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“We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.” – Ornette Coleman







Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Turnaround”



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Carol A. Hand

Have you ever felt a deep sense of kinship or overwhelming revulsion upon meeting someone for the first time? Seen someone’s face change as you gazed at them, like the layers of an onion dissolving to reveal deeper layers of light or darkness? Felt the weight of too many conflicting thoughts and emotions as you looked out at an audience when you lectured or entered a crowd? Been the person in the crowd whom strangers gravitated to in order to seek help or share their stories and troubles? How can you deal with this level of unwanted sensitivity in a household, organization, or world that is too often filled with chaos, unkindness and violence?

Drawing: Carol A. Hand

We are told by religions that compassion is essential for a world at peace, that empathy – “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions:…

“When, alone amid words, we are unable to communicate the slightest vibration to them, when they seem to us as dry, as degraded as ourselves, when the mind’s silence is heavier than that of objects, we descend to the point where the dread of our inhumanity lays hold of us. Adrift, far from the evident, we suffer suddenly that horror of language which hurls us into silence—an instant of vertigo in which poetry alone can console us for the momentary loss of our certainties and our doubts.”

~ Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”
~ Henry James