The way I wanted to start tonight is with a story that to me really captures
the spirit of radical compassion and inspired by Jarvis Masters, for many
years he's a longtime prisoner and meditator. And as the story goes he was
in the exercise yard at San Quentin when one of the one young inmates was
about to throw a stone at a pigeon. Now the unspoken rule in the yard is
mind your own business, but Jarvis immediately raised his hand to stop...
raised his arm to stop him and antagonized, the young man shouted
out "What are you doing?" Everybody's expecting a
fight but Jarvis responded in a very spontaneous way. He said, "That bird has my wings.
That bird has my wings." And the tension dissipated and interestingly
four days after the incident, different inmates would come up to him and say,
"What did you mean by that, Jarvis?" But intuitively we know what Jarvis meant.
We all have the capacity to move through life and it becomes a real adventure
with that sense of "that bird has my wings" where we run into others and it's
like anybody that we run into, including any animal or non-human animal. There can
be this sense of the aliveness, of connection and that open-heartedness and
it feels good. We have that wired into us as young
children and it's something that we can cultivate. I thought I'd end by sharing
some stories about children and the heart space that's there. One child
writes and this is in response to the question, "What does love mean? and these
are 4 to 8-year-olds. One little girl says, "Well when my grandmother got
arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her
toenails anymore ,so my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his
own hands got arthritis - that's love!"
Another: "When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know
that your name is safe in their mouth.
"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before
giving it to him to make sure it tastes okay." "Love is what's in the room with you
at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen." "When you tell someone
something bad about yourself and you're scared they won't love you anymore, but
then you get surprised because not only did they love you, they love you even
more." "Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left them alone all
day." "I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes
and has to go out and buy new ones." "You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless
you mean it, but if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget."
Finally: "When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars
come out of you."
So radical compassion has all the flavors of love. It has the love that's
appreciation, the love that's caring and the love that's forgiving. It means
though if our life is to have meaning that it comes into action.
There's a lot of people now that are saying this is the point in history when
the activists - the social activists - need to learn how to sit down on a cushion
and get connected with their heart and spirit. And the people that sit on the
cushion all the time, they need to know how to bring what they've discovered on
the cushion and get out there and do stuff to help - which is really a key piece.
With that I want to end with a brief reflection. If you will close your
eyes. We talked about widening the circles. The innermost circle is the life
right here - this body, this heart. So just sense your own body-heart-mind. "That
bird has my wings" is an expression of universal belonging, of realizing the
sacredness that lives through all beings.
Namaste and thank you