Pamela's Blog 9

Published on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Compassion Always Comes Too Late”

by Pamela Satterwhite

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity. (George Eliot, Adam Bede)

When we’re stuck in a pattern it takes energy from outside that pattern to alter its course. Thoughts, repeated – the cut grooves of our recognition – run like water to the lowest point, reinforcing conditioning that's been centuries in the shaping.

We feel sorry when we gaze on the disaster our unthinking makes. Compassion always comes too late. The garden neglected ‘til weeds choke our dearest bloom. The loved one we speak our heart to once he’s nestled in a tomb. The need we would have met, in other times or circumstances. Acknowledgement of the debt to others had our suffering been glanced at.

Compassion for others can’t seed when our own need goes unseen. And our souls in distress, thinned out by centuries of the insanity “self-interest,” are in such a weakened state, we passively allow our alternative energy – the ancestors, the earth, and each other – to be bought and sold as commodities.
The only answer is for the few, who see this disaster, to generate the wind that dispels the fog.

““For human intelligence is like water, air, and fire – it cannot be bought or sold,” wrote Robert Crowley in 1550.

“…Reduce no human spirit to disgrace of price,” says Emily three hundred years later.

Walter Lundquist, a commercial artist, tells this story:

The turning point in my life was the death of my father. It was a funny thing. Here you’re watching a beautiful guy with white hair lying in his bed, dying of a heart attack. You hear him ramble and wander and talk about his life: “I was never anything. I didn’t do a job even in raising my children. I didn’t mean anything…” You watch death. Then you say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on with him is going to hit me. What am I doing between now and my death? If you take actuarial tables of insurance companies, I’m running on borrowed time.” You begin to assess yourself and that’s a shock. I didn’t come up smelling like a rose. “Am I going to go on forever being a goddamn pimp? What’s the alternative? Is there another way of earning a living?” (Walter Lundquist in Studs Terkel’s Working, p. 526)

He decided there was.

He altered the course of his life.

What about us?

Is it too late to grow compassion for ourselves, our ancestors, our earth? …to put these things before anything else?

In his story in Working, Walter Lundquist concluded: “Once you wake up the human animal you can’t put it back to sleep again.”

We’ve been lulled to sleep. But if we listen closely enough, the earth speaks.

It does.

Nothing is more important than beginning to listen.

What you hear when you’re alone with yourself, or sitting with your friends of green, or meditating with the sky, is ‘reality.’

The job we give our soul to every day is somebody else’s wet dream.

It’s time to start living our own.

Maybe the place to start is at “compassion.”

Let’s cry a little for ourselves already. We deserve it after all this system’s put us through.

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Pamela's Blog 9

Published on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Compassion Always Comes Too Late”