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)