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Monday, March 25, 2024
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering
Via Daily Dharma: Giving Up Is Just the Beginning
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Sunday, March 24, 2024
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation \ Words of Wisdom - March 24, 2024 💌
Why do we keep listening to spiritual lectures and reading spiritual books? It seems we need to keep saying it to ourselves, over and over again, until we finally hear.
- Ram Dass -
Via White Crane Institute \\ NDREW ELIAS RAMER is a Maggid (Jewish sacred storyteller)
1951 -
ANDREW ELIAS RAMER is a Maggid (Jewish sacred storyteller) living in San Francisco, California. Born on this date in Queens, New York, Elias (as he prefers now) believes that the prophetic tradition and storytelling are one and the same. The job of a storyteller is to create a narrative that holds a group together, forms the fabric of thought that a community or village of people inhabit.
Andrew grew into being a maggid through many moments and teachers. As a five-year-old he lay under an enormous honeysuckle vine with his best friend. Sprawled on the ground that warm day with the sun streaming in long shafts of light, she showed him how to pluck the honeysuckle from the vine and suck the nectar from the flower. The bees were swarming in and out of the blossoms. Something in his consciousness opened up and he understood that just as the bees were going back to the blossoms, that everything comes from and goes back to something, to a primal Source. It did not occur to him then that the ‘something’, is God or that this was a spiritual experience. Now he reflects that that experience changed his life, as it was his first encounter with God of and in nature and the world.
As an adult he was spiritually formed through many communities including the Gay Spirit Visions Conference in North Carolina, and the New York Healing Circle, which flourished during the early AIDS years. His mentors, collaborators and guides have included Charles Lawrence, Donna Cunningham, Harry Hay, Raven Wolfdancer, Rabbi Benay Lappe, and Rabbi Dev Noily. He is a member and one of many lay leaders at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco. After years of spiritual wandering, it was in Torah study with Dev Noily at Sha’ar Zahav that he found wisdom, comfort and a rich new way to live as a Queer Jewish man.
He believes that leadership is best when it is collective, like a flock of birds with each member of the flock taking a turn leading at the front. In that spirit, Andrew was one of 141 members of Sha’ar Zahav who worked together to create a new Siddur (prayer book) which was published in 2009. His contributions include art, the blessings he wrote, and editorial assistance. He also facilitated six writing workshops in which community members created new liturgy to reflect the beautifully complicated realities of LGBT Jewish lives.
His writings are a form of Midrash, an interpretation of biblical tales where he tells the stories of queer and transgender people that were left out or written out of our scriptures. This practice of “queering the text” is both joyously traditional and transgressive. As a child attending a traditional religious Jewish school he first learned the craft of Midrash through his teachers, who would tell stories about the Torah before they read it. When he learned to read Hebrew he learned that most of his favorite stories were not in the written Torah at all, because they were Midrash, Oral Torah. That discovery was one of the doorways for him into this tradition and practice.
In his role as a storyteller Andrew likes to create origin tales, to seduce people into the narrative, and to fulfill the understanding that without storytelling we cannot function as a people. When he thinks about the stories that don’t get told he feels more empowered to write and speak them. He believes that whatever your faith tradition you can and must own all the stories and re-tell them any way you want--for the sake of us all, for the sake of a viable planet, and so that people may find themselves and love themselves. He invites us to question everything, question every story no matter what our elders tell us, so that we can retell everything quietly until we’re in a safe place where we can tell all of our stories out loud to the world.
Andrews’s stories can be found in the books: Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Stories; Siddur Sha’ar Zahav; Two Flutes Playing; Revelations for New Millennium; Angel Answers; Ask Your Angels; and The Spiritual Dimensions of Healing Addictions. He was interviewed in Gay Soul by Mark Thompson and is a long time friend of White Crane for which he wrote the column Praxis. Ramer has recently release a new book, Two Hearts Dancing, a companion read for Two Flutes Playing.
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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 \\ An excerpt from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
TODAY'S GAY WISDOM
An excerpt from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
19 . I Sing the Body Electric
1
I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;
5
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?
2
The love of the Body of man or woman balks account—the body itself balks account;
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.
10
The expression of the face balks account;
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him;
The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;
15
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.
The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,
The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up, and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water,
The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats—the horseman in his saddle,
20
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performance,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child—the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn—the sleigh-driver guiding his six horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown, after work,
25
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
The upper-hold and the under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
The natural, perfect, varied attitudes—the bent head, the curv’d neck, and the counting;
30
Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child,
Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, and count.
3
I know a man, a common farmer—the father of five sons;
And in them were the fathers of sons—and in them were the fathers of sons.
This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person;
35
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes—the richness and breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see—he was wise also;
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old—his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome;
They and his daughters loved him—all who saw him loved him;
They did not love him by allowance—they loved him with personal love;
40
He drank water only—the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face;
He was a frequent gunner and fisher—he sail’d his boat himself—he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner—he had fowling-pieces, presented to him by men that loved him;
When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang.
You would wish long and long to be with him—you would wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and he might touch each other.
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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 Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and the First Jhāna
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