Unitarian Front Archway

Just when we thought Spring had arrived (or at least officially arrived) here we are with a storm in this weekend’s forecast! While the weather report is only calling for 9-10 inches, it still feels like more than we would like to see this time of year.

Regardless of the outcome, the camera man and I plan to be in the parlor on Sunday recording the service along with anyone else who makes it to the building. We’ll have the front walk shoveled and the coffee machine on…We continue our year-long theme on Belongingness with a summary taken from Geoffrey Cohen’s book Belonging titled “Key Takeaways; How We Can All Create Belonging.”  Our YouTube Channel service for this week is 

Rev. Mary Blocher continuing her series on the energy centers of the body and how they assist our spiritual development. The title of her message is “The Root of it All.” The videos that she used in her service are listed (below) along with the links. Please join us for one of the services this weekend. 
There is also a Peace Vigil in Monument Park on Saturday at 1PM to show support for a nationwide assault weapons ban. Please join us! See details below. 

Peace Vigil in Monument Park, Saturday, March 25     1PM

Support Our Children and Grandchildren

Please consider gathering to show support for a nationwide assault weapons ban. We are acting in solidarity with local students who have been called to participate in a march .

Come to the Peace Pole in Houlton’s Monument Park from 1 pm to 1:30 pm on Saturday, March 25 for a quiet vigil in support of the children. This year is the fifth anniversary of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Each year since, the students of Parkland have organized a March for Our Lives, led by students who respond around the country. They know and we know about all the school shootings in our country. They know and we adults know that they will be routinely practicing Active Shooter Drills in classrooms for the rest of their school lives. This ban is one step in slowing and stopping the violence in schools.

You may invite others to come stand or sit with us in silent solidarity. 
Have a great weekend!

In Ministry,

Dave

THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:

Here are links to the YouTube videos that Mary used in her service:“Deliver Me”  Rev. Erin MaCabe

https://youtu.be/3YKD3BJqKXQ“Peace in Our Hearts”  Eliza Gilkyson

https://youtu.be/MPTtwiRUTdQ
“I Believe This Belongs to You”  Jan Garrett & JD Martin

https://youtu.be/VukT-tdyalw“Taking Back My Day”  Jan Garrett & JD Martin

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/UrKU46uANug
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:

Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check inTime: Mar 26, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85971502254?pwd=N2JPTXpsM1lTckd3MUlQWENqbzhOQT09
Meeting ID: 859 7150 2254 Passcode: 311948

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 Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME  04730

Internationally acclaimed Houlton photographer is releasing new book

by Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli March 20, 2023

This article recently appeared in the Bangor Daily News and Houlton Pioneer Times featuring a local photographer (and friend many of us know).  Just thought we would include it in this week’s support page.

HOULTON, Maine — Just three weeks after ending nearly a decade of heroin use, Lawrence Hardy picked up his smartphone and started chasing the light instead of his next fix. 

Now the self-taught Houlton photographer, who has been featured in galleries around the globe, will soon publish “Zen Xan,” his most serious and intimate work to date. Taken over the course of a year in Aroostook County, this series of black-and-white photographs — obscure visual representations of his long battle with opioid addiction, panic attacks, depression and anxiety — ultimately represents hope, he said.

Last year, Maine had more than 10,000 reported drug overdoses and 716 overdose deaths, according to the state attorney general’s office. Hardy said he hopes his photographs will help others.

This project is a message to those who have suffered, endured and felt alone, he said. 

“You are not alone,” Hardy said. “I remember it provided relief to know I wasn’t the only one dealing with it; that I wasn’t the only junkie hooked on fentanyl.”

Hardy’s days are often measured by sunrises and sunsets. When he’s not working as a railroad operator or spending time with his family, he’s patiently waiting for the exact moment the light paints the horizon, the side of a building or a fencepost.

His work is his meditation, he said. He looks for the moments many people miss: Skidding tire tracks in the road or the way a dried stalk pops up in the middle of a house with snow dusting the image.

“I intend to show the beauty in the mundane, in the things everybody passes on an everyday basis and a lot of people don’t even turn their heads to look at,” he said. “It’s just something I see. I feel blessed that I see the world that way.”

Most recently, Hardy was one of 68 artists featured in individual   films by Lights Out Gallery in Norway, Maine.

“We wanted to do an interview with him. His story inspired us,” said Presque Isle native Daniel Sipe, gallery co-founder, adding that he is sure the gallery will work with Hardy again. 

Hardy and his sister were raised on Route 212 in Merrill by a single father.

“I had such a strong bond with my father because my mother wasn’t around. She walked out on us when I was 3. Then my dad unexpectedly died when I was 19.”

The grief from his father’s death and hanging out with the wrong crowd led to his addiction, he said, adding that he had already been dealing with depression. He started using opioids to numb the pain, he said.

Hardy stopped using heroin and fentanyl the year his son Asher Lawrence Hardy, now 3, was born. At the time, he was unemployed and had too much time on his hands. So he started taking pictures and posting on Instagram. Today, he has more than 5,000 Instagram followers.

“I felt like I was catching on quickly but most importantly I was enjoying myself,” he said. “I went from my iPhone to an awful digital camera and then a Nikon F3.” 

He learned more about photography’s nuances from YouTube, friends on Instagram and trial and error, he said. 

While learning, Hardy said he was often disappointed to see work come back from the film lab, Northeast Photographic in Bath.

“They would scan it and send it back to me. I was very depressed to see what I did wrong. Overexposed, underexposed,” he said.

But when he purchased his Fugifilm XT3 mirrorless camera, things really started to change, Hardy said.

His rise to notoriety was swift. He’s been featured at Open Doors Gallery in London and Matcha Gallery in Vietnam and in magazines including Broad, Rental, Noice, Banal, Two Italian Rascals, Phases, Urban Nautica and The Zone Zine.

His project “No Traffic Jams” was featured in Canada’s Broad magazine. Hardy was featured in New York magazine, and he had a solo show at Humble Arts Foundation in New York. Last year, he was awarded the People’s Choice Award for his print, “Evacuate,” in Lights Out Gallery’s MaineReunited competition.

For now, Hardy is working as hard as he can to improve his art and continue his recovery. “Zen Xan” will be published this summer, and there is talk of solo installations at several galleries, he said. 

“I always seem to be in a place where it’s never good enough, never what I thought it should turn out to be,” he said. “I love what I’m doing, and I’m always striving for that next level shot. The shot that genuinely makes me feel something I haven’t felt before.”

Lawrence Hardy’s photograph, “-56 Degrees,” was taken on one of 

The County’s sub-zero mornings in February this year. It was so cold 

his camera kept sticking and he had to capture it from inside his cab. 

Credit: Courtesy of Lawrence Hardy

What to Do When Someone You Love Is Hurting

BY RAVI CHANDRA

Psychiatrist Ravi Chandra on how you can support a loved one suffering from mental illness without minimizing or ignoring your own pain.

We empathize with people with obvious physical health conditions; we sign their casts and send get-well cards and flowers. But people with mental health issues are all too often stigmatized, misunderstood, and ignored. Even those hospitalized with mental health crises often do not receive sympathy, let alone flowers.

As a psychiatrist, I’m deeply grateful when people do their best to help their family and friends suffering from mental illness. Just one caring person can make a world of difference. According to relational-cultural theory, which stems from the work of psychoanalyst Jean Baker Miller, suffering is a crisis of disconnection, while the opposite of suffering is belonging. This resonates with what Buddhism teaches us about interdependence. That is, we suffer because we are under the delusion that we’re separate.

The important thing is to do our best not to add salt to the wound of disconnection, even as we set boundaries around what we can and will do to help others.

No one is an island. Relationships are incontrovertibly necessary for human development, and in times of suffering, we can feel isolated and raw if we do not have tangible relationships, or if we do not remember the connections we have. Creating islands of belonging, understanding, safety, and trust in relationships is critical, not just for those with identified mental health concerns, but for all human beings.

The best way to help a loved one is a very individual question, but a good place to start is simply being present. As one of my psychiatry professors used to advise, “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

Being present and caring toward others helps those who suffer become more present and caring toward themselves. Most of us learn to soothe ourselves when we have been soothed by others. Those who have grown up without much comfort have to actively learn these skills. Caregivers often must deepen their capacities to self-comfort in order to help their loved ones find comfort.

Mindful Self-Compassion, a practice developed by Kristin Neff and Chris Germer, teaches us to offer self-comfort in three components: (1) mindfulness, which includes noting, labeling, and sitting with difficult emotions, experiences, and disconnections, as opposed to letting them run into a story, judgment, or criticism of self or other; (2) the recognition of our common humanity, which entails realizing that any emotion and suffering we experience is shared by many, if not all, people; (3) self-kindness, which means we offer ourselves kindness when we’re suffering.

In difficult moments, we can offer self-comfort by reminding ourselves of the three components. With mindfulness, we can say to ourselves, “This is a moment of suffering.” With the recognition of our common humanity, we can say, “Suffering is a part of life.” And with self-kindness, we can say, “In this moment of suffering, may I at least be kind to myself.”

Over 1,600 research trials have shown that self-compassion is associated with fewer negative states, such as depression, anxiety, emotional avoidance, stress, and shame and with more positive states such as happiness, life satisfaction, social connectedness, optimism, and better physical health. Giving ourselves the warmth and spaciousness to be with our suffering allows us to investigate the difficult stories of our lives, so we can make better choices about how to support ourselves and ally with others.

Our emotional responses to our loved ones’ suffering can be overwhelming. Caregiver stress and burnout are real. We must learn how to recognize when we are overwhelmed, and learn what we can do to bring ourselves back into comfort and safety before we reengage with a challenging situation. This is for the mutual benefit of both our loved ones and ourselves, since our well-being is inextricably tied to the well-being of our loved ones. Caring for yourself is vital in order to care more deeply for others.

While our care can make a critical difference in the lives of those in distress, it also takes a village. It’s important to reach out to skilled professionals and supportive communities creatively and proactively. There is a web of trauma and suffering in our world, but we can transform it into a web of healing by cultivating our own node of the web and connecting to others who are similarly engaged.

Yet what about feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and inadequacy that arise when we see our loved ones struggle with mental illness? My advice: join the club.

In Psychotherapy Without the Self, Mark Epstein writes of the profession of psychiatry, “What other occupation requires of its practitioners that they be the objects of people’s excoriations, threats, and rejections?…What other occupation has built into it the frustration of feeling helpless, stupid, and lost as a necessary part of the work? And what other occupation puts its practitioners in the position of being an onlooker or midwife to the fulfillment of others’ destinies?”

Well, I know of many such occupations. They are called mother, father, sibling, partner, and friend. We are all carers in an often hostile and callous world, helping those who are overwhelmed and lost. How could we not feel the tug of our loved ones’ upheaval?

To those who have felt powerless and lost: you are not alone. Buddha’s first noble truth verified reality: life is difficult and entails suffering and hardship. This is the human condition. The important thing is to do our best not to add salt to the wound of disconnection, even as we set boundaries around what we can and will do to help others.

Mental health is not possible without meaning. Perhaps the fundamental mental health crisis in the world is that some try to find meaning and power in not investing in the well-being of others. This threatens to destroy the entire human project, and even the project of life on Earth. We are all related, so we find true meaning and purpose in caring for others. To paraphrase lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, we find our embodiment as humans in our proximity to suffering.

I have lost friends and patients to suicide, violence, and addiction. I have not forgotten them. The possibility of loss and the reality of the losses we experience can help us strive for ever more skillful means of caring, loving, and being. In the end, perhaps we cannot save everyone. But in caring, we save what is most precious in us, and advance the cause of compassion throughout our connected, awe-inspiring, tragic, and sometimes hopeful human voyage.

ABOUT RAVI CHANDRA

Ravi Chandra is a blogger for Psychology Today. His documentary The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to Covid and Racial Justice won Best Film at the 2021 Cannes Independent Film Festival.
A couple of weeks ago the thermometer hit 45 degrees on a Sunday afternoon and we decidedto set up our bistro table on the front deck to note the occasion. Here we are!

Linda with a cup of hot tea…

Prayer ListFor those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of MaineLocal emergency personnel and hospital staffFor our state and national leaders as the respond to the current coronavirus crisisFor those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine is now in its second yearPrayers for those suffering from seasonal flu and continuing covid casesPrayers for those who are housing and food challenged during these cold months of winterPrayers for those recovering from the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria Prayers for those affected by the mass shooting at the University of Michigan

Prayers to ease the political unrest in the Middle EastPrayers for those affected by the recent violence in the West Bank and political protests in IsraelPrayers for those in California experiencing extreme  weather

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.