Imagine Compassion

A recounting, in near approximation, of what I spoke as Opening Words at the UUFHC on Sunday, June 19, at the annual arts service:

Imagine compassion.

I believe that compassion is primarily an exchange, and an experience.

Mystery, for me, is found in the interplay among experience, exchange, translation, and imagination.

There have been a few times in my life when I have been stunned by an experience of that which I had never imagined. More commonly, though, I am aware that I organize and arrange and build my daily life from what I can and do imagine. I arrange the furniture in my living space, the utensils in my kitchen, the placement of decorations. I arrange my schedule from how I imagine I will fulfill my desires or the duties I've accepted. I imagine possibilities, and thus I build. Sometimes I'm disappointed, of course, chance happens, and then I re-imagine.

In this context, it seems to me that a failure of compassion is akin to a failure of imagination.

In her poem "Pastorale," Anita Barrows tells of twin lambs born one January, of how the first one immediately stood and nursed, "it's tail crazy with want," she writes. The second struggled and flailed until Barrows thought she must act: wipe it dry, wrap it in her coat. She didn't know what to do, though, so she stayed outside the fence and watched. (The lamb did live) In her not knowing, Barrows recognized the possibility that simply allowing events to unfold might be the most compassionate thing.

Thich Naht Hahn gives a well-known illustration of how we don't know how to judge. He simply reminds us that compost becomes a flower, which becomes compost, which becomes flower, compost, flower... All is one, Hahn teaches.

Noticed or not, we are in exchange with all with every breath. Our reasoning minds cannot absorb all. So it is simply the human condition that we do not know how to judge right/wrong, good/bad with deep, true compassion.

In her book Hand Wash Cold, Karen Mazen Miller writes of watching a heron take a koi from their fish pond, the gold crescent hanging from the narrow beak as wings beat into the air. She writes of how she knew in that unresisted, dreadful moment that she saw a fish turning into a bird.

We experience the world through our senses. We exchange with the world, starting with breath. We translate and interpret meaning. And we imagine, as in my own little poem, titled:

Imagine

Do you know how?
Wait.

Study your desire:
heart
gut
spine
breath.

Swim in
your reward.


I wrote three more paragraphs about coming to art as a full body experience. I wrote about how all works of art carry rhythm and balance, color and tone, and we may experience all art with every part of our being. It's true, but you already know that anyway.

What I want to say is that
between Alone and All One
there is only that one L-letter
of difference.

Sometimes that space between
feels so small, snug,
warm, fed, clean and restful

and sometimes
it feels like
an enormous, yawning gap,
ragged and jagged
and bigger than the Grand Canyon
or even the whole Milky Way.

In that echo-y,
huge, small space,
I want to say
that I desire
with all of my being
to imagine compassion.