Excerpts from “Field Notes on a Compassionate Life” by Mark Ian Barach
Excerpts From “Field Notes on a Compassionate Life”
by Mark Ian Barach
…you could say we’re all in the pews, even if we’re beyond the pale. Whether we know it or not, the whole crowd of us, friends, family, strangers, enemies; mixed-up and wise, caring and craving; striving to do better than mundanity even as we cling to the status quo, opening our hearts, locking them tight, then opening them again….
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If we are less than kind, it may be that we feel for each other so irresistibly, with such shocking abruptness, that sometimes, below the threshold of awareness, some inner circuit breaker shuts down the heart before it can take the full jolt. But just look, really look, at somebody; anybody; laying down your defenses, not thinking a beat about yourself, and there: the quick leap of tender flame, a little aureole of light…..Save each other, fail each other, hurt each other, help each other, it is there: Seeing-Good, always there, just waiting for us to notice…
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We are not safe. I can read it in the Times; I can read it in Thucydides. It is a long battle, this struggle between love and hate. But to live in a climate of fear, with its color-coded thermometer readings, means that men with box cutters, bullets, and bombs sit above us like kings. The hermetic paradox sill holds: In the poison is the medicine. Hatred summons forth its unconquerable opposite.
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It’s true our human task is made harder by the institutionalization of hurt and harm, by an accumulated investment in the ruin of our own prospects. But we are, collectively, wiser than our leaders, kinder than our institutions, more open-hearted than all our dogmas.
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It does seem that we suffer from a collective cognitive dissonance. We know the children are starving; the ice caps really are melting. We know our designer sweats are connected to designer sweatshops; our automobiles to the turbid atmosphere; the food on our table to the dwindling water table and the chemicalized soil…We also know there’s already enough to feed, clothe, house, heal, and educate everyone, without exception. It’s less a shortage of resources than a short-changing of imagination: compassion being an ability to imagine – to see – the connection between everyone and everything, everywhere.
Mark Ian Barach published Field Notes on a Compassionate Life: Awakening the Heart of Awareness with Tarcher / Penguin in 2008. The book is a collection of meditations and reflections rooted in his work as a contemplative practitioner, and the whole text is worth reading.
I remember reading this in a hammock somewhere, decades ago, some summer day, underlining these passages. The naming of the cognitive dissonance that we’re required to hold, the hope that we are indeed “wiser than our leaders, kinder than our institutions, and more open-hearted than our dogmas.” I was grateful for these words at the time and still am.
