Compassion Archives - Stumbling Mystic

June 2, 2026May 31, 2026

Our Basic Goodness

I see the trouble in the world and I’m worried on so many levels. We thought war was declining, but we see it is on the rise, causing unnecessary devastation and suffering. Extreme weather and rising sea levels show that we’ve been ignoring the warnings of a changing climate for too long. We thought we had progressed against prejudice and bigotry, but loud voices shout to pull us backward. Democracy itself is buckling under the strain of authoritarian governments.

Perhaps most troubling of all, I’m worried we are losing faith in our underlying goodness, which is the power we need most to meet the trouble.

The troubles are powerful. Feelings of despair are understandable. It’s easy to think that goodness is a fickle choice, a sucker’s game, too weak to counter the forces we are facing. But don’t be fooled. That is just the frightened voice of cynicism, looking for an escape from our responsibilities. When I stop to listen, I realize that voice is the one that is weak, too shallow to be true. The fundamentals of our nature have an energetic signature that enters our bones and turns our head. When I am in step with the force of our basic goodness, I feel grounded in something powerful, flowing, alive.

What is my evidence for this conviction? The fact that we are inspired at the sight of kindness, and recoil from acts of cruelty; the fact that there are millions who rise up, offer aid, counter cruelty, work to heal, whose efforts are not motivated by individual gain, but from a desire to help; the fact that the energy of selfishness and fear, which is centered in separation, can never exceed the energy of wisdom and compassion, which is grounded in our connection.

Connecting to this essential goodness, acting from this goodness, seeing this goodness in others even when they don’t see it in themselves, is my crucial step in moments of despair. When I touch this power, it amplifies. The signal strengthens as it goes, calling others, who see something in me that draws them toward the goodness in themselves.

You have felt this too, the uplift every time you brush against goodness. Every brave act of kindness reveals the core that makes us human. It is more than an individual moral choice – it is action aligned with a fundamental, a first cause. When you look, really look, into the eyes of another, you see the glinting light of that fundamental. The world softens and we advance another step against the trouble.

For an uplifting story about the power of seeing the goodness in another, watch this two minute video of Jack Kornfield.

Photo by ‪World Central Kitchen

April 14, 2026March 30, 2026

Repairing the World

Horrified by the violence and suffering that is growing in the world, I struggle to keep my balance, to absorb the news without shutting down. Wars in Ukraine, Sudan, Iran, and a dozen other hot spots have killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. The numbers are so large they have become a sanitized abstraction, removed from the raw level of slicing pain I can comprehend. Every bomb or missile that lands creates another tragedy – a family without heat or drinking water, a child orphaned, a hospital in ruins. I feel the urge to help, to stop the parade of cruelty, hoping my small actions matter even in the face of hardship at such enormous scale.

It’s easy to despair that after so many millennia, we haven’t made more progress. It seems humanity has been breaking bones and crushing hearts since time began. I take guidance, and perhaps comfort, from the wisdom traditions that teach us suffering is the symptom of a broken world, and that my small actions are needed to hasten its repair.

All traditions honor this impulse to render aid to those in need. Matthew says Jesus implored us to feed the hungry and care for the stranger. Buddhism places right action and right livelihood at the foundation of the eight-fold path. Zakat, the obligation to provide for the poor, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Talmudic teaching holds that we must all join in the work of repairing the world: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” The last, for me, is the clearest reminder that I must not be daunted by the impossible magnitude of the task. The obligation is not to complete, but to participate.

I know a teaching holds true wisdom when it can speak to us at different times on our growth journey. Early on, we understand these instructions as commands. We help others because we are told to. The requirement comes from divine law, a moral code, or other external source. As we mature, we come to see that the repair we offer the world also repairs ourselves. All the painful evils that we hate – greed, fear, desire for power, self-protection – have their seeds in us as well. These seeds can grow if aggravated in the wrong direction. Part of my horror is the subtle recognition that, in the right circumstances, I am capable of cruelty myself. When empathy stirs in me, it interrupts the destructive cycle, giving me space to find myself and take compassionate action. Each act of mercy is itself a repair, a saving grace, a tending in the right direction.

I don’t know if we’ll ever complete the work. Perhaps it can only come at the end of the human journey, when we have finally wounded and healed enough and learned what we came here to learn. I have an image in my mind of the last band of human beings performing the last act of compassion before graduating from the school of earthly form and cycling off to their next assignment, looking back at a broken world made whole. It’s a vision that reminds me that we carry the seeds of goodness too.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

January 6, 2026January 11, 2026

Our Basic Nature is Goodness

I approach life with the assumption that people act with good intent. This is not wishful thinking, it’s an observation. Look at how we proceed through life and through history. It seems each human life repeats the progress of our species.

We all have desires, dreams, goals we’re reaching toward. But the focus of what we want changes depending on where we are in our growth trajectory. We start with a core need for physical and emotional survival. We learn how to get by in a world we are grappling to understand, and as our basic needs are met, we’re drawn to something more. As we learn the basic skills of school, work, and career, we also explore our needs for creativity and engagement, topics and activities that interest and excite us. And, of course, we feel the strong need to connect with others in bonds of friendship, community, and love.

As we walk through life, all of these needs are continually pulled by a moral gravity to higher orders of consciousness. While our early efforts are directed toward ourselves, maturity brings an expansion outward. We’re no longer satisfied with only selfish concerns, our focus grows to include the welfare of others. Anyone who reaches a basic level of maturity strives to enhance the world for others, to make the world a better place.

This matches the growth trajectory of human history on a grander scale. Over the millennia, an innate drive has pulled us constantly toward greater freedom, fairness, and interconnection. From warring tribes to nation states to an interdependent global economy, each evolutionary step required a critical mass of common conviction that more freedom, more equality, more collaboration, more recognition that working together for a larger community was better for us all. Modern society could not function if the vast majority of us did not act honestly, morally, and with concern for our neighbors.

October 21, 2025October 20, 2025

I Long to Fill the Gaps

Life has always seemed a mixed bag, a loose collection of pieces that form a coherent whole only if I squint. It’s as if the potter dropped the vase and made dubious guesses gluing our brokenness back together. Why else is the collage so disjointed – ecstatic joy laid alongside blistering pain; splashes of beauty decorating the abhorrent?

I long to right the world, to repair this vessel we are sailing. In the long run, I know that goodness will prevail because our ultimate nature leans in that direction, if ever so slightly. But the traveling to get there is so, so, painfully slow. I want to add my efforts to help it along, to quicken the time, to run my fingers over the scars and heal what aches. In a world that is ripping itself apart, I want to fill the gaps.

Being human, I need the world to make sense. I have to find the patterns that hold it together and rescue the bottom line from utter randomness. And so I fall back on that most basic human skill, I tell a story. Am I making it up to numb myself, avoid reality? That’s not what stories do, fabricate from nothingness. They ring a bell to send a signal outward, like sonar, and if the sound hits something solid, you get a message back and know you’re heading in the right direction.

September 16, 2025September 14, 2025

The Harder Path of Kindness

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Cruelty tries to mimic strength. But it is a hollow brand of strength, an overreach, a compensation for the fears that eat us from inside. True strength comes from a deeper source.

Kindness does not accumulate by addition, tallying by ones; it multiplies, doubling as it goes. Each act of kindness has more positive impact on our moral psyche than an act of mean-spiritedness can detract.

I know this from the compass in my bones. I feel contracted and repulsed when I see cruelty, or when my anger pushes me toward cruelty. I feel open and alive when I receive or give a kindness. Research confirms my intuition. Clinical studies show that witnessing an act of generosity lifts our mood and increases the likelihood that we will act with kindness.

It is easy to view kindness as an act of volition that comes from my separate self, but I feel it more as a feature of the universe that is always available, naturally arising, flowing outward, seeking the widest possible landscape. This universal kindness has its own peculiar gravity; it wants to include us and carry us along. Our choice is whether to align with it or not, and when we do, the surge of energy makes us bigger.

Societies and nations also choose whether to align with kindness or cruelty, swinging back and forth through the circumstances of history. We are in a time when anger and fear consume our attention, and our leaders have fallen victim to our collective anxieties, opting for the false strength of cruelty. This does not make us tough, it makes us small.

We don’t have to accept this, we can speak out against actions that violate our values. But we must not let our indignation lead us to match the vicious stroke for stroke. We are stronger when we are not pulled toward cruelty ourselves, when we align with kindness, the basic principle that makes us human. It’s a harder path, designed for hardy souls. And walking the harder path builds greater strength in me to witness pain, bear it, and still greet the world with a generous, open hand.

It is not enough for me to fight cruelty by addition, reciprocating tit for tat. I want to be a multiplier of well-being.

Photo by Il Vagabiondo on Unsplash

August 26, 2025August 24, 2025

Balancing the Scales of Fortune

I’ve been lucky.

I grew up in an easy time, raised by parents who loved me, my disappointments light. I experienced no physical or sexual abuse, I did not comprehend the ugly shape of trauma until it was explained to me much later.

I’ve seen war only in books and movies. Vietnam ended while I was in high school. I graduated law school in the 80s, when business was booming and jobs were plentiful. I’ve only really loved one woman, and surprisingly, she peeked behind the folds that hid my quirks and tender spots, and loved me back; we are deep into our fourth decade of marriage. My health is good, my memory mostly sound.

I’ve been lucky. Outrageously, randomly lucky. No logic explains my fortune. Why I slipped the cruel fates while others took a brutal dose, I’ll never know. I recognize the disparity in the dice, I know there are countless others who got the short end of the stick, and I can’t help but contemplate the hardships they endure.

July 1, 2025August 9, 2025

Walking Each Other Home

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

Ram Dass

Ram Dass describes life as a walk. That image feels right. It’s a terrain I learn about by moving though. There are easy stretches where fields explode with flowering brush and insects buzzing in the sunshine. There are rough patches where soaking rains have washed away the trail. The distant hills might slope gently, convincing me I have the strength to meet them, before turning into mountain cliffs that seem to want to break me. It’s all there for me to learn from as I go. I pray the joys outweigh the woes, but I know, whatever comes, I am stronger for the walking.

And it’s true, my walk is leading somewhere; I am walking home. I’m trying to find my way through the wood, guided by the lessons I’ve been given. My learning has not always been pretty. I’ve made mistakes that hurt people, as many times as I’ve been hurt. But when the lesson took, I advanced another step, my inner goodness brightened, and my actions from that point were better.

Isn’t that how we all proceed along this road, learning, laughing, cringing, crying, finding our way through the flowers and the mud? We’re all trying to figure out how to make it through with a minimum of harm, under motivations we only partly understand, all of us wanting, desperately, to feel love, and trying stunningly stupid ways to find it.

May 27, 2025May 25, 2025

Politics, Awareness, and Love

I want to be more loving. To be more forgiving, big-hearted, generous of spirit. When I touch this side of myself, it feels good to the bone and reminds me that I fulfill something fundamental when I act from The Well at the center of my being. But in our current political times, I feel a darkness seeping into me, and The Well can seem far away, dry, exhausted. Maybe even poisoned.

Politics. A word fraught.

In one sense, politics can mean the structure and policies of our government. But in a larger sense, it’s also how we organize society, the collection of choices we make as we thrash out the messy details of how we differ and agree. We are shaped both by the decisions we make and how we make them. Each small choice along the way fills The Well or depletes it. Together, they tell the story of who we are as a people.

The choices we have seen in recent years have left many of us horrified, appalled, heartbroken. The shape that is emerging is grotesque, and the story it tells about us is shameful. I recoil when I realize the road we are on seems headed for more of the same in the coming years.

I don’t often write about politics. Stumbling Mystic is devoted to a different, parallel track of the human project. I write to understand the call of an impulse that moves me toward The Well, pulls me to the center where my goodness blooms, and reminds me that a bloom of goodness rests in the potential of every person. I worry that writing about politics will diminish this devotion. Political views today have become adamant, vehement, like blocks of pre-cast concrete. To talk about politics arouses stale arguments that enflame without enlightening, switching the track of conversation to an empty siding that can go nowhere.

May 13, 2025May 10, 2025

Broken Birds

I see the impact through the window. The spinning blades hit each of them in rapid succession – BAM-BAM – a puff of feathers and a falling body. Two mourning doves, perched on the cowling of the ceiling fan on our porch, are struck as they take flight. I go out to where they’ve landed, hoping they’re only bruised, but neither can fly. One hops away from me. The other hides behind a pot in the corner, immobile.

I go inside feeling as stunned as the birds, not knowing what to do. My thoughts circle: Should I ignore them? Should I let nature take its course? Exposure or a cat might take them. If they die in the yard, how do I dispose of them? Is it legal to put them in the trash? Maybe they will recover and fly away, like the songbird that hit our window last year. She lay motionless for quite a while before righting herself and darting off.

But as the afternoon wears on, the birds remain. I feel burdened that this is now my problem. I’m confounded until I remember our city has a wildlife center that cares for injured animals. I look them up. They close at six o’clock.

I feel a sense of urgency now. These birds are in pain and I can help – why not do so? I go outside with two boxes. No matter how soothingly I talk, the frisky one evades me, hopping through the fence into my neighbor’s yard. I enlist his help and after a comic chase through the flowerbeds, we corral her. I hold her firmly but gently so she won’t struggle. I don’t want to cause further harm. In my hands, she looks large but weighs nothing, a warm bundle of feathers. Her eyes are black dots, looking at me without expression. I wonder if she feels pain as I do, or fear. I place her in the box and tape it shut, elated that I might be able to pull off this rescue.

February 11, 2025February 8, 2025

A Hundred Lifetimes From Now

Up close, daily events seem more important than they are. While they have an impact, the lasting significance of life’s happenings is how they unfold as a process of learning and growth. As we humans experience and respond to life, dormant faculties awaken, making change and creativity possible.

We only tend to see this over the long haul. Here’s a thought experiment: think of the wise being you will be a hundred lifetimes from now as you watch humanity continue to grow over vast periods, a drama both inspiring and painful.

You will see times when we demonstrate the capacity and intelligence to craft societies of reciprocal care that allow our citizens to flourish materially in the world of form and spiritually across our inner dimensions. You will see moments of immense generosity and self-sacrifice. You will also witness appalling examples of our immaturity, when our survival instinct becomes warped, feeding cancers of greed and ambition, times when fear inflames our worst excesses.