Compassion

Compassion is not pity. It is the recognition of yourself in another’s suffering.

When Michael Jackson released Heal the World in 1991, he did not offer it as a pop song. He offered it as a prayer. Written during the recording of the Dangerous album, it emerged from Jackson’s lifelong preoccupation with the suffering of children, the fracturing of communities, and the radical belief that love expressed widely enough, genuinely enough, could function as medicine for a wounded world. “Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race” was not a slogan. It was a conviction he organized his philanthropic life around, founding the Heal the World Foundation the same year the song was released.

That conviction is the emotional core of this painting.

Compassion asks more of us than sympathy. Sympathy observes pain from a careful distance. Compassion moves toward it, makes contact with it, sits inside the discomfort of another’s experience without flinching, without the urgency to fix or resolve. It requires the willingness to say: I see you. I am not afraid of what you are carrying. Jackson understood this intuitively. His music at its most powerful was always an act of reaching across racial lines, across national borders, across the ordinary barriers human beings erect between themselves and the suffering they would rather not witness.

The symbols pressed into the rock-like formations of this work transcribe fragments of his lyrics as permanent inscription. Words left behind by a man whose relationship to compassion was as complicated as it was genuine, and whose death in June 2009 at 50 cut short a final chapter that might have rewritten how the world understood him. What remains is the music, and within the music, the sincerest expression of what he believed humanity was capable of.

“If you care enough for the living, make a better place.” Compassion is that caring made visible. First turned inward, toward the parts of ourselves we have deemed unworthy, and then extended outward as a natural consequence of that inner reckoning. You cannot truly offer it to another until you have learned to offer it to yourself.

This piece asks: Where are you withholding compassion? from another, or from yourself?