Oct 30, 2025 | Featured, Green Tips, Weekly Message
As the light softens and the days grow shorter, the garden enters a quieter, more contemplative season. Fall invites both gardeners and landscapes to slow down, to shift from growth to renewal. Yet, even in this season of decline, the principles of sustainability are alive and essential. The choices we make in autumn—how we clean up, plant, and prepare—shape the health of the garden and the planet in the months to come.
Sustainability begins with seeing the garden as an ecosystem, not a display. Rather than clearing away every leaf and cutting back every plant, fall offers the chance to work with nature’s rhythms. We leave the leaves as mulch to enrich the soil and shelter insects and pollinators throughout the winter. The standing stems and seedheads you see provide beauty and habitat, feeding birds and protecting beneficial insects. What might look “messy” is actually the quiet work of life continuing beneath the surface.
Ultimately, fall sustainability is about shifting perspective—from maintenance to stewardship. The garden doesn’t end with the first frost; it simply changes form. Each seed that falls, each leaf that decomposes, each creature that finds shelter in a hollow stem contributes to the continuity of life. By tending thoughtfully in autumn, we nurture not just next year’s blooms but the long-term balance of our shared environment.
–Kate Jerome
Oct 16, 2025 | Featured, Weekly Message
Fall Faith Formation Update: We have some great stuff happening for families at UU Asheville!
A couple of notes for this Sunday, 10/19:
- 7th-8th OWL begins at 10:30 am in room 3.
- 6th-8th Soul Matters will begin meeting in room 7 (next to the playground door on Edwin Place side).
- Soup Sunday! Come support our UU High Schoolers fundraising efforts and enjoy some delicious homemade soup!
- Parent/Family Soul Matters Group kicks off – see below for more info!
Next Sunday, 10/26, is an all-ages worship service! Families should sit together in the Sanctuary. Child care will be provided starting at 10:45 am.
A reminder: Kids in grades 5 and under need to be picked up from their classrooms or the playground by 12:30 PM. Many of our groups move out to the playground before pick-up time, so be sure to check there! Please help us honor the time of our staff and volunteers by picking up your kids promptly. Please note that outside of Faith Formation time on Sunday mornings, your kiddos are your responsibility while on campus. Kids in grades 5 and under should be with their parents whenever on campus. Older kids may move between buildings and spaces on their own, but you should know where they are and have a plan to reconnect.
Upcoming Family Ministry Opportunities:
Parent Soul Matters Group begins Sunday, 10/19
Join us on the third Sunday of each month for a family friendly Soul Matters conversation group. We’ll meet downstairs in The Commons at 1 pm. Folks are welcome to bring lunch (or buy some soup upstairs!) and eat together starting at 12:30. Children and youth are welcome to hang out in The Commons and play games or do their own thing while we meet. This group will be facilitated by Rev. Audette, Rev. Claudia, and Kim Collins, Religious Educator No RSVP needed, you can just show up!
Raising Financially Savvy Kids Workshop – Sunday, November 23
1-3 pm in The Commons
For all parents and caregivers! Child Care available if we get enough folks signed up! This is also a soup Sunday – get some soup and then join us! Please RSVP here!
Thanks so much,
Kim Collins, Religious Educator
Oct 8, 2025 | Featured, Weekly Message
Having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness. – Kristin Neff
This month, our Soul Matters theme is cultivating compassion. We are invited to explore what it means to have compassion for ourselves and others, and how that compassion moves us to action. As a people oriented toward justice, we are moved by the suffering of others and the injustice and oppression we witness in the world. As we launch our new congregational year for Justice Ministry and Faith Formation, there are many opportunities to explore how we hold the tension between working for justice and needing to rest and recharge before re-engaging again.
One of the ways that we can care for ourselves is by engaging in spiritual practices. This year, we are piloting a new Soul Matters program called “Practice Matters.” The goal of the program is to explore the monthly theme through a spiritual practice. In October, our practice will be Lovingkindness Meditation. This link has an outline for this year’s spiritual practices. Each will be accompanied by a packet with background information and options for practice. We will meet monthly (onsite or online, depending on the practice) on the 3rd Thursday of the month and explore the packet, practice together, and reflect on our experiences. Please reach out if you are interested in joining in or would like to learn about a particular practice.
In faith & solidarity,
Rev. Claudia
Minister of Faith Formation
Oct 2, 2025 | Featured, Weekly Message
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Poet Emma Lazarus
Rev. Claudia and I spend a lot of time thinking, individually and together, about the life of this congregation and the best ways we can serve. We meet each week, with Donald as senior staff and one on one together, to dream and scheme – co-conspire! – about how we can share our gifts to magnify your gifts, and serve our beloved Asheville community, North Carolina, our Unitarian Universalist faith.
Both Rev. Claudia and I believe deeply in collective liberation. We use this term, and some folx aren’t quite sure what it means. Terms like “anti-racism” or other more discrete notions are more familiar, but collective liberation means only: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Your salvation is bound up in my own. Wherever we are going, we are going there together.
That means we are working to wrestle free of the binds of “oppression olympics”- my suffering is greater than yours! We are aiming for a deep understanding that all risks matter, all harms are harmful, and while we may not all be at the same risk or vulnerability at the same time, our faithful work is to face this imperfect world together, and work to build a better one: one where all of us can live safe, healthy, and free. We do work to resist harms where they are. We stand together.
And an essential part of this work is to find ways to talk, with compassion and a spirit of openness, about those harms we face, the struggles that are devastating us or our beloveds, and each one of us to find ways to build power, create community, and find alternate paths toward that better world of which we dream. One way your ministers are doing this this year is by our Collective Liberation minutes – small, bite-size education and conversation opportunities built into regular meetings and gatherings. We hope that every person who enters our doors will, in some way, personally commit to the work of collective liberation. It is a part of our mission here at UU Asheville.
And so, we carry on, together. Join us, in the pews on Sunday, at a social or justice gathering, to learn and to lead. We need each other.
Love,
Rev. Audette
