Since we’re not starting other than from our humanity, all we can do is
use the situations in which we close down as exercises to work on
ourselves, to watch how we lose it again and again. We must be very
compassionate with ourselves, and each time just center again, quiet
again, and begin again.
- Ram Dass -
Lama Foundation, 1983
This Day in Gay History
On this date RALPH WALDO EMERSON the poet & essayist was born. Emerson had a wild crush on a classmate at Harvard. Martin Gay, the subject of Emerson's growing infatuation, was the subject of numerous entries in Emerson's journals which modern editors have been able to reconstruct. As the scholar Martin Greif has written, "they provide a rare view of the future philosopher in the thrall of same-sex love." With an unembarrassed frankness he wrote in his journal about the disturbing power of the glances he and Gay exchanged.
Emerson wrote of Martin Gay in his notebook, “Why do you look after me? I cannot help looking out as you pass.” Emerson heavily crossed out the Martin Gay journal notes at some later time. He would later tell Walt Whitman to cross out the homoerotic portions of the Calamus cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass. Fortunately for us and for posterity Whitman did not take the "advice." In Emerson's mature life "his craving for friendship and love seldom found adequate satisfaction," as his biographer Stephen Whicher put it.
To experience emptiness is not a descent into an abyss of nothingness but a recovery of freedom.
—Stephen Batchelor, “Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center”
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It
is very important to see your life not only from the narrow view of
your egoistic telescope but also from the broad view of the universal
telescope called egolessness. This is why we have to practice.
—Dainin Katagiri Roshi, “Time Revisited”
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