These days it seems like it’s getting more and more difficult to get straight answers from anyone about anything. With fake news and media misinformation running rampant in our current culture the need for reliable informational sources is critical to living a sane and informed life. How can we tell what is going on and who to listen to when conflicting news streams are enough to make our head spin? In this week’s service we take a look at Straight Talk in a confusing and befuddling world.
Today’s Support Page includes an article by Oren Jay Sofer on right speech for some extra reading on the topic.
Have a great week-end everyone and we hope you can join us for the UUHoulton weekly service.
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.
Practice patience and kindness.
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 Houlton
61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
A Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Rest In Poetry
by Abby Zimet, Further columnist for Common DreamsPortland, Maine
We bid fond farewell to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, indefatigable poet, publisher, painter, pacifist, iconoclast, political activist, “heart of the Beat generation” and “legend of American letters, bookselling, rabble rousing, wild dreaming” who co-founded San Francisco’s iconic City Lights bookstore and became a hometown icon himself. He died Monday at 101 after a lifetime of extolling poetry as “insurgent art,” while “awaiting/ perpetually and forever/ a renaissance of wonder.”
Born in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1919, he grew up essentially an orphan; after university, he became a journalist, joined the Navy during World War Two, and on the GI Bill went to work on his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he began writing poetry.
In 1953, back in the U.S. he founded City Lights with a friend who left soon after; Ferlinghetti stayed, becoming to many devotees a steadfast champion of the Beats, “a psychic ballast…the keepsake of ancient dreams and dimly remembered fables.” City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night, creating a home for poets, anti-war activists and other countercultural denizens with a vibrant atmosphere and its own singular principles. A sign on the wall declared, “We will not call the police for book thieves. But they may be publicly shamed.”
In 1955, Ferlinghetti first heard Allen Ginsberg’s seminal, explicit poem Howl; he sent Ginsberg a telegram: “I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. STOP. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCRIPT OF HOWL?” After publishing it, his copies of the poem were seized and he and Ginsberg were arrested on obscenity charges in 1957. The ACLU successfully defended the poem at a months-long trial, where the judge ruled it was not obscene due to its “redeeming social significance.”
In 1958, Ferlinghetti published his own first collection, A Coney Island of the Mind – written “to be performed aloud with a jazz accompaniment” – which has sold over a million copies. He went on to write more than 50 volumes of poetry, along with novels and travel journals; he dismissed the notion of “process” in his writing, arguing his poems “were born full-blown, full-grown out of the air.” As a publisher, he long focused on poetry, along with offbeat or radical books ignored by the mainstream; among the Beat legends he introduced to America were Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso.
In his “Constantly Risking Absurdity,” he likened himself and his fellow poets to acrobats as they fly above the circus, seeking to perceive “taut truth” and beauty while “spreadeagled in the empty air of existence.”
In later decades, Ferlinghetti remained active at City Lights and became a hometown avatar: “He was San Francisco. He will always be San Francisco.” The city named a street after him, appointed him their first Poet Laureate, and to mark his centennial declared March 24, his birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day, with month-long events. On his 100th birthday he also published his final book, Little Boy, an autobiographical stream-of- consciousness novel; his publisher wanted to call it a “memoir,” but Ferlinghetti found the term too “genteel.”
In recent years, he was nearly blind and could no longer bike and walk around his city, but he retained a busy life. At 99, he was described in an interview with The Paris Review as “still unbent, and all attempts to persuade him to adopt a cane have been rebuffed”; despite his fame, he remained “deficient in any aggrandized sense of self.”
As news of his death came, New Directions, his publisher for over 60 years, declared, “May we all live so long and so well.” He was celebrated as “eternal hero, liberator of the amusement park mind, the quiet bookstore clerk as 1-man molotov.”
Many thanked him for “bringing the Beat poets and other great writers up to the surface,” for introducing them to “unreality” and “a life” and poetry itself. “You’re just on another road now,” read one goodbye. “Say hi to Allen, Jack and Neal.” The most apt farewells were, somehow, the most succinct: “Bummer…My condolences to the world….Rest in poetry.” Yes.
A Vast Confusionby Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Long long I lay in the sands
Sounds of trains in the surf
in subways of the sea
And an even greater undersound
of a vast confusion in the universe
a rumbling and a roaring
as of some enormous creature turning
under sea and earth
a billion sotto voices murmuring
a vast muttering
a swelling stuttering
in ocean’s speakers
world’s voice-box heard with ear to sand
a shocked echoing
a shocking shouting
of all life’s voices lost in night
And the tape of it
someow running backwards now
through the Moog Synthesizer of time
Chaos unscrambled
back to the first
harmonies
And the first light
Constantly Risking Absurdity
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his wayto the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he’s the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charley
chaplin manw
ho may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.
Bird With Two Right Wings
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
And now our government
a bird with two right wings
flies on from zone to zone
while we go on having our little fun & games
at each election
as if it really mattered who the pilot is
of Air Force One
(They’re interchangeable, stupid!)
While this bird with two right wings
flies right on with its corporate flight crew
And this year its the Great Movie Cowboy in the cockpit
And next year its the great Bush pilot
And now its the Chameleon Kid
and he keeps changing the logo on his captains cap
and now its a donkey and now an elephant
and now some kind of donkephant
And now we recognize two of the crew
who took out a contract on America
and one is a certain gringo wretch
who’s busy monkey
wrenching
crucial parts of the engine
and its life-support systems
and they got a big fat hose
to siphon off the fuel to privatized tanks
And all the while we just sit therein the passenger seats
without parachutes
listening to all the news that’s fit to air
over the one-way PA system
about how the contract on America
is really good for us etcetera
As all the while the plane lumbers on
into its postmodern
manifest destiny
When to Speak and When to Listen
You have a choice—using it wisely can spell the difference between misunderstanding and meaningful dialogue.
When it comes to conversation, the force of our habits and the pressure of social settings can make it exceedingly difficult to maintain awareness.
Here, mindfulness practice serves as a basis. We can use the arena of conversation itself as a training ground for presence, using techniques to anchor awareness within the midst of exchange and developing the capacity for relational awareness.
Consciously choosing when to speak and when to listen is essential for meaningful conversation. In some respects, it’s the most basic communication skill.
How many times have you said something, only to wish you could take it back moments after the words left your mouth? Or hit “Send” on an email when it might have been better to let things cool off?
It’s equally important to have the courage to say our piece. When we don’t speak up, we can feel as if we’ve let ourselves or our loved ones down. Conversation is a dynamic interplay between each person’s choice to speak or listen. When those choices are conscious and respectful, conversations tend to be more productive and enjoyable. If those choices are unconscious or impulsive, conversations tend to be less productive and more stressful.
I call this juncture the “choice point” between speaking and listening. With presence, every moment offers a choice. Our ability to maintain presence at the choice point takes practice. Sometimes the moment of choice races by like a road sign while we are doing 75 miles per hour on the freeway. The impulse to speak can be so strong that it impels us to verbalize simply to release the internal pressure. If we tend toward the quieter side, it can feel as if those openings in a conversation disappear before we can muster our voice.
This is where mindfulness comes in. In meditation, we learn how to observe unpleasant sensations (knee pain, a sore back) without immediately reacting. We develop the capacity to be aware of an impulse without acting on it. The anxiety we feel in conversation is usually rooted in deeper needs to be seen or heard, needs for safety, acceptance, belonging, and so on. The less confident we feel in meeting those needs, the more pressure we will experience to speak up or remain silent. We may fear that if we don’t say something right now we’ll never be able to do so. Or that if we do say something, disaster or disconnection will surely ensue.
The more ways we find to meet those needs (and to handle them skillfully when they aren’t met), the less pressure we feel to speak or remain silent; we can relax into the flow of a conversation. There’s no danger in speaking our mind and no rush to say it all at once. If it’s important, we’ll find the right time and way to say it.This capacity builds slowly. As we practice honoring our needs, we learn to trust ourselves.
Paying attention to any small successes helps our nervous system settle and reset. With a new baseline of ease, it can stop setting off false alarms that impel us to speak or prevent us from speaking, and our ability to make more conscious choices grows. We can then discern what’s going to be most helpful to move a conversation forward and how to balance all the needs on the table.
Practice:
CHOICE POINTS
To practice, choose someone with whom you feel relatively comfortable. This familiarity makes it easier to learn the tool. During a conversation, notice when you choose to speak. If you find yourself talking without having consciously chosen to do so, try stopping and leaving space for the other person to continue. Notice what it’s like to actively choose to say something rather than doing so automatically. Pay particular attention to any urgency or reluctance to speak or any sensations of internal pressure. Use that pressure as a signal to make a more conscious choice.
MEETINGSThere tends to be more freedom to remain silent in meetings than during one-to-one conversations. The next time you are in a meeting, notice how the impulse to speak can rise and fall as the conversation unfolds. If there is an important point you’d like to make, choose when to do so. You can always begin, “I’d like to go back to something we were talking about a few moments ago.” Notice how it feels after you speak. Is there relief? Anxiety or self-doubt?
WRITTEN COMMUNICATIONExperiment with making conscious choices about when you check your inbox or social media feeds (“listening”). When you do engage, pause before replying to consider whether or not you want to “speak.” Is this the right time? Would it be useful to wait or to say nothing at all?Part of this investigation is getting to know our own patterns. Do we tend to speak easily and freely, finding it harder to leave space for others? Is it more comfortable for us to listen, finding it challenging to come forward?Most of us tend to be stronger in one area. Circumstances and events tied to our gender, race, class, or other aspects of our social location tend to mold how we show up relationally. We’ve all received messages—explicitly and implicitly, personally and through media, stories, and culture—about how we are expected to behave. Through various cues of approval or disapproval, inclusion or exclusion, we learn what’s safest based on our role and the expectations of others.Our work is to uncover these patterns and develop an authentic freedom of expression. There is no ideal way to be, no one thing to do in all circumstances. The goal is dynamic flexibility through presence, choosing to speak or listen as needed.
♦
Adapted from Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication, by Oren Jay Sofer © 2018. Shambhala Publications (shambhala.com).
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
Here is the link to the YouTube video we watched at zoom coffee hour last week. This is Peter Gabriel and Playing For Change performing “Biko” a tribute to Bantu Steve Biko the slain Apartheid leader from South Africa. Check last week’s Support Page for more background on Biko.
https://youtu.be/jWNEr4eHL18
In memory of Jonathan Miller (1969-2021)
Jonathan P. Miller, 51, passed away February 18, 2021, in Presque Isle after a hard fought battle with cancer. He was born April 4, 1969 to Clifton and Alta (Nelson) Miller. Jon was a proud member of the United Vets Motorcycle Club which he played an active role in as Vice President. On top of that, Jon was also a proud member of North Country Cruisers. The clubs that Jon was a part of helped him show his passion for classic cars, motorcycles, and buying and selling antiques.
Bangor Daily Obituary
Jon was also an active promoter and fundraiser for local musicians, the Houlton Humane Society and other charitable causes. I knew Jon from growing up with him in Monticello and he is the uncle of Derek Mills (drummer for Gunther Brown). Jon hung out at the Cup Cafe and Houlton Coffeehouse on numerous occasions. He will be missed.
posted by Dave
Ceremony at the White House this week commemorating the loss of 500,000 American lives to Covid.
MaryAlice Musingsfrom her writer’s blog maryalice-musings.blogspot.comFebruary 20, 2021
“sparks”While volunteering at Patten’s Covid Vaccine Site earlier this month, I got to talking with one of the nurses and somehow he and I got on the subject of my new kick sled. He got excited, he knew about kick sleds and shared that when him and his partner were in Norway he saw them everywhere. He talked about going to a tavern in the little town and parked outside everyone’s “spark” ! He sent me a couple of pictures and the next day he texted that he had ordered two kicksleds from Ely Bike and Kick Sled, maybe we will have kick sleds parked in front of the new micro brewery that will be opening later this year….so next winter we can hop on our sparks and kick on over.
Tomorrow I am going out to Mt. Chase Lodge and will bring my “spark” – the sun is supposed to be shining bright. There are groomed and packed trails and I am ready to go.
So I have been learning about kick sleds and in no importance here are a few random “spark” facts:
Kicksleds were first used in Scandanavian countries in the late 19th Century.
Kick translates to “spark” in Swedish and Norwegian.
To steer the kicksled, you can simply shift your weight from side to side.
A kicksled can act as a great trail-walker-turned-extreme-adventure.
Snow-packed driveways, trails and sledding hills can all be great spots to try kicksledding!
I have enjoyed kicking around town as they have not put down lots of sand, so I can still get around…might get a little more snow tonight. Perfect for kicking.
Please continue to send in joys and concerns during the week to revdav@mfx.net and I will post them on the Support Page.
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 available by church member email and request.
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.
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