Via Daily Dharma: Your Mind’s Potential

 All the qualities that the great masters found, we can attain as well. It all depends on our own efforts, our diligence, our deeper knowing, and our correct motivation.

—Ogyen Trinley Dorje, “Calm Abiding”

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Via Daily Dharma: Continue Taking Care

 Taking care of body, mind, soul, taking care of ourselves and each other emotionally and physically, repairing the world, earning a living—it’s endless. ... But to brightly begin, and then, having begun, to continue: that’s the great thing.

—Norman Fischer, “Saved from Freezing”

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Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History : JANE ADDAMS

September 06

Born

Jane Addams

1860 -

JANE ADDAMS, born; American social worker, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1935) Although she would not have used the word Lesbian, she did have lasting intimate and romantic relationships with women throughout her life.

After returning from a Grand Tour of Europe, Jane resumed friendship with Ellen Gates Starr, now a teacher. A female love of Starr's had moved away and she was heartbroken. She wrote to Jane, "The first real experience I ever had in my life of any real pain in parting came with separating from her. I don't speak of it because people don't understand it. People would understand if it were a man." Soon Addams would become the object of Starr's affection. It is not clear whether Jane returned the affection. In 1889 she and Starr co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related divisions. She was probably most remembered through the institution of her adult night school which set the stage for the continuing education classes offered by many community colleges today.

Hull House also served as a women's sociological institution. Addams was a friend and colleague to the early members of the Chicago School of Sociology, influencing their thought through her work in applied sociology and, in 1893, co-authoring the Hull-House Maps and Papers that came to define the interests and methodologies of the School. She worked with George H. Mead on social reform issues including promoting women’s rights, ending child-labor, and the mediating during the 1910 Garment Workers’ Strike. Although academic sociologists of the time defined her work as "social work", Addams did not consider herself a social worker.

The term Lesbian was coined in 1890, one year after Addams founded Hull House. Although she would not have used the term to define herself, by today's standards, Jane Addams would be a Lesbian. Mary Rozet Smith arrived at Hull House one day in 1890, the daughter of a wealthy paper manufacturer. Over the years she became Jane's devoted companion, virtually playing the role of a traditional wife: tending to her when she was ill, handling her social correspondence, making travel arrangements.

Unfortunately, we will never know the full extent of Jane's relationship with Mary Smith. Toward the end of her life, Jane destroyed most of Mary's letters to her. Perhaps she was trying to cover up a sexual component of their relationship. "I miss you dreadfully and am yours 'til death," Addams wrote to Smith. Smith wrote back, "You can never know what it is to me to have had you and to have you...I feel quite a rush of emotion when I think of you."

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Addams's life and the one which won her the most notoriety was her involvement in the peace movement. Addams declared herself a pacifist and spoke out against World War I. Although she would eventually win a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, it was an unpopular stance to take in 1914.

Addams believed women had a social responsibility to work for peace because working men would never be against war. She took on a leadership role in the Woman's Peace Party. In March 1915 Addams was invited to speak at an International Congress of Women in the Netherlands. Addams presided over the event and one participant said, "She towered above all the others and again and again when she rose to speak and when she closed the audience would stand and applaud...She led without dominating and with extraordinary parliamentary skill clarified and interpreted for the polyglot congress of women."

Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. True to her cause, Jane gave all her prize money away.

 

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - September 6, 2020 💌

If we live in the moment, we are not in time. If you think, "I'm a retired person. I've retired from my role," you are looking back at your life. It's retrospective; it's life in the rearview mirror. If you're young, you might be thinking, "I have my whole life ahead of me. This is what I'll do later." That kind of thinking is called time-binding. It causes us to focus on the past or the future and to worry about what comes next.

Getting caught up in memories of the past or worrying about the future is a form of self-imposed suffering. Either retirement or youth can be seen as moving on, time for something different, something new. Aging is not a culmination. Youth isn't preparation for later. This isn't the end of the line or the beginning.

Now isn't a time to look back or plan ahead. It's time to just be present. The present is timeless. Being in the moment, just being here with what is, is ageless and eternal.

- Ram Dass -

Via Apple News // Remembering Chadwick Boseman

Remembering Chadwick Boseman

How the Black Panther star created an indelible cultural legacy. Plus: the uncompromising arrival of director Chloé Zhao, how The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby became indie royalty, and Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin saddles up for the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter

 

Via White Crane Institute // "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG)

 

Noteworthy

The TAG condom on Jesse Helms House

1991 -

On this date a group of AIDS activists called "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG) accomplished one of the funniest and most outrageous bits of public activism when they literally put an enormous condom over the home of rabid homophobe and AIDS death accomplice Senator Jesse Helms in Arlington, Virginia.  The activists knew they only had seven minutes before the police showed up.  You can see the action in the 2012 documentary How To Survive and Plague. Here: https://youtu.be/Nrr0eA34CSM 

Via White Crane Institute // FREDDIE MERCURY

 

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Freddie Mercury

1946 -

FREDDIE MERCURY, Zanzibar-born singer and songwriter (Queen) (d. 1991) Widely regarded as one of the great singers in popular music, Freddie Mercury possessed a distinctive voice, with a recorded range of nearly four octaves. Although his speaking voice naturally fell in the baritone range, he delivered most songs in the tenor range.

Biographer David Bret described Mercury's voice as "escalating within a few bars from a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, almost perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches." On the other hand, he would often lower the highest notes during live performances. Mercury also claimed never to have had any formal training.

Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé, with whom Mercury recorded an album expressed her opinion that "the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was he was selling the voice." Despite the fact that he had been criticized by Gay activists for hiding his HIV status, author Paul Russell included Mercury in his book The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present. Other entertainers on Russell's list included Liberace and Rock Hudson.

Via White Crane Institute // JOHN CAGE

 This Day in Gay History

September 05

Born

John Cage

1912 -

JOHN CAGE, American composer born (d. 1992). American composer. He was a pioneer of Chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments, and electronic music.

He is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, whose three movements are performed without a single note being played. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era. Cage was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce Cunningham. In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher, writer, printmaker and avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.

Cage always referred to his The Perilous Night (1943) as his "autobiographical" piece, and biographer, David Revill has associated it with the traumas associated with Cage's sexual reorientation, culminating in divorce from his wife (1945) and the beginning of his monogamous partnership with Merce Cunningham, that lasted to the end of his life.

Via Daily Dharma: Returning to Focus

 Each time we let go of distractions to return to our focus, whatever that is, we practice letting go. Letting go of thoughts, scenarios, judgments, conceptual thinking—little chunks of self.

—Erik Hansen, “Bartelby the Buddhist”

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Medicine Buddha Mantra

 

TAYATA, OM BEKADZE BEKADZE
MAHA BEKADZE BEKADZE,
RADZA SAMUNGATE
SOHA

This is pronounced:

Tie-ya-tar, om beck-and-zay beck-and-zay
ma-ha beck-and-zay beck-and-zay
run-zuh sum-oon-gut-eh
so-ha.

Make the jump here

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Via Daily Dharma: Being Truthful

 There is an essential connection between truthfulness and personal integrity. If one goes, so will the other.

—Matthew Gindin, “What Did the Buddha Say About Lying?”

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Via Daily Dharma: Identify with Consciousness

 Suffering exists until we identify not with the changing conditions of our lives but with consciousness itself.

—Nina Wise, “Sudden Awakening”

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Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History: JOHN M. MCNEILL

 

Father John M. McNeill

1925 -

JOHN M. MCNEILL, Jesuit scholar, psychotherapist, born (d: 2015); For more than twenty-five years John J. McNeill, an ordained priest and psychotherapist, devoted his life to spreading the good news of God's love for Lesbian and Gay Christians. One year after the publication of The Church and the Homosexual (1976), McNeill received an order from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican ordering him to silence in the public media. He observed the silence for nine years while continuing a private ministry to Gays and Lesbians which included psychotherapy, workshops, lectures and retreats.

In 1988, he received a further order from Cardinal Ratzinger (soon to become Pope Benedict XVI, the first Pope to resign in a millennium) directing him to give up all ministry to Gay persons which he refused to do in conscience. As a result, he was expelled by the Vatican from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for challenging the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on the issue of homosexuality, and for refusing to give up his ministry and psychotherapy practice to Gay men and Lesbians. McNeill had been a Jesuit for nearly 40 years.

After enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II at the age of seventeen, McNeill served in combat in the Third Army under General Patton and was captured in Germany in 1944. McNeill spent six months as a POW (Prisoner of War) until he was liberated in May of 1945. John enrolled in Canisius College in Buffalo after his discharge from the army and, upon graduating, entered the Society of Jesus in 1948. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1959.

In 1964, McNeill earned a Doctorate in Philosophy, with highest honors (Plus Grande Distinction), at Louvain University in Belgium. His doctoral thesis on the philosophical and religious thought of Maurice Blondel was published in 1966 as the first volume of the series Studies in the History of Christian Thought edited by Heiko Oberman and published by Brill Press in Leyden, Holland.

During his professional career, McNeill taught philosophy at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY, and in the doctorate program at Fordham University in NYC. In 1972, he joined the combined Woodstock Jesuit Seminary and Union Theological Seminary faculty as professor of Christian Ethics, specializing in Sexual Ethics.

In 1974, McNeill was co-founder of the New York City chapter of Dignity, a group for Catholic Gays and Lesbians. For over twenty-five years, he has been active in a ministry to Gay Christians through retreats, workshops, lectures, publications, etc. For twenty years John was a leader of semiannual retreats at the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania.