“red echinacea” (sombrero sangrita red)
It’s hard to believe this is the last day of July (it seems like summer has just begun) but August is about to make its entrance. Of course there are advantages as the summer continues; the black flies and mosquitoes have diminished, the lawn mowing has slowed down and Houlton Farms Dairy still has plenty of ice cream. I keep reminding myself to enjoy each day of summer and proceed knowing the days are numbered but each one is amazing. While summer is a time for travel and new adventures it is also a time to slow down and try not to do too much.
The title of this week’s service is “Going Nowhere,” exploring the value of non-travel and doing nothing special at all. I hope you can join us in-person or catch last week’s service on our church website or YouTube Channel. (It looks like we’ll be shifting to a one-week delay on our recorded services.) If you would like to join us for zoom coffee hour the link will be active by 11:15 on Sunday morning.
The link to last week’s July 25, 2021 Sunday Service: https://youtu.be/QgqkE7LYNK4
Covid cases are also on the increase in the state and the town of Houlton. At this point we plan to continue in-person Sunday services in the parlor but individuals may want to wear a mask to the service and take precaution by social distancing. We will continue to monitor conditions week to week and keep you informed.
The Houlton Congregational Church is holding a special service of Celebration and Leave Taking on August 8th at 11AM as they meet for the last time after two hundred and ten years as a religious organization in our community.
UUHoulton will be joining them for the service and hosting a reception in their honor afterwards. We had a delightful planning meeting a couple of weeks ago during coffee hour and preparations are in progress. There will be a light luncheon in the parlor after the service with sandwiches, finger foods, fruit and a vegetable platter. We invite members of the group to bring bring homemade desserts to accompany the food.
Have a great week-end everyone.
Practice patience and kindness.
In Ministry,
Dave
LAST WEEK’S SUNDAY SERVICE LINK:
HERE IS THE ZOOM COFFEE HOUR LINK FOR THIS SUNDAY:
(It may take us until 11:15 to get the zoom set up and ready so keep that in mind…)
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: zoom coffee hour
Time: Aug 1, 2021 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Sun, until Sep 5, 2021, 6 occurrence(s) Aug 1, 2021 11:00 AM Aug 8, 2021 11:00 AM Aug 15, 2021 11:00 AM Aug 22, 2021 11:00 AM Aug 29, 2021 11:00 AM Sep 5, 2021 11:00 AMPlease download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/92563972294?pwd=YXB4WTJucTdFQlp2N3lzTmFrVzNZQT09
Meeting ID: 925 6397 2294 Passcode: 289694
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Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kcVx1d7kQL
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UU Church of Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
from Brain PickingsMy name is Maria Popova and Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love exploring what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life.
The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power
BY MARIA POPOVA“It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.” -Carson
“Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” philosopher Alan Watts wrote in the 1950s as he contemplated the interconnected nature of the universe. What we may now see as an elemental truth of existence was then a notion both foreign and frightening to the Western mind. But it was a scientist, not a philosopher, who levered this monumental shift in consciousness: Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964), a Copernicus of biology who ejected the human animal from its hubristic place at the center of Earth’s ecological cosmos and recast it as one of myriad organisms, all worthy of wonder, all imbued with life and reality. Her lyrical writing rendered her not a mere translator of the natural world, but an alchemist transmuting the steel of science into the gold of wonder. The message of her iconic Silent Spring (public library) rippled across public policy and the population imagination — it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, inspired generations of activists, and led Joni Mitchell to write lyrics as beloved as “Hey farmer farmer — / Put away the DDT / Give me spots on my apples, / but leave me the birds and the bees. / Please!”
A scientist without a Ph.D. or a Y chromosome or academic affiliation became the most powerful voice of resistance against ruinous public policy mitigated by the self-interest of government and industry, against the hauteur and short-sightedness threatening to destroy this precious pale blue dot which we, along with countless other animals, call home.
In 1935, 28-year-old Carson was asked to write a brochure for the Fisheries Bureau. When she turned in something infinitely more poetic than her supervisor had envisioned, he asked her to rewrite the brochure but encouraged her to submit the piece as an essay for The Atlantic Monthly. She did. It was accepted and published as “Undersea” in 1937 — a first of its kind, immensely lyrical journey into the science of the ocean floor inviting an understanding of Earth from a nonhuman perspective. Readers and publishers were instantly smitten. Carson, by then the sole provider for her mother and her two orphaned nieces after her older sister’s death, expanded her Atlantic article into her first book, Under the Sea-Wind — the culmination of a decade of her oceanographic research, which rendered her an overnight literary success. Against towering cultural odds, these books about the sea established her — once a destitute girl from landlocked Pennsylvania — as the most celebrated science writer of her time.
But the more Carson studied and wrote about nature, the more cautious she became of humanity’s rampant quest to dominate it. Witnessing the devastation of the atomic bomb awakened her to the unintended consequences of science unmoored from morality, of a hysterical enthusiasm for technology that deafened humanity to the inner voice of ethics. In her 1952 acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal, she concretized her credo:
It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
One of the consequences of wartime science and technology was the widespread use of DDT, initially intended for protecting soldiers from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. After the end of the war, the toxic chemical was lauded as a miracle substance. People were sprayed down with DDT to ward off disease and airplanes doused agricultural plots in order to decimate pest and maximize crop yield. It was neither uncommon nor disquieting to see a class of schoolchildren eating their lunch while an airplane aiming at a nearby field sprinkled them with DDT. A sort of blind faith enveloped the use of these pesticides, with an indifferent government and an incurious public raising no questions about their unintended consequences.
In January of 1958, Carson received a letter from an old writer friend named Olga Owens Huckins, alerting her that the aerial spraying of DDT had devastated a local wildlife sanctuary. Huckins described the ghastly deaths of birds, claws clutched to their breasts and bills agape in agony. This local tragedy was the final straw in Carson’s decade-long collection of what she called her “poison-spray material” — a dossier of evidence for the harmful, often deadly effects of toxic chemicals on wildlife and human life. That May, she signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin for what would become Silent Spring in 1962 — the firestarter of a book that ignited the conservation movement and awakened the modern environmental consciousness.***Carson withstood the criticism with composure and confidence, shielded by the integrity of her facts. But another battle raged invisible to the public eye — she was dying.
She had been diagnosed with cancer in 1960, which had metastasized due to her doctor’s negligence. In 1963, when Silent Spring stirred President Kennedy’s attention and he summoned a Congressional hearing to investigate and regulate the use of pesticides, Carson didn’t hesitate to testify even as her body was giving out from the debilitating pain of the disease and the wearying radiation treatments. With her testimony as a pillar, JFK and his Science Advisory Committee invalidated her critics’ arguments, heeded Carson’s cautionary call to reason, and created the first federal policies designed to protect the planet.
Carson endured the attacks — those of her cancer and those of her critics — with unwavering heroism. She saw the former with a biologist’s calm acceptance of the cycle of life and had anticipated the latter all along. She was a spirited idealist, but she wasn’t a naïve one — from the outset, she was acutely aware that her book was a clarion call for nothing less than a revolution and that it was her moral duty to be the revolutionary she felt called to be. Just a month after signing the book contract, she articulates this awareness in a letter found in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964 (public library) — the record of her beautiful and unclassifiable relationship with her dearest friend and beloved.
Carson writes to Freeman: I know you dread the unpleasantness that will inevitably be associated with [the book’s] publication. That I can understand, darling. But it is something I have taken into account; it will not surprise me! You do know, I think, how deeply I believe in the importance of what I am doing. Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent… It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.In that sense, the eventual title of Silent Spring was a dual commentary on how human hubris is robbing Earth of its symphonic aliveness and on the moral inadmissibility of remaining silent about the destructive forces driving this loss. Carson upheld that sense of duty while confronting her own creaturely finitude as she underwent rounds of grueling cancer treatment. In a letter to Freeman from the autumn of 1959, she reports:Mostly, I feel fairly good but I do realize that after several days of concentrated work on the book I’m suddenly no good at all for several more. Some people assume only physical work is tiring — I guess because they use their minds little! Friday night … my exhaustion invaded every cell of my body, I think, and really kept me from sleeping well all night.
Silent Spring was published on September 27, 1962 and adrenalized a new public awareness of the fragile interconnectedness of this living world. Several months later, CBS host Eric Sevareid captured its impact most succinctly in lauding Carson as “a voice of warning and a fire under the government.” In the book, she struck a mighty match:
When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence … it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth.
How tragic to observe that in the half-century since, our so-called leaders have devolved from half-truths to “alternative facts” — that is, to whole untruths that fail the ultimate criterion for truth: a correspondence with reality
.Carson, who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, never lived to see the sea change of policy and public awareness that her book precipitated. Today, as a new crop of political and corporate interests threatens her hard-won legacy of environmental consciousness, I think of that piercing Adrienne Rich line channeling the great 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, another scientist who fundamentally revolutionized our understanding of the universe and our place in it: “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”
Let’s not let Rachel Carson seem to have lived in vain.
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.
When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
JOYS
The Blue Moose in Monticello has re-opened under new management. Hillary Ellis and her husband Joshua Ford are the enthusiastic new owners and invite everyone to swing by and check out their menu. Hillary and Josh are affiliated with UUHoulton and were married several years ago in our sanctuary. Gwydion Griffith is also on staff at the Blue Moose.
Happy 175th Anniversary to the town of Monticello!
CONCERNS
Covid numbers are trending up around the country and other parts of the world. The virus continues to mutate and the Delta variant is particularly difficult to monitor and combat. Please remain diligent.
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
For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of Maine
Local emergency personnel and hospital staff
For our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisis
For those working for social justice and societal change
Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation
Prayers for the heat wave in the American West and wide spread drought conditions
Prayers for those affected by the floods in Europe, India and China
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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