Today marks 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales.
On 27 July 1967 the Sexual Offences Act was changed and legalised sex in private between two men.
Despite this being a huge milestone for the LGBT community we still have an enormous way to go when it comes to true equality.
- Ram Dass -
Shin Buddhism: A Path of Gratitude
By Rev. Dr. Kenji Akahoshi
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Any
spiritual path should provide us with an understanding that gradually
leads us beyond habitual, reactive mind so that we can engage in our
life with intelligence and openness.
—Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “Open Stillness”
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Presence
has no measurable product except positive feelings, feelings of
support, intimacy, and happiness. When we stop being busy and productive
and switch to just being still and aware, we ourselves will also feel
support, intimacy, and happiness, even if no one else is around.
—Jan Chozen Bays, “The Gift of Waiting”
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Still arriving ~ Thich Nhat Hanh https://justdharma.com/s/b2s1o
Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive. – Thich Nhat Hanh from the book "Being Peace"
ISBN: 978-1888375404 - https://amzn.to/19RFS7z
Thich Nhat Hanh on the web: http://plumvillage.org Thich Nhat Hanh biography: http://plumvillage.org/about/
Sent from Gmail Mobil
Slowly over the years I’ve noticed that when I’m working with the dying
or working on a political action or something, I feel absolutely
harmonious with my being - like this is just what I should be doing. And
it began to dawn on me: feed people, serve people, be like Gandhi.
- Ram Dass -
Who’s being affected by your hatred? The first person is you.
—Interview with Ani Choying Drolma by Pamela Gayle White, “Topping the Charts for Freedom”
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| Yes, We Can Have Hope | ||
| Roshi Joan Halifax reflects on the idea of “wise hope” and why we should open ourselves to it. | ||
As
Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from suffering; for
many of us, this aspiration is not a “small self” improvement program.
The bodhisattva vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if
nothing else, a powerful expression of radical and wise hope—an
unconditional hope that is free of desire.
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This Day in Gay History
T.S. Eliot
T.S. ELIOT, poet, dramatist and literary critic, born in St. Louis MO (d: 1965) He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He wrote the poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. When he was living in Paris before WWI, he met a French medical student named Jean Verdenal in the Luxembourg Gardens. Werdenal was waving a branch of lilac at the time. Verdenal died in the Dardanelles in 1915. Eliot dedicated Prufrock to him, adding a epigraph from Dante’s Purgatory: “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me to you, so that I forget out vanity, and treat the shadows like the real thing.”
This is all we know about his friendship with the young medical student, and all we are likely to know. Other considerations: Eliot had a horror of the female body, he feared it, and thought it “smelled.” He had an abhorrence of sex in general, though as a boy, he masturbated guiltily and wrote a magnificently sensuous poem about it…an excerpt here:
Then he knew that he had been a fish
With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers
Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty
Caught fast in the pink rips of his new beauty.
Eliot obsessed with the thought that every man wanted to kill a woman, and without irony, extended his fantasy to all men. His first marriage was miserable in that his wife laughed in his face at the very idea of sleeping with him. These are the general facts, and various interpretations are offered by various biographers. Thus far, interpretations have run in two obvious directions. Of course he was completely asexual. Of course he was a latent homosexual. Either seems unfair in some way; he was simply T.S. Eliot. Perhaps the first queer?
Appreciating the many ordinary encounters we have leads to a broader and deeper experience of life.
—Rev. Dr. Kenji Akahoshi, “Shin Buddhism: A Path of Gratitude”
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