“little blues” 2022
Memorial Day week-end is here; time to get flowers in the window boxes, some seeds in the ground and fire up the grill. In this week’s in-person Sunday service we will remember those who have served our country and those who have worked to make our living democracy possible. This is doing “the hard work” of building a civil society even when the obstacles are numerous. The title of the talk is “Singing in the Dark.”
Looking ahead to next week, our Flower Communion service is on Sunday, June 5th in the sanctuary. The service includes special music for the occasion, welcoming new members, our flower communion ritual and a light luncheon in the parlor following the service. Hopefully it will be a nice enough day to mingle on the church front lawn and soak up some sun. Bring a lawn chair if you like.
If you would like to donate to the church luncheon (consisting of fruit, vegetable and sandwich platters) you can contact our moderator, Leigh (207-694-5732) or our treasurer, Donna (207-295-6241). More details to follow.
It seems like all we’re hearing about lately is rising inflation and higher prices on everything. If that’s something you can relate to, this week’s online YouTube Service is titled “Murphy’s Law” and explores what happens and what it feels like when Murphy’s Law kicks in.
Please join us for one of the services this weekend.
Sunday Service Update:
During coffee hour last month we conducted an informal survey of how people felt about continuing in-person Sunday Services with safety precautions in place and after a discussion with the church leadership we are (cautiously) moving ahead with in-person Sunday Services. The on-line digital options will still continue including the zoom coffee hour and check-in. As we move forward we will continue to monitor the covid numbers in the State and in our community and base any change on those numbers. We hope that everyone will find a way to participate in the life of our spiritual community in a manner that is safe and meaningful.
Have a good week-end everyone.
In Ministry,
Dave
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
https://youtu.be/aRXXCP7nWbc
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hour and check-inTime: May 29, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/85394513760?pwd=VmgvZ2Z0c3lVcTJUMEdMd3p3bzZ3QT09
Meeting ID: 853 9451 3760 Passcode: 215771
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. You can also send your donation electronically with our new payment system on the church website. Simply go to uuhoulton.org and click “Donate” on the menu and it will explain how the system works. You can set up a regular monthly payment plan or donate in single transactions.
Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton
61 Military Street
Houlton, ME 04730
Fragrant
A smell could take Marianna Pogosyan back in time, or she could stay present to this precious, fleeting moment.
The last time I had used my time machine was one year ago, on some Tuesday morning in early March. My husband and I often shared the drive to work, and it was one of my favorite hours of the day. He’d dream about free highways and self-driving electric cars. I’d fret about the kids going to bed too late. Sometimes, he’d watch me in his rear-view mirror as I smeared color on my lips. Finally, I’d pull out my time machine, pop open its coral lid, and bring it to my neck.
One spritz on the left.
One spritz on the right.
Suddenly, the air around me would bloom with notes of jasmine and gardenia, and in a Proustian instant, I would be transported across decades and continents.
And there I am, age fifteen, lounging on a Hawaiian beach. My bronzed feet are sticking out from the white sand my younger brother is piling on me. My father is in the water, lecturing a family of tiny fish assembled around his giant legs. My mother is next to me, with a towel over her shoulders, thumbing through the magazine she bought at the airport. Quivers of ukulele merge with the purr of the waves. The air smells of delicate flowers, just like the ones in my time machine.
Neurobiologically, smell and memory are a well-traveled road. Which means that in some post-pandemic future, thanks to our olfactory-hippocampus superhighways, a whiff of alcohol sanitizers could send us back here. Again.
“What do you think?” My husband’s voice dispelled my mirage of perfect happiness on that Tuesday.
“About what?”
“About why I have this weird feeling that I can’t get enough air?” he grimaced, rubbing his hand on his chest.
I offered my guesses—stress? bad night? cafeteria curry?—the remembered sun still warm on my skin.
But he had his own hypothesis.
“It’s your perfume!” he blurted, opening the windows around me. “You can’t spray that thing in the car anymore. It gives me asthma.”
There was not a trace of my perfume left in the car when we saw each other again. But he still could not breathe. On our way home, we stopped at the ER. He had no fever, so they sent us home, where we pulled the kids out of school and locked our doors. A few days later, frail and shaking, we woke up to a new world of pandemic.
A year on, it’s still the same new world outside our windows.
I bring the silver tip of my time machine to my neck.
One spritz on the left.
One spritz on the right.
And there I go again, tumbling through time and space.
But instead of lying next to my parents on a Hawaiian beach, I am standing in front of my Tuesday morning Cultural Psychology class. We are discussing “untranslatables”—words from different languages with no exact equivalents in English.
The magic of odor-induced time travel comes down to evolution. According to recent research, as our sensory apparatus rerouted to accommodate our growing brains, olfaction appears to have escaped the great rearrangement.
As a result, our sense of smell—unlike the rest of our senses—maintained a direct access to the hippocampus, the memory seat of the brain. Neurobiologically, smell and memory are a well-traveled road. Which means that in some post-pandemic future, thanks to our olfactory-hippocampal superhighways, a whiff of alcohol sanitizers could send us back here. Again.
Which moments, from a year of loss, would you wish to revisit?
Given the choice, I’d plot my time–space coordinates to when my grandmother’s words would finally reach me from across the planet.
“Don’t let your heart get narrow,” Grandmother would conclude our Zoom conversations about war and love, food and grief, everything and nothing. “Make a ring from my words and hang them on your ears,” her halo of white hair nodding on my screen. “Keep your heart wide.”
Grandmother, who in her nine decades had become a reluctant expert in loss, was not specific on the how of her insistent counsel. Apparently, I had to come to it myself.
It wasn’t difficult to keep things wide and spacious when skies were Hawaiian blue. Human hearts opened to joy.
Like heliotropic plants following the sun, they turned toward light.
But when the skies darkened and gales howled, hearts preferred to stay unabashedly narrow, with their locks
intact and guards at the ready.
Last year, the gales didn’t stop. I made peace with the increasingly fragile disarmament treaty I had with my own heart and went for a walk.
In the stretch of woods behind our house, the air smelled of fresh rain. The trees, with their straight backs and curved limbs, were reaching toward the clouds. Some of their trunks looked like the legs of elephants, ancient and stable. Others looked like young storks, nimble and restless, ready to flee with the first kiss of wind. The red-breasted robins had volumes to sing about. The woodpecker didn’t bother with their spring tales.
He had bark to drum on, lunch to secure. Life spewed forth from the pores of the forest floor. My eyes stumbled on color. Purple crocuses, lime moss, white snowdrops, yellow daffodils had overpowered the thawing carpet of dead leaves to announce the change of seasons.
A child giggled. A young labradoodle, blissful for no reason, ran up to me, his caramel-colored ears flapping all around him. He had the same trusting brown eyes as the dog we had just lost.
He bumped his wet nose against my hand, just as Teddy liked to do. He must have smelled the treats that were still in my winter coat pockets. Even his isn’t-this-day-marvelous bark sounded familiar. I swallowed through my smile and wondered if it was possible to love someone at first and last sight. Yes, I decided.
As I watched him bolt toward his owner, the “untranslatables” from my classroom board suddenly swam into the tasty forest air. There it was, the Greek word charmolypi that married happiness and sorrow; there it was, the Japanese mono no aware that alluded to the pathos of impermanence; there it was, the Latin memento mori, the reminder of death and hence, the reminder that as long as breath danced in and out of your lungs as you went about your Tuesday mornings, leaving your footprints on Earth’s four-billion-year-old skin, you were one with the miracle of life. A precious and rare life. And while it is nothing short of miraculous that a network of 86 billion neurons could send us flying to the past on a whiff of a scent, perhaps the greatest gift was in staying put with the fleeting moments in real time.
Because it’s here where we discovered that even the most imperfect of years teemed with micro-bursts of eucatastrophe (English: a sudden happy resolution of events).
Even the queens of the heliotropic flora know how to stay put. At each dusk, mature sunflowers saluted the sun’s
first rays, and kept their majestic heads facing east, once and for all. It’s as if a childhood of tracking the rise and fall of light had them convinced that the sun was always there, whether they saw it or not.
There is a ransom life demands for the proof that the good we seek, just like the sun, is all around us.
The same humble ransom that helped Grandmother survive her gales of unspeakable grief.
The heart, again and again, was to be beckoned to open.
If not as wide as the world itself, then wide enough for any wonders strolling idly, looking for things to do, to slip quietly in.
ABOUT MARIANNA POGOSYAN
Born in Armenia and raised in Japan, Marianna Pogosyan currently lives in the Netherlands, where she is a lecturer in cultural psychology. She is a consultant to international executives and their families on psychological adaptation to life far from home.
Poetry Corner
In light of the recent shootings in our country, inaugueration poet Amanda Gorman wrote this poem which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times.
Hymn for the Hurting
By Amanda Gorman
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.
Ms. Gorman is a poet and the author of “The Hill We Climb,” “Call Us What We Carry” and “Change Sings.”
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
Pray for peace
The war in Ukraine is in its third month
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Southern California
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Uvalde , Texas
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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