Transition - Sermon on 7/18/2021

 Sermon on transition from the Rev. Angela Herrera on 7/18/2021:

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Image of the process:

Universalist Unitarians Today

From question box sermon on 8/28/2021:

What would UUs be called if we chose a new name to reflect our beliefs now?

"We choose" (rhymes with UUs, rhymes with Jews, rhymes with we/yous)

Resilience - The Rev. Christine Robinson sermon 8/22/2021

 

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Video:

Poem - For the New Year, 1981 - Denise Levertov

I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.

Poet recommendations

 How the Word Is Passed - Clint Smith

pg. 28

• Robert Hayden - ballads to remember the Middle Passage
• Gwendolyn Brooks - children on the South Side of Chicago
• Audre Lourde
• Sonia Sanchez

Your thoughts are not facts.

" Sometimes it's good; sometimes it's bad. We'll see." - The Rev. Christine Robinson

Poem - At Blackwater - Mary Oliver

 

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live

your life.

Tapping medicine meditation

Instructions:

1. Rub hands to move the energy.
2. Take diaphragmatic breath.
3. Shake out hands to release pooled energy.
4. Close eyes. Soft smile. 
5. Tap the following areas in order, cycling through twice with the mantra and a breath at each place.

• Top of the head

• First time: I release my inner critic.
• Second time: I release guilt and embarrassment.

• Inside eyebrow

• First time: I allow myself to feel connected to my intuition.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel accepted.

• Outside of the eye – close to eye socket on the bone.

• First time: I release sadness and frustration.
• Second time: I release any uncertainty and confusion.

• Under the eye on cheekbone (stomach meridian)

• First time: I allow myself to feel inner peace and healing.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel confidence.

• Under nose. (One hand)

• a. First time: I release anger and resentment.
• b. Second time: I release stress and any feeling of being stuck.

• Under mouth. (One hand)

• First time: I allow myself to feel compassion for myself.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel calm and at ease.

• Below collarbone – kidney

• First time: I release worry and anxiety.
• Second time: I release any insecurity and hopelessness.

• Side of chest (by bra straps, using hands like flippers)

• First time: I allow myself to feel safe now.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel compassion for others.

1. Hands at heart.
2. Release tongue to floor of mouth. Invites other parts to release, too.
3. Diaphragm breathing.
4. Smile.

Poem - To have without holding - Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Marge Piercy, "To have without holding" from The Moon is Always Female. Copyright © 1980 by Marge Piercy. 

From Poetry Foundation Collection: It’s Complicated: Love poems that offer a realistic take on relationships today.

Poem - In the Middle - Barbara Crooker

In the Middle
of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

Learning Lots about Confidence - Podcast with Amy Poehler

 On Confidence

- Learning Lots with Brie Larson and Jessie Ennis

Amy Poehler:

• Remember it's about habit, not character. Gives you space to try again, make a different choice, have a different outcome. Unlearning is the word. If you treat it like habit and not character, then you don't also get to beat yourself up when you didn't hit a bullseye. If you have a moment when you didn't advocate for yourself or sold yourself short, so what? You didn't spend the whole day saying, I'm such a piece of shit. It's a habit. Practice it. I did it again! Huh. Oh well. Try it again.
• What serves you?
• We can always call cut, take a break, do a second take. It's not all or nothing. 
• Be as gentle with yourself as you are to other people.
• The most talented people are the easiest to work with because they're not coming from a fear-based place.
• Don't cry, sexy.
• "I really like failing and succeeding with people. Look what we created or destroyed together."
• It always come back to, I just didn't commit - to the person, to the project...
• Improving and just dying on stage... If you are dying and someone stays with you, you love them forever. We're in this together. If they leave you, desert you, you'll never forget it. The way they act when the ship goes down tells you everything about them.
• You can tell people how they should see you. Whether or not you feel it is its own journey. Watch the words you say about yourself, and then the ones in your head. People are waiting for you to tell them who you are. So just tell them you're good at it. 
• This happens to us women all the time - we're asked a question that's a little too personal - I ask, "What made you ask that?" It buys you a little time and makes them think about why they are wanting to spend that precious time with you asking that.
• A little managing your adrenaline, a little manifestation, a little I deserve to be here, which is always half the battle in all things.
• You can shine your brightest around real people, they bask in the glow of it, they don't ask you to turn it down. Real friends do that. They don't think your fireworks are too close. They love it and watch them and support you.

Brie Larson:

• "It lifts everyone up, it's infectious. If you are embodied in yourself, that type of leadership actually just makes everyone else feel it."
• Confidence is infectious. When you are living with joy, with freedom to know what your yeses and your no's are, that's that pure confidence that's not oppressive at all. It only brings about more. It might be that someone watches you at work, or watches you on tv and says, oh wow, that's how that works. I want to be more like that. Or there might be that there's a direct work environment, that by you being calm, steady, and in yourself, it leaves the room for someone else to be in the I don't know space or I do know space. After talking to Amy, an expert in confidence, I can see that there isn't an upside to dimming my light. 

Jessie Ennis:

• You use laughter as a form of support. You're so funny that you make everyone else feel like they want to find what's funny about this, too.
• I watched you in interviews reject questions that didn't serve you. When did you learn to set those boundaries?
• Amy said, we can't dim our lights for anyone . If your brightness is blinding to someone else, you shouldn't be dimming the light to make them more comfortable, you just need to shine the light on them bright enough so they feel the confidence, too.
• I value her voice, the way she uses her voice, the way she directs her talent.

Kids corner:

• Calvin, age 4 - confidence means brave. You need to be superhero. They have special powers. I have all of their super powers. 
• Story, age 11 - If you're yourself, you're saying all the right things. 
• Oona, age 4 3/4 - Confidence means you're really brave about something. [My stuffed animal] makes me calm and comfortable. [What about using a big grown up knife?] Only if my hand was on mommy or daddy's hand, if mommy or daddy was confident about me doing it. - I feel confident with their help. Super Oona comes out when someone needs help. Super Oona and Oona have the same scaredness and not scaredness. [What would you say when someone's not feeling confident?] Just be kind and loving and they'll want to play with you. 

Cleaning -- Camille T. Dungy (poem)

I learned regret at mother’s sink,
jarred tomatoes, river-mud brown,
a generation old, lumping
down the drain. Hating wasted space,
I had discarded what I could
not understand. I hadn’t known
a woman to fight drought or frost
for the promise of winter meals,
hadn’t known my great-grandmother,
or what it was to have them lose
the company of that woman
who, upon seeing her namesake,
child of her child, grown and gliding
into marriage, gifted the fruit
of her garden, a hard-won strike
against want. Opening the jar,
I knew nothing of the rotting
effect, the twisting grip of years
spent packing, of years spent moving
further each time from known comforts:
a grandmother’s garden, her rows
always neat, the harvest: bright wealth
mother hoarded. I understood
only the danger of a date
so old. Understanding clearly
what is fatal to the body,
I only understand too late
what can be fatal to the heart.