Love and Compassion

By Rev. Cathy Toldi

Avalokitesvara!

You who hears the cries of the world,

who responds to our human need with your ten-thousand hands,

I turn to you to guide my practice;

Opening to love in the morning,

Expressing gratitude in the evening.

This morning, opening to love looked like this:

I made a big mistake last night.

I usually turn off my phone at night.  But I checked to see if my niece had replied to my text. Before I knew it, I was sitting up in bed reading about the Coronavirus, spooky facts and speculations. I travelled through many worm holes over the next hour, my heart pounding, anxiety mounting. It was really hard to get to sleep.

So this morning, I lay in bed feeling dread. This is the end of the world as we know it. All the ways I engage with the world to try to stay sane—who knows when any of this will happen again?

But something inside of me remembered to take a deep breath, to expand my consciousness outwards, rather than trapping myself in my internal spin.  I realized, What I’m feeling is the suffering of the world. We’re all in this together. I thought about those that I love, and those about whom I was reading on my screen. May we all find some ease in the midst of this whirlwind.

My body began to relax, as I felt my intimate connection with humanity. 

Compassion is the word we use in Buddhism for this experience, of

feeling the suffering of others and wishing that this suffering be released.  

“In the morning my first impulse of mind and heart is compassion,” we say in our chant for Kanzeon (Avalokitesvara) as described by Gene in his recent dharma talk.

I believe we can also call this love.

Love, as expressed by being kind with ourselves as we feel the truth of our emotions. Love, as extending our consciousness out to feel the truth of the emotions of others. Love, as generating the intention that others be well. And then carrying this intention into our day: caring for those in our homes,   in our neighborhood, and, through our screens, in the ways that we can, for the beings in the broader world.