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.
In
a future Baha’i government homosexuality will be banned and for those
who engage in homosexual “behaviors” will face a punishment that has yet
to be determined by the Universal House of Justice, the international
governing body of the Baha’i Faith, most Baha’is are clueless about this
future punishment yet to be prescribed and for that I say “shame”,
shame on them for their ignorance when they claim modernity,
progressiveness, and uniting the hearts of mankind, for those who know
about this disturbing future punishment, you are all cowards in your
silence. If the Baha’i Faith is to pick up where Shia Islam left off we
are doomed, but there’s a ray of hope and that is to re-examine the
“translation by committee” of the Kitab-i-Aqdas (The Most Holy Book,
the Book of Laws) and the Guardian’s very human fallibility, Baha’u’llah
spoke against pederasty (child molestation) not adult same sex
relationships. Let’s not go down the path of the Shia fanatics in Iran
the home of the Baha’i Faith, we have the tools laid out by Baha’u’llah
to build a future civilization based on Oneness , Love, Logic, and one
that embraces Science, let’s strive for that and do better by our LGBTQ
Baha’i Brothers and Sisters.
20-year-old Alireza Fazeli-Monfared,
a young gay man living in Iran, has been brutally beheaded in a
suspected honour killing. Three close male relatives, reported to be his
brother and two cousins, have been arrested.
Videos of Alireza
shared on social media paint a picture of a vibrant, charismatic youth
who loved fashion and lip-syncing to his favorite songs on TikTok.
Reports say he had been planning to flee to Turkey with his boyfriend at
the time of his killing.
Alireza's violent and untimely death
cannot be in vain: his voice may have been silenced, but those of his
community must continue to rise up and demand a world where such horror
is no longer possible.
ANGELA MADSEN, was an American Paralympian sportswoman in both rowing and track and field born on this date.
In a long career, Madsen moved from race rowing to ocean challenges
before switching in 2011 to athletics, winning a bronze medal in the
shot put at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London. Madsen and teammate
Helen Taylor were the first women to row across the Indian Ocean. She
died in June 2020 while attempting a solo row from Los Angeles to
Honolulu. Her heroic story rivals Greek tragedy.
At 6 feet 1 inch
tall, Angela excelled at basketball and played for the Marine Corps
women’s team. During practice one day, she fell forward and someone
stepped on her back. She had two ruptured disks and a damaged sciatic
nerve and for a time could not walk.
With therapy, she
slowly recovered. She found work as a mechanic in the Sears automotive
department and later at U-Haul. But she could not keep up such
physically demanding work and took a desk job as a mechanical engineer.
Then in 1992 she
broke a leg and some ribs in a car accident. Already suffering from
spinal degeneration from the basketball injury, she had corrective
surgery the next year, which left her with both legs paralyzed.
After the
surgery, the woman who had been her romantic partner for four years
left, saying she “did not sign on to be with someone in a wheelchair,”
according to Ms. Madsen’s memoir, “Rowing Against the Wind” (2014).
The partner took her car, her disability checks and her savings,
Ms. Madsen wrote. With no money for rent, she was evicted. She stored a
few possessions in a locker at Disneyland and lived on the streets with
her dog for a couple of months, until she was helped by the Paralyzed
Veterans of America. Then came an accident in the San Francisco subway
in which she plunged headfirst from her wheelchair onto the train
tracks. It left her with a mild brain injury but led her to realize that
she had more to be grateful for than sorry about, and she resolved to
shape her own destiny.
Always athletic,
she turned to competitive sports. She got involved with the Veterans
Wheelchair Games, and in 1995 won three gold medals: in swimming, the
wheelchair slalom course and billiards.
By 1998 she had
discovered adaptive rowing for athletes with physical disabilities, and
by 1999 she had joined her first ocean rowing regatta.
Even cancer and a double mastectomy did not slow her down.
She trained,
raced, coached and surfed, as a 2015 documentary on her achievements
makes clear. She founded the California Adaptive Rowing Program. She won
four gold medals with the U.S. rowing team at the world championships
and competed in three Paralympic Games, winning a bronze medal for the
shot put in London in 2012.
Ms. Madsen aimed to be the first rower with paraplegia, the first openly gay athlete and, at 60, the oldest woman to do so.
She was two
months in and halfway to Hawaii when she discovered a problem with the
hardware for her parachute anchor, which deploys in heavy seas to
stabilize the craft.
She met Debra
Moeller, a social worker, in 2007 when Debra brought a disabled and
abused child to Angela’s adaptive rowing program. They married in 2013.
She had been in
constant contact with her wife in Long Beach, Calif., by text and
satellite phone, and Angela was posting pictures and observations on
social media for those following her voyage. Debra said in an interview
that when she warned that a cyclone was coming, Angela knew she had to
fix the hardware, which would require tethering herself to the boat and
getting in the water.
“Tomorrow is a
swim day,” Angela posted on Twitter on Saturday, June 20. On Sunday,
there were no messages from her. As the day wore on, Debra grew more
worried. She could tell from tracking data that the boat was not being
rowed. At around 10:30 p.m. she texted Angela that their friend Soraya
Simi, who is making a documentary about Angela, was calling the Coast
Guard.
At around 8 p.m. Monday, the Coast Guard spotted her in the water, lifeless and tethered to her boat.
The plane
couldn’t land. But the Coast Guard had already diverted a German-flagged
cargo ship en route, to Tahiti from Oakland, to retrieve her. The ship
was able to recover Ms. Madsen’s body on Monday night, but not her boat.
The ship reached Tahiti on Tuesday.
Debra Madsen said
she may never know what happened, unless Angela, who was keeping a
video diary, had turned on one of her cameras.
She said Angela
might have been caught in her tether, or developed hypothermia without
knowing it. She might also have had a heart attack or other illness.
The answer may
lie in the boat, still adrift in the Pacific. Debra is trying to arrange
for its retrieval, which will be costly, and for Angela’s body to be
transported to Hawaii for cremation and burial at sea with military
honors.
At one point Maharaji said, “See everything as the Mother and you will
know God.” What was he talking about? Seeing your mother in everything?
By telling us to see everything as the Mother, I think Maharaji meant us
to use every detail of life as grist for the mill of our spiritual
development. Every experience is a mirror reflecting where we are in our
consciousness and our work of the moment. In the compassionate embrace
of the Mother the layers of old habits, preconceptions, and residues of past experiences can dissolve in the ocean of maternal affection.
My
most important job as a mother, it turns out, is to struggle with my
own pain and anger, to live up to the vow I have made to myself: to love
my child well.
If
you are stressed out, then it is part of your meditation to become
fully aware of being stressed out. Don’t make a big effort to push it
aside, don’t try to be some other way... The minute you embrace that
fact, you will actually become less stressed and more awake.
"I
gained twenty pounds during COVID and felt awful about it. Then a good
friend told me ‘maybe just dress the body you have and stop worrying
about it. So I finally went and bought new pants. I’m very grateful for
having such good friends… and also for these bigger pants. This past
year has put us all through a heck of a lot. If you, like a lot of us,
gained some weight while trying to survive a deadly global pandemic,
consider me officially on your ‘wgaf?’ team.”
—Activist Chasten
Buttigieg, husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg,
confessing to his own weight gain during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The
“wgaf” reference is an abbreviation for “Who gives a f*ck.”
Repairing Generations of Trauma, One Lotus Flower at a Time
The
lotus flower, blooming out of muddy waters, has long been a symbol of
rising above suffering. In the wake of Anti-Asian attacks, spiritual
leaders hope it can help heal the trauma of racial violence in the U.S.
The Land of Many Dharmas By Rev. Dr. Kenneth Tanaka
For
the first time in Buddhism’s history, all major Buddhist denominations
in the world today coexist in one country: The United States. Rev. Dr.
Kenneth Tanaka surveys the landscape of the new Buddhist melting pot.
The
Buddha encouraged us to think of the good things done for us by our
parents, by our teachers, friends, whomever; and to do this
intentionally, to cultivate it, rather than just letting it happen
accidentally.
