Sunday, January 10, 2021

Via Tricycle // What’s in a Word? Dukkha

What’s in a Word? Dukkha
By Andrew Olendzki

The Buddha’s four noble truths are all about dukkha (“suffering”). But it’s important to realize that dukkha has a much deeper and richer meaning beyond just physical and emotional pain.

Via Daily Dharma: Let Fear Subside

Being free of fear is not a matter of never feeling it, but of not being flattened when we do. We can feel it and know it is a natural phenomenon, also an impermanent one, which will have its say and be gone.

—David Guy, “Trying to Speak: A Personal History of Stage Fright”

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Saturday, January 9, 2021

Via White Crane Institute // Gay Wisdom

1900 -

RICHARD HALLIBURTON, American adventurer and author, born (d: 1939) If Halliburton was alive today he would be the guy in "The Most Fascinating Man in the World" ads. Halliburton was the quintessential preppie. And in the Ivy League of yore, preppiness and Gayness often went hand-in-hand. When Halliburton’s Chinese junk, Sea Dragon, was lost in the Pacific in 1939, he still looked very much as he had at Lawrenceville and Princeton – trim, muscular, and innocently handsome.

His athletic prowess and world-wide adventures had titillated a generation of vicarious thrill seekers and had been happily exploited by both the media and Halliburton’s many best-selling books. And it’s easy to see why. He climbed the Matterhorn in 1921; swam the Hellespont in 1925 and the Panama Canal (from the Atlantic to the Pacific) in 1928; and flew over 50,000 miles around the world in his own airplane, The Flying Carpet, between 1928 and 1931, thereby milking the adoration of an aviation-mad public.

Halliburton starred in his own documentary films and lectured, for stiff fees, to large audiences throughout the world. Between times, he managed to find time for men. As Roger Austen writes in Playing the Game, Halliburton “had a special fondness for YMCAs, spend the night with Rod La Roque, went flying with Ramon Navarro, and settled down with another bachelor in Laguna Beach.” And how was his adoring public to know? Hadn’t his books been filled with his appreciation of “Kashmiri maidens, Parisian ballerinas and Castillian countesses”? “Halliburton,” writes John Paul Hudson with acute insight, “certainly did a lot of straight-approved things, though his exploits were self-stretching and not competitive – which is the Gay way.”

Via Daily Dharma: Train in Compassion

We know that someone like Michael Jordan trained for years to get as good at basketball as he was, but we assume someone like Mother Teresa was just born like that. Really, compassion is a skill you need to practice having for other people and also for yourself.

—Interview with Laura Mustard by Emily DeMaioNewton, “The Sun Behind the Clouds”

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Via NPR: Love And Hope Are At The Heart Of 'The Prophets'

Robert Jones Jr. says his debut novel, The Prophets, came to him in whispers from people whose stories haven't been told, and whose history has often been wiped from the record: Black queer people who were enslaved in America. It is a love story set inside a tragedy, the story of Samuel and Isaiah, two Black men enslaved on a plantation in Mississippi who find love with each other.

"You know, a psychologist might say that's your own conscience speaking to you, but I wanted to be a little bit more spiritual in my thinking about it," Jones says. "And imagine that it was my ancestors sort of pushing me toward writing this story, toward being a witness to their testimonies that have not made it into the official record."

Make the jump here to listen to the full interview

And via Amazon:

"A new kind of epic...A grand achievement...While The Prophets' dreamy realism recalls the work of Toni Morrison...its penetrating focus on social dynamics stands out more singularly." --Entertainment Weekly

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man--a fellow slave--seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony.

With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr., fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries--of ancestors and future generations to come--culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.

Via Amazon

Friday, January 8, 2021

Seated Bodhisattva, 770, Art Institute of Chicago: Asian Art

This rare and important sculpture represents a Buddhist bodhisattva, or bosatsu, an enlightened and compassionate being who postponed Buddhahood in order to help save others. Calm, stately, and full-bodied, the bosatsu is seated in a frontal, meditative pose; his gracefully held hands, raised midair, make a gesture of assurance. Buddhism, which originated in India with the teachings of the Buddha Sakyamuni, or Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563-c. 483 B.C.), was named the official religion of Japan at the beginning of the eighth century by the Emperor Shomu (701-56). This small, finely crafted lacquer figure is the only Buddhist sculpture outside Japan that is firmly attributed to the influential sculpture workshop of Todai-ji, the largest and most prestigious of the great state-sponsored Buddhist temples built during the Nara period. This sculpture represents a dramatic shift in Japanese sculptural tradition—a move away from the expensive, time-consuming technique of using lacquer (a resin extracted from the sap of a tree) over a temporary clay core that, once removed, left a sculpture that was completely hollow except for perhaps a wood bracing system. Here a sculpted wood core is overlaid with lacquer-soaked cloth. The innovative sculptors at the Nara temple modeled the wet and pliable surface of the cloth to create fine details such as facial features and jewelry. Finally the sculpture was gilt; traces of gold remain on the bodhisattva’s face and chest.

Kate S. Buckingham Endowment

Size: 61 × 43.2 × 32.3 cm (24 × 17 × 12 ¾ in.)

Medium: Wood core, dry lacquer, traces of gold leaf

Make the jump here to see this and more

Via Daily Dharma: Glimpsing Joy

We may think that we will be drained once hatred and desire have lifted, but that’s not the case. In the liberated space of freedom, there is a glimpse of joy.

—Judith Simmer-Brown, “Transforming the Green-Ey’d Monster”

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Thursday, January 7, 2021

Doritos – El mejor regalo.

Via Daily Dharma: Locating Emotions in Your Body

Emotions circulate in the body. … Noting that stirring, that circulating, can help us find settledness even within difficult emotions.

—Grace Schireson, “Humility and Humiliation”

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Via Gay Wisdom // White Crane Institute

1919 -

ROBERT DUNCAN, American poet, born (d: 1988); An American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the New American Poetry and Black Mountain Poets.

Duncan's mature work emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture and today he is also identified as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Duncan’s name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall Gay culture, particularly with the publication of The Homosexual in Society. While in Philadelphia, Duncan had a relationship with a male instructor he had first met in Berkeley. In 1941 he was drafted and declared his homosexuality to get discharged.

In 1943, he had his first heterosexual relationship. This ended in a short, disastrous marriage. In 1944, he published The Homosexual in Society, an essay in which he compared the plight of homosexuals with that of African Americans and Jews. The immediate consequence of this brave essay was that John Crowe Ransom refused to publish a previously accepted poem of Duncan's in Kenyon Review, thus initiating Duncan's exclusion from the mainstream of American poetry.

From 1951 until his death, he lived with the artist Jess Collins. Before then, Duncan began a relationship with Robert De Niro Sr., the father of famed actor Robert De Niro, Jr., shortly before DeNiro Sr. broke up with his wife, artist Virginia Admiral.

Duncan was the first poet to use the word “cocksucker” in print, and the first to strip to the buff during a reading. Nevertheless, he is in spirit, if not in fact, a modern romantic whose best work is instantly engaging by the standards of the purest lyrical traditions.

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Via Facebook

Via The Upworthiest

Jerry Seinfeld said daily meditation and lifting weights have completely changed his life

Jerry Seinfeld has been one of the keenest observers of the human condition for over five decades. Albeit most of his observations have been brilliant dissections of the mundane, most famously socks, chips 'n dip, and sports jerseys.

However, earlier this month the comedian got serious on Tim Ferriss' podcast, revealing the two routines that help him stay sane and creative in the mentally and physically draining world of comedy.

Read the Story

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - January 6, 2021 💌

How do you awaken out of the illusion that you are separate?

That doorway is through the heart. The heart opens a doorway into the unitive nature of the universe, and love flows through it. Love doesn’t know boundaries. The mind creates the barrier of separation between you and me. The heart keeps embracing and opening out so that when you open your heart, you open into the universe to experience the preciousness, the grace, the sweetness, and the thick interconnectedness of it all.

It’s beyond interconnected. It’s all one thing, it just keeps changing its flow and patterns, and you’re a part of it.

-Ram Dass -

Via SBMG // I am no longer waiting - Mary Anne Perrone

I am no longer waiting for a special occasion; I burn the best candles on ordinary days.

I am no longer waiting for the house to be clean; I fill it with people who understand that even dust is Sacred.

I am no longer waiting for everyone to understand me; It’s just not their task.

I am no longer waiting for the perfect children; my children have their own names that burn as brightly as any star.

I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; It already did, and I survived.

I am no longer waiting for the time to be right; the time is always now.

I am no longer waiting for the mate who will complete me; I am grateful to be so warmly, tenderly held.

I am no longer waiting for a quiet moment; my heart can be stilled whenever it is called.

I am no longer waiting for the world to be at peace; I unclench my grasp and breathe peace in and out.

I am no longer waiting to do something great; being awake to carry my grain of sand is enough.

I am no longer waiting to be recognized; I know that I dance in a holy circle.

I am no longer waiting for Forgiveness.

I believe, I Believe.

~ Mary Anne Perrone

Via Daily Dharma: Radiate Happiness

When it is warm with tenderness and affection toward others, our own heart can give us the most pure and profound happiness that exists and enable us to radiate that happiness to others.

—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “Opening the Injured Heart”

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