In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Rebecca Solnit explores empathy as an act of imagination—the capacity to feel beyond the boundaries of one’s own body. She begins with Roshi Joan’s distinction between empathy as “feeling into another” and compassion as  “[empathy] accompanied by the aspiration to take action.” Rebecca considers how our inner capacities to both care and act shape our public lives and notes from surgeon Paul Brand’s work with leprosy patients, “it’s hard to care for what you can’t feel.” This turns into a broader inquiry about what we allow ourselves to feel or what we may avoid feeling. The shared roots of sutra and suture—“to sew together”—anchor her critique of the Ideology of Isolation and frame her call for relational responsibility. Citing Bell Hooks’ insight that “the first violence patriarchy commits is against men,” Solnit argues that disconnection is culturally produced. She closes with a mention of the community safety patrols in North Carolina, where neighbors gather nightly to protect immigrants: a living example of what feeling-for and acting-with can look like.