Mindrolling – Raghu Markus – Ep. 447 – Music & Mindfulness with Richard Wolf
July 08, 2022
Music
legend, Richard Wolf, joins Raghu for a discussion on music and
mindfulness, silence and listening, John Coltrane and nonduality, and
music as self-transcendence....
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.
Saturday, July 9, 2022
Via Be Here Now Network
Via Be Here Now Network
David Nichtern – Creativity, Spirituality & Making a Buck – Ep. 36 – Applied Dharma w/ Miriam Parker
July 08, 2022
In
this episode, David and Miriam have a vulnerable conversation about the
nature of practice and how to apply it in our creative lives....
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One week from today: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Making Friends with Our Ego
It
is possible to take a friendly relationship to our ego natures, it is
possible to appreciate the aesthetic play of forms in emptiness, and to
exist in this place like majestic kings of our own consciousness.
Allen Ginsberg, “Negative Capability: Kerouac’s Buddhist Ethic”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via White Crane Institute // JUNE JORDAN
Poet, teacher and community activist JUNE JORDAN was born on this date in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents (d: 2002). Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-1970 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. Jordan also won the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Women’s Foundation in 1994. Jordan attended Barnard College. She was an activist, poet, writer, teacher, and prominent figure in the civil rights, feminist, antiwar, and LGBTQ movements of the twentieth century.
Of her career, Toni Morrison wrote, "I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art."
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
Via White Crane Institute // MINOR WHITE
MINOR WHITE was an American photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator born on this date (d: 1976). He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies. Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people, and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow. He taught many classes, workshops, and retreats on photography at the California School of Fine Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, other schools, and in his own home. He lived much of his life as a closeted gay man, afraid to express himself publicly for fear of loss of his teaching jobs, and some of his most compelling images are figure studies of men whom he taught or with whom he had relationships. He helped start, and for many years was editor of, the photography magazine Aperture. After his death in 1976, White was hailed as one of America's greatest photographers.
White took up photography while very young but set it aside for a number of years to study botany and, later, poetry. He began to photograph seriously in 1937. His early years as a photographer were spent working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Portland, Ore. Many WPA photographers were chiefly concerned with documentation; White, however, preferred a more personal approach. Several of his photographs were included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1941.
White served in the U.S. Army during WWII, and in 1945 he moved to New York City, where he became part of a circle of friends that included the influential photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz His contact with Stieglitz helped him discover his own distinctive style. From Stieglitz he learned the expressive potential of the sequence, a group of photographs presented as a unit. White would present his work in such units along with text, creating arrangements that he hoped would inspire different moods, emotions, and associations in the viewer, moving beyond the conventional expressive possibilities of still photography. White also learned from Stieglitz the idea of the “equivalent,” or a photographic image intended as a visual metaphor for a state of being. Both in his photographs and in his writing, White became the foremost exponent of the sequence and the equivalent.
White was greatly influenced by Stieglitz's concept of "equivalence," which White interpreted as allowing photographs to represent more than their subject matter. He wrote "when a photograph functions as an Equivalent, the photograph is at once a record of something in front of the camera and simultaneously a spontaneous symbol. (A 'spontaneous symbol' is one which develops automatically to fill the need of the moment. A photograph of the bark of a tree, for example, may suddenly touch off a corresponding feeling of roughness of character within an individual.)"
In his later life he often made photographs of rocks, surf, wood and other natural objects that were isolated from their context, so that they became abstract forms. He intended these to be interpreted by the viewer as something more than what they actually present. According to White, "When a photographer presents us with what to him is an Equivalent, he is telling us in effect, 'I had a feeling about something and here is my metaphor of that feeling.'...What really happened is that he recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself.
Among his best-known books are two collections, Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations (1969), which features some of his sequences, and Minor White: Rites and Passages (1978), with excerpts from his diaries and letters and a biographical essay by James Baker Hall.
From 1965 to 1974 White taught photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. In 1968 he photographed in Maine and Vermont, United States and Nova Scotia, Canada. In 1973-1974 White photographed in Lima, Peru and Europe. He died June 24, 1976.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
Friday, July 8, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Intoxication
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Intoxication
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One week from today: Abstaining from Harming Living Beings
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Becoming More Human
We
do not become less human by purging toxins from our emotional life but
rather more nobly human. Abandoning greed, hatred, and delusion at every
opportunity, we are still left with a rich, nuanced, and healthier
emotional life.
Andrew Olendzki, “The Buddha’s Smile”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Thursday, July 7, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action
Reflecting Upon Social Action
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One week from today: Reflecting upon Bodily Action
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via White Crane Institute // TANABATA
2018 - TANABATA, meaning "Evening of the seventh" is a Japanese star festival, derived from the Chinese star festival, Qi Xi "The Night of Sevens.” It celebrates the meeting of Orihime (Vega) and Hikoboshi (Altair). The Milky Way, a river made from stars that crosses the sky, separates these lovers, and they are allowed to meet only once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month of the luni-solar calendar. Since the stars come out at night, the celebration is held at night. The festival originated from The Festival to Plead for Skills. In the Edo period, girls wished for better sewing and craftsmanship, and boys wished for better handwriting by writing wishes on strips of paper. At this time, the custom was to use dew left on taro leaves to create the ink used to write wishes. | ||
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 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! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 |
Via Daily Dharma: Trust in the Precious Nature of Every Moment
No
matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of
perfectly balanced forces. If you feel abandoned by all that might
comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see.
Kathleen Dean Moore, “We are Held by What We Cannot See”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Wednesday, July 6, 2022
Via Lion´s Roar // The Essential Guide to Profound Practices of Tibetan Buddhism
New for subscribers: “The Essential Guide to Profound Practices of Tibetan Buddhism” Ebook | ||
In this ebook
available exclusively to Lion’s Roar subscribers, nine great dharma
teachers including Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Lama Tsultrim Allione, Willa
Blythe Baker, and more offer you a glance into the transformative
practices of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. |
||
|
Via Lion’s Roar// Thich Nhat Hanh’s Hugging Meditation
|
|
|||
Via White Crane Institute // A Flemish artist Jérôme (Hieronymus) Duquesnoy
This Day in Gay History
July 06
JÈRÔME DUQUESNOY, was a Belgian sculptor, born on this date (d: 1654); A Flemish artist Jérôme (Hieronymus) Duquesnoy was one of the most renowned sculptors of the 17th century, but for decades after his death he was better known for his conviction and execution on charges of sodomy than for his impish yet polished style of sculpture. Born into a Brussels family of artists at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Jérôme Duquesnoy lived his first twenty years in the shadow of his famous father, Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder (who re-cast the famous Mannekin Pis [1619], the urinating boy that still stands as Brussels' signature fountain) and his brother François, who showed artistic promise at an early age.
Like his brother he was trained in his father’s studio. After a long stay in the service of Philip IV, he traveled to Florence in 1640 and a year later settled in Rome with his brother. On Francois’s death in 1643, Jérôme returned to Brussels where he carved several statues of the apostles. He was at work on several projects at the cathedral of St. Bavon in Ghent, where his best sculptures were executed, when he was, alas, arrested for sodomy with two acolytes of the church who had served as his models.
The brilliance of his work for the church notwithstanding, he was strangled then burned at the stake, a double death, which, under the circumstances, seems to be a case of clerical overkill and a terrible waste of matches. But you know, the Roman Catholic Church has really strict rules about messing around with children.
8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - July 6, 2022 💌
The technique of the witness is to merely sit with the fear and be aware
of it before it becomes so consuming that there’s no space left. The
image I usually use is that of a picture frame and a painting of a gray
cloud against a blue sky. But the picture frame is a little too small.
So you bend the canvas around to frame it. But in doing so you lost all
the blue sky. So you end up with just a framed gray cloud. It fills the
entire frame.
So when you say, 'I'm afraid' or, 'I'm depressed', if you enlarged the
frame so that just a little blue space shows, you would say ‘Ah, a
cloud.’ That is what the witness is. The witness is that tiny little
blue over in the corner that leads you to say, ‘Ah, fear.’
- Ram Dass -
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Frivolous Speech
Refraining from Frivolous Speech
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One week from today: Refraining from False Speech
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Random Acts of Kindness
We
never really know what’s going on with anyone else, but we know what
it’s like to be human. So in the face of suffering, what appropriate
response is there but compassion?
Taylor Plimpton, “Lessons From a Mostly Good Dog: #3: Be Kind”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE