72425 Via Vail
Rancho Mirage, CA 92270
760-321-0694
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Celebration of Life for Diana Leslie
Sunday, November 16, 2025 "Immigration Landscape Update"
Worship Leader:
Megan Beaman Jacinto
Worship Associates:
Denise Janssen Eager and
Joni Padduck
This Sunday, we welcome back one of our favorite speakers who keeps us informed on the plight of the migrant farmworkers in our East Valley. Megan Beaman Jacinto is a renowned attorney and her firm is a longstanding leader in worker and immigrant justice, and our advocacy is grounded in community needs and power. She will talk to us about the current situation in the east valley and beyond. Immigration enforcement and policy has always been a source of instability and trauma for American families with immigrants, and 2025 has been an exacerbation. Expansion of enforcement—prolonged and indefinite family separation, unmarked and masked agents and vehicles, erosion of safe spaces, and more—have transformed life for immigrant families. Healing requires not just medical attention, but activism and policy change.
Diana first came to the desert in the Fall of 2019, spending her fall and winters here and the remainder of the year in Connecticut. She quickly established a heart connection with our UUCOD community at the 2020 Women’s Retreat. With her own experience in leading spritual retreats, she became a coordinator of the Chalice Circles. She and Steve Toperoff selected the discussion topics and readings for the monthly Circles.
Her spiritual practice and love of nature led to her participation in the formation of the Sacred Grounds. During Covid, many quiet moments were spent walking the grounds and pulling invasive plants.
At the entrance to the Hummingbird Garden stands a sign, in part saying:
This garden is dedicated to the memory of Diana Leslie who formed a kinship with the hummingbird. As co-chair, she became the spiritual heart of the Sacred Grounds. May you, sitting in stillness here, experience her connection to the land and its inhabitants.
The first Sacred Grounds Organizing Committee in 2020. Diana in the front row on the left.
Meanwhile, back in the courtyard, the two baby hummingbirds have grown more this week and barely fit in the nest….Enclosed by the one side of the house and a wall covered with flowering vines, and filled with colorful native plants and annuals, the courtyard has become a place of peace and safety, a sanctuary for both the hummingbird family and for the humans who live here. My whole being fills with gladness, a quiet joy when I sit quietly here.
~Diana, March 2024
Exploring the slot canyons in Anza Borrego before the Women’s Retreat.