Voter registration deadlines are fast approaching! In Georgia and Florida, voters must be registered by October 7th in order to vote in the general election on November 5th. Help us get out the vote in states that have passed voter suppression laws by sending non-partisan, issue-based, and registration-focused postcards! Check out the details on our Get Out the Vote page!
Beginning the middle of August, UUCM is honored to feature the work of another new member of our congregation, Sondra Schwartz, a creative UU artist.
Sondra taught high school Spanish in Oakland for 40 years, from 1972 until her retirement in 2010. During her time as a teacher, she drew on her creativity to maintain her sanity and augment her skills in a very challenging inner city school. When she retired, she went to Tuscany in Italy for two weeks to take an oil painting class. In addition to painting, Sondra has been quilting for 40 years and is looking forward to sharing her work with our community.
Sondra is 79 years young. She teaches Qi Gong, a Chinese martial arts design for healing, flexibility, and youth. She practices and teaches online on Tuesday mornings and has done so for 25 years.
Sondra is looking forward to meeting all of you and sharing her oil paintings, acrylics, watercolors, and quilts. She would be happy for anyone who would like to own any of her art pieces to make the best offer possible. She would love to put her art in your home!
Sondra’s reception will be on Sunday, September 22 after the service. We look forward to celebrating her artwork with you all.
Due to poor air quality predicted for Saturday, August 10, the monthly Building & Grounds Work Party will be canceled. Please join us next month on Saturday, September 21st to help maintain and beautify our shared space while connecting with friends and neighbors. You can direct any questions to B&G Team Lead Wally at B-G@uugrassvalley.org
Cultivating equanimity for this election season and beyond…
In reflecting on how to calm anxiety and keep balance in the face of daily world and US news, including the upcoming election in November, member Elizabeth Rose is forming a group to offer support and mutual care. If you are struggling with your emotional or mental reactions to the never-ending list of unprecedented events, maybe you’ll benefit from coming together with others who feel the same.
Do you wonder how to get through to November 5th with your peace of mind and physical well being?
Do you think some of the following tools or guidelines could help you?
a daily mantra, prayer or meditation focused on this?
reduced news reading to once a week or?
a reminder of how much is out of my control?
stay off Facebook? Check in to it once a month?
inspiration on what is in my control and what I choose to focus on and do?
how to sift through the news and know what to ignore and what to pay attention to?
a reminder that all of us are in this together?
Beth will prepare a flexible agenda for this first meeting including a short check in, what the group needs and where it could go next. There may be opportunities to break out into smaller groups or diads. Future meetings or spin-off groups will be discussed before wrapping up.
Coffee/tea/water and snacks from participant volunteers will be served.
Joys and Sorrows Service follows at 7pm for a helpful wind-down from this discussion.
For questions, more information, or to volunteer to bring snacks, please contact Beth at PeacefulBalance@uugrassvalley.org.
Author Sidney Morrison is our guest speaker on Sunday, August 4th! He is in town presenting his new novel about the life of Frederick Douglass. He has asked us to share the resources below with our community.
We hope you’ll stay after the service on Sunday for an informal Q&A session with Mr. Morrison!
Sidney Morrison A Selective Bibliography Grass ValleyDownload
Author Sidney Morrison will be our guest speaker for the service on Sunday, August 4th. But you can get a sneak peek by attending his presentation at the Royce Branch library in downtown Grass Valley on Friday, August 2! Mr. Morrison will read from his new book, Frederick Douglass, a novel[…]
I bet if we were to gather a group of us together for a discussion about some of our fondest memories from childhood, many of those memories would be related to how we spent our summers. My childhood summer memories mostly involve palling around with neighborhood friends—participating in seemingly endless sessions of hide-n-seek or tag-you’re-it, usually at dusk; competing against a very best friend all afternoon in impossibly long games of Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly; swimming all afternoon at the local high school pool and coming home thoroughly sunburned and ready to do it again the next day; walking half a mile (which seemed more like three miles) to the local branch of the town’s library to return a pile of books and get a new pile to replace it; riding bikes from one school yard recreation program to another, looking for opportunities to engage with the recreation leaders, who were fabulously charismatic high school students whom we adored. Your specific activities were certainly not identical to mine, but they likely had some of the same feelings of open-endedness, possibility, and connection that mine had.
Shift to the task of putting together a summer program for pre- and elementary school UU children. How great it would be to capture some of that magic—the open-endedness, possibility, and connection—that we recall from our long ago summers, in my case well over 60 years ago. That goal may be too ambitious for a once a week program in a moderately sized UU community in the years following a pandemic that shifted everyone’s ways of engaging with their world. But we on the Family Ministry Team are still holding the significance of memorable summer experiences in mind as we build the lessons each week for the children who show up to spend an hour engaging with us. The scale of our operation may be small, but our intentions are robust and heartfelt.
Through the month of August, we are continuing to use the UU Summer Curriculum entitled Can Do Summer. So far, this summer we have constructed and launched paper airplanes, built a fairy house, and explored all things fishy. Before the official publication of this newsletter occurs, we will be building blanket forts and exploring our bodies as percussion instruments. In August we will be building junk sculptures, making our way through obstacle courses, designing tooth pick architecture, and perhaps creating our own mini-golf experience.
Let me end by saying, we are always looking for people who would enjoy spending a Sunday with us in Kids Connection once in a while. We have a core group of dedicated people who have been helping out as second teachers for a long time now, and we so very much appreciate them. If we could double that core group of people from about 4 to 5 to about 8 to 10, then no one person would be called upon to serve as a second teacher more than once every two months. The role of the second teacher is to be a presence in the room and help out as needed. Mostly, it is a chance to enjoy the children. We hope that a few more of you will find your way to this opportunity to serve our UUCM community. It is a relatively low pressure/high reward way to serve UUCM. If you would like to explore this low pressure/high reward opportunity to serve, contact us at familyministry@uugrassvalley.org. Or, better yet, touch
bases some Sunday (before or after the service) with Cheryl Spaulding, Lindsay Dunckel, or
Rene Wiley. We would be glad to share with you some the joy that we experience by spending
time with the youngest UU’s in this community.
ACTIVITIES THIS MONTH INCLUDE:
UUCM Camping Trip, August 18-20 at Plumas Eureka State Park.
Forward questions to Shannon at shannondooleymiller@uugrassvalley.org.
Interfaith Food Ministry & Twin Cities Church are hosting a Back-to-School event offering families school supplies, groceries, haircuts, and lunch. Volunteers needed! […]
We are looking for someone to Coordinate Sunday Hospitality!
Beth Rose has served in this role for the last 2 years since we reopened from the pandemic. She says Sunday Hospitality is a very rewarding service and she has enjoyed building new relationships with the many “conversations in the kitchen.” Read the description to see if this ministry is one for you (or you and a friend!) […]
Join UUCM’s monthly book club for a year of great reads! The book club’s members suggest and agree to read a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction and meet monthly to discuss each book. The group always welcomes new members – join them on the 2nd Sundays after service at 12:30pm or reach out with questions: Books@uugrassvalley.org.
