We are doing something a little different this Sunday.  For practical reasons such as to lower the costs of heating the parlor during the winter and for safety considerations as COVID continues to besiege our community, we are starting to record our weekly service from the Stone Room in the basement of the church. It’s a cozy and efficient space to heat and Fen thinks it has great potential as a downstairs set.

For special music we plan to draw from our video library of performances from the parlor, coffeehouse and our concert series in the sanctuary. Musicians can also record something from their home studio and send it to our production team (Fen & Dave).

We’re hoping that lay leaders will also send in prerecorded talks that can used in this format. We think it’s an exciting model that will get us through the winter months until the parlor warms up again. And we’re pleased to have Frank Sullivan’s artwork being used for title slides and credits (check out the sample above).  

This week’s topic explores the inner life and dual nature of humanity; our upside and our downside. Based on the events of this past week it seems to be a relevant and timely topic. Our musical guest is Gunther Brown from a recording in made in my office several years back. Please join us!

Frank

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

Here is one of the poems I am sharing in this Sunday’s Service so you can read it ahead of time… 

TV guide    by Dave Hutchinson

the constituents of awareness

are a keen mind

and sardonic wit

of intersecting insights

checking into a cheap motel

for a two-day stay

The entity that we take so seriously as our self

is at best

abstract

self-created

a perception

of dubious and fleeting reputation

a flattering of persona

that I take great delight in

yet I can’t help but notice

the shady paranoia

lurking on the wings

peering at my clever construction

teetering on the precipice of my neurotic mind

as I watch the evening news on network TV

And Here are the lyrics to the Gunther Brown song in the Sunday Service. (No one can sing a down and out song like Pete)
Time and Again(Pete Dubuc)’ It’s all that you wantit’s all that you want but it’s a whole lot more than I’ve got it’s all that you needit’s all that you need but it’s a whole lot more than I feel it wasn’t easyto tell you time and again that the train just don’t roll down these tracks lay your head on the table and cry’cause this is goodbye

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

How to Establish a Daily Practice of Almost Anything, in Six Steps

BY ANNE CUSHMA

NWhether it’s meditation, yoga, or your favorite creative activity, you’ll get so much more from doing it every day. Follow these six steps, says Anne Cushman, to enjoy all the benefits of daily practice.

Going to a retreat or program is a wonderful way to deepen our meditation practice. But how do we stay connected with these waking-up practices when we go home to the myriad projects, emails, responsibilities, and distractions waiting for us?

This is a question that applies not just to meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices, but to any creative art we want to commit to, such as painting, writing, or playing an instrument. Paradoxically, the practices we know are most vital to our wellbeing are the very things that are usually pushed aside by daily tasks that feel more urgent.

You may start each day intending to spend half an hour on your zafu, practice walking meditation in the park, or write three haikus capturing the essence of your insights. But you’re out of yogurt and broccoli, there are 237 unread emails in your inbox, your taxes were due last week, and your child has knocked out a tooth skateboarding or needs you to buy Japanese print fabric for a history project. So you put off meditating or working on your memoir for one more day. And then one more. And then one more.

Lately I’ve been offering students a six-step plan that I’ve found effective for establishing and maintaining a home practice of almost anything—even in the middle of a crazily busy life. I’ve used these principles to maintain a yoga and meditation practice for almost 30 years—and also to pursue various long-term artistic projects, such as writing a novel.

Here are six steps you can follow to establish a daily practice of almost anything:

1 Set Your Intention

Get very clear about what you want to commit to—and even more important, why.

Why is it important to you that you sustain a meditation practice—or do tai chi, or paint wildflowers? What part of you does it nourish? Write down your reasons. The more specific you are, the more likely you will be to do it. It’s not just “I want to meditate more.” It’s “I commit to meditating for ten minutes before I wake up the kids for school because it keeps me calm, grounded, and more present for my family.” To make your intention even stronger, share it with someone close to you. However, be careful about talking about it too widely—that can dissipate the energy.

Establish a Cue

2 This is what reminds you to start your practice. The most simple and reliable cue is a specific time. For instance, you decide you will meditate every evening from 9 to 9:30 p.m.It can also be a floating cue: you will do half an hour of yoga right after you finish work, whenever that happens to be. Or you will take ten mindful breaths whenever you are about to launch your email program. To ensure that your good intentions don’t get overrun by other plans, carve out the time in advance. Write it into your calendar and don’t schedule anything else during that period. Be sure to build in time for any preparations or cleanup that are necessary.

Remember, start modestly. Meditating for ten minutes every day for a year is more beneficial than meditating an hour a day for three days, then burning out. Again, it can help to let the people close to you know what you are doing, especially if you live together. That way they can support you in your commitment.

3 Round Up Your SuppliesMake sure you have everything you need for your practice in a place where you can find it easily. That way you don’t have to waste your precious time hunting them down. Maintain a meditation nook with an inviting cushion, a small altar, and a supply of incense and matches. If you want to write down your dreams every morning, place a notebook and pen on your bedside table.

4 Do Your PracticeSo you don’t spend your dedicated practice time spacing out or trying to figure out where to get started, it helps to have a plan in place, especially at first. Know what meditation method you intend to practice—for example, breath meditation or loving-kindness practice—and stick with one method for at least a week before switching. (If you’re planning on using a guided meditation, download or bookmark the instructions in advance, so you don’t eat up your meditation time surfing the web.)

If you’re doing yoga, outline a standard routine you can fall back on, knowing that if you get inspired, you can always change it once you get going. If you’re doing writing practice, put some prompts in your journal to get you started. 

5 Reward YourselfYes, theoretically the practice is its own reward. But especially when you’re establishing a new pattern, it helps to have an external reward as well. After your dawn meditation, make yourself a cup of green tea and sip it slowly while watching the sun come up. After your evening yoga, watch a silly movie with your kids. After you draw in your art journal, put a gold star sticker on your calendar. Our brains love this kind of positive reinforcement.

6 Track your progressKeeping a record of what you have and haven’t done increases your sense of accountability. Make this part fun! You can go the old-fashioned route by checking off boxes on a calendar. Or you can use one of the many new habit-tracking apps that are available. Remember, this is about celebrating your accomplishments, not beating yourself up when you miss a day. Through daily small changes of routine, your whole life can shift over time to a new trajectory. Just remember to enjoy the journey.

ABOUT ANNE CUSHMANAnne Cushman is the author of the memoir The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, AND THE PATH OF MOTHERHOOD; THE NOVEL ENLIGHTENMENT FOR IDIOTS; AND OTHER BOOKS. SHE DIRECTS THE MENTORING PROGRAM FOR THE MINDFULNESS MEDITATION TEACHER CERTIFICATION PROGRAM AND IS ON THE TEACHERS COUNCIL AT SPIRIT ROCK MEDITATION CENTER.

In light of the recent events in Washington DC and our nation the importance of bold and responsible journalism is clear. Dr. Heather Cos Richardson, a professor of 19th century American History at Boston College who resides on a small fishing island in Maine has become an unlikely “go-to” news source. Here is an article from the New York Times about her story.

Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working.
She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.
By Ben Smith Published Dec. 27, 2020

Last Wednesday, I broke the news to Heather Cox Richardson that she was the most successful individual author of a paid publication on the breakout newsletter platform Substack.

Early that morning, she had posted that day’s installment of “Letters From an American” to Facebook, quickly garnering more than 50,000 reactions and then, at 2:14 a.m., she emailed it to about 350,000 people.

She summarized, as she always does, the events of the day, and her 1,120 words covered a bipartisan vote on a spending measure, President Trump’s surprise attack on that bill, and a wave of presidential pardons.

Her voice was, as it always is, calm, at a slight distance from the moment: “Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice,” she wrote. “He has done so.”

The news of her ranking seemed to startle Dr. Richardson, who in her day job is a professor of 19th century American history at Boston College. The Substack leader board, a subject of fascination among media insiders, is a long way from her life on a Maine peninsula — particularly as the pandemic has ended her commute — that seems drawn from the era she studies.

On our Zoom chat, she sat under a portrait that appeared as if it could be her in period costume, but is, in fact, her great-great-grandmother, who lived in the same fishing village, population a bit over 600.

She says she tries not to think too much about the size of her audience because that would be paralyzing, and instead often thinks of what she’s writing as a useful primary document for some future version of her historian self. But there was no ignoring her metrics when her accountant told her how much she would owe in taxes this year, and, by extension, just how much revenue her unexpected success had brought. By my conservative estimate based on public and private Substack figures, the $5 monthly subscriptions to participate in her comments section are on track to bring in more than a million dollars a year, a figure she ascribes to this moment in history.
“We’re in an inflection moment of American politics, and one of the things that happens in that moment is that a lot of people get involved in politics again,” she said.

Many of those newly energized Americans are women around Dr. Richardson’s age, 58, and they form the bulk of her audience. She’s writing for people who want to leave an article feeling “smarter not dumber,” she says, and who don’t want to learn about the events of the day through the panicked channels of cable news and Twitter, but calmly situated in the long sweep of American history and values.

Dr. Richardson’s focus on straightforward explanations to a mass audience comes as much of the American media is going in the opposite direction, driven by the incentives of subscription economics that push newspapers, magazines, and cable channels alike toward super-serving subscribers, making you feel as if you’re on the right team, part of the right faction, at least a member of the right community. She’s not the only one to have realized that a lot of people feel left out of the media conversation. Many of the most interesting efforts in journalism in 2021, some of them nonprofit organizations inspired by last summer’s protests over racism, will be trying to reach people who are not part of that in-group chat. One new nonprofit, Capital B, plans to talk to Black audiences, while another well-regarded model is Detroit’s Outlier Media, which is relentlessly local and often delivered by text message. For Dr. Richardson’s audience, it’s an intimate connection. She spends hours a day answering emails from readers. She spent most of Saturday sending thank-you notes for Christmas presents.

The challenge for many of those efforts, and for nonprofit news organizations in general, has been reaching large numbers of people. Dr. Richardson, whose run of short essays began when she was stunned by the response to one she posted last September, has done that by accident, though she credits her huge audience of older women to the deepening gender gap in American politics. “What I am doing is speaking to women who have not necessarily been paying attention to politics, older people who had not been engaged,” Dr. Richardson said. “I’m an older woman and I’m speaking to other women about being empowered.”

Dr. Richardson confounds many of the media’s assumptions about this moment. She built a huge and devoted following on Facebook, which is widely and often accurately viewed in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists don’t see their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.

She also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to turn their social media followings into careers outside big media, and at times appears to be where purged ideological factions go to regroup. That’s true of Never Trump Republicans pushed out of conservative media, whose publications, The Dispatch and The Bulwark, are the largest brands on the platform (just above and below Dr. Richardson’s revenue, respectively). And it’s true of left-leaning writers who have broken bitterly with elements of the mainstream liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from the Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias to the firebrand Matt Taibbi, whom Dr. Richardson unseated from the top slot in late August.

Dr. Richardson happened into this frontier of the media business pretty much by chance. When readers on Facebook started suggesting she write a newsletter, she realized she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform, and jumped at Substack because it would allow her to send out her emails without charge to her or her readers.

Substack makes its money by taking a percentage of writers’ subscription revenue, and she said she felt guilty that the company’s support team wasn’t getting paid for fixing her recurring problem: that her extensive footnotes set off her readers’ spam filters. She seemed intensely uncomfortable talking about the money her work is bringing in.“If you start doing things for the money, they stop being authentic,” she said, adding that she knew that was both a privilege of her tenured professorship and “an old Puritan way of looking at things.”

Like the other Substack writers, Dr. Richardson is succeeding because she’s offering something you can’t find in the mainstream media, and indeed that many editors would assume was too boring to assign. But unlike the others, it’s not her politics, per se: She thinks of her politics as Lincoln-era Republican, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on America’s institutions.

She’s a historian who studied under the great Harvard Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald, and her work on 19th century political history feels particularly relevant right now. This spring, she published her sixth book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America,” an extended assault on the kind of nostalgia that animates Mr. Trump’s fight to preserve Confederate symbols. The face of the South in Dr. Richardson’s book is a bitterly racist and sexually abusive South Carolina planter and senator, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s notion that all men are created equal “ridiculously absurd.”What is unusual is to bring a historian’s confident context to the day’s mundane politics. She invoked Senator Hammond when Representative Kevin McCarthy and other Republican leaders signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to reverse the presidential election, comparing the Republican action to moments in American history when legislators explicitly questioned the very idea of democracy.“Ordinary men should, Hammond explained, have no say over policies, because they would demand a greater share of the wealth they produced,” she wrote.

She is, ultimately, offering what feels like straightforward, if thoughtful, answers to the big questions about America right now. One subscriber, Dani Smart, 50, who works for her family real estate brokerage in Richland, Wash., told me that Dr. Richardson helped her “sort through this maelstrom.” (In fact, the edgier younger sibling of Dr. Richardson’s “Letters From an American” is a newsletter that’s called “WTF Just Happened Today?”

Its founder, Matt Kiser, says he reaches more than 200,000 subscribers a day and is supporting the business on voluntary contributions.)Dr. Richardson’s “readers are people who have been orphaned by the changes in media and the sensationalism and the meanness of so much of Twitter and Facebook, and they were surprised to find her there and pleased and spread the word,” said Bill Moyers, the former Lyndon B. Johnson aide and public television mainstay.

Dr. Richardson isn’t sure what she’ll do next. She plans to keep writing her letters through Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first 100 days as president. But her routine isn’t sustainable: She makes dinner most nights and eats with her partner, a lobsterman, then starts reading. She often falls asleep facedown on her desk for an hour around 11 p.m. before getting back up to write.

I’ve been getting “Letters From an American” in my inbox since July, and I have to admit that I rarely open them. I live on Twitter much of the time, where yesterday is old news, and everyone assumes you know the context. I find it hard to hit the brakes to look at a print newspaper, much less Dr. Richardson’s rich summaries.

When I confessed that to Mr. Moyers, he didn’t seem surprised. “You live in a world of thunderstorms,” he said, “and she watches the waves come in.”

Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that, he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer and The New York Sun.

Joys & Concerns

When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain

New Year Joy!
We enjoyed last week’s Sunday service and were refreshed by the cold air and warmed by the burning Yule Log.  Our list to burn is very long!  A lovely and meaningful way to begin the New Year.Posted by Dale Holden

Please add my nephew to the prayer list.  Adam MacDonald he has been known as the boy in the wheel chair for years in Presque Isle.  He was on the channel 8 news tonight. (Friday) posted by Susan Carmichael

The Christmas Eve Candlelight Service has 155 views (as of Friday) surpassing the Thanksgiving “Float The Gravy Boat!” Service of 152. And we now have 45 subscribers!Keep sharing with friends what we’re doing at UUHoulton.

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!

The USA is now averaging over 4,000 coronavirus deaths per day.

The vaccines are becoming more readily available but there are millions and millions to inoculate.   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.

Climate Update; January 2021

“PPM” stands for “parts per million,” which is a way of measuring the ratio of carbon dioxide molecules to all of the other molecules in the atmosphere. Countless scientists, climate experts, and governments officials agree that 350 ppm is the “safe” level of carbon dioxide. On May 9, 2013, CO₂ levels in the air reached the level of 400 parts per million (ppm). This is the first time in human history that this milestone has been passed. The 400 ppm mark is considered by many to be a “red line,” the crossing of which poses dangerous climate ramifications. 

Climate activist Bill McKibben’s climate change initiative 350.org was so named because 350 ppm is considered by many scientists to be the upper limit of safe CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. “Right now we’re at 400 ppm, and we’re adding 2 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year,” the initiative’s website reads. “Unless we are able to rapidly turn that around and return to below 350 ppm this century, we risk triggering tipping points and irreversible impacts that could send climate change spinning truly beyond our control.”

Last CO2 Earth update: 3:35:03 AM on Jan. 8, 2021, Hawaii local time (UTC -10)

This table presents the most up-to-date, daily average reading for atmospheric CO2 on the planet.  Units = parts per million (ppm).  Measurement location = Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. Source = NOAA-ESRL.  See the tabs below for more info and CO2 readings.