Monday, May 16, 2011

International Day of Compassion and Finding My Passion Again

Bloggers Unite International Day of Compassion Yesterday was International Day of Compassion, created as a blogging event by BlogCatalog and organized by its blogging activism website, Bloggers Unite. The day was created in honor of Dr. Patch Adams, a man who through great struggle in his life and after three hospitalizations in one year due to how suicidal he was after being relentlessly bullied in school, declared to himself that “you don’t kill yourself; you make revolution.” That is exactly what he has done throughout his life.

In 1971, Dr. Patch Adams founded the Gesundheit! Institute where each year, he organizes a group of volunteers from around the world to travel to various countries dressed as clowns in order to bring humor to people, patients and orphans of those countries. Everything Dr. Patch Adams does in his life is because of the compassion he has in his heart. I never saw the movie “Patch Adams” starring Robin Williams. Everything I know about Dr. Patch Adams is because International Day of Compassion was created in his honor and naturally, I did a bit of research on him. I can now say that I am truly and completely blown away by this man, especially, I must admit, because he is completely against insurance policies being used to dictate who is worthy of receiving the highest quality of medical care and in essence, who is worthy of living a happy, healthy life and who must suffer because of their lack of finances.

compassion

I took part in International Day of Compassion and wrote a post for my other blog, Woman Tribune, also known as my day job. While writing this post, I noticed that I was writing from a place I haven’t really touched on in months–the place within myself that oozes passion and heart and everything that has always bubbled within me and kept me blogging here on Menstrual Poetry for years.

Woman Tribune is my livelihood; it is the reason why I have a roof over my head and food in my refrigerator, but the reason why it pays is because it is all facts, fun and frivolous. It has a completely different tone than anything I have ever written here. At times, well, most of the time really, it lacks heart. When Woman Tribune took off and started receiving more attention and thus my bank account started seeing more action, Menstrual Poetry took the backseat in my daily life in a pretty extreme way. As a result of that, it has been over a year since I have blogged here more than two or three times a month.

It has been so long since I have written with the amount of heart that I wrote with last night and once I felt that vulnerable, excited and sort of anxious feeling in my gut–the same feeling I have had while writing every post on this blog–I knew that my passion had finally returned. And it is amazing.

And as for that post for International Day of Compassion…

There is so much in our world that needs to changed. It is possible and do not ever, not for a second, let anyone tell you that the world you envision living in isn’t possible or that you don’t have the power within yourself to initiate or contribute to lasting change in the world. Take the lead of Dr. Patch Adams and other revolutionaries throughout our history and every time you get knocked down, stand up again and declare your truth louder each time.

Compassion is what contributes to the greatness of humanity; if more people were to look inside themselves and exhibit compassion in everything they do, we would see so much less suffering in the world. We would see the world in the way we have always envisioned it to be–with less struggling, less hunger, less homelessness, less ignorance, less sickness, less silencing, and with more love, more understanding and more peace.

Continue reading at Woman Tribune »

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