American Wisteria by the river…   (photo by Dave)

Earlier this week I was walking by the trellis that overlooks the river by the cabin and I noticed the wisteria was in bloom. This is remarkable, in that, in the twenty years since it was first planted, this is perhaps the second or third year it has blossomed. Apparently this is not uncommon. Although the plant is a vigorous grower and climber, it does not always bloom. Linda brought this to my attention, so I figured I’d better take some pictures while I can. The photo in this week’s support page is one of them. Here is a short description of the flower from the Farmer’s Almanac.

Wisteria is a high-climbing, long-lived vining plant with cascades of blue to purple flowers that look spectacular hanging from a pergola or archway in spring and early summer. However, this vine is a fast and aggressive grower—often reaching 30+ feet long—and is known to grow quite heavy. Wisteria vines will work their way into any crook or cranny they can reach, so it’s advised not to plant them too near your home. Wisteria flowers are beautifully fragrant, providing a feast for the senses. Blooms only appear on new growth. Jeremy Harden is speaking at this week’s Sunday service at 10AM and the title of the talk is “Free as in Freedom; Liberating Humankind by Alternative Operating Systems and EULA.”  Rev. Dave will be assisting in the service. 

For those interested, we are planning a trip to visit the Beaverbrook Art Gallery on July 22. Steve has arranged a tour for our group (at a reduced rate) and we will also have a meal at one of Fredericton’s many fine restaurants. The cost of the tour is $12 per person (Canadian funds). We will meet at the church parking lot at 8AM and then carpool to Fredericton. If you are interested in joining us please register by sending an email todave@backwoodsblog.com

or speak to Dave or Steve in person. There will also be a sign up list on the information table in the coffee room. We have 18 people signed up thus far for the outing. Please join us.

YouTube Channel content for this week is a service with Dave speaking on a topic titled “Interdependence Day and the Atomic Art of Lichen.” Dave has a series of images taken from his thirty year old compost bin that alludes to the inter-dependency of our world and the atomic art of nature. Here is a quotation from Emerson that helps to illustrate the talk:

In the rapture of the soul, we will come to see that the world is a perennial miracle that the soul works, that the world is not profane, but sacred, and that the entire universe is represented in an atom, a moment in time. We will weave a world that is no longer a spotted life of shreds and pieces, but will live a divine unity.You will find the link for YouTube listed below. Please join us for one of the services this weekend. 

In Ministry,

Dave

THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:

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/SCXD95K1eYc

HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:

Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check -in

Time: Jul 9, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87255285441?pwd=NUpMeGM2ZS85VWp4b3QwbUtTT0FCZz09

Meeting ID: 872 5528 5441

Passcode: 109650

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

July 9    Sunday Service:  Jeremy Harden

July 11  Meditation Group 4PM  (online)

July 15  Houlton Coffeehouse  7-9PM

July 16  Sunday Service:  Rev Mary Blocher

July 22      Trip to Beaverbrook Art Gallery  8AM

July 23  Sunday Service:  Joshua Atkinson

July 25  Meditation Group  4PM  (online)

July 30  Sunday Service:  Dave Hutchinson

August 6   Sunday Service:  Dan Crawford

August 8   Meditation Group  4PM  (online)

August 13 Sunday Service: Rev. Mary Blocher

August 19 Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards Concert 7PM               

 Performance is on the coffeehouse stage  (no admission fee, but donations are encouraged)

August 20 Sunday Service: Dave Hutchinson

August 22 Meditation Group  4PM  (online)

August 27 Sunday Service: Dave Hutchinson

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 Street

from Maria Povova’s weekly column “Brain Pickings”

The Work of Happiness: May Sarton’s Stunning Poem About Being at Home in Yourself

In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing. And yet happiness is as much a matter of how we inhabit the self — how we make ourselves at home in our own singular lives, in the dwelling-places of our own experience. 

That is what May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995), who has written so movingly about unhappiness and its cure, explores in her poem “The Work of Happiness,” included in her indispensable Collected Poems: 1930–1993 (public library)

THE WORK OF HAPPINESS

by May Sarton

I thought of happiness, how it is woven
Out of the silence in the empty house each day
And how it is not sudden and it is not given
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,
But the tree is lifted by this inward work
And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours
And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:
The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,
White curtains softly and continually blown
As the free air moves quietly about the room;
A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall —
These are the dear familiar gods of home,
And here the work of faith can best be done,
The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

SCIENCE

The Atlantic

Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.

We’ve just learned that the whole universe is humming around us. Now what?

By Adam Frank 

The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat. That’s the takeaway from yesterday’s remarkable announcement that scientists have detected a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. If the result bears up as more data are gathered, it’s a discovery that promises to open new windows on everything from the evolution of galaxies to the origin of the universe.

Scientists had been awaiting such a discovery for decades. More than 100 years ago, Einstein introduced his radical general theory of relativity. For Einstein, space and time were a single entity, “space-time,” comprising a flexible fabric that could be stretched and compressed, bent and warped. In general relativity, matter makes space-time bend, and space-time, in turn, guides how unconstrained matter will move. Because space-time is flexible, you can make it wave. Just like snapping a bedsheet, if you move enough matter around fast enough, a wave of distorted space-time will ripple outward into the universe.

Scientists predicted the existence of these ripples, called gravitational waves, as far back as the 1910s. But because the distortions they create in space-time are so minute, they weren’t detected until eight years ago. That’s when physicists used mile-long lasers to catch distortions in space-time from two black holes colliding in a distant galaxy. With that first epochal discovery, the doors to gravitational-wave science were thrown open. Since then, scientists have found many other merging black-hole pairs. But an even fainter signal carrying a profound cosmic significance still lay out of their reach.

Along with signals from discrete black-hole mergers, experts believed that a background of gravitational waves should also be washing through the universe, the space-time equivalent of car horns, jackhammers, and shouts all combining into the diffuse cacophony of city life. Plenty of cosmic phenomena could produce such a gravitational-wave background, and astronomers are now busily debating the most likely explanation. Perhaps the culprits are the zillions of supermassive black holes, some billions of times heavier than the sun, that reside at the center of every galaxy. Over cosmic timescales, galaxies collide and merge—and so do their black holes. These are near-apocalyptic events in terms of their effect on space-time, like a wall of speakers at a heavy-metal concert blasting against so many eardrums. Untold numbers of galaxies have merged across the 13.8-billion-year life of the universe, and those blasts should still be echoing in the background of space-time today. And so, perhaps, should the gravitational waves from the birth of the universe itself. The Big Bang was, well, a big bang. Initiating the expansion of everything required so much energy, and did so much violence, that it should have flooded space-time with gravitational waves that continue to ricochet around the universe to this day.

If scientists could find and analyze this background, they’d have a direct look all the way back to the first slivers of time after the moment of creation. First, however, they’d have to prove it exists. And now it seems they might have. A team of astronomers from around the world, working together as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (a.k.a. NANOGrav), made the detection using the rapidly spinning cinders of once-massive stars called pulsars. Pulsars emit bursts of radio waves so perfectly timed that they serve as one of the universe’s most accurate natural clocks. Through 15 long years of sweat and perseverance, the NANOGrav scientists patiently tracked tiny changes in the burst patterns of 67 pulsars scattered across the Milky Way. They found that a small change in the period of any one pulsar’s signal was linked to changes in the others’. These linked anomalies, they concluded, were reflections of changes in the distance between Earth and the pulsars as passing space-time ripples caused those distances to continually grow and shrink. Putting it all together, the NANOGrav scientists could see that these ripples were not from one discrete source but from a din, a hum, the overlapping echoes of disturbances scattered across the universe.

Over the course of a decade and a half, the NANOGrav team pored over their machines, their numbers, and their mathematical theory to bring us proof that something miraculous—something wonderful—is happening right under our noses. Actually, it’s happening to our noses, and the rest of our bodies as well. Every gravitational wave in that background the NANOGrav team found is humming through the very constitution of the space you inhabit right now. Every proton and neutron in every atom from the tip of your toes to the top of your head is shifting, shuttling, and vibrating in a collective purr within which the entire history of the universe is implicated. And if you put your hand down on a chair or table or anything else nearby, that object, too, is dancing that slow waltz.

The gravitational-wave background is huge news for the cosmos, yes, but it’s also huge news for you. The nature of reality has not changed—you will not suddenly be able to detect vibrations in your morning coffee that you couldn’t see before. And yet, moments like these can and should change how each of us sees our world. All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been. It’s all within us, around us, pushing us to and fro as we hurtle through the cosmos.

As an astronomer, I am often asked about UFOs. I’m pretty skeptical about them having anything to do with alien life, but I believe the questions represent something ancient and innate in us all. As children, each of us had a deep and easily triggered sense that the world is full of wonder, that everything is strange and amazing. Stepping out into the backyard, we’d get entranced staring at an anthill or watching leaves pirouette as they fell. As a toddler, my daughter would purposely tip her cup over just to be delighted by how the water spilled across the table.

Today, gifted with a new understanding of the architecture of the universe, each of us has an opportunity to revisit that wonder. After you finish reading this, take a look around you. Ponder how the solid-seeming ground beneath your feet is quietly shaking with the force of billions of years of cosmic collisions. Go outside, if you can, and watch the wind blow through the trees. Perhaps the experience will be different now that you know how the rhythm of giant black holes in distant galaxies also beats out a time in the trees’ gentle swaying.

The universe is an impossibly vast symphony of cause and effect. The endless comings and goings of galaxies, stars, and planets create a melding of songs that you are part of too. The NANOGrav discovery exposes the intricacy and gracefulness of that melding. It’s a reminder that the world always has been, and always will be, worthy of wonder. But of course, you already knew that. You always have.

Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. His work has appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, and NPR. He is the author of the upcoming book The Little Book of Aliens.

Here are some photos from our yard sale last week

and Midnight Madness. A big THANK YOU to everyone

who assisted in making it a weekend to remember 

and a highly successful fundraising effort!!!!

Satisfied chicken curry customers…

Suddenly a guitar appeared and we had an impromptu concert!

Thank you Ira!!!




Prayer List

For 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 to ease the political unrest in the Middle EastPrayers for those affected by the recent violence in the West Bank, the Dome of the Rock and political protests in IsraelPrayers for the Carmichael family with the loss of DillonPrayers for those affected by the recent train crash in India Prayers for those affected by the heat dome in the American southPrayers for the five lives lost in the Titan submersible off the coast of NewfoundlandPrayers for the firefighters in Canada and the US fighting fires this summerThe 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.