Via White Crane Institute / This Day in Gay History February 14

Noteworthy

The reliquary of St. Valentine in the Vatican

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ST. VALENTINE. No no-no…Don’t jump to any conclusions. St. Valentine was not Gay, but neither did he have anything to do with the holiday for lovers that bears his name. That St. Valentine, one of the more boring Christian martyrs, is the patron saint of lovers is a mere fluke. You see, the Norman word galatin, meaning a lover, was often mispronounced valentin, and through a natural confusion of names, St. Valentine became associated with love.

Officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, St. Valentine is known to be a real person who died around A.D. 270. However, his true identity was questioned as early as A.D. 496 by Pope Gelasius I, who referred to the martyr and his acts as “being known only to God.”

One account from the 1400s describes Valentine as a temple priest who was beheaded near Rome by the emperor Claudius II for helping Christian couples wed. A different account claims Valentine was the Bishop of Terni, also martyred by Claudius II on the outskirts of Rome. Because of the similarities of these accounts, it’s thought they may refer to the same person. Enough confusion surrounds the true identity of St. Valentine that the Catholic Church discontinued liturgical veneration of him in 1969, though his name remains on its list of officially recognized saints.

There is lore that says he was sent to the prison as he was involved in the act of soldiers' weddings who were not allowed to marry or mistreated in the Roman empire. 

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Via Daily Dharma: Reaching Our Greatest Capacity for Love

As people become more whole and are freed from certain basic fears (of abandonment, of unworthiness, of engulfment), new possibilities may open up for the expression of embodied love.

—Jorge Ferrer, “What’s the Opposite of Jealousy?”

#LGBTfilms #Guatemala #LoveIsLove "Jose" trailer from Outsider Pictures

Via Daily Dharma: How Awareness Leads Us

Awareness shows us the questions, the problems we might be able to solve and the questions that can’t be answered at all, and awareness makes the hand-holds and toe-holds appear as we traverse the cliff of our lives.

—Interview with Jane Hirshfield by Mark Matousek, “Felt in Its Fullness”

Via Lions Roar / Growing Together Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how we can use loving relationships to cultivate the seeds of buddhahood inside us.

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Via Whaite Crane Institute / This Day in Gay History February 12

 






Abraham Lincoln's bed-mate Captain David Derickson

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 16^th President of the United States, born (d: 1865); Only in a world that thinks that being Gay is an abnormal condition does the suggestion that a revered president might have been primarily Gay become an issue. C.A. Tripp went farther than any earlier study to present the greatest amount of evidence and the strongest argument currently available that Lincoln’s primary erotic response was that of a homosexual man in his posthumously published book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.

Over the years, a number of other writers and scholars had argued that Lincoln was homosexual, but Tripp objected to the evidence, finding it unconvincing. He then set out to collect as much information as he could on Lincoln and explore the 16^th president’s sexuality in all its dimensions and complexity. What he created was neither a work of sexual or biological reductionism, but a full-fledged character study and a significant effort to understand a complicated man, that placed Lincoln’s sexuality into a larger, more significant framework.

There are, as usual, the dismissals of his evidence as “misreadings” of the customs of another time. And yet the evidence of the relationship Lincoln had with his wife Mary is as obscure and subject to interpretation as are his relationships with the important men in his life and there is no problem accepting those vagueries. As any modern Gay man will attest, Lincoln may have functioned as a heterosexual, but his marriage does not preclude an intense homosexual drive.

From 1862 to 1863, President Lincoln was accompanied by a bodyguard from the Pennsylvania Bucktail Brigade named Captain David Derickson. Unlike Lincoln’s earlier male friend, Joshua Speed, Derickson was a prodigious father, marrying twice and siring ten children. Like Speed, however, Derickson became a close friend of the president and also shared his bed while Mary Todd was away from Washington. According to an 1895 regimental history written by one of Derickson’s fellow officers:

“Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President’s confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln’s absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and — it is said — making use of His Excellency’s night-shirt!”

Another source, the well-connected wife of Lincoln’s naval adjundant, wrote in her diary: “Tish says, ‘there is a Bucktail Soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, & when Mrs L. is not home, sleeps with him.’ What stuff!” Derickson’s association with Lincoln ended with his promotion and transfer in 1863.

Sadly, Tripp died in May 2003, and we will never know how he would have defended his study of the sexual orientation of Abraham Lincoln. But any Gay man reading of Lincoln’s seduction of a 44-year old captain of the Pennsylvania Bucktails in the fall of 1862, will have little trouble with the remaining arguments. But it does give a whole new meaning to the term “rail-splitter” doncha think?

Via :Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - February 12, 2020 💌

Of course it’s embarrassing not to always be infinitely wise, but I feel that what we can offer each other is our truth of the process of growing, and that means we fall on our face again and again.
Sri Aurobindo says, “You get up, you take a step, you fall on your face, you get up, you look sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you take another step, you fall on your face, you get up, you look sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you take another step…” and that’s the journey of awakening.
If you were awakened already, you wouldn’t do that, so my suggestion is you relax and don’t expect that you will always make the wisest decisions, and just realize that sometimes you make a decision, and it wasn’t the right one, and then you change it.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: How to Ripen Wisdom

Wisdom, which includes skillful action, arises when we can hold our views lightly and continue to question the basic assumptions that underlie our truths.

—Brandon Dean Lamson, “Meeting Violence with Kindness”

Via Queerty / Farmer's diary from 1810 shows he was more woke about homosexuality than many Americans today

 

 A page of Tomlinson’s diary. Credit: The University of Oxford

An English farmer who lived 200 years ago was more woke about homosexuality than many people today, according to an entry from his newly unearthed diary.

Matthew Tomlinson was a farmer in West Yorkshire in Northern England. In January 1810, he heard about a naval surgeon who had been executed for sodomy and took to his journal to express why he thought criminalizing homosexuality was wrong.

In England and Wales, homosexuality was punishable by death until 1861, when it was replaced with a prison sentence. Homosexual acts remained illegal until 1967 when it was finally decriminalized.

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Being Free Together | Ram Dass Full Lecture

James Taylor - Song For You Far Away

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Via FB / Thich Nhat Hanh

Life ~ Thich Nhat Hanh https://justdharma.com/s/ycdwo 

Only the present moment contains life. – Thich Nhat Hanh from the book "Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices" ISBN: 978-1888375916 - https://amzn.to/1bGLLIM Thich Nhat Hanh on the web: http://plumvillage.org Thich Nhat Hanh biography: http://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/biography/

Via Daily Dharma: Feeling Close with Every Creature

For compassion to develop toward a wide range of persons, mere knowledge of how beings suffer is not sufficient; there has to be a sense of closeness with regard to every being.

—Jeffrey Hopkins, “Everyone as a Friend”

Via Daily Dharma: Change Can Be a Gift

It is only because of change that suffering can end.

—Sallie Tisdale, “Washing Out Emptiness”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Be a Bodhisattva in Everyday Life

[The] wish to be more kind and helpful is the beginning of the bodhisattva path itself, and the treading of this path … will mainly consist of small acts of kindness and concern, brief moments of putting others before ourselves.

—Manjusura, “An Everyday Aspiration”

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - February 9, 2020 💌

It is the continuing work of life: of learning to trust that the universe is unfolding exactly as it should, no matter how it looks to us; learning to appreciate that each of us has a part in nurturing this interconnectedness and healing it where it is torn; discovering what our individual contribution can be, then giving ourselves fully to it.
Demanding as that sounds, it is what, in the spiritual sense, we are all here for, and compassionate action gives us yet one more opportunity to live it. It is an opportunity to cooperate with the universe, to be part of what the Chinese call, "the great river of the Tao."
It is not a coincidence that Hanuman, who in the Hindu cosmology is called the “embodiment of selfless service,” is the son of the wind god; when we give ourselves into becoming fully who we are by doing fully what we do, we experience lightness, we are like kites in wind, we are on the side of the angels, we are entering lightly.

- Ram Dass -