Awakening Together
By Mindy Newman and Kaia Fischer
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A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
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Mindfulness
is about understanding. You have to use wise thinking to decide how to
handle things; you cannot limit your practice to continuously being
aware.
—Sayadaw U Tejaniya, “The Art of Investigation”
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KATHARINE LEE BATES, American poet (b. 1859) died on this date; The author of the words to the anthem "America the Beautiful," Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts. The daughter of a Congregational pastor, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and for many years was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. While teaching there, she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics for which she also studied.
Bates lived at Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who herself was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman's death in 1915. These arrangements were sometimes called "Boston marriages" or "Wellesley marriages". The 1999 play Boston Marriage by David Mamet depicts such a marriage as having an explicitly sexual component. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to allow legal same-sex marriages, which made Boston the only major city in the U.S. at the time where a "Boston marriage" could also be a legal marriage, if the couple wished it to be. Now, of course, that’s all history. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world. When you bear what you think you cannot bear, who you think you are dies. You become compassion. You don't have compassion - you are compassion. True compassion goes beyond empathy to being with the experience of another. You become an instrument of compassion.
- Ram Dass -
It’s
simple to say that violence is wrong or that vengeance only begets more
vengeance. It’s far harder to break the chains of cause and effect in
our own lives that have conditioned so many cycles of oppression and
hate.
—Mike Gillis, “Press X to Awaken”
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A
meditation practice deepened in silence yields an intimacy with
oneself, and over time, a greater intimacy with others and with all of
life.
—Beth Roth, “Family Dharma: The Fragility of Silence”
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Death is our greatest challenge as well as our greatest spiritual opportunity. By cultivating mindfulness, we can prepare ourselves for this final passage by allowing nature, rather than Ego, to guide us.
- Ram Dass -
Everyone wants love and care, but, more than these, human beings want respect for who they are.
—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “Old Relationships, New Possibilities”
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The
point of dharma practice is to pay attention to where there is
suffering, see the clinging and identification, and release it to find a
freedom of heart.
—Interview with Jack Kornfield by Helen Tworkov, “The Sure Heart’s Release”
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Without
spiritual discipline we are never going to wake up or advance on our
journey through this life. But our discipline must be wedded to joy, and
we must find pleasure in the myriad wonders that this life offers.
—Joan Gattuso, “The Balancing Buddha”
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In Buddhism patience has three essential aspects: gentle forbearance, calm endurance of hardship, and acceptance of the truth.
—Michele McDonald, “Finding Patience”
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THE VERNAL EQUINOX -- also known as The March equinox – marks the beginning of the spring season in the Northern Hemisphere and the autumn season in the Southern Hemisphere. The March 2021 equinox arrived yesterday, March 20 at 09:37 UTC or 4:37 a.m. Central Daylight Time.
On the dates of the equinox, the sun rises due east and sets due west as it crosses the celestial equator. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, start watching the sun this month, and watch every night as the sun sets just a bit farther north on the horizon each evening until the summer solstice.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the March equinox will bring earlier sunrises, later sunsets, softer winds, sprouting plants. Meanwhile, you’ll find the opposite season – later sunrises, earlier sunsets, chillier winds, dry and falling leaves – south of the equator.
The equinoxes and solstices are caused by Earth’s tilt on its axis and ceaseless motion in orbit. You can think of an equinox as happening on the imaginary dome of our sky, or as an event that happens in Earth’s orbit around the sun.
Owing to the pandemic, and in the interests of public health, there will be no Spring Equinox gathering at Stonehenge this year. People wanting to watch the sunrise to mark the first day of spring have been told not to travel to Stonehenge. English Heritage maintains it cannot host the usual celebrations at the prehistoric monument due to safety concerns.
You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.
- Ram Dass -