sideways lupine
The lupine is at-peak in northern Maine and it’s one of my favorite times of year. You’ll see a photo of the lupine field on the Hutchinson farm in this week’s support page. There was no lupine at all on the property until about twenty years ago (I have no idea how it started) but now it is one of the highlights of June. I am currently on vacation so I won’t be at this week’s in-person Sunday service in the sanctuary. Fen Carmichael is leading the service.
This week’s online YouTube Service is titled “Budget-Crunch.” Right now with everything that’s going on in our country and in the world, it’s no small task to attain moderate happiness. The rising price of a gallon of gas, a bag of groceries or a tank of fuel oil and widespread inflation is stressing everyone’s budget, and that in return, can stress our happiness.
Please join us for one of the services this weekend. This week’s Father’s Day Service at church will be led by Jeffrey Carmichael.
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/KhQgWxLB0yY
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: Jun 19, 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: 215771Virtual 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 Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
Waking Up to the World
BY PICO IYER
Pico Iyer meets the good people of a maligned place. Travel broadens the mind and opens the heart.
Goats were foraging along the empty, cracked main street. My taxi stopped at a red light—the only car in sight—and a hollow-cheeked old woman hammered at the window. There were no playgrounds to be seen, few shops, no bright lights. After forty years of unceasing warfare—the Brits, the Soviets, every group from North Yemen—the little town of Aden, on the oil-rich coastline of South Yemen, was as shattered a place as I had seen.
I’d been there, as it happened, when I was two years old. In those days Aden was the busiest port in the world outside Manhattan. Great ships stopped for refueling as they traveled between Britain and British India, and the place throbbed with all the energy that arises when East first touches West. Now it seemed a crying illustration of the Buddha’s first noble truth. Not many seemed to grow old here, and when eventually I found a place to sleep, I had to walk through a metal detector every time I approached the lobby.
All across the broken town, however, people extended more kindness to me, a relative millionaire, than I had any right to expect. A young man who spoke good English offered to show me around. We spent a long, hot afternoon in the cemetery where his mother, his sister, and some nuns who’d tried to be of help to the country now lay. When my flight out was abruptly canceled, the veiled matron in the airline office who rebooked my ticket took meticulous pains to hand me the forty dollars I was due as a refund. She could so easily have kept the money for herself. Forced now to travel across the country in the dead of night, past one roadblock after another manned by teenagers with assault rifles, I found an old man ready to drive me through the war zone for six long hours so I could fly away.
In its wounds, as in its kindness, Aden reminded me of so many of the other outposts of our global neighborhood where I seem to spend my time: Phnom Penh, Port-au-Prince, parts of L.A. Back in my mother’s house in California upon my return, as I was wondering how we in our gated communities could ever begin to do justice to our neighbors, my mother raced into the room, uncommonly agitated.
“That place you just came back from,” she cried, “the one we visited when you were a child. It’s on all the TV screens. There are planes flying into the World Trade Center, and it’s said they’re masterminded by a man whose ancestral village is in Yemen. We’re being told it’s a menace to our security.”
Suddenly everyone around me began talking about the long-forgotten country, pronouncing curses on it, claiming our first responsibility was to attack. It was all the fear, confusion, and hatred—which the Buddha had warned us about—that belonged not to real life but to our own turbulent heads and hearts.
I, simply by virtue of bungling through the country as a traveler just the month before, saw in my mind’s eye something very different. I saw the old man who had risked his life to drive me through treacherous roadblocks. I saw the friendly stranger walking slowly among the graves of almost everyone he cared for. I saw the veiled women in a back alleyway, tapping away on borrowed keyboards to try to track down loved ones—and new futures, perhaps—in Manhattan.
The world is always larger—more human—than our ideas of it. Pulling out the arrow of suffering the Buddha talked about is of much more help than speculation about where the arrow came from. And projections never throw off as much light as even the most bewildering meetings in the flesh.
ABOUT PICO IYER
Pico Iyer is the author of fifteen books, most recently Autumn Light and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, twinned works on living with uncertainty and impermanence.
Lupine field on the Hutchinson farm (2022)
Prayer List
For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of MaineLocal 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
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Racine, Wisconsin
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting(s) in Chattanooga, Tenn
Prayers for those grieving the recent shooting in Smithsburg, Maryland
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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