I have never witnessed rolls of money being passed out indiscriminately to the crowd of people attending church before. I can only imagine what the meetings leading up to that action must have been like. Surely there were at least two sides to those discussions!

In the context of the Parable of the Talents on May 4, the announcement of Seeds of Action will go down as the most memorable Sunday morning of my life. I am serving as the scribe for five of us who typically meet at Unity each Sunday. We five come from about seven walks of life. Our discussions always have more than two sides to them, and when we pooled our $50.00 we had more than three ideas of what to do with the money.

My favorite was Philosophers’ Phudge. Over several weeks we collected famous and family fudge recipes and met at last on the sidewalk in front of church to select a recipe, appoint a shopper for ingredients, “volunteer” a kitchen for the work, itemize the tools required to determine who should bring what to the fudge party, plan the packaging, and vow to one another not to eat up the product!

A couple of days before the scheduled fudge session one of us told another of us to call the others of us and suggest a change of plans. “Let’s make Beads of Compassion” said the voice in my cell phone. I answered “Why not,” but I was really thinking “Huh?” Fudge packaged in wise sayings sounded like so much fun. For the next few days the bead idea grew from putting a few beads and a piece of string in baggies with instructions for stringing them into a full-blown Bead Event concept.

The five of us met at Fusion Beads on Stone Way on a buying mission. We had more ideas than budget, and the ladies at Fusion were supremely helpful in focussing our energy to the realities of budget and effective implementation. Onyx beads from Botswana, wooden spacers on sale, strong stretchy string to hold it all together filled the little shopping bag and just made it within our budget. The Fusion staff got into the spirit and when we finished that part of the mission we were ready for work.

We reconvened at a Starbucks where we assembled the bracelets and found specialists among us: artists (no two bracelets were the same!), stringers (steady finger-and-eye coordination), and the indispensable final-tier (tiny, strong fingers of a surgeon!). We finished that session with a brief discussion of marketing ideas and chose sayings related to compassion to print on little business cards, sayings from the dictionary, Thomas Merton, and the Buddha.

The last pre-sale meeting was on the sidewalk in front of a Jamba Juice place. We appraised the final work of our collective hands, attached the cards, put our hands over the beads and blessed them with a prayer that the compassion we had learned over the preceding weeks would continue to spread to those who bought the beads, those who heard about the beads, and those who would see the beads on the wrists of those willing to wear them.

We sold the Beads of Compassion to friends, each other, family members, co-workers, and to Unity folk downstairs at church at the breakfast and ice cream social. We’re not sure what the final figure of the return on our investment was, but it was somewhere near $200.00. More than whatever that figure was, we profited from the saying we included on our card from Thomas Merton: “Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.”

Indeed it is!

–Pete, Kathy, Steven, Hsin, and Susan

I had a piece in the auction last year and some of you may have seen the trunk show I did in the bookstore. Check out my website, dianegraves.com to get
an idea of what I do.

See you on Sunday. Stay with the Love.
Diane

David

Blessings, all around!