Passionate Compassion If you want to dabble your doodle in some mystical soup, you need go no farther than the pot marked “compassion.” The word comes from the Latin, cum pasio. Literally, “with suffering.” That’s it. Just being with suffering. Compassion offers no answers. It gives no reason. Has no rational justification. Compassion is no counselor. No doctor. No mother’s breast to offer suckle. Compassion is not a commodity. Can’t be bought, sold, borrowed or traded. Don’t think you can lay your money down at the altars of self-help workshops, therapists’ couches, social workers’ desks, ministers’ offices, doctors’ tables, psychics’ living rooms or gurus’ caves and expect compassion to spontaneously geyser itself into your life. Compassion with a price tag ain’t compassion at all. Nor can you horde compassion, save compassion, invest compassion or stick it under your mattress. You can’t stuff it in the freezer and pull it out when you need it. Like most of the really worthwhile happenings in life, compassion is a catch-it-when-you-can kind of critter. Doesn’t lounge around in corners waiting for crises to appear. Doesn’t lurk in the shadows waiting for you to stumble or screw-up. Doesn’t hole up in a fort waiting to ride out on a white horse to save your butt. In truth, compassion is one of the most ludicrous ideas that ever hatched from the human/divine consciousness egg. To be with suffering. To hunker down/cuddle up/snuggle with pain. To actually get close enough to another’s pain to feel it. Share it. Taste it. Touch it. Smell it. It’s absurd and preposterous and more than a little repugnant to think that anyone in their right mind would voluntarily get close enough to another’s muck and misery to actually experience it. Isn’t there enough pain and suffering to go around? Don’t we each have enough poop of our own? Why would we ever want to share someone else’s anguish and wretchedness? It makes no sense whatsoever. But we do. Oh, yes we do (And heah come de mystery, Sweet Cakes), because somehow, this insane act is one of the most life-restoring and regenerative of all human encounters. Compassion is no cure. No antidote to pain or suffering. But, compassion somehow connects us to a deeper wisdom, to a higher awareness, to eternity. Compassion is spirituality beyond religion. Not bound by doctrine, dogma or even tradition, compassion is free to make love with your heart and soul. And the even more amazing mystery, Sweetcakes, is that the passion of compassion gushes into the lives of both the giver and the receiver… the compassionate and compassionee. It’s magic is what it is. Wizardry. As illogical as any fairy tale. As incongruous as any Bible story. The way compassion works is almost like it was out of some ancient myth. Some legendary adventure of the gods. Which may well be precisely what we are. - Howard | 
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