compassion

[Image: On my first visit to downtown Durham, NC, in the fall of 2022, I was struck — moved — both by the obvious demographic diversity and by the displays of public art, especially murals. This mural (I haven’t been able to learn the artist’s name) commemorates (among other things) a particularly fraught moment in the history of that diversity: the establishment in the early 1970s of a “charrette” to help resolve ongoing racial tensions, especially surrounding school integration. The two people seated at the table at top left were appointed by a Federal judge to lead the charrette; from left to right, they are C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater. At the start of the project, Ellis was the angry “Exalted Cyclops” of Durham’s Ku Klux Klan; Atwater, an angry community activist and organizer. You can read more about the charrette — and the “best of enemies” relationship between Ellis and Atwater — here, here, here, and elsewhere.]

From whiskey river:

Now it’s April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Prayer for the Abuser
(excerpt)

To those who see only division and separateness,
I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.
For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother’s embrace,
I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.
To those who still feel somehow incomplete,
I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.

(Kuan Yin [source: widely quoted, including here, but nothing canonical I can find])

Not from whiskey river:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Some schools of Buddhism teach that [skillful means (upaya)] goes along with two other aspects of the spiritual life: compassion (karuna) and wisdom (prajna). I’d like to borrow this Buddhist trio of virtues for my own religion. What could be more perfect than basing your life on wisdom, compassion, and skillful means? What better way to describe religion than as a deep way of life that takes into account your mind, your heart, and your hands?

In my own private book of spiritual practices, along with these three central ingredients I would add wonder and serenity, two items I borrow from Glenn Gould. That gives me a five-legged table on which to build my religion: wisdom, compassion, skillful methods, wonder, and serenity. I’ve borrowed them all, but now, in this new configuration, they become mine…

It isn’t always easy to practice the virtues of wisdom, compassion, skillful means, wonder, and serenity. Especially serenity. The world might like you to do something else.

(Thomas Moore [source])

[Image: “Light filling the gap,” by Rodrigo Filgueira; found it on Flickr, naturally, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I like the shape of this image — the horizontal extreme — and the extravagant use of darkness. But maybe my favorite thing, oddly, is the clock ticking away in the shadows.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Daddy Longlegs

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and:

We walk around awash in unseen worlds and forces. Sound waves, electromagnetic waves, the subatomic universe, the human aura, the famous quantum soup. All of these are examples of real things that we don’t see. Not only do they exist, they impact our lives continuously, they influence us, they affect us all the time.

Compassion too is real, it’s a solid physical thing, as powerful as gravity, and it affects outcome, turns one thing into another. Compassion, and the lack of compassion, affect us all the time. The fear we feel in the middle of the night can be traced to a lack of this “force.”

When there isn’t enough compassion being generated (either for ourselves as individuals or in the world in general), we become unbalanced; we suffer from it as we would from a lack of fresh air and clean water. It is not an incidental element, it is mandatory. We will not survive without it.

(Patricia Anderson [source])

[Read more…]

Digging Deep for Compassion When Cynicism Comes to Call

Let Me Have Your Abyss