I mean, I could try and sleep earlier, but I had enough trouble sleeping at midnight last night. NyQuil is about the only thing I know that will actually get me to sleep, but I didn't get any at the store today. I seem to have a bit of a cold to go with my astonishingly low energy of the past few weeks/months; clearly something is bugging me, so it's a good thing I'm headed up to the nice chilly, damp woods of Mendocino County for the weekend. Hopefully it will come to me.

    For the Abbot must have the utmost solicitude
    and exercise all prudence and diligence
    lest he lose any of the sheep entrusted to him.
    Let him know
    that what he has undertaken is the care of weak souls
    and not a tyranny over strong ones.
    

I wonder sometimes about kindness and compassion, how it comes so naturally to some and not so much to others. Is it something I picked up from my parents? I remember in first grade or so, my friend Corey was sick and we were eating carrots in class and I brought him some. Why? Looking at the current national climate--which, however you want to describe it, is absolutely not about helping people in need of help--why don't people care? Maybe they care on a personal level, when there's a clear human face on it, like a family at their church whose house burns down or something. Is it the anonymous feeling of wider-scale social planning that brings out the callousness in people? It's not the people down the street who need help, it's "welfare queens" and AIDS patients just paying the price for their behavior, although for some reason the behavior in question is always homosexual. Which is neither the largest nor the fastest-growing HIV-positive demographic, by the way, and hasn't been for some time.

I don't know. How much of the world can we save? I only occasionally give money to homeless people, but I help my friends and people who fall down in the street.

From a neat little book:

The title of this book is a well-known phrase from the Lotus Sutra attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha. Suzuki referred to it on a number of occasions, usually translated as "to light up one corner," but in one lecture he said:

We say, to shine one corner of the world--just one corner. If you shine one corner, than people around you will feel better. You will always feel as if you are carrying an umbrella to protect people from heat or rain.

Shine one corner. I like that. That, I can handle.