March 30, 2024
Last Year’s Easter Altar UUHoulton As I am writing tonight’s column for the Support Page it is snowing outside. I know that this is Easter weekend and our preference is for a more spring-like experience, but white and slushy it is. Last week, our Palm Sunday Service was cancelled when two feet of snow dropped. Of course, Easter is larger than the weather, but it’s hard to ignore the white backdrop. Perhaps this is one more reason to attend the service this year. We need to celebrate spring, transformation, resurrection and enthusiasm even more than usual. Since we cancelled the service last week, we are combining Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Easter (and the Eclipse) all in one service! Dale plays the Frisbee Organ for our opening prelude, there is a Children’s talk, an adult talk and special music from the Unitunes. The title of my homily is “Easter Eclipse.”
Please note that there is no new content on the YouTube Channel due to last week’s cancellation, but there are plenty of previous services (or reruns) that you may want to check out.
We hope you can join us for one of the services.
There is an eclipse work day at the church today from 10AM – 3PM Dave will have dunkin’ donuts at the church at 9:30. Come early or they might be gone!More details are listed below in the Eclipse ’24 section.
In Ministry,Dave
Eclipse ’24
6 more days until the UU Houlton Eclipse Fair Begins!!!
Work Day today at the church! 10AM – 3PMPotluck lunch and cleaning fun!
The UUH Eclipse Committee is an incredible group of dedicated volunteers respectively working together for the Highest Good! I have planned too many events to count in my 20+ years of event planning – but NONE of them have been like this….so many moving parts and unknowns and a dedicated crew of people to navigate all the ins and outs – it truly amazes me!
That said, we are still in need of more happy hearts and hands to make this experience a smooth and successful event for all involved. Open positions include Greeters for the Concert Series and Metaphysical Tent, Popcorn Leaders & Cosmic Cleaners! Once you complete a 4 hour shift, you receive a free meal with a drink ticket or a free concert ticket – your choice! Of course multiple shifts equal multiple tickets!
If you have not yet signed up to for a volunteer shift, you can do so on our LIVE sign up sheet here… https://docs.google.com/document/d/11NBMmwdAB-z3HkfQkEuTUIHFKnEfE2iXUacJHrzGrIY/edit You can also sign up this Sunday Morning after Services with Randi and/or myself for specific shifts during the event.
Alternatively, If you want to “head for the hills” during the event, we still need help to get ready for the big weekend, so please plan to join us for our official Church Clean Up Party – Saturday, March 30th from 10:00-3:00. Bring a potluck item to share for lunch, wear your comfy cleaning cloths and let’s make our Church sparkle and shine! If it’s a nice day we will work inside and outside so come dressed for your preferred activity. We’ll be doing yard clean up, hanging lights, dusting, vacuuming, sanitizing, organizing and truly putting on all the finishing touches for the event.
Oh and of course I can’t forget the most important thing……TP! Yes….more toilet paper, unscented trash bags and paper towels are greatly appreciated! Thanks for bringing them on Sunday!
With SOOOOO much gratitude and anticipation for the big event,
Your dedicated Eclipse Committee CO-Chair,
Holli
hnicknair@gmail.com
P.S. Don’t forget to get your tickets for the Concerts too on the newly updated church website https://uuhoulton.org/ and share the event on Facebook… https://www.facebook.com/events/1420898368511183/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[]%7DThanks for helping us get the word out!
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR LAST WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check-inTime: Mar 31, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/85289611131?pwd=GmLkHtxaEQ4oJerv1jKm8wVLHJs7Se.1
Meeting ID: 852 8961 1131Passcode: 580457
Calendar of Events @UUHoultonMarch 31 Sunday Service:
David Hutchinson Easter Sunday
(Eclipse planning in the cafe during the afternoon)
April 5-8 UUHoulton Eclipse Fair (see events on church website)
April 7 Sunday Service: Eclipse Service in the Sanctuary
April 8 Totality Solar Eclipse April 9 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
April 13 LGBTQ+ luncheon 12 noon
April 13 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PM
April 14 Sunday Service: Randi Bradbury & Ira Dyer
April 21 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson (Earth Day Service)
April 23 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
April 28 Sunday Service: Jodi Scott
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 St., Houlton ME 04730
This article appeared in both the Bangor Daily News and the front page of the Houlton Pioneer Times earlier this week:
Church in Houlton will offer meditation and yoga during eclipse
HOULTON, Maine – For Holli Nicknair, the significance of the eclipse is not just about the astronomy, it’s the energy the event creates that inspires her.
“I feel like this is a very powerful time and can touch our planet in a very positive way,” said Nicknair, who has co-organized the Unitarian Universalist Church’s Eclipse Fair in Houlton.”The eclipse, energetically, is the end of the old patterns and the beginning of the new. The eclipse is the planet’s way of giving us this experience.”
The total solar eclipse on April 8 will pass through a large swath of totality in the U.S. from Texas to Maine. Ending in Houlton before crossing the international border, the small Aroostook County town is projected to draw 40,000 visitors to view the eclipse.
In planning for this cosmic rarity, Nicknair and other church leaders, including David Hutchinson, UU minister, believed this was a time to help facilitate healing journeys and to come up with offerings of interest to their members.The UU Church believes in the dignity of all people and the Houlton congregation is made up of members from many religious traditions. The church supports each member’s spiritual journey, regardless of the path.
Nicknair said there is so much division and separation in our world today that the eclipse offers people an opportunity to find a way to unify.
When the head of the Greater Houlton Chamber of Commerce, Jane Torres, approached church leaders about providing a spiritual component to the town’s slated events for the April 5 to 8 town festival, the path was clear.
They would host the UU Eclipse Fair, an umbrella for a host of church created events. It is the biggest thing the small Houlton church has ever done.
“The whole fair is an act of social action in hopes it helps our community and the planet at large come into more balance,” Nicknair said. “One of the first events is the planetary moment of silence. An opportunity for us to come together regardless of how you believe and hold three minutes of silence for the sake of our planet’s healing.”
The UU Eclipse Fair, part of the larger Houlton townwide Eclipse Festival, includes a weekend of music, blues and rock concerts, healing foods like warming curries, a 100 by 40 foot metaphysical tent, speakers, daily chanting and children’s events.
A sound healing offering on Sunday, April 7 and a complete day of mindful movement on Monday, April 8, includes healing energy practices like mindfulness meditation, tai chi, qigongand ecstatic dance.
“For me, it is all about a healing journey we are all in together,” Nicknair said.
Monday’s Day of Mindful Movement introduces the practice of mindfulness and cultivating an awareness of all that is in our bodies, hearts and minds, said Nicknair, who has been a mindfulness practitioner for over 20 years.
The practice of mindfulness, introduced decades ago by Jon Cabot Zinn, helps people appreciate and recognize what they are experiencing in the moment instead of worrying about the future or regretting the past.
Today, Zinn says that mindfulness can help heal the planet and help counter technology addiction and isolation.
“The concept of mindfulness is the practice of letting what arises in us come to the surface and be with it and let it pass like the clouds,” Nicknair said. “The value of mindfulness comes when we learn to say, ‘oh I notice myself feeling really angry.’ I can notice that, I can be as opposed to acting on all these feelings.”
The Day of Mindful Movement will be held in Houlton’s Monument Park at the amphitheater on Military Street. It opens with kids’ mindfulness at 9 a.m. and continues with meditation, yoga, qigong, tai chi, ecstatic dance every hour until totality at 3:32 p.m.
The Sound Healing Sunday, features Windham healers Jason and Rebecca LaWind, owners of Ways to Wellness in the UU church sanctuary.
“They will be bringing all their bowls, gong instruments and tools used on a regular basis and will lead the way and cultivate a relaxed state within us,” she said. “It’s about cultivating deep relaxation.”
The events, whether concerts or mindful movement, are offerings that nourish our spiritual journeys, Nicknair said.
“ We did not want to serve food just because people want food, we wanted to create an offering that truly nourished people’s spirits and brought people together in a unified way,” she said. “This whole eclipse is much larger than us. It’s not just about us as human beginnings, it’s about something greater.”
All UU Eclipse Fair events are open to everyone at no charge, although donations are welcome.
Jeremy Smith joined us for a Sunday morning service last month when he was in Houlton interviewing for the town manager position. He and his wife are long-time UUs and look forward to seeing us again when they arrive.
Houlton to hire New Mexico man as town manager
HOULTON, Maine – After a nearly seven month search, the Houlton Town Council is hiring a town manager, according to Council Chairman Chris Robinson.
Jeremy Smith will move to Houlton from Los Alamos, New Mexico. He is currently the director of community services for the City of Española.
“We are pleased to announce as a council that we are going to be hiring Mr. Jeremy Smith who came to town a couple weeks back,” Robinson said at the end of the council meeting on Monday night. “We are very pleased with our choice as a council.”
The council will officially approve Smith’s appointment in a special town council meeting at 6 p.m., April 1. Smith’s salary will be $110,000 and his new job with the town begins on April 29, Robinson said.
Smith and his wife have been interested in Maine and Robinson said he is a natural fit.
“He wants to be vested in the community,” he said.
Before making their final decision, the town flew Smith to Houlton a few weeks ago to meet with the council.
Councilor Jane Torres, who is also the executive director of the Greater Houlton Chamber of Commerce said that she was very pleased with Smith’s engagement with the business community during his five-day visit.
“With no prompting from us, he wandered about town talking to people and getting a feeling for the community,” she said on Tuesday. “I am also happy that he has a strong background covering, not only municipal government, but recreation and community development.”
The Maine Municipal Association assisted the town in the search after town manager Marian Anderson retired after five years in the position for personal reasons at the end of August. And it’s not been an easy task finding the right person for the job.
Robinson said Smith’s application was in the third round of the search after they had already reviewed 40 or 50 applications.
Police Chief Tim DeLuca has been doubling his duties with the town as interim town manager.
DeLuca’s interim status was for six months. In addition to his $89,000 police department salary, he was also being paid an hourly rate of $43.38 for his town manager role, according to Torres. The council calculated the amount from the former town manager’s salary of $90,227, she said.
About a month ago, the council decided to change its approach in searching for the right person for the position when they realized there were so many town manager openings throughout the state.
“There are all these openings and everybody is looking for someone with municipal experience,” Torres said in a previous interview. “We just changed track and said let’s look for that person who can manage people, manage a budget and learn on their feet.”
According to Torres, the council was seeking a person with either public or private sector managerial experience, strong budget and financial management skills, experience in personnel management and labor relations, knowledge of grant preparation and administration, and experience in economic development issues. And that’s when they found Smith.
On Monday night, Robinson said the council felt like Smith will integrate well into the community.
“He’s going to work well with department heads and the employees,” Robinson said. “We have a positive feeling. We made our choice and I think it is a positive choice for Houlton.”
Easter MessageTransformation and Coming Alive
The Art of Allowing Change: Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry’s Moving Correspondence with Oliver Sacks about the Blessed Overwhelm of Transformation
There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it, about the nature of knowledge, the mystery of consciousness, and the irreducibility of aliveness: Living in a black-and-white chamber, Mary the scientist studies how nature works — from the physics of light to the biology of the eye — but when she exits her monochrome room and encounters color, she experiences something far beyond her knowledge of what color is. It might be impossible, the experiment intimates, to imagine — even with our finest knowledge and best predictive models — what an experience would feel like before we have it, raw and revelatory and resinous with the one thing we can never model, never reduce to information: wonder — the wonder of the world suddenly new and we suddenly new to ourselves.
Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry was in her fifties when she realized she had been living in Mary’s Room.
Born cross-eyed and stereoblind — unable to form three-dimensional images the way most people do as we aim our two eyes in the same direction, combining the visual input in the brain — Barry had undergone a number of corrective eye-muscle surgeries as a child, which made her eyes appear aligned. She was told she was cured, able to do anything people with normal vision do except fly an airplane.
It was not until her junior year of college that, listening to a lecture about the visual cortex and ocular dominance columns, she learned about monocular and binocular vision. She was astonished to realize that she had gone through life lacking the latter — the kind most people have, which allows us to see in stereo. She accepted her condition and went on living with the lens chance had dealt her. But by midlife, her eyes had grown even more misaligned, both horizontally and vertically. She learned about a kind of vision therapy involving a set of prism glasses and some impressively inventive eye-training exercises. It was transformative. Paintings began to look more three-dimensional and she could see “the empty, yet palpable, volumes of space between leaves on tree.” She recounts:
Over the next several months, my vision was completely transformed. I had no idea what I had been missing. Ordinary things looked extraordinary. Light fixtures floated and water faucets stuck way out into space.
Three years into relearning to see, she met Oliver Sacks at her astronaut husband’s space shuttle launch. With his passionate curiosity about the interplay of physiology and psychological reality, the famed neurologist asked her a question that came to haunt her: Could she imagine what the world would look like viewed with two eyes?
As a neurobiology professor herself, having written and read countless papers on visual processing, binocular vision, and stereopsis, Barry was at first certain she could. But the more she thought about the question, the more she felt into it, the more she realized that something essential was missing from her cerebral understanding: She was Mary, and the world was the world.
Discomposed by the implications of the question, she decided to reach out to the questioner — for orientation, for consolation, for collaborative reckoning with this suddenly exposed facet of the confusion of consciousness. “That is my story,” she wrote at the end of the nine-page letter detailing her unusual vision history. “If you have the time and inclination, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts. And, of course, I eagerly await your next book.”
Within days, Oliver had written back. Amazed at her defiance of the odds — it had long been accepted that binocular vision must be achieved by a “critical age” or will forever elude the seer — he expressed his admiration for her willingness to welcome her “new world” with such “openness and wonder.” So began their decade-long correspondence, which helped Barry “shape a new identity.” This richly nourishing epistolary friendship, which lasted until his death, now lives on in her wonderful part-memoir, part-memorial Dear Oliver (public library).
From her very first letter, she sets out to convey the wonder-filled disorientation of her newly trained vision — a transformation both life-expanding and overwhelming, given the coevolution of vision and consciousness. She writes:
Imagine a person who saw only in shades of gray suddenly able to see in full color. Such a person would probably be overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Could they stop looking? Each day, I spend time looking head-on at objects — flowers, my fingers, faucets, anything — in order to get that strong three-dimensional sense… After almost three years, my new vision continues to surprise and delight me. One winter day, I was racing from the classroom to the deli for a quick lunch. After taking only a few steps from the classroom building, I stopped short. The snow was falling lazily around me in large, wet flakes. I could see the space between each flake, and all the flakes together produced a beautiful three-dimensional dance. In the past, the snow would have appeared to fall in a flat sheet in one plane slightly in front of me. I would have felt like I was looking in on the snowfall. But, now, I felt myself within the snowfall, among the snowflakes. Lunch forgotten, I watched the snow fall for several minutes, and, as I watched, I was overcome with a deep sense of joy. A snowfall can be quite beautiful — especially when you see it for the first time.
Barry’s question about whether one could be so overwhelmed by a new way of seeing as to stop looking is not rhetorical — the history of medicine is strewn with cases of blind people receiving corrective surgery that grants them sight, only to reject the new reality of light and return to the familiar world of darkness, moving through their lives with eyes shut.
These physiological transformations are a haunting analogue for our psychological pitfalls — accepting change, even toward something that deepens and broadens our experience of aliveness, is never easy, in part because we are so poor at picturing an alternate rendering of reality. “The things we want are transformative,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her superb Field Guide to Getting Lost, “and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.” We live so often lost in our frames of reference, lulled by the familiar, too terrified to live a larger life on the other side of a transformation that upends our comfortable ways of seeing and of being. (And what is the self if not just a style of being?) It takes both great courage and great vulnerability to welcome such a change — a transformation often mired in uncertainty, discomfiture, and confusion as we adapt to the overwhelm of life more magnified; a transformation that asks us to begin again, and a beginning always places a singular strain on the psyche.
Years into their correspondence, Barry shares with Oliver the case of a young woman who embodied this courageous willingness to welcome transformation — a student of hers born with almost no hearing, who had received a cochlear implant at age 12. Barry writes:
When her implant was first turned on, she did not recognize a sound as a sound but rather as a terrifying, unpleasant, unnerving feeling. For the first few days, she had this same frightening sensation every time she put on the implant. Eventually, she said, she came to accept the feeling. Then she began to expect the sensations and to interpret some of them as meaningful sounds.
[…]
I was intrigued by her use of the word “accept,” because I think anyone who goes through a substantial perceptual improvement must learn to tolerate a certain amount of discomfort, uncertainty, and confusion. If one doesn’t have the support of doctors, therapists, family, and/or friends, then one may not allow the changes to occur.
The degree to which we allow transformation — whether it comes in the form of new prism glasses or a new cochlear implant or a new love — may be the fullest measure of our courage, the great barometer of being fully alive.Here’s what it looked like on Monday morning.
This is the view from Dave and Linda’s front window last Sunday morning in Monticello
Vacuum packed vegetables in the freezer prepped for the curry and chili.That’s a lot of veggies!!
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continues
Prayers for those in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its fifth monthPrayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza
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 delusion.
Comments are closed