For an Open Heart

"Don't apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time.

You don't need to do everything. Do what calls your heart; effective action comes from love. It is unstoppable, and it is enough.

We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings.

Don't ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.

All is registered in the 'boundless heart' of the bodhisattva. Through our deepest and innermost responses to our world - to hunger and torture and the threat of annihilation - we touch that boundless heart.

The wave of the future is on the local level. Don't waste your heart and mind trying to pull down what is already destroying itself.

But come into where you're almost below the radar and reorganize life. We [need] communities where we live and work and fight for the future.

Out of this darkness a new world can arise, not to be constructed by our minds so much as to emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still called to let the future into our imagination.

We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts."

~Joanna Macy