Where the mind is without fear...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

-Tagore

This poem is so beautiful and rings so true that it hurts. "ever-widening thought and action" makes me think of how we all seem to choose what causes to be sensitive to, what is important to us. And then we are all undoing each other's work -- some working for human rights but causing immense suffering by consuming animals, others working for animals rights without a care for the amount of waste they produce, others working for the environment but unaware of how they emotionally abuse people around them. Each person stagnating within his particular ideological construct. For 'ever-widening' love, sensitivity, compassion, awareness to be awakened seems quite different.