- Ram Dass -
Guidelines for an Ethical Life
With Leslie Booker
|
To
get over yourself, appreciate what is other than you and get on with
living, being liberated, free of the karma that we create. Trust the
universe and let it carry you along.
—Roshi Robert Althouse, “After Awakening”
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Experiencing
the disappearance of discomfort soothes the mind, makes it confident,
and allows for the insight of impermanence: Everything passes.
—Sylvia Boorstein, “The Wisdom of Discomfort”
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TOMMY KIRK, American actor, born; If you are of a certain age, and watched early kid-TV and Disney movies, there is little need to say who Tommy Kirk is. Or more accurately, was. Kirk is an object lesson in the dangers of not concealing one's Gayness in the early 1960s. Kirk was a child star in such blockbuster Disney films as The Absent Minded Professor, Old Yeller, and The Shaggy Dog.
But in his late teens, despondent over the exploitation of his cute all-American adolescent image, Kirk took a step that most of his Gay predecessors in Hollywood never dared. He came out to Disney. Immediately fired, Kirk briefly received national press coverage but soon passed into obscurity.
He joined church organizations working with Gay and lesbian youth. He remained furious, and, at times, vocal, about Disney's propaganda mill and discriminatory practices. Unfortunately, Kirk's heroic act has all but disappeared from Gay history.
Tommy Kirk was inducted as a Disney Legend in 2006, alongside his old co-stars Tim Considine and Kevin Corcoran.
His other repeat co-stars, Annette Funicello and Fred MacMurray, had already been inducted (in 1992 and 1987, respectively). Also in 2006, the first of Kirk's Hardy Boys serials was issued on DVD in the fifth "wave" of the Walt Disney Treasures series.
We’re all prisoners of life and death. The question is: What kind of prisoners do we want to be?
—Bonnie Myotai Treace, “Rising to the Challenge: Filling the Well with Snow”
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The
body, however evanescent in its character, must be considered holy even
as the holy tree, and all the necessary care should be taken to keep it
the worthy vessel in which the spirit is lodged.
—Soyen Shaku, “The Middle Way”
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- Ram Dass -
REV. JAMES LEWIS STOLL, M.Div.a Unitarian Universalist minister, died (b: 1936). Stoll was the first ordained minister of any religion in the United States or Canada to come out as gay. He did so at the annual Continental Conference of Student Religious Liberals on September 5, 1969 in La Foret, Colorado.
Born in 1936 in Connecticut, he was educated at San Francisco State University and the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, CA. In the words of his friend, Leland Bond-Upson, Mr. Stoll took a flat in the Eureka Valley neighborhood in San Francisco with three other friends. In September 1969, Mr. Stoll went to the La Foret Conference Center in Colorado Springs to attend a convention of about 100 college-age Unitarians. On the second or third night of the conference, Stoll got up to speak. He told the assembly that he’d been doing a lot of hard thinking that summer and that he could no longer live a lie.
He had been hiding his true nature—from everyone except his closest friends. “If the revolution we are in means anything, it means we have the right to be ourselves, without shame or fear.” And then he told the group he was gay, and it wasn’t a choice, and he wasn’t ashamed anymore and he wasn’t going to hide it anymore. From now on he was going to be himself in public.
He led the effort that convinced the Unitarian Universalist Association to pass the first-ever gay rights resolution in 1970. He founded the first counseling center for gays and lesbians in San Francisco. In the 1970s he established the first hospice on Maui. He was president of the San Francisco chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1990's. He died at the age of 58 from complications of heart and lung disease, exacerbated by obesity and a life-long smoking habit.
During
this time of giving, we should not place too much importance on
material gifts; it’s our thoughts, words, and deeds that count. Sincere
expressions of appreciation, praise, thanks, and an unexpected helping
hand can be the most treasured gifts of all.
—Reverend Earl Ikeda, “O Bodhi Tree, O Bodhi Tree”
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No
longer dividing the world into good and bad, love and hate, we not only
have more freedom and ease in daily life; we also gain access to the
wisdom of our real nature.
—Anne C. Klein, “The Four Immeasurables”
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In
the very first moment of meditation, there is a profound realization:
we recognize that we do not have to take our thoughts as completely
real.
—Douglas Penick, “What Are You Meditating For?”
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Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.
- Ram Dass -
