Well, we made it to 2021 (No small feat!). It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen in the new year but I’m latching on to any positive indicators I can find. The development and release of new coronavirus vaccines tops the list and hopes of bringing the pandemic to controllable levels is encouraging. That’s the best news we’ve heard in a very long time. We may have a dark and hard covid-winter ahead of us but there appears to be sunlight of recovery in the Spring and Summer of 2021.
This week’s service is a collection of reflections on the old year past and the new year here plus a yule log ceremony. The service will be coming from Dave and Linda’s cabin on the north branch Meduxnekeag River in Monticello. It’s almost like dropping by for a visit without having to ski all the way in to get there! This year’s yule log will end up in the campfire.
The recorded service will be available to view at 10AM on Sunday morning and archived so it can be watched later at your convenience. I will send out the service link to YouTube later today and the link will be live on Sunday morning at 9:45AM (in case you want to come to the service early). If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you can locate it automatically on your YouTube home page under subscriptions.
The 10AM service will be followed by a Zoom coffee hour and check-in at 11AM for those who are interested in discussing the service or just want to check in. I’ll send the Zoom links out today. Have a great week-end everyone!
Practice patience and kindness in the new year.
In Ministry,
Dave
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation (we still have to pay the bills) simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. Thank you for your support!
UU Church of Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
The Greatest Restaurant City in America Is Hurting More Than You KnowThe coronavirus has come for the trattoria you love.
By Frank BruniOpinion Columnist
December 19, 2020
On the March weekend just before indoor dining in New York City was banned for the first time this year, I ate out on Friday night. I ate out on Saturday night, too. That was partly because I had a friend in town but mostly because I love restaurants. I live in restaurants. Many of us New Yorkers do — or, I should say, many of us New Yorkers did.
We can’t live in restaurants anymore, and the consequence is that many restaurants no longer live. About a week ago, indoor dining was banned anew — for how long, nobody knows. That could be the death knell for many of the restaurants that are still hanging on, barely.
There has been a war in our city, which is the greatest restaurant city in America, pitting owners and managers and cooks and bartenders and servers and dishwashers against an invisible invader. On too many fronts and in too many instances, the invader is winning.And it’s not just the owners and managers and cooks and bartenders and servers and dishwashers who are losing — though their pain, make no mistake, is most acute. It’s all of us, and we have absolutely no idea how much we’ve lost.
I thought about this the other day, as I lookedat the latest list of casualties. I take in these compendiums the way I walk through war memorials, pausing at each name to appreciate the magnitude of all of them put together. But in this case, I suddenly realized, the mourning hasn’t fully begun, because so many of the mourners are in the dark.
Away from the city or cloistered in our apartments or hesitant to visit communal spaces until the pandemic ebbs, we won’t know or register that a beloved trattoria is gone until some safer day when we try to make a reservation and learn that there’s nothing at 8 p.m. or even at 5:30 p.m. because there’s nothing, period. Until we walk down the street where sated brunch-goers once spilled out of our favorite bistro and see an empty, still patch of sidewalk instead.
Maybe a Chinese restaurant across the way will also be shuttered, along with a ramen place around the corner. Commerce-wise, whole patches of New York City are becoming ghost towns. We just haven’t been out and about enough to commune with the ghosts.
The tragedy is national of course, and it has had profound effects on the American economy because, as Matt Goulding noted in The Atlantic, the restaurant industry “generates $900 billion a year and employs 15 million people.” He meant in normal times. That’s what it did generate; that’s what it did employ. Not now. The headline on the article referred to the pandemic as “an extinction event for America’s restaurants,” and that was in June , when summer was upon us and the worst was supposedly behind us.
It turned out that the worst was yet to come and the extinction metaphor would have to be refined. In New York magazine this month, Carl Swanson compared the continuing disappearance of restaurants and other small businesses to when “that asteroid hit the Yucatán 66 million years back, chilling the atmosphere just enough to set in motion a cascade of effects that wiped out an entire dense ecosystem.”
He was focused on New York City, where the damage has been especially severe. A few months ago, the New York State comptroller estimated that as many as half of the roughly 24,000 restaurants that operated in the city at the start of 2020 would be out of business soon into 2021. “New York is the perfect storm,” the chef and restaurateur Camilla Marcus told me: It has a winter that inhibits outdoor dining, limited space for that in the first place, punishing rents that strain restaurants’ budgets and interiors that need to be packed tight with customers for the numbers to work.Marcus had to close her nearly three-year-old restaurant, West-bourne, in downtown Manhattan in September and is a founder of ROAR (Relief Opportunities for All Restaurants), which lobbies and raises relief funds for unemployed restaurant workers.
In contrast to airlines, the restaurant industry has received no targeted federal bailout — even though it has traditionally, by some estimates, employed more than 10 times as many people. “I’m not an economist,” Marcus said, “but how that doesn’t deserve an industry-specific relief package is beyond me.” Me, too. The House passed such legislation two and a half months ago, but the Senate didn’t follow suit.
I worry that many Americans downgrade the fates of restaurants, regarding them as conveniences and indulgences — shouldn’t we all be cooking more, anyway? — instead of the job creators and economic forces that they are.“People don’t understand how large a ripple effect on the economy one 30-seat restaurant can have,” said Gabriel Stulman, who has had to close two of his nine Manhattan restaurants. What dies along with a restaurant is money that went to a landlord, to food producers, to food deliverers, to linen suppliers, to appliance repair workers. “For most people in our industry, 90 cents of every dollar that we make goes back into the economy in one form or another,” Stulman told me.
That’s the financial arithmetic. What about the social and emotional math? Restaurants often anchor the neighborhoods that they’re in and attract additional businesses. They’re engines of urban renewal. They’re cultural ambassadors, introducing the spirit and traditions of a given country or ethnic group to customers whose souls as well as their bellies grow bigger for it.
I’m no impartial judge. I spent more than five years, from 2004 to 2009, as The Times’s restaurant critic, so I know many of the creative, hard-working, humble people whose existences have been upended. They have responded more with grace and determination than with self-pity or rage, quickly and cleverly adapting their operations as best they can.
Some restaurants now sell groceries. Some used shrubs and trellises to fashion veritable Edens on the sidewalk.But no amount of ingenuity could save other restaurants. Uncle Boons, one of my favorite Thai spots, didn’t make it. I’ll miss its crab fried rice, but more than that I’ll miss introducing it to friends and relatives and gazing at their contented expressions as we nourished ourselves in so many ways at once.
Momofuku’s Ssam Bar is gone. I had two different, terrible dates there and remember thinking that so long as the chef David Chang’s food was in the mix and all those pork-struck sybarites were eating and drinking around me, any romantic torture was survivable
Restaurants symbolize not just high points and low points but also whole chapters of our lives, whole facets of our identities. They’re part of the topography of our journeys — the part with criminally good tacos and a lethal margarita.
Many decades after the fact, my siblings and I still reminisce about Remington’s, a restaurant in Southern California where we often celebrated Christmas Eve in the years just before our mother died. “Remember the size of those steaks?” one of us will say, but we’re not talking about beef. We’re talking about grief — or, rather, about the joy and innocence that preceded it.Remington’s closed long ago, because that happens to restaurants. They fall out of favor. They fall on hard times.But they don’t fall with this suddenness — bustling one day, barricaded the next. They don’t fall in these numbers. It’s as if pages of a cherished scrapbook are being ripped out and thrown away, one after another after another.
We’re losing the past along with the present and the future. We’re losing the very refuges we might have gone to for solace.
| This Lonely Winter by Yael Shy The other day, I randomly ran into a former colleague on the street. It wasn’t someone with whom I was particularly close, but I felt so unexpectedly moved to see her that after we said goodbye, I felt tears sting the corners of my eye. God, I thought, I have been so lonely. I know I am not alone in feeling alone. This winter, so many of us are walking around lonely, thirsty for community and connection. This much isolation and distance and anxiety around every interaction is not normal. |
| What’s helped me in recent months has been a three-step process of allowing the loneliness, feeling the body, and de-mystifying the stories that cause loneliness to worsen. These three practices each stand on their own, but can also be combined together in a single meditation session (or just when you’re sitting on your couch) and can, over time, become a kind of second nature. 1. Allow, allow, allow In the present moment, loneliness is just a feeling. Often, the most painful aspect of it is how hard we fight to push it away—which, this year, may just not be possible anyway. If we let it be, it can just be a feeling. Maybe not a pleasant one, but one that is still less difficult. So, see if you can allow the loneliness. Can you stop fighting or running away from the feeling? Can you take a breath before reaching for the next Netflix show, or alcoholic beverage, and just acknowledge the feeling is present within you? I know it feels awful. But like a tantrum-y child, the loneliness wants to be seen and felt—and won’t leave you alone until it is. It helps me to say, “loneliness is here,” rather than “I am lonely.” It leaves room for other feelings that might also be present. It implies that loneliness might not be here after the passage of time. It gives it room to breathe. 2. Turn to the body Once you’ve made some space for the loneliness to exist, the next step is to turn toward it—but maybe not the way you think. One of my teachers, Teah Strozer, used to say that the mind is a terrible receptacle for suffering. It tries to solve suffering with logic, bouncing it back and forth, supplying arguments and counterarguments until you feel like you want to scream. The body, on the other hand, can hold a tremendous amount of suffering and transform it to healing and growth. This doesn’t have to be esoteric. Have you ever been wracked by a problem and then you did an intense yoga class or gotten a good night’s sleep, and felt the entire structure of the problem shift, ease, clarify? This is the body’s gift. So, when you find yourself feeling lonely, ask yourself the question, “How do I know? What signals is my body sending me? Where do I feel loneliness in the body?” In my case, I often feel loneliness like a vacuum of emptiness in the pit of my stomach. Other times, loneliness feels like thousands of blankets between me, my body, and the world—an alienation causing me to feel far away from myself, everyone and everything. What’s true for you? Drop into your sensations and stay with them as long as you can. Allow the breath to soften and cradle the feelings. This may be difficult, so treat it as an act of self-love and self-care, and be very, very gentle with yourself. See if anything begins to shift or settle for you. 3. Notice the stories As you’re allowing and looking and feeling, you might notice some thoughts come up in your mind, little stories we tell ourselves all the time. Even if the reason we’re lonely is because we are separated from our loved ones because of the pandemic, we might still replay our inner critic’s greatest hits. Some of my favorites? Stories that tell me “there’s something wrong with you” or “no one understands you” or “this is how it’s always going to be.” When I believe stories like these, I can fall down a spiral of gloom and doom in my mind, producing even more loneliness. So the key is, with mindfulness, to notice the stories without necessarily believing them. You don’t have to make them go away—you just have to notice that it’s a loneliness story, not get into whether it’s true or not (which you probably can’t know), and instead come back to the body, and what’s happening right now. Eventually, this will become second nature. You’ll hear a “loneliness story” in your mind, and you’ll intuitively come back to the body. Over time, as you put distance between “you” and your stories about yourself, you may notice a greater capacity to be with your own heart, and with life itself. I encourage you to try these three practices whenever you find yourself lonely. And remember, no matter how alone you may feel, all of us are inextricably, irrevocably connected to one another. Even when it doesn’t seem like it. Even when we feel the hard edges at the end of our skin where we end and others begin (and the seemingly endless distance between). If this virus has taught us anything, it showed that, in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, we “inter-are.” All of us. We are separate, and yet we are not. Something about this paradox is comforting to me. I hope for you, too. |
| Yael Shy is the author of What Now? Meditation for Your Twenties and Beyond (Parallax, 2017) and recently served as the Senior Director of NYU’s Office of Global Spiritual Life and MindfulNYU. She can be found at mindfulnessconsulting.net. |
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!
We are adding Mary Blocher to our prayer list for healing.
We have fresh snow for the New Year. Just enough, not too much!
The UUChurch of Houlton is currently looking for a new treasurer in the new year. If you are interested in finding out more about the position please contact our good moderator, Leigh Griffith at griffith@mfx.net We’d like to express our thanks and appreciation to our outgoing co-treasurers Mary Blocher and Barbara Erickson for their excellent years of service to the organization.
THANK YOU!
Covid cases are increasing in the Houlton area. Please remain vigilant as we help to keep the curve flat in our town.
Please continue to send in joys and concerns during the week to revdav@mfx.net and I will post them on the Support Page.
Linda’s Christmas cookies in line…
The joy or the sorrow of one is shared by all. May our hearts be as one on this day. Let us carry each thought or concern expressed in our heart and may the light of our love and compassion transform suffering into non suffering and ease the difficulties of life. We radiate love and the light that we are. Blessed are we all.
Prayer List distributed via personal email.
The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering. May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering. May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion.
UU Classifieds (transportation, helped needed, odd jobs, people to visit etc…)
Individuals available to help with transportation:(include e-mail and telephone#)
Individuals available to assist with tasks:(include e-mail and telephone #)
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