As the world knows, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, was detained this past week in Tehran, Iran by the “morality police” for allegedly wearing her hijab too loosely in violation of strictures demanding women in public wear the Islamic headscarves. She died three days later in police custody.

Women in Iran, exhibiting great courage and risking their lives, have taken to the streets to lead protests. Let us dare to allow their courage to awaken us from our chosen ignorance, complacency, and callousness by enacting courage and solidarity in the sphere of our influence.

Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour was arrested this week after releasing this song based on tweets shared by Iranians expressing sentiments of why people are protesting, according to NGO Iran Human Rights.

I link compassion immediately with intimacy. Compassion is the ability to vitally imagine what it is like to be an other, the force that makes a bridge from the island of one individuality to the island of the other. It is an ability to step outside your own perspective, limitations and ego, and become attentive in a vulnerable, encouraging, critical, and creative way with the hidden world of another person.

Compassion is an ability to feel pity for another. One of the greatest problems in post-modern culture is the problem of otherness, because many of the forces, like electronic media, commerce, economics, and the ideology of rush and speed that we adhere to leave us few possibilities to really engage the difference that we are and that each other is.

Compassion is the ability to enter into a world that may be totally different from you, in an imaginative way, naturally, and feel what the others feel. It is related directly to justice. A lot of evil happens because of ignorance and of numbness, and compassion is one of the forces that invites and permits us to step outside our own complacency and see what life beyond our own skin is like.

~ from an interview with John O’Donohue

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