cycles of the once-steady seasons. I think of our mammal cousins—whales slow-swinging easy with the ceaseless ocean rhythms, rising to breathe the essential air, blowing rainbow spouts across the sloping waves. But in these frenetic times, the climate calendar's constant clangings tr

June 16, 2024 HUU Minute with Judith Dreyer I am preparing a talk for LLI as part of a class offered by the Master Gardeners. I have been researching the “flip side of invasives” for several reasons…to flip the narrative from war on specific plants to what they are trying to tell us and, more importantly, what they are doing for us. As you can imagine, I'm going “out on a limb” here. (pun intended) I am looking at specific troublesome species. Guess what? As Merle calls our

By Rev. Janet Onnie May 12, 2024             Among other events on the May calendar is Mother’s Day.  This holiday is celebrated in the U.S. and in several other countries around the world today.  This is a day when many of my colleagues flee their pulpits.  To address the complexity of the individual experiences with their birth mother – or lack thereof – regardless of nationality -- is to guarantee push-back from almost everyone.  It also ignores the men who have nurtured c

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!) 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

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 al