Saturday, June 19, 2021

Via FB // Pride is...

 


Via Daily Dharma: Find Your Ground

 

Anger and rage can be all-consuming and render us ineffective. Meditation practice becomes a way to re-center ourselves and find our ground, time and time again.

—Cheryl A. Giles in conversation with Pamela Ayo Yetunde and James Shaheen, “Black, Buddhist, and Free”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Lama Surya Das // FB

 

All the peace and happiness of the whole globe,
the peace and happiness of societies,
the peace and happiness of family,
the peace and happiness in the individual persons’ life,
and the peace and happiness of even the animals and so forth,
all depends on having loving kindness toward each other. 
~Lama Zopa Rinpoche
 

Friday, June 18, 2021

Via Lama Surya Das / FB

 


tAbandon your notions of the past,
without attributing a temporal sequence!
Cut off your mental associations
regarding the future, without anticipation!
Rest in a spacious modality, without clinging
to [the thoughts of] the present.
Do not meditate at all,
since there is nothing upon which to meditate. Instead, revelation will come
through undistracted mindfulness —
Since there is nothing
by which you can be distracted.
~Padmasambhava 
 

Via Lama Surya Das

 


Thoughts are just thoughts. Feelings are just feelings. Sensations are just sensations. They come and go in waking life as quickly and easily as they do in dreams. ~Mingyur Rinpoche


#LamaSuryaDas #Dzogchen #MingyurRinpoche #Awareness #Meditation #Awakening

v

Via Tricycle // RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry

 

RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry
With Michele McDonald 
Available for self-study
Emotions are so wrapped up with our everyday experience that the two often seem inseparable. But by using the qualities of attention that make up a complete moment of mindfulness, we are given the liberating choice to respond to whatever comes our way—and not just blindly react to the world at-large. 
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Via Daily Dharma: Do Your Part

What is this? This is just your life. So you do your part, and the rest is clear. It is clear because there has never been anything lacking, despite any beliefs you might have, despite any ideas you might have.


—Elihu Genmyo Smith, “Do Your Best”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Thursday, June 17, 2021

Hanging Out In the Heart Space Online Satsang - June 17, 2021

Via Lama Surya Das / FB

 

There’s the space that seems to be out there, like the sky and the ocean and the wind, and there’s the space that seems to be inside. We could let the whole thing mix up. We could let the whole thing just dissolve into each other and into one big space. Practice is about allowing a lot of space. It’s about learning how to connect with that spaciousness that’s inside, and the spaciousness that’s outside. It’s about learning to relax, soften, and open — to connect with the sense that there’s actually a lot of room.

Maggie Szabo - Rebuild (Official Music Video)

Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided To Go For It -Official Trailer | In...

Summer of 85 Trailer #1 (2021) | Movieclips Indie

Via Daily Dharma: Love Is Like the Sun

 

Love is like the sun that burns through the fog, dissolving it, until only vast openness and clarity remain. When nothing but boundless openness and lucidity remain, we come face-to-face with the basic nature of all phenomena beyond concepts.

—Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, “The Secret Strength of Sadness”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via FB


 

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Via White Men for Black Lives untSp6onsshored

 


· #LifeLessons❤️

 

Via Lama Surya Das // FB

 

Beings are like the moon in rippling water,
Fitful, fleeting, empty in their nature.
Bodhisattvas see them thus and yearn to set them free. Their wisdom is beneath compassion’s power. ~Chandrakirti
 

Via White Crane Institute // 2018 - TODAY’S GAY WISDOM: An Excerpt from Jaime Manrique’s Eminent Maricones “A Sadness As Deep As the Sea”

 

Today's Gay Wisdom
2018 -

TODAY’S GAY WISDOM

An Excerpt from Jaime Manrique’s Eminent Maricones

“A Sadness As Deep As the Sea”

The last days of the Cuban-born Reinaldo Arenas ("Before Night Falls") Reinaldo lived on 44th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. He had visited my apartment many times yet had never invited me into his home. So when Thomas Colchie phoned in December 1990 and asked me to check on Reinaldo, I thought I'd better get in touch with him right away. Too many friends had died before we had a chance to say things we wanted to say. I called him, and we made plans for me to stop by late that afternoon. I climbed the steps of Reinaldo's building and rang his buzzer. The building was a walk-up, and Reinaldo's apartment was on the top floor, the sixth.

At the top of the steep stairs I knocked on his door. I heard what sounded like a long fumbling with locks and chains, which even in Times Square seemed excessive. The door opened, and I almost gasped. Reinaldo's attractive features were hideously deformed: half his face looked swollen, purple, almost charred, as if it were about to fall off. He was in pajamas and slippers. I can't remember whether we shook hands or not or what we said at that moment. All I remember is that, once I was inside the apartment, he started putting on the chains and locks, as if he were afraid someone was going to break down the door.

We went through the kitchen into a small living room. Besides an old-fashioned sound system and a television set, I remember a primitive painting of the Cuban countryside. A table, two chairs, and a worn-out sofa completed the decor. Reinaldo sat on the sofa and I took a chair. I felt that if I sat too close to him, I would not be able to look him in the eye. Stacks of manuscripts lay on the table--thousands and thousands of sheets, and Reinaldo seemed like a shipwreck disappearing in a sea of paper.

When I asked if they were copies of a manuscript he had just finished, he informed me that the three manuscripts on the table were a novel, a book of poems, and his autobiography, Before Night Falls. Reinaldo spoke with enormous difficulty, his voice a frail rasp. "The novel, El color del verano, concludes my Pentagony. It's an irreverent book that makes fun of everything," he mused.

"Leprosorio is a volume of poems. And Antes que anochezca," he pointed to the third pile, "is my autobiography. I dictated it into a tape recorder and an amanuensis transcribed it. It's going to make a lot of people mad.

It seemed to me absolutely protean the amount of writing he had managed to do, considering what a debilitating disease AIDS is. I said so. "Writing those books kept me alive," he whispered. "Especially the autobiography. I didn't want to die until I had put the final touches. It's my revenge." He explained, "I have a sarcoma in my throat. It makes it hard for me to swallow solid foods or to speak. It's very painful." "Then maybe you shouldn't talk. I'll do the talking," I offered, moving to the sofa.

"But I want to talk," he said curtly. "I need to talk." I said, "Reinaldo, if there is anything you need, please don't hesitate to let me know. Whatever it is...cooking your meals, getting your medicines, going with you to the doctor, anything." I mentioned the the PEN American Center had a fund for writers and editors with AIDS and offered to contact them. "Thanks so much, cariño," he said in the plaintive singsong in which he spoke. It was a sweet, caressing tone: melodious like a lazy samba but also mournful, weary, accepting of the hardships of life. This was a typically peasant trait. "There is a woman who comes to help three days a week. She does all my errands. Besides, Lazaro [Lazaro Carriles, his ex-lover who had remained his closest friend] comes by every day."

Just in case he wasn't aware, I mentioned other sources where he could go for help. He snapped, "I don't like those men who serve as volunteer. I can't stand all that humility." From where I sat I could see a bleached wintry sunset over the Hudson. "But if you contact the PEN Club that would be good," he conceded. "I would like to get away from here before winter comes. My dream is to go to Puerto Rico and get a place at the beach so I can die by the sea." To encourage him, I said, "Perhaps your health will improve. People sometimes..."

"Jaime," he cut me off, "I want to die. I don't want my health to improve...and then deteriorate again. I've been through too many hospitalizations already. After I was diagnosed with PCP [AIDS pneumonia], I asked Saint Virgilio Piñera," he said, referring to the deceased homosexual Cuban writer, " to give me three years to live so that I could complete my body of work." Reinaldo smiled, and his monstrous face showed some of his former handsomeness.

"Saint Virilio granted me my request. I'm happy. I do wish, though, that I had lived to see Fidel kicked out of Cuba, but I guess it won't happen during my lifetime. Soon, I hope, his tyranny will end. I feel certain of that." I knew better than to disagree with him when it came to discussing Fidel Castro. Once, in the mid-eighties, I had tried to tell him to put behind him his years of imprisonment and persecution, to forget Cuba, to accept this county as his new home and to live in the present.

"You just don't understand, do you?" he had shouted, shaking with anger. "I feel like one of those Jews who were branded with a number by the Nazis; like a concentration camp survivor. There is no way on earth I can forget what I went through. It's my duty to remember. This," he roared, hitting his chest, "will not be over until Castro is dead. Or I am dead." We talked for a while about the collapse of the communist states.

The last thing I wanted was to upset him in any way, yet I had to defend my belief in socialism as the most humanistic form of government. So I spoke to that effect. "On paper socialism is the ideal form of government," he said, not altogether surprising me. "It's just that it's never worked anywhere. Perhaps some day." Becoming thoughtful, almost as if talking to himself, he added, "Jaime, what a life I've had. Even before the revolution, it was bad enough the agony of being an intellectual queen in Cuba. What a sad an hypocritical world that was," he paused.

"Finally, I leave that hell, and come here full of hopes. And this turns out to be another hell; the worship of money is as bad as the worst in Cuba. All these years, I've felt Manhattan was just another island-jail. A bigger jail with more distractions but a jail nonetheless. It just goes to show that there are more than two hells. I left one kind of hell behind and fell into another kind. I never thought I would live to see us plunge again into the dark ages. This plague -- AIDS -- is but a symptom of the sickness of our age."

As night fell, the neon of the billboards of midtown Manhattan and the lights of the skyscrapers provided the only illumination. We chatted in hushed tones, more intimately than we ever had before. I was aware of how precious the moment was to me, how I wanted to engrave it forever in my memory. When I got up to leave, Reinaldo had difficulty finding his slippers in the darkness, so I knelt on the floor and put them on his calloused, swollen, plum-colored feet. We went again through the kitchen, where he mentioned he would have broiled fish for dinner. Then he unchained the numerous locks, slowly, one by one.

We didn't hug or shake hands as we parted -- as if neither of those gestures was appropriate. "Call me any time, if you need anything," I said. "You're such a dear," he said. As I was about to take the first step down, I turned around. The door to the apartment was still open. In the rectangular darkness Reinaldo's shadowy shape was like a ghost who couldn't make up its mind whether to materialize or to vanish.

The following day Reinaldo called to ask me if I could get him some grass. He said he had heard it helped to control nausea after meals. I told him that I would try to get some. I called a couple of friends and mentioned Reinaldo's request. Bill Sullivan suggested that I contact the Gay Men's Health Crisis because he thought Reinaldo sounded suicidal. I dismissed this possibility. Because his wish was to die by the sea, I thought he would try to make it to Puerto Rico if he received the grant from PEN.

The next day, around noon, Tom Colchie called to say the Reinaldo had taken his life the night before; that he had used pills and had washed them down with shots of Chivas Regal; that he had left letters -- one of them for the police, clarifying the circumstances of his death -- and another one for the Cuban exiles, urging them to continue their fight against Castro's rule. Reinaldo had died in the early hours of December 7, and his body had been found by the woman who came by to help with his chores. He was forty-seven.

Via White Crane Institute // BLOOMSDAY

 


2018 -

Today is BLOOMSDAY. Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce during which the events of his novel Ulysses, which is set on June 16, 1904, are relived.

It is observed annually on June 16 in Dublin and elsewhere. Joyce chose the date as it was the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle; they walked to the Dublin suburb of Ringsend. The name is derived from Leopold Bloom, the Ulyssean protagonist.

The day involves a range of cultural activities, including Ulysses readings and dramatizations, pub crawls and other events, some of it hosted by the James Joyce Center in North Great George's Street. Enthusiasts often dress in Edwardian costume to celebrate Bloomsday, and retrace Bloom's route around Dublin via landmarks such as Davy Byrne's pub. Hard-core devotees have even been known to hold marathon readings of the entire novel, some lasting up to 36 hours.

Via Tumblr