The SUUF Podcast

March 8, 2026

Susan Thayer

The Scenic Route explores how life’s winding paths—through change, uncertainty, loss, and discovery—shape who we become. Through reflection, music, poetry, and shared ritual, we consider how beauty often emerges not despite life’s detours, but because of them. Together we honor the journeys we travel individually and in community.

February 22

Cindy Bjorklund & Regenerate Skagit Team

Regenerate Skagit is a place-based initiative rooted in the belief that we can learn to live in right relationship with one another and the Earth.
We are cultivating a culture of face-to-face connection, building trust, shared responsibility, and collective capacity within our community.
In the coming months, we will deepen our understanding of what is happening here by exploring the interconnections among our food systems, farms, waterways, energy flows, and patterns of land use.
We will examine how extraction shapes our relationship to the Earth and explore what it means to move toward reciprocity.
Regenerate Skagit seeks to amplify the work already underway in this region, connect people to existing efforts, and create pathways for meaningful participation.

February 8, 2026

Joseph Bednarik

On this Super Bowl Sunday we explore what it means to be “woke,” and why—and how!—you should try to become woker than you already are.

Rev. Barbara Gilday

As we try to make sense of what is happening in our country, it is useful to look back at some past recoveries, and importantly, look at what successful strategies are being employed in our day. We must not lose faith. We must not give in. And true to our Unitarian values, we must think and act in love – the greatest power in the world.

January 25, 2026

Cydney McFarland
 
Helping Hands is Skagit County’s largest direct food provider with six distribution locations across Skagit County. We work to address the inequity in the food bank experience by focusing on participant autonomy and lowering the barriers to entry. We do not have any income or residency requirements, and all our locations provide participants with a choice of food that works best for them. Helping Hands also serves as a touch point to help connect participants with other local programs and services that can help provide stability for individuals and families. Our goal is to ensure that our community has access to the food and resources they need to help them thrive. For more information, visit HelpingHandsSkagit.org.

January 18, 2026

Kurt Hoelting

In his 2010 book, Circumference of Home, Whidbey Island writer Kurt Hoelting shares insights from a year of car-free living, during which he explored the Whidbey and Skagit regions on foot, by bicycle and sea kayak. Now, in his new memoir Apprentice to the Wild, Hoelting shares stories from his life as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide in Alaska, and his embrace of Zen practice and mindfulness teaching as gateways to the “wild within”.

During our January 18th service, Hoelting will speak of the theme of “Embracing the Storm”–a theme central to his new book–during his sermon at the Skagit UU Fellowship on January 18th. “How, then, shall I live?”, in the face of the storms now gathering on our human horizons? What can we respond fruitfully and with resilience to these storms, with the courage that faith requires, and the compassion that faith makes possible?

January 11

Joseph Bednarik

Joseph Bednarik serves as the Co-Publisher of Copper Canyon Press, a nonprofit literary publisher dedicated to poetry. He studied philosophy at Haverford College and speaks regularly at Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Salish Sea region.

January 4, 2026

Rev. Dr. Barbara ten Hove

Doubt is often frowned upon in religious circles but our faith encourages us to doubt and question. Can doubt lead us to faith? And when is doubt not helpful even in our progressive religion?

December 28, 2025

Rosalinda Guillen

C2C is a food justice organization that bases their beliefs “on the notion that society should arrange its relationships so that everyone has equitable access to the fundamental democratic processes affecting their everyday lives.” C2C strives to “develop projects that come from and are led by the folks from communities that need to affect change for improving the lives of their families and future generations.”

Rosalinda Guillen (she/hers) is the founder of Community to Community and a lead strategist and visionary with the non-hierarchical ecofeminist leadership of C2C. Her perspective is fundamentally influenced by her introduction to the multi-racial, working-class community organizing model of the Rainbow Coalition, the Cesar Chavez house meeting model, The World Social Forum, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil and growing up a farmworker in La Conner, WA. Rosalinda has organized farmworkers in WA State and the strawberry fields of Salinas, CA. She has represented farmworkers in the Legislatures of California and Washington States, and in ongoing policy and Movement guiding dialogues on immigration issues, climate change, labor rights, trade agreements, ecofeminism and strengthening the food sovereignty movement towards a Solidarity Economy.

December 14, 2025

Rev. Bruce Bode

The phrase “Follow Your Bliss” found its way onto refrigerator magnets through the PBS interviews of journalist Bill Moyers with scholar of world mythology Joseph Campbell in the six-part series titled The Power of Myth. The phrase has been taken in a variety of ways. What did Campbell mean by this phrase? And what, for him, was its point of origin?