COMPASSION ISN'T THE FIRST-BORN OF INSIGHT

COMPASSION ISN’T THE FIRST-BORN OF INSIGHT

 

Compassion isn’t the first-born of insight. It’s not just enough to see suffering and commiserate; you must be that agony as if it were a stone in your own shoe in order to remove it from another. If the healer doesn’t fall sick first, how will the others ever get better? Compassion isn’t one of the sad apples of life. When you bite into it it’s never bitter. Compassion is the action of one true thought that didn’t get lost in the eyes of the mirror like a nightbird in the face of a storm. It delivers its message like blood to the wizard of the heart conjuring the spirits of powerful elixirs out of toxic cauldrons: Let your own sorrows ripen into the sweetness that flows into others like an underground river in paradise and be the dark water that mothers the roots of all. Compassion isn’t a door you open like a roof to let the rain in or the stars out like fireflies you’ve kept in a jar like a lot of good ideas. It isn’t feeling sorry for yourself as a human when you see how others are wounded worse than you are. There’s no inside or outside to it. It doesn’t wear skin to say this is where you end and I begin to the world. It doesn’t take fingerprints. It doesn’t take names. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush in the valley of Tuwa and said I am that I am. Sit still. And know. And compassion answered out of the silence that followed like the female principle of life you are as he is. A vow of solitude that’s bound by the wound deep in the heart of things not the sword that swears by the scar that it isn’t. And insight might come like the sun at midnight to thaw your eyes like the slack glass of old windows that have stared into the darkness too long without seeing anything, but it’s compassion that kisses your eyelids like the moon that whispers her way into your dream like a lifeboat on the mindstream. Insight might stun you with answers but compassion sits down on the ground beside you and asks the same questions that you do with the same mouth, the same voice, the same loss about why there is so much suffering in life and still there’s no word like a stand-in for God that comes like a crow or a dove that knows whether to bless or blame it. Compassion lays her head on the shoulders of the labouring hills like the glow of moonlight and insight understands what its eyes are for when the night looks through them for signs of intelligent life and all it can see are these small gestures of ours that flower among the stars like tears among the thorns. Compassion isn’t the happy widow of a God with horns that gores the world at conception. It isn’t the final term of a law intent on its own perfection. It isn’t a distillate of love that can be isolated from flesh and blood like aspirin from a willow and taken three times a day until the pain goes away. Compassion is the star in the eyes of the dark mother that feels like a familiar constellation too far from home to be seen. Insight might identify the cause of the hurt as desire and prescribe a course of detachment as a copious solution, but compassion opens its orchid of blue fire in the hottest part of the flame like a cool breeze in hell that feels the heat of thousands upon thousands of wounded candles, and taking a breath as deep as the sea, one by one, child by child, leaving the nightlight on like the moon, gently blows them out like a better dream than the one that woke them up.

 

PATRICK WHITE