PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER MILLS  “Rainbow over lupine on Hutchinson farm”

The Unitarian Universalist annual convention or General Assembly (GA) is currently taking place in Portland, Oregon. Last year we streamed the GA Sunday Worship Service during our 10AM service in Houlton and watched it together. Since the convention is on the west coast this year, the service won’t start streaming until 12:30 Eastern Daylight Time. (Do you see the problem?)

Our creative solution is to provide the link to GA Sunday Worship so you can watch it in real time starting at 12:30 on your device at home. We have provided the easy steps to help you do this just below. This will take the place of our usual pre-recorded Sunday Service on the YouTube Channel.

For those of you who would like to attend the in-person service in the sanctuary this Sunday, I will be showing a short excerpt from the 2017 GA Sunday Worship Service that took place in New Orleans. (I was actually there.)

The Big Easy inspired music is great and the sermon is delivered by Rev. Mara Dowdall who was the senior minister of the First UU Society of Burlington, Vermont at the time.

 
Fourth of July celebrations are next week. Check out the support page and see what’s happening on the front lawn at UUHoulton during the festivities. 

Have a good week-end everyone.

In Ministry,

Dave

HERE IS HOW YOU FIND THE SERVICE LINK TO WATCH THE GA SUNDAY WORSHIP STREAM:
1. The service starts at 12:30 and runs until 2:00 p.m.  EDT  (The service takes place on the west coast)

2. Go to the UUA website    uua.org  

3. On the home page you will see a green block on the second row far right titled “Spiritual Community” subtitled “Watch General       Assembly Live Online.”

4. Click on the link “Watch GA Live.”

5. This will take you to a YouTube player where you can watch the streaming service.

6. Enjoy the GA experience online.

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 26, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85394513760?pwd=VmgvZ2Z0c3lVcTJUMEdMd3p3bzZ3QT09

Meeting ID: 853 9451 3760 Passcode: 215771

MIDNIGHT MADNESS ON THE UUHOULTON FRONT LAWNJuly 1, Friday Night  4-8PM

Join us for Midnight Madness on the UUHoulton front lawn. UUChicken Curry has become a Midnight Madness must-have. I don’t know how many years we’ve been doing this (I’ve lost count) but we’re doing it again. There is also a vegetable curry option. Get there early before we sell out!

There will also be hot and cold beverages, iced lattes from the cafe and slushies to cool your cravings.

Don’t miss it! MUSIC & FOOD ON THE UUHOULTON FRONT LAWN

July 2, Saturday Morning   
Food and Drinks    

9AM – 1PMMusic with Herding Unicorns    10AM – Noon

We have live music on the church front lawn from 10AM until noon with Herding Unicorns (John Pasquarelli, Rosalind Morgan, Nick Foster and Enoch Carter). Bring a lawn chair, sun screen or bug spray and enjoy the music! There is no charge for the concert but donations are always appreciated.

We also have grilled sausage and peppers, leftover chicken curry from Midnight Madness (hopefully) and a full line of coffee drinks and slushies. The Arts and Crafts Sale is right across the street in Monument Park so you can shop a little too.

Happy Fourth from all of us at UUHoulton!

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

Summertime Longing

BY SUSAN MOON

When I was a child, I found a secret place in the bayberry bushes. In the summers my family floated free from the known world—the world that was measured by carpools and sidewalks—and went to the seashore. It was lonely for me there; I felt alone in my separate self, in my dungaree shorts, with dirty knees and poison ivy between my toes.

I would put my jackknife in my pocket and slip through a scratchy gap in the bushes and into a clearing the size of a small room—an almost flat piece of land on the flank of a hill, overlooking Menemsha Pond. From this bushy room, I could see sails and the shimmering dunes across the water. I practiced cartwheels and handstands, turning the world upside down. I sat on the grass and whittled sticks.

Back in the house, my father was shut up in his study writing all the time. My mother tied her hair up in a bandanna and tried to keep us kids from bothering him. My little sisters, considerably younger than me, chased each other around the house, screeching. I felt the tension of our family life—a sadness I couldn’t cure, couldn’t even name as sadness.

I lay on the ground that was crunchy with lichen, while the sky did cartwheels above me. As the day came to an end, the sun’s light turned a thicker and thicker yellow and clouds rushed away from me and disappeared into the void on the other side of the horizon. This daily ending, staged with the smell of the bayberry and the crying of the gulls, gave me a lump in my throat—a shout I couldn’t shout out.

I had no playmates and we had no neighbors nearby; my schoolteacher father liked to get away from people in the summer. But it wasn’t just someone to play with that I wanted. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself.

Why was there only my one small self inside my head, serving a life sentence in the solitary confinement of my skull?

I read Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood and made plans to start a Robin Hood club when we got back to town in the fall. My friends and I would learn to fight with cudgels and we’d defend the little kids in the neighborhood against the bullies. I would be Little John who, big and kind, was my favorite of Robin Hood’s band. I found a stick of driftwood on the beach and practiced fighting with my cudgel. I made it sing as I swung it through the air.

Books from the public library were company. One summer I went through all of Louisa May Alcott’s, with their plain, cloth library-bindings stamped with gold on the spine. I went kite flying with Jo in Little Men and then with my family in what’s called real time, on a day when my father wasn’t so depressed. He was the captain of the kite; he was a sailor and this was another kind of sail. We got the kite aloft and it grew smaller and smaller as it rose closer to the gibbous moon. Then my father held onto the spool of string and we walked down the hill, climbed into the rowboat, and pushed off from the beach. My father let me put on garden gloves and hold the string while the kite pulled us, frictionless, across the pond. It was magic, as if God himself were up there in the air pulling us along, though my parents didn’t speak of God.

I wondered about God. I wondered who I was and why I was alive. Why was there only my one small self inside my head, serving a life sentence in the solitary confinement of my skull? It didn’t make sense.

The summer I was ten I had insomnia, although I didn’t know that word, and I was afraid I was going to die from lack of sleep. I lay in my bed listening for the ship’s clock as it chimed the watches of the night. Eight bells for midnight. The worst thing about the loneliness was that it was unspeakable. I couldn’t describe it or explain it. Nothing was wrong, but I was lost. Two bells meant one in the morning. I tiptoed into my parents’ room. “I can’t go to sleep,” I said.

I wanted to get into bed with my parents but I didn’t dare ask. I was too old. My mother told me to imagine sheep jumping over a fence and to count them. It seemed like a dumb idea that had nothing to do with the fear that kept me awake but I was willing to give it a try. “If you get up to a hundred sheep and you’re still awake, come back,” she said.

I did—I got to a hundred, easy. “Could a person die from not sleeping?” I asked my mother.

“No,” she said, “No one ever died from not sleeping. Why don’t you read your book, sweetie?”

I was microscopic and huge at the same time.

Back in my bed I read Under the Lilacs, a story about an orphan boy and his dog, and how they ran away from the circus. Four bells for two a.m. I saw the curtains shifting like breath in the moonlight. Six bells for three a.m. The moonlight faded and pulsed again in a silent, scary whoosh—caused unbeknownst to me by a passing cloud—and then I must have slept because I never heard the end of the night watch.

In the morning I walked barefoot to the secret place, watching out for poison ivy. There had been a light mist in the night, so the pale green lichen was wet and soft. I imagined myself an orphan in the wilderness. I would have to gather berries and build a shelter for myself in order to survive. I made a little one first, for practice. I snapped off some twigs from the bayberry bushes and whittled away the little bumps. When I had a nice pile of smooth twigs no more than six inches long, I constructed a lean-to with them. Then I put some stones and shells inside it, to serve as chairs and tables for the fairies. I didn’t exactly believe in fairies, but I assumed there were unseen forces in the universe and I wanted to contact them. They were either very small or very large.

When I lay on my stomach and stuck my face into the sweet-smelling grass, I saw a little red dot that revealed itself to be a spider when it crawled up a blade of grass. To that spider I was as big as a whole world. Then I rolled over on my back, careful not to crush the spider, and looked at the clouds—the layers of them, some so far up that they made the near clouds seem to move in the opposite direction. Compared to them I was a little red spider. I was microscopic and huge at the same time.

I practiced handstands, and the more I practiced the longer I could stay up. I liked the part where I kicked up the second foot, when the momentum took over and inverted the world. I wanted to be able to walk on my hands. I could take the first step—could pick up my right hand and quickly put it down again a few inches forward before I fell—but I wanted to take a second step with the left hand. Patiently, I practiced. It seemed important. When my shoulders got tired, I sat on the grass to rest and rearranged the fairies’ furniture in their lean-to. “Okay, fairies,” I said. “Watch me walk on my hands.” I swung my feet up against the sky and this time I took two steps with my hands before I came down. I gave a whoop. Robin Hood would be proud of me. Maybe I’d even join the circus.

My parents didn’t worry that I was wandering around exploring the natural world by myself; they knew I would follow their only rule: not to go in swimming alone, and the only other local hazard was poison ivy. They didn’t know I was full of longing for something I couldn’t name because I didn’t tell them.

“Susie! Time for lunch!” came my mother’s voice. The other world was calling, the middle-sized world.

As I get older, I find myself coming back to childhood yearnings. I both seek solitude and fear it, just as I did at ten. I’m upstairs in my study in my quiet house. I’m drinking Heavenly Mist green tea and sitting in my favorite chair, with my feet hanging over one arm like a teenager, looking out the window at the redwood tree. I’m wondering who I am and what I’m doing here in this bag of skin, as the old Chinese Zen masters called it. Why am I still the only one inside my separate self?

In that slow turn between the out-breath and the in-breath, the question sometimes arises: How do I get out of this bag of skin?

Twice I wasn’t alone in my body. I could feel the company inside as I watched the bulge of a foot move within my belly. For a change, I liked having someone else with me in the small apartment of my body, though I liked it even more when the babies came out to meet me.

If I had a partner now, I expect it would take the sharp edge off my longing, but I would still feel an essential separation. My longing is not about being alone in my bed; it’s about being alone in my head.

These days, I sit in meditation at home and I go out to sit with others in Buddhist centers. Sometimes I sit in the teacher’s seat, sometimes I sit in the seat of a student, and always I sit in longing. In that slow turn between the out-breath and the in-breath, the question sometimes arises: How do I get out of this bag of skin?

In the Zen tradition we usually face a wall and, therefore, we can’t see each other. When I sat recently with people from the Theravadan tradition, we sat in a circle, facing each other with our eyes closed. I snuck a peek at the others, all of them seeming to sit so peacefully, and I thought, “What are they all doing and how do they know how to do it?” I could feel longing vibrating in my blood; I could feel hot prickles all over my skin. I said to myself, “Hello, longing. I know you.” And in that moment I suddenly felt happy; I liked the prickles. And for the hundred thousandth time, I returned to my breathing, letting the air in the room come into my lungs like the tide—the same air that was flowing in and out of all the other bodies in the room, joining us together. Longing is its own satisfaction. It’s already complete.

All my life I have felt this longing. I guess it’s how I travel in the world; it’s what takes me where I’m going. The longing for connection calls forth a life of connection. The longing that took me to the secret place in the bayberry bushes is the same longing that, as an adult, has made me spend months in a monastery; join a voter registration drive; and set the table for family and friends. My small self continues to reach for something beyond myself. The little girl practicing handstands in that secret place is still with me, keeping me company. If she can bear the longing, I can bear it. I remember that this is who I am: the one who wonders.

ABOUT SUSAN MOON

Susan Moon is a writer and teacher and for many years was the editor of Turning Wheel, the journal of socially engaged Buddhism. She is the author of This Is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Dignity and Humor and The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi, a humorous book about an imaginary Zen master. She edited Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism.

Prayer List

For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of MaineLocal emergency personnel and hospital staffFor our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisisFor those working for social justice and societal change 

Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation

Pray for peace

Sylvia Williams is now at Madigan Estates

The war in Ukraine is in its fourth 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

Prayers for those affected by the tragic earthquake in Afghanistan this week.

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.