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.
No matter how high the mountains of the great dharma are, no matter how deep the sea of ignorance is, they will be as nothing before a boundless spirit of determination.
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Finding Myself in the Garden | ||
Valerie Brown returns to gardening to recover her broken spirit, and discovers what really grows in a garden is love. | ||
The
first foundation of mindfulness is awareness of the body. Mindful
awareness invites the practitioner to see, touch, taste, and smell — to
be fully alive in the present moment to the great gift of life.
Mindfulness is an innate quality in every person that supports awakening
to the non-reoccurring nature of each and every moment of daily life.
For me, gardening became a theology of love that invited me back to my
senses, which were deadened by too muchness, too soon-ness, and too
fastness.
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When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It’s a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It’s a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
- Ram Dass
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MARK THOMPSON, American activist, author and editor, was born on this date (d: August 23, 2016); Mark Thompson was born and raised on the Monterey Peninsula, California, during the 1950s and '60s. In 1973, Thompson helped found the Gay Students Coalition at San Francisco State University, where he was a journalism student, and has worked for Gay causes since that time.
He began his writing career at the national Gay and Lesbian news magazine The Advocate in 1975, reporting on culture and politics in Europe. Thompson continued to serve the publication during the next two decades in a number of capacities--as a feature writer, photographer, and Senior Editor. In 1994, he completed his tenure at the magazine by editing Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement (St. Martin's Press), a massive volume of half a million words and over seven hundred images documenting the Gay and Lesbian struggle for civil rights. The book was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards.
Thompson is best remembered, however, for his influential trilogy of books dealing with Gay spirituality. The first in the series, Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning (White Crane Books) was published in 1987. The anthology has been acclaimed around the world and was recently included on a list compiled by the Lambda Book Report of the "100 Lesbian and Gay Books That Changed Our Lives." The Los Angeles Times called Gay Spirit an "exciting challenge to conventional thinking."
Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature (HarperSan Francisco) followed in 1994. The Lambda Literary Award-nominated book consists of in-depth conversations and photographs with sixteen prominent writers, teachers, and visionaries. "Gay Soul is an outpouring of much-needed love--from new kinds of 'fathers'," commented poet Judy Grahn. Christine Downing, author of Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, described the book as "a wake-up call to Gay souls." Robert Goss, author of Jesus Acted Up said, "I came away with a great deal of hope, for Gay spiritualities have the potentiality for profound cultural transformation."
The trilogy was completed in 1997 with the publication of Gay Body: A Journey Through Shadow to Self (St. Martin's Press), an autobiographical memoir combining elements of Jungian archetypes, Gay history and mythology, and New Age spirituality. The Washington Post said "the road Thompson travels is fascinating, as he unlocks closets within closets." Library Journal called the Lambda Literary Award-nominated book "a provocative work, seamlessly woven."
Mark and Malcolm gave a substantive interview about their twenty-year relationship in the fall 2005 issue of White Crane. Thompson book, Advocate Days, is a memoir about about LGBT activism in the 1970s. He was the co-editor of The Fire In Moonlight: A Radical Faerie Reader with Richard Neely and this writer.
He lived in Los Angeles with his life partner, Episcopal priest and author Malcolm Boyd who died the year prior to Mark. Mark had moved to Palm Springs after Malcolm’s passing. He suffered a heart attack swimming in his pool. I miss him every day.