I don't know. I think it was more of a learned phenomenon for me than something that was a n innate, intuitively felt part of how I moved through life as a child and young adult. The experiences that brought me the tactility and density, the sweetness and often confounding energy, the flavors and voices and textures and music of being out in the world got me to where I could move out of myself emotionally and feel into the pain, joy, and confusion of another person in any sort of meaningful way.  
Now it comes down to allowing myself to be permeable. (Not to anything specific. Just permeable.) This is often exhausting and I need quite a bit of solitude in order to replenish and sustain my capacity for empathy. I think that capacity is pretty strong now, but it can also be fragile. Maintaining a sense of balance and personal strength allows me to feel empathy consistently at this point in my life, but if I am worn down by work or anything else, really, it can become dulled and diminished. So practice and attention to how my world is impacting me, neither of which I am very good at yet, are what keep me in a place where I can consistently feel empathy for others.

Basho

So here it is again, same as last time,
water under the bridge, a day straight
as the crow flies, and light
smoky through the woods.

There is no other color except brown and gray,
and a rattling from the tree
whose leaves do not fall.
                                                     Oh,
so this is what you meant
when you mentioned
a weather into which we'd drift
one afternoon late in November.

--Harry Humes, from August Evening with Trumpet

Coldest days---
dried salmon,
gaunt pilgrim.

--Basho, from Haiku, translated by Lucien Stryk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/20/kids-reenact-the-first-th_n_365432.html

A scrawl of smoke to the west travels outside the forest at night. Sitting next to the fireplace, I listen for small noises. The sounds that I know best are the whisk of a homemade broom across a dusty floor, the whisper of a chilly wind through the tops of tall trees, the susurrous flooding of Southern rivers.
 
*

These are not ordinary playing cards. Soon you will be expected to speak their disappeared language. To parse words from faces and numbers, from three colors, or four. To talk about the spy's incomplete mission, the village of subterranean ninjas, the soldier's tattered coat: a dark and somber shell with its wool lining shrugging loose from buttonholes. The varmint in the garden.

*

The horses' hooves have trampled the high meadow grass. They will be here soon. We plunge toward the future without a clue, dribbling a hapless trail of words behind us, a glossolalia of fear and retreat, as he closes the distance between our slow caravan and his fast stallion. When he arrives, it is a day of silences. The crickets, too, seem puzzled.

*

He has to spend all his time managing this place. Some of his answers have satisfied our need for a perfect story. Still, he mesmerizes us with his telling. It despises the brassy sun and loves dark, damp places, crevices of secret richness and loamy wealth. Me, I'm a moss kind of person, so I listen good.

*

Milkweed grows in places where it is not always wanted. You could call this a home or a shack. The vines are all you  can see from the road. Still, it has some running water, and a place to hide out when funnel clouds tear through the lonesome pastures.

*

I also sought a beloved meeting place in the village. For years he lived alone in sparsely furnished rooms. But now he comes out to be with us whenever the sun shines directly on the longleaf pines. Once, he brought us a fistful of mica and a few slippery pumpkin seeds. This was during the time of the abandoned marigolds. 

 *

Unexpectedly possessed by some urgent instinct, I suddenly feel a new connection with everything alive and breathing. Walking through the sleeping house, I see that ferns grow everywhere there.

*

Some of us like to play a game with walking sticks and circles in the turf. The sky is slowly darkening, and I hear my pounding heart in the blood of my listening ears: tiny books made from old newspapers, powder horns full of the sift of ancient narratives. I try to write them down but cannot.

*

Every year I think it may not happen. While the light is still new in the morning, the ceremony in the old garden begins. It is the keeper of our mysteries. The unexpected colors clash and then blend.

*

I only wish I could stop. It's never enough. Somehow I always leave things out: the ship in the bottle, the branches of winter blooms, the pestle and mortar I found in my great-aunt's attic, still dusty with someone's private work.

*

Behind him was his other world. When would he have had time to build this bridge? When we are trapped in the world of a story, a gathering of imaginary friends reminds us that we should not say a word.

*

Today, he smiled at me for the first time: a scent of citrus, like a freshly sliced lemon.

*

The trapecistas arrive, and then the young detectives, washing away the colors of everything that slowed me down. The power lines above my head spit and sizzle with electricity and solutions, alchemy and healing. Maybe just one more day here. You know the way that light can make you dizzy, its voice a secret you used to know the name of.

*

Our mother was once a dancer, before the time we live in now. She showed us the shadow side of the quiet cove. But the knees of the swampland's cypress trees had their own brilliant ideas.

*

We make our wishes on Mars and Venus, and the next morning, before any other light can greet us, we wake up floating, the sky a skin whose voice we always knew.

--lks November 2009

I ran across this earlier today upon opening Lawrence Weschler's book Everything that Rises: a Book of Convergences.

Tree, always in the middle
of everything that surrounds it [...]

Tree, that (who knows?)
may be thinking there inside

--Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Le meyer'

An old friend mentioned her music to me last night, and I remembered how much I enjoy it. I hope you do too.

.....there are always two paths to take; one back towards the comforts and security of death, the other forward to nowhere.

--Henry Miller

A friend recently gave me a copy of Louise Gluck's book of poetry A Village Life. I have had mixed feelings about her poems in the past but I love these. She creates a simple, luminous world with and in these poems and I like going there.
 

Twilight

All day he works at his cousin's mill,

So when he gets home at twilight, he always sits down at this one window,

Sees one time of day, twilight.

There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.

It's as his cousin says:

Living---living takes you away from sitting.

In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape

Representing the world. The seasons change,

Each visible only a few hours a day.

Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness---

Abstractions from which come intense pleasures,

Like the figs on the table.

At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.

It goes down late in summer----sometimes it's hard to stay awake.

Then everything falls away.

The world for a little longer

Is something to see, then only something to hear,

Crickets, cicadas.

Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.

Then sleep takes this away also.

But it's easier to give things up like this, experimentally,

For a matter of hours.

I open my fingers---

I let everything go.

Visual world, language,

Rustling of leaves in the night,

Smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.

I let it go, then I light the candle.

--Louise Gluck

I don't have time to be bored, but even if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't feel that way. I can't remember the last time I did. My mind doesn't seem to want to let me. Even when I'm standing in line or stuck in traffic, my mind always finds a way to create stories, to remember things, to suppose and conjecture. (This can be problematic at times, actually.) I can get cynical, restless, pensive, eager for change, indignant, pissy, wistful, but not bored. There are too many friends and family members to catch up with and see, too much music, too many books, too many films, too many photographs to take, too many things happening, too much change to help along, too many stories to hear and tell. The issue for me has more to do with making choices about which book? which road to drive down? which film? which music? Life is rich and full, and boredom doesn't suit it.

I think I need this CD. I haven't been buying new music for awhile, but I like the sound of this.