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Via Lion´s Roar // Thich Nhat Hanh

This Is the Buddha’s Love: An Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh

In this interview from 2006, the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about non-self, interdependence, and the love that expands until it has no limit.

Thich Nhat Hanh: We say, “I take refuge in sangha,” but sangha is made of individual practitioners. So you have to take care of yourself. Otherwise, you don’t have much to contribute to the community because you do not have enough calm, peace, solidity, and freedom in your heart. That is why in order to build a community, you have to build yourself at the same time. The community is in you and you are in the community. You interpenetrate each other. That is why I emphasize sangha-building. That doesn’t mean that you neglect your own practice. It is by taking good care of your breath, of your body, of your feelings, that you can build a good community, you see.   Make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via White Crane Institute

1903 -

Psychoanalyst DR. A.A. BRILL presented a paper at a joint meeting of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association in Boston on homosexuality and paranoia. He stressed that homosexuality was part of the normal sexual instinct and plays a useful part in social relationships and that homosexuality was only pathological when combined with adjustment difficulties. However, he also equated homosexuality with paranoia by saying homosexuals experienced delusions of persecution. (Now why would that be?

Via Daily Dharma: The Accomplishment of Slowing Down

Choosing to slow down and not accomplish anything is a revolution in itself.

—Hai An (Sister Ocean),“The Joy of Letting Go: Spring Cleaning Inside and Out”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Ram Dass on Polarization, Awareness and Social Responsibility

 

 

[New Article] Ram Dass on Polarization, Awareness and Social Responsibility

I recently met with a police chief who had been going around to colleges getting college students to become policemen for New York City. I complimented him on what he’s doing, on trying to create another kind of psychic space in the police department, and so on.

At the same time, I said, “The program will be as successful as you are conscious because as long as you are stuck in a polarity you’re just going to enroll more people into that polarity. If you aren’t stuck in the polarity, you may be able to free people by the model that new policemen will adopt about what it is that they think they’re doing every day when they go out and be policemen...”

Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom:

Today's Gay Wisdom

2018 -

TODAYS GAY WISDOM

From Edward Carpenter's Ioläus

I CONCLUDE this collection with a few quotations from Whitman, for whom "the love of comrades "perhaps stands as the most intimate part of his message to the world — "Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting." Whitman, by his great power, originality and initiative, as well as by his deep insight and wide vision, is in many ways the inaugurator of a new era to mankind; and it is especially interesting to find that this idea of comradeship, and of its establishment as a social institution, plays so important a part with him.

We have seen that in the Greek age, and more or less generally in the ancient and pagan world, comradeship was an institution; we have seen that in Christian and modern times, though existent, it was socially denied and ignored, and indeed to a great extent fell under a kind of ban; and now Whitman's attitude towards it suggests to us that it really is destined to pass into its third stage, to arise again, and become a recognized factor of modern life, and even in a more extended and perfect form than at first. [As Whitman in this connection (like Tennyson in connection with In Memoriam) is sure to be accused of morbidity, it may he worthwhile to insert the following note from In re Walt Whitman, p. 115," Dr. Drinkard in 1870, when Whitman broke down from rupture of a small blood-vessel in the brain, wrote to a Philadelphia doctor detailing Whitman's case, and stating that he was a man ' with the most natural habits, bases, and organization he had ever seen.]'

"It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American Democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences; but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and lifelong, carried to degrees hitherto unknown-not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having deepest relations to general politics. I say Democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself."

Democratic Vistas note:

The three following poems are taken from Leaves of Grass:

"Recorders ages hence, Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I will tell you what to say of me,
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
The friend the lover's portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest,
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely pour'd it forth,
Who often walk'd lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
Who pensive away from one he lov'd often lay sleepless and
dissatisfied at night,
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov'd might secretly be indifferent to him,
Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills, he and another wan dering hand in hand, they twain apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter'd the streets curv'd with his arm the
shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon him also."

Leaves of Grass, 1891

"When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still, it was not a happy night for me that follow'd,
And else when I carous'd, or when my plans were accomplish'd, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander'd alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,
laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
nourish'd me more, and the beautiful day pass'd well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend, and that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continuously up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast-and that night I was happy."

"I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions, (What indeed
have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these
States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large
that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades."

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Via Daily Dharma: Be Conscious of Your Intentions

When we understand that karma is based on volition, we can see the enormous responsibility we have to become conscious of the intentions that precede our actions.

—Joseph Goldstein,“Cause and Effect”

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Hand Mudra Lessons

Via Daily Dharma: Alleviating Disruptions from Your Life

Anger, annoyance and impatience deplete energy. Patient effort strengthens our resources. We need to practice cooling emotional fires and alleviating fierce disruptions from our lives.

—Allan Lokos, “Cooling Emotional Fires”

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Via NYTimes // Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84

Larry Kramer, Playwright and Outspoken AIDS Activist, Dies at 84

He worked hard to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency. But his aggressive approach could sometimes overshadow his achievements.

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Via White Crane Institute // From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS

From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of it in THE YOUNG KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY; in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.

It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.

I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfillment.

Via White Crane Institute // RACHEL CARSON

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L to R: Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman

1907 -

Marine biologist RACHEL CARSON was born on this date. She was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania and spent the majority of her life outside of Washington, DC with summers in Maine. She is best known as the author of Silent Spring, which is considered one of the foundational documents for the modern environmental movement.

Silent Spring, published in 1962, awakened society to its responsibility to other forms of life. Carson had long been aware of the dangers of chemical pesticides and also the controversy within the agricultural community. She had long hoped someone else would publish an expose' on DDT but eventually realized that only she had the background as well as the economic freedom to do it.

Silent Spring provoked a firestorm of controversy as well as attacks on Carson's professional integrity. The pesticide industry mounted a massive campaign to discredit Carson even though she did not urge the complete banning of pesticides but called for research to ensure pesticides were used safely and to find alternatives to dangerous chemicals such as DDT.

The federal government, however, ordered a complete review of pesticide policy and Carson was asked to testify before a Congressional committee. As a direct result of that review, DDT was banned. With the publication of Silent Spring, Carson is credited with launching the contemporary environmental movement and awakening concern by Americans about the environment.

She died from cancer in 1964 at the age of 57. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named one of its refuges near Carson's summer home on the coast of Maine as "the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge" in 1969 to honor the memory of this extraordinary woman.

In the early 1950s Carson moved with her mother to Southport Island, Maine and subsequently began a extremely close relationship with a neighbor Dorothy Freeman. The relationship would last the rest of Carson's life. The two women had a number of common interests, nature chief among them, and began exchanging letters regularly while apart. They would continue to share every summer for the remainder of Carson's life, and meet whenever else their schedules permitted. Carson and Freeman knew that their letters could be interpreted as a lesbian.

Freeman shared parts of Carson's letters with her husband to help him understand the relationship, but much of their correspondence was carefully guarded. Shortly before Carson's death, she and Freeman destroyed hundreds of letters. The surviving correspondence was published in 1995 as Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964: An Intimate Portrait of a Remarkable Friendship, edited by Freeman's granddaughter.

Via White Crane Institute // WILD BILL HICKOK

This Day in Gay History

James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok

1837 -

WILD BILL HICKOK is born in Troy Grove, Illinois. His real name was James Butler Hickok. Like many men in the wild west, Wild Bill really was wild with the men on the frontier and used his Lesbian buddy, Calamity Jane as a blind.

Few people ever knew the pair's secret, and in the movies about their lives, not a mention was made by either Doris Day or Howard Keel. The American West of the nineteenth century was a world of freedom and adventure for men of every stripe—not least also those who admired and desired other men.

Among these sojourners was William Drummond Stewart, a flamboyant Scottish nobleman who found in American culture of the 1830s and 1840s a cultural milieu of openness in which men could pursue same-sex relationships.

William Benemann’s recent book, Men In Eden traces Stewart’s travels from his arrival in America in 1832 to his return to Murthly Castle in Perthshire, Scotland, with his French Canadian–Cree Indian companion, Antoine Clement, one of the most skilled hunters in the Rockies. Benemann chronicles Stewart’s friendships with such notables as Kit Carson, William Sublette, Marcus Whitman, and Jim Bridger. He describes the wild Renaissance-costume party held by Stewart and Clement upon their return to America—a journey that ended in scandal.

Through Stewart’s letters and novels, Benemann shows that Stewart was one of many men drawn to the sexual freedom offered by the West. His book provides a tantalizing new perspective on the Rocky Mountain fur trade and the role of homosexuality in shaping the American West. For more: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13594189-men-in-eden

Via Daily Dharma: What You Discover Through Buddhist Practice

Practicing Buddhism is about discovering ourselves to be in a great, flowing river of continuities.

—Roshi Joan Halifax,“Giving Birth to Ancestors”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - May 27, 2020 💌

"Being conscious is cutting through your own melodrama and being right here. Exist in no mind, be empty, here now, and trust that as a situation arises, out of you will come what is necessary to deal with that situation including the use of your intellect when appropriate. Your intellect need not be constantly held on to keep reassuring you that you know where you’re at, out of fear of loss of control.
Ultimately, when you stop identifying so much with your physical body and with your psychological entity, that anxiety starts to disintegrate. And you start to define yourself as in flow with the universe; and whatever comes along—death, life joy, sadness—is grist for the mill of awakening."

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: How to Unearth Natural Freedom

Exposed to the lucidity of simple awareness, practice dissolves into a practice of no practice (which is not the same thing as abandoning practice) where no one is doing or not doing anything, and natural freedom, no longer yearned for, naturally prevails.

—Joel Agee, “Not Found, Not Lost”

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Via White Crane Institute / SIR IAN McKELLEN

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Sir Ian McKellen

1939 -

Today's the birthday of beloved stage and screen actor and long time Gay Rights advocate and hero SIR IAN McKELLEN. Born in Burnley, England, he studied at St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. McKellen was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Gay director James Whale ("Frankenstein") in Gods and Monsters becoming the first openly Gay actor to be nominated.

He is the recipient of six Oliviers, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, A BIF Award, two Saturn Awards, four Drama Desk Awards and two Critic’s Choice Awards. He has also received two Academy Award nominations, five Emmy Award nominations, and four BAFTA nominations.

He's had quite a career with roles in such classic plays (and films adaptations) of Macbeth, Richard III and Edward II to name just a few. These are all available on DVD and well worth the watching. Millions of fans the world over know him as the bearded wizard Gandalf or the helmeted mutant master of magnetism Magneto. He may be the best known out Gay actor in the world. He's been out for decades becoming one of the first to do so back in the 1980s. People told him it would mean the end of his career. It hasn't.

In 2009 McKellen premiered a one-man show in Washington, DC as a benefit for the Washington Shakespeare Theater. He held an audience and this writer spellbound as he performed soliloquy after soliloquy from Shakespearean roles he's had over the years. He shared stories of the actors he has known and called friend. Most moving of all was his telling the story of being in South Africa after the end of apartheid. He was there for a role but was asked by local gay activists if he'd be willing to speak to Nelson Mandela about the need for Gay Rights protections in the new country's constitution.

He told them he would only agree if he were accompanied by South African Gay activist leaders. The three of them, all friends, met with Mandela and spoke of the need for the new country to place Gay Rights protections into the constitution. Mandela agreed and it was his support that allowed for South Africa to become the first country to place direct rights for Gay and Lesbian people into its constitution. McKellen called it the proudest moment of his life. We love you Sir Ian. Happy birthday!

Via Daily Dharma: Imagine the War Being Over

Victory is no balm for loss. Any of us may celebrate a moment, but we live a long time, and finality is not what we need, compassion is what we need. Let the future think about the war being over, because then it will be.

—George Evans,“A Walk in the Garden of Heaven”

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Via Modern MET // Giant Buddha Is Surrounded With Harmonious Mound of 150,000 Lavender Plants

Renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando brings harmony to the landscape by enclosing a large stone Buddha in a lavender covered hill. Located in the Makomanai Takino Cemetery in Sapporo, Ando was charged with shaping the landscape around the pre-existing sculpture.

For 15 years, the 44-foot-tall Buddha stood alone as a solemn 1,650-ton figure in a field. “Until now, the Buddha statue has stood alone in the field, giving an unrestful impression. The client wanted to give visitors a more serene appreciation of the Buddha,” Ando shared. “Our idea was to cover the Buddha below the head with a hill of lavender plants. We called the idea the ‘head-out Buddha.'”

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