We’re sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine. - Ram Dass
Friend, poet, activist, Radical Faerie, former White Crane Managing Editor and co-creator of this Daily GayWisdom, DAN "MAHATMA" VERA, was born in South Texas on this day. He has studied and received degrees in history, anthropology, theology, and justice & peace studies. He is a graduate of Southwestern University and Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.
In Vera’s early 20s Pablo Neruda "whispered in his ear" and his world went Technicolor. Consequently he's had a hard time seeing in black and white ever since. A writer of poetry for over a decade, his poetry has been featured in Shaping Sanctuary: Proclaiming God's Grace in an Inclusive Church, DC Poets Against The War: An Anthology, Red Wheelbarrow, and Raddish and the chapbook, Crepusculario. His poetry has also been featured on Pacifica Radio's nationally broadcast Democracy Now program. He is a founding member of Brookland Area Writers & Artists and a member of the Triangle Artists Group and Poets Against the War. Most recently he won the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize. Dan is also an accomplished watercolorist.
Dan has worked in advocacy for working poor and homeless people in Denver, Colorado, and as field director and trainer for the LGBT-welcoming Reconciling Ministries Network in the United Methodist Church. In 2000 Dan authored the groundbreaking statement "United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church" which lead to the first denominational people of color organization for LGBT inclusion, which he served as director. He served as poetry editor for RFD magazine.
He’s a hell of a knitter, a fine, sweet friend and an indispensible colleague. His other interests include cooking, gardening and occasionally walking the dog. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC with his husband Peter Montgomery and their dog Blossom. The Tejano Cubano Radical Faerie poet had been a contributor to White Crane since 1998 and as its managing editor oversaw its redesign in the Summer of 2003. He has recorded his work for Grace Cavalieri's Poet and the Poem program at the Library of Congress.
Check it out here: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/
Dan won the Red Hen Press Letras Latinas Prize for his book, Speaking Wiri Wiri. It can be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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This Day in Gay History
MOHANDAS "MAHATMA" GANDHI , was born on this date (d: 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist, who employed nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule, and in turn inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahatma (Sanskrit:: "great-souled", "venerable"), first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world.
Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, western India, Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple, London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891. After two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to stay for 21 years. It was in South Africa that Gandhi raised a family, and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India. He set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban laborers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and above all for achieving Swaraj or self-rule.
Was Mahatma Gandhi gay? A Pulitzer-Prize winning author Joseph Lelyveld claims the god-like Indian figure not only left his wife for a man, but also harbored racist attitudes.
According to Lelyveld, his lover was Hermann Kallenbach, a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder. The couple built their love nest during Gandhi's time in South Africa where he arrived as a 23-year-old law clerk in 1893 and lived for 21 years.
Much of the intimacy between the two is revealed in Kallenbach's letters to his Indian friend. Gandhi left his wife, "Ba," -- an arranged marriage -- in 1908 for Kallenbach, a lifelong bachelor, according to the book.
In letters, Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach, "How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance. "
"Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in the bedroom," he writes. "The mantelpiece is opposite the bed."
The book has been banned in one Western India state, Gujarat, after local press reports claimed the book maligns the father of modern India, according to the Associated Press. Its top state politician, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, called the book "perverse. "
Politicians in the state of Maharashtra, home to India's financial capital Mumbai, asked the central government to bar publication nationawide.
The Hindu religion, just as Christianity, frowns upon homosexuality. But in India today, discrimination against gays is illegal and many are open about their sexual orientation.
In Levyveld's book, the lovers' nicknames to each other were "Upper House" and "Lower House," suggesting one may have been in a stronger position of power.
At the age of 13 Gandhi had been married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji, but after four children together they broke up so he could be with Kallenbach. As late as 1933 Gandhi wrote a letter telling of his unending desire and branding his ex-wife "the most venomous woman I have met." Kallenabach emigrated from East Prussia to South Africa where he first met Gandhi. The author describes Gandhi's relationship with the man as, "the most intimate, also ambiguous relationship of [Gandhi's] lifetime."
"They were a couple," said Tridip Suhrud, a Gandhi scholar who met Lelyveld in India.
The source of much of the detail of their affair was found in the "loving and charming love notes" that Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach, whose family saved them after the architect's death. They eventually landed in the National Archives of India. Gandhi had destroyed all those from Kallenbach.
It was known that Gandhi was preoccupied with physiology, and even though he had a "taut torso," weighing 106 to 118 pounds throughout his life, the author says Gandhi was attracted to Kallenbach's strongman build.
The pair lived together for two years in a house Kallenbach built in South Africa and pledged to give one another "more love, and yet more love."
Gandhi implored Kallenbach not to "look lustfully upon any woman" and cautioned, "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women."
By the time Gandhi left South Africa in 1914, Kallenbach was not allowed to accompany him because of World War I. But Gandhi told him, "You will always be you and you alone to me...I have told you you will have to desert me and not I you."
Kallenbach died in 1945 and Gandhi died in 1948.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabiano_Contarato
DENMARK: The world's first legal, modern same-sex civil union are sanctioned and called "registered partnership."
Construction of the Royal Airforce Base at Lakenheath was held up in 2008 when relics of this base’s ancient inhabitants were unearthed during a routine construction project. The base must work with British archaeology officials for every base construction because of the area’s dense concentration of buried artifacts.
Before the Air Force set up shop at Lakenheath more than 60 years ago, it was home to the Anglo-Saxons — ancient peoples who inhabited the south and east of the country from the early fifth century through the Norman conquest of 1066.
Toiling alongside a construction crew that rebuilt the traffic circle on the northside of the base in August, a team of British archaeologists dug up three Anglo-Saxon graves dating to between 450 and 650.
They found two unusually large bodies dating from before the Norman Invasion of 1066 that appeared at first glance to be a husband and wife. The bodies were buried embracing each other, but genetic testing revealed both were men. It remains unknown if they were lovers, relatives, warrior companions, or just good friends…but I think we know.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
This Day in Gay History
JALAL AL-DIN MUHAMMAD RUMI, Persian mystic and poet born (d. 1273) also known as Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, but most famously known to the English-speaking world simply as RUMI.
Rumi was a 13th century Persian (Tajik) Muslim poet, jurist and theologian. His name literally translates as "Majesty of Religion", Jalal means "majesty" and Din means "religion." Rumi is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he died in Anatolia which was part of the Byzantine Empire two centuries before.
Rumi was born in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan), then a city of Greater Khorasan in Persia and died in Konya (in present-day Turkey). His birthplace and native language/local dialogue indicates a Persian (Tajik) heritage. His poetry is in Persian and his works are widely read in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and in translation especially in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the US, and South Asia. He lived most of his life in, and produced his works under, the Sejuk Empire. Rumi's importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders. Throughout the centuries he has had a significant influence on Persian as well as Urdu and Turkish literature. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages in various formats. After Rumi's death, his followers founded the Meylevi Order, better known as the "Whirling Dervishes," who believe in performing their worship in the form of dance and music ceremony called the sema.
It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on November 15th 1244 that changed his life completely. Shams had traveled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could "endure my company." A voice came, "What will you give in return?" "My head!" "The one you seek is Jalal al-Din of Konya." On the night of December 5, 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. It is believed that he was murdered with the connivance of Rumi's son, 'Ala' ud-Din; if so, Shams indeed gave his head for the privilege of mystical friendship.
Rumi's love and his bereavement for the death of Shams found their expression in an outpouring of music, dance and lyric poems, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus. There, he realized:
Why should I seek? I am the same as
He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!
For more than ten years after meeting Shams, Mawlana had been spontaneously composing ghazals, and these had been collected in the Divan-i Kabir. Rumi found another companion in Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, the goldsmith. After Salaḥ ud-Din's death, Rumi's scribe and favorite student Hussam-e Chelebi assumed the role. One day, the two of them were wandering through the Meram vineyards outside of Konya when Hussam described an idea he had to Rumi: "If you were to write a book like the Ilāhīnāma of Sanai or the Mantiq ut-Tayr of 'Attar it would become the companion of many troubadours. They would fill their hearts from your work and compose music to accompany it."
Rumi smiled and took out a piece of paper on which were written the opening eighteen lines of his Masnavi, beginning with:
Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,
How it sings of separation...
Hussam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next twelve years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi to Hussam. In December 1273, Rumi fell ill; he predicted his own death and composed the well-known ghazal, which begins with the verse:
How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?
Do not cast thy glance upon my golden face, for I have iron legs.
He died on December 17, 1273 in Konya; Rumi was laid to rest beside his father, and a splendid shrine, the Yesil Turbe "Green Tomb" (original name:قبه لخزراء), was erected over his tomb. His epitaph reads:
"When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men."
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