Haven't posted anything in a while, apologies! Came across this quote from Roshi Joan Halifax that I thought might resonate with folk. It's from her 1997 book Being With Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death.
Compassion coupled with strength sustains our work with sickness, loss, and all the forms of suffering encountered in the experience of dying. Compassion is not an idealized state. It is the profound realization that we are not separate from one another, and it requires the ability to feel another’s suffering. Like loving-kindness, it is fundamentally interactive and ultimately has no subject and no object. Loving-kindness and compassion are the perfume of interconnectedness, the fragrance of nonduality.
