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Saturday, May 27, 2023
Via Daily Dharma: Planting the Seeds for Equanimity
Equanimity is not just a decision that we can will into being: “Let me be equanimous, right now, in the face of this difficulty.” It’s based on a deep understanding of the impermanent, unstable, changing, unreliable, and conditional nature of reality.
Pascal Auclair, “The Fourth Quality of the Heart”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
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Via White Crane Institute // From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS
Today's Gay Wisdom
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TODAY'S GAY WISDOM
From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of it in THE YOUNG KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY; in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.
I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfillment.
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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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Via White Crane Institute // WILD BILL HICKOK
Born
1837 -
WILD BILL HICKOK is born in Troy Grove, Illinois. His real name was James Butler Hickok. Like many men in the wild west, Wild Bill really was wild with the men on the frontier and used his Lesbian buddy, Calamity Jane as a blind.
Few people ever knew the pair's secret, and in the movies about their lives, not a mention was made by either Doris Day or Howard Keel. The American West of the nineteenth century was a world of freedom and adventure for men of every stripe—not least also those who admired and desired other men.
Among these sojourners was William Drummond Stewart, a flamboyant Scottish nobleman who found in American culture of the 1830s and 1840s a cultural milieu of openness in which men could pursue same-sex relationships.
William Benemann’s recent book, Men In Eden traces Stewart’s travels from his arrival in America in 1832 to his return to Murthly Castle in Perthshire, Scotland, with his French Canadian–Cree Indian companion, Antoine Clement, one of the most skilled hunters in the Rockies. Benemann chronicles Stewart’s friendships with such notables as Kit Carson, William Sublette, Marcus Whitman, and Jim Bridger. He describes the wild Renaissance-costume party held by Stewart and Clement upon their return to America—a journey that ended in scandal.
Through Stewart’s
letters and novels, Benemann shows that Stewart was one of many men
drawn to the sexual freedom offered by the West. His book provides a
tantalizing new perspective on the Rocky Mountain fur trade and the role
of homosexuality in shaping the American West. For more: http://www.goodreads.com/book/
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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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Friday, May 26, 2023
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Taking What is Not Given
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Via Daily Dharma: Preparing to Let Go
The meditative experience is the practice of dying, the practice of letting go.
Bruce Joel Rubin, “Reel to Real”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Thursday, May 25, 2023
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Verbal Action
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Via White Crane Institute // SIR IAN McKELLEN
1939 -
Today's the birthday of beloved stage and screen actor and long time Gay Rights advocate and hero SIR IAN McKELLEN. Born in Burnley, England, he studied at St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. McKellen was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Gay director James Whale ("Frankenstein") in Gods and Monsters becoming the first openly Gay actor to be nominated.
He is the recipient of six Oliviers, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, A BIF Award, two Saturn Awards, four Drama Desk Awards and two Critic’s Choice Awards. He has also received two Academy Award nominations, five Emmy Award nominations, and four BAFTA nominations.
He's had quite a career with roles in such classic plays (and films adaptations) of Macbeth, Richard III and Edward II to name just a few. These are all available on DVD and well worth the watching. Millions of fans the world over know him as the bearded wizard Gandalf or the helmeted mutant master of magnetism Magneto. He may be the best known out Gay actor in the world. He's been out for decades becoming one of the first to do so back in the 1980s. People told him it would mean the end of his career. It hasn't.
In 2009 McKellen premiered a one-man show in Washington, DC as a benefit for the Washington Shakespeare Theater. He held an audience and this writer spellbound as he performed soliloquy after soliloquy from Shakespearean roles he's had over the years. He shared stories of the actors he has known and called friend. Most moving of all was his telling the story of being in South Africa after the end of apartheid. He was there for a role but was asked by local gay activists if he'd be willing to speak to Nelson Mandela about the need for Gay Rights protections in the new country's constitution.
He told them he would only agree if he were accompanied by South African Gay activist leaders. The three of them, all friends, met with Mandela and spoke of the need for the new country to place Gay Rights protections into the constitution. Mandela agreed and it was his support that allowed for South Africa to become the first country to place direct rights for Gay and Lesbian people into its constitution. McKellen called it the proudest moment of his life. We love you Sir Ian. Happy birthday!
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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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Via Daily Dharma: No Self to Deny
There
never was a self—only our identification makes us think so. So while
purification, kindness, and attention can certainly improve our habits,
no amount of self-denial or self-torture can rid us of a self, for it
was never there.
Jack Kornfield, “Identity and Selflessness in Buddhism: No Self or True Self?”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
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