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.
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Monday, August 8, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of Suffering
Understanding the Noble Truth of Suffering
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One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: The Beauty of Asking For Help
To awaken to the awareness of being helped is to enter the path of humility and gratitude.
Reverend Patti Nakai, “You Can’t Go It Alone”
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Sunday, August 7, 2022
Via White Crane Institute // David Nimmons - Manifest Love
Changing the World from the Margins
David Nimmons - Manifest Love
I really do believe that we as Gay people have an involved role in the world. I see Gays as a kind of perpetual Peace Corps. We are meant for something far beyond ourselves and our own selfish concerns. This is a part of the meaning of being Gay. --Reverend Malcolm Boyd
The national project by that name, Manifest Love, is a whole new kind of project for Gay/queer men. It exists to help Gay men find new ways to be with and for each other. Men who take part get a chance to explore our shared patterns, look at our values around community, nurturance, and affection. We offer concrete new ways to experience ourselves and conduct our relationships. By helping frame more nurturant patterns with each other, we envision and create the more sustaining queer world we want to live in.
There is no simple box for what we do. It is part social movement, part applied spirituality. Our gatherings are not encounter weekends, human potential groups, some dating service or sect. Nobody will ask you to loan your life's savings or tell you how to vote. You can go to the bathroom as often as you want and do whatever you want, when you're there.
The Manifest Love movement invites a range of queer men to create a new kind of world together, one that better reflects our best values and aspirations. Our focus is to craft the lives--social, intimate, sexual, communal, voluntary, moral--that we want to experience with each other. Call it a great Gay experiment in applied affection. To date, about 1,800 of us have taken part in these events from San Francisco to Providence; from Ukiah, California, to Ellsworth, Maine. You may have heard something of the discussions of these ideas now bubbling at Gay gatherings and conferences. If so, you may already be familiar with the basic thrust of this work. Men come because they are hungry for some changes in how we are with each other and what we can be for each other.
This work tries to link ethical analysis to action, to more mindfully foster creative forms of beloved community. Local chapters work to promote critical understanding of our cultural innovations and to find concrete ways to manifest sustaining values in our communities. A key focus is on creating individual and collective acts to help us reflect, experience, and practice values of care and nurture in new ways. We call them Loving Disturbances.
Loving Disturbances are just that: innovations and experiments in applied affection. They are concrete real-world experiments devised to nudge the patterns and practices of Gay lives in more affirming and humane directions. They are social actions that bring values into being, and are the action core of Manifest Love's local work. They may happen at a bar, on the street, or in a meeting, between friends or tricks or neighbors. They may happen alone or with others. The point is to broaden the habitual patterns of queer men's cultures to help us meet and interact in new ways, and have fun doing it. A Loving Disturbance aims to leave a corner of queer world just a little better off--a tad more affectionate or less defended, slightly more in line with the values discussed here, a moment aglow with an aura of promise fulfilled.
In local groups, we devote much time to helping men brainstorm all manner of new institutions and practices we could create with each other, to enlarge the possibilities of our interactions. In Providence, a group decided to do a "gang affection bang" when a gaggle of friends teamed up on one of their own to cook him a meal, bake him cookies, clean his house, give him massage, walk his dog, sing him a serenade, take him to a movie, and generally celebrate his presence in their lives. The Minneapolis troop invented the idea of a "group date." Troops in Boulder and Atlanta have experimented with creating various events for voluntary, nonsexual, touch that are free and available to all. In San Francisco, men experimented with using their eyes differently to cruise for affection, not just sex. Each Loving Disturbance is an example of that shameless kind of love Plato talked about.
If we could somewise contrive to have a city or an army composed of lovers and those they loved. . . when fighting side by side, one might almost consider them able to make even a little band victorious over all the world. -- Plato, Symposium
Work in local troops affords a chance to reflect on yourself and the givens of your Gay world, why you sought it out in the first place, and how it's working for you. Most important, it is a chance to reflect on what all of us are doing here together, at a deeper level than we usually think about it. If the ideas here have struck a chord with you, you are invited to join the ongoing conversations of men talking with each other, seeking new ways of being for and with each other.
In an interview with a French Gay magazine, Foucault once made this observation: [Homosexuality] would make us work on ourselves and invent, I do not say discover, a manner of being that is still improbable.
It is to the invention of improbability we are now called. Its exact shapes and forms depend on us. But basically, it comes down to this: If we want to rewrite the code of conduct in this Queer Kingdom, everybody has to grab a pen. The only way to get a more trusting and affectionate queer men's world is to make it. Because, it turns out, when we're all being that way with each other, the next thing you know . . that's what we are to each other.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
We cannot yet know what will happen when this confederacy of beloved men unabashedly claims our values before the world. If we better understood and celebrated our best practices, Gay lives would never look the same. Then, of course, all hell might break lose. In a world beset by violence, with male nurturance and caretaking in short supply, for a society confused and guilty in its sexuality, where practices of intimacy and the pursuit of pleasure are viewed with suspicion, where relations between the sexes are fraught with risk and confusion--in such a straining world, might not the lessons of such men help us all? As our distinct habits diffuse, how might that change the life of our larger culture?
Who knows what it could look like if our gender were less prone to violent solutions; if new varieties of communalism and caretaking now seen in many of our lives were a broader norm; if celebratory sexual exploration were a more accepted feature of our culture, enjoyed and explored, not hidden and lied about; if we structured our intimate communities in more inclusive ways; if our national life included more freely loving, publicly altruistic men; if we could find new understandings across gender lines. In a dozen demonstrable ways, our habits have the potential to shift the most deeply held values of the majority culture. How might that transform the experiences and fears of women, of children, and of men? What promise does it hold to sweeten the shared life of our planet?
If, as facts suggest, society harbors a hidden army of lovers in its midst, the challenge is to celebrate and nurture these gifts, this genius, It is a cultural patrimony we can offer to our shared life as a nation. Equally important, it is a gift to ourselves that will transform our own experience with and for each other. For now we know only this. A resolute community of fiercely loving males can only heal the world. We, whom Plato called the best of boys, the bravest of men, can compose his army of lovers. When we more fully manifest love in word and deed and we live out the values of our hidden hearts, the larger culture can only follow. It always has.
David Nimmons, formerly President of New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, is founder of Manifest Love, a national project helping Gay men find new ways to be with, and for, each other. This text was excerpted by the author from his recent St. Martin's Press book The Soul Beneath the Skin.
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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 Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - August 7, 2022 💌
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and the Fourth Jhāna
Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects
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One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and Abiding in the First Jhāna
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: What is Lovingkindness?
Lovingkindness
is a feeling that blesses others and oneself with the simple wish, “Be
happy.” The Japanese poet Issa [1763–1828] expresses this openhearted
feeling so well: “In the cherry blossom’s shade, there’s no such thing
as a stranger.”
Joseph Goldstein, “Triumph of the Heart”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Saturday, August 6, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
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One week from today: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Facing Loss
We
are so busy running from loss, like a child hiding from the boogeyman,
that we don’t care who we knock down along the way, so long as sorrow
stays far enough behind. But loss doesn’t need to be feared, and neither
do we, ourselves.
Breeshia Wade, “Loss Doesn’t Need to Be Feared”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Friday, August 5, 2022
Via Daily Dharma: Make Joy an Offering
We
can reframe joy for ourselves by thinking of it as something that we
can offer as a gift to the world rather than something that we take or
have to wait to receive.
Christina Feldman and Jaya Rudgard, “Where to Find Joy and How to Cultivate It”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Intoxication
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Intoxication
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One week from today: Abstaining from Harming Living Beings
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Thursday, August 4, 2022
Via Daily Dharma: Settle the Mind to Find a Solution
We
feel overwhelmed. The situation seems bigger than us. But meditation
restores us to that calm, without which we cannot face the truth of our
condition and think clearly about how we can get out of our
predicament.
Ben Okri, “The Role of the Artist in a Time of Crisis”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Frivolous Speech
Refraining from Frivolous Speech
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One week from today: Refraining from False Speech
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Cultivate Awe
You
will recognize the practical nature of awe when despair becomes
compassion; righteous indignation transforms into openness and humility;
and the tendency to want to fix things turns into a natural, unhindered
longing to respond.
Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “Nurturing the Intelligent Heart”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via White Crane Institute // RUDOLF BRAZDA
RUDOLF BRAZDA, (b: 1913) believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — died on this date.
Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three years.
It was only after May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Victims of the Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed there were no other pink-triangle survivors.
Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the last victim and the last witness” to the persecution.
“It will now be the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said, “a task that they are just beginning to undertake.”
One of those historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of A Different Holocaust (2006).
Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said, “The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-gay persecution, the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th century.” During the 12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr. Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year.
“The experience of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution, but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the “relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately exterminate them.”
Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous, said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Men sent to the camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for guards’ target practices.”
Two books have been written about Mr. Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was. “Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.”
Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175.
After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003. He has no immediate survivors.
“Having emerged from anonymity,” the book “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation of today.’ ”
He died on August 3, 2011 in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France. He was 98.
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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 Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - August 3, 2022 💌
I went to India and I met my guru, Neem Karoli Baba. What he reflected to me was that what I was intuitively feeling was valid—that we are indeed much more than who we think we are, that we give ourselves very short shrift because of the way we’ve been socialized, and that it was possible for a human being to be a more conscious being, not just a conditioned reactive mechanism.
- Ram Dass -