it's been a bit tiring the past few days.  my wife has been enduring a very painful recovery from a back injury.  i try to help her in various ways.  meanwhile, due to the consistently bad weather, the kids are cooped up inside, and i guess feeling a bit stir crazy.  i've been trying to have them do activities with their cousins; like yesterday, each of the kids decorated a section of a gingerbread house, and then i put it all together...

i suppose i'm on edge for a few reasons.  i guess i've been teetering on the edge of being irritable and just saying f it to a lot of things and people on the one hand, and just maintaining a kind of openness with regards to things.  this anger about circumstances is sort of like a fulcrum point; it pretends movement, but in the end, it is fixed to the ground.  i want to break away from it, and move on to bigger and better things.  a more open sky.

***

i've thought a bit more about the metal element.  its virtue is righteousness.  when a person inauthentically manifests this virtue, then in his mind and heart, he considers profit and loss.  in true righteousness, there is a sense of the will of heaven- and nothing else.  it is in this sense that "righteousness" corresponds to the central irony of the metal element, i.e. that that which is of most value is also the least substantial.  true righteousness does not deal with the realm of the substantial, material, and tangible- i.e. profit and loss.  it simply knows and obeys what is right.

there is a story of an emperor who approached a zen monk.  the emperor said, "i have built many countless stupas and temples, and donated great sums of money to the monasteries.  what merit will i have attained from the buddha?"  to which the monk replied (in essence), "nothing at all."

we don't do things to attain a reward, or to avoid a punishment.  we do things because they are right.  righteousness, in this sense, is empty.  it is empty of a reason.  it is empty of a motive.

***

acknowledgement and respect- these are compensatory factors for a person who does not trust in his own inherent righteousness.  if a person follows the will of heaven, then there is no need for the acknowledgement or respect of others.  a person just does what is right.

the western mind sees a trap in such thinking: i.e., you are becoming a solipsist, and eclipsing the world outside.  that isn't true.  i think that a person who is righteous (not in the pejorative sense) is open to and grounded in reality, but who opts to always do what heaven (i.e. "objectively") mandates is right...