The truest form of the heart is as a vessel of empathy: to hold the emotional realities of others as an echoing of emotions within yourself. And the first instinct of the heart is to do this unstintingly, indiscriminately, to give of itself to all others in an outpouring of feeling until the oceans of its compassion are drawn down dry. And still the heart would yearn to give. But compared to the colossal generosity of the heart's intentions, we find that we ourselves have only so much to give. In a world rampant with murder, poverty, and other unconscionable injustices both large and small, systematic and arbitrary, we react with our limited time and attention according to what seems to hit closest to home. And so our empathy flows out to our fellow human beings not like an ocean to cover all of humanity but rather like meager rivers winding through the lowlands and the channels that were dictated to us by the topography of our cultural paradigms, of US vs THEM, of HERE vs THERE, of race and religion, of power and discourse, of preconception and news media. Everyone deserves our empathy. And though we're only human, if we stretch our minds and hearts a little bit each day, we might better approximate something divine. ----- Thinking about the Boston Marathon and about People Everywhere (Apr 16, 2013)

Yesterday I shared a parking lot with four Jewish women who were praying at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. I saw them all standing with the western sun at their backs, rocking gently back and forth while they read their prayers from the tiny books that they held before them in both their hands. They stood in a staggered line beside their car so that some of them prayed from the asphalt and some from the sidewalk among the weeds and the wild mustard that were growing there. They were young women all of them, and they wore long sleeves and long loose skirts that wimpled in the breath of wind whenever it blew across the lot.


I do not fully understand what they were doing, and I do not pretend to know what their worship meant to them, what thirst or need it satisfied. But as I passed them by to perform my own prayers in yet another remote corner of the parking lot, I felt a quiet awe that something as ancient and reverent as this still moves other people in the world, and I was glad to have their company.

Today the Earth rotated 360 degrees around her axis. She completed ~1/365th of her journey around the Sun, a trip which she has completed ~4.54 billion times before. Humankind also went about business as usual, though less gracefully than the cosmos. Wars were fought. Horrors were wrought. Marriages were held. Vows were made. Some were broken. Babies were born. A marginal increase in the global atmospheric carbon gave some people cause for concern. Some of us died. Some of us learned to live anew. The Earth laughed at us for our follies, wept with us for our tragedies, and frequently she did both, since the two so often coincide.

And at night we lay in the arms of lovers, or alone, or some with their children, atop spring mattresses, or padded mats, or the gum-stained sidewalk in the recessed doorways of stores, and some slept fitfully, or hardly at all, but sleep they did at last and succumbed to the realm of dreams and repose where everybody goes alike until tomorrow comes...

Aug 23rd (~12:30am)