Via White Crane Insitute

 

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Nathan Lane

1956 -

NATHAN LANE, (nee Joseph Lane) American actor, born; a Tony Award- and Emmy Award-winning actor of the stage and screen. When he was 21 and told his mother he was gay, her reply was: "I'd rather you were dead." Lane shot back: "I knew you'd understand". His professional association with his close friend the playwright Terrence McNally includes roles in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Lisbon Traviata [Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards], Bad Habits, Love! Valor! Compassion! [Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards ], and Dedication.

Lane, who came out publicly after the death of Matthew Shepard, jokingly describes himself as "one of those old-fashioned homosexuals, not one of the newfangled ones who are born joining parades." When he was asked once by a reporter whether he was Gay, rather than providing a blunt yes-or-no answer, he famously declared, "I'm 40, single and I work a lot in the musical theatre. You do the math." 

He has been a long-time board member of and fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids, and he has been honored by The Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and The Trevor Project for his work in the gay community. Lane lives in New York, and on November 17, 2015, married his long-time partner, theater producer and writer Devlin Elliott.

Via Tricycle // Thich Nhat Hanh in Paris

 

Thich Nhat Hanh in Paris
By Fred Eppsteiner

On a trip to France in 1975, an American Zen student finds all his beliefs powerfully (and playfully) challenged by a young Vietnamese Buddhist activist named Thich Nhat Hanh.

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Via Daily Dharma: Generate Gentleness

 Meditation is not necessarily about generating intense concentration. It can be about the exact opposite: a slow, steady gentleness that adds no intensity to what already exists. 

—M. Sophia Newman, "Straight Outta Kapilavastu"   

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - February 3, 2021 💌

 

 

"When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is."

- Ram Dass -

Top 7 Stretches to Do Everyday | Target Every Joint!

Via Tricycle // The Joy of Joy

The Joy of Joy
By Daisy Hernández

There’s no word in English to describe the delight of celebrating another person’s happiness. But we can look to the Sanskrit mudita to discover the profound practice of shared joy.

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Via Daily Dharma: Give Thanks for Your Community

 Meaningful acts of the individual—our practice included—can take place only in the context and with the support of a strong community. 

—James Shaheen, “Finding Community”    

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Documentário AHAMTAI 2020 Juntos á Distância

Via Tricycle // The Best Possible Life

 The Best Possible Life
By Seth Segall

In the West, our ideal of human flourishing as the pinnacle of a good life has deeply shaped the way we’ve adapted the dharma.

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Via Daily Dharma: Breathing as One

 May we carry each other through these dark times through the strength of our practice, sitting in silence and stillness, breathing as one.

—Brandon Dean Lamson, “Meeting Violence with Kindness”

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Via Daily Dharma: Build the Foundation of Compassion

 Generosity is the ground of compassion; it is a prerequisite to the realization of liberation.

—Marcia Rose, “The Gift That Cannot Be Given”

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Via White Crane Institute // HOWARD OVERING STURGIS

 

Howard Sturgis and The Babe (William Haynes Smith)

1855 -

HOWARD OVERING STURGIS, the novelist and eccentric was born on this date. A millionaire American expatriate, Sturgis passed his life in England knitting, embroidering and writing novels. He is best known for two: Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber. Affable and witty, Sturgis was a favorite with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and A. C. Benson, and the subject of a memorable sketch by E. M. Forster. Sturgis maintained a lifelong relationship with a much younger man, William Haynes-Smith, familiarly known as "the Babe", to whom his novel "Belchamber" is dedicated.

The scion of a wealthy New England family, his parents sent him to be educated at Eton College. He went on to study at Cambridge where he became a friend of the novelists henry James and Edith Wharton.

After the death of his mother in 1888 he moved, with his lover William Haynes-Smith, into a country house named Queen's Acre, near Windsor Great Park. Sturgis's first novel, Tim: A Story of School Life (1891), was published anonymously and was dedicated to the "love that surpasses the love of women." It describes the love of two youths at boarding-school.

He died on February 7, 1920. After his death appreciations of him were published by A.C. Benson, Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster and George Santayana, his cousin.

Via BrainPickings // D.T. Suzuki on What Freedom Really Means and How Zen Can Help Us Cultivate Our Character

 

D.T. Suzuki on What Freedom Really Means and How Zen Can Help Us Cultivate Our Character

“The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.”

By Maria Popova

 

Alan Watts may be credited with popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, but he owes the entire trajectory of his life and legacy to a single encounter with the Zen Buddhist sage D.T. Suzuki (October 18, 1870–July 12, 1966) — one of humanity’s greatest and most influential stewards of Zen philosophy. At the age of twenty-one, Watts attended a lecture by Suzuki in London, which so enthralled the young man that he spent the remainder of his life studying, propagating, and building upon Suzuki’s teachings. Legendary composer John Cage had a similar encounter with Suzuki, which profoundly shaped his life and music.

In the early 1920s, spurred by the concern that Zen masters are “unable to present their understanding in the light of modern thought,” Suzuki undertook “a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view” — a rather humble formulation of what he actually accomplished, which was nothing less than giving ancient Eastern philosophy a second life in the West and planting the seed for a new culture of secularized spirituality.

But by 1940, all of his books had gone out of print in war-torn England, and all remaining copies in Japan were destroyed in the great fire of 1945, which consumed three quarters of Tokyo. In 1946, Christmas Humphreys, president of London’s Buddhist Society, set out to undo the damage and traveled to Tokyo, where he began working with Suzuki on translating his new manuscripts and reprinting what remained of the old. The result was the timeless classic Essays in Zen Buddhism (public library), originally published in 1927 — a collection of Suzuki’s foundational texts introducing the principles of Zen into secular life as a discipline concerned first and foremost with what he called “the reconstruction of character.” As Suzuki observed, “Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul.” His essays became, and remain, a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.

 

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Via Comic Sands // The Walking Dead' Shuts Down Homophobic Backlash

 

'The Walking Dead' Shuts Down Homophobic Backlash To Show's Gay Storyline With Powerful Post

Eric Spring

Jan. 29, 2021

AMC

Zombie thriller franchise The Walking Dead just clapped back at homophobic internet trolls in a concise but oh-so-satisfying tweet.

The show's non-negotiable commitment to showcasing LGBTQ+ characters and relationships has already won praise in the past. The recent tweet only solidified the franchise's solid footing as an ally.

The homophobic hullabaloo all began when actor Jelani Alladin appeared on the podcast Talk Dead to Me.

He discussed how proud he was to play his character in the show who—among many heroic attributes—just so happens to be one half of a same-sex couple.

"There was no kind of need to explain anything further and I love that The Walking Dead is kind of putting that forward, that LGBTQ relationships are nothing different than any other kind of relationship."

"They have the same struggles, they have the same complexities, they get mad at each other, they love each other just as hard."

The onscreen couple is made up of Alladin and fellow actor Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender fluid.

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Via Daily Dharma: Train Your Mind How to Respond

 The quality of our life is determined by our mind’s response to the circumstances of our life. It is not determined directly by the circumstances.

—Yoshin David Radin, “Brief Teachings”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - January 31, 2021 💌

 

"It’s amazing how the nature of your relationships change when it’s coming out of love instead of trying to get love."

- Ram Dass -

Via Tricycle // Buddhism by the Numbers: Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites

Buddhism by the Numbers: Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites
By The Editors

Population growth, heat waves, and other climate-related factors are likely to have a dramatic effect on the future of tourism to Buddhist holy sites.

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