Izzy loves herding sheep, although he’s not all that great at it. He does move them from place to place, and has a good time, but he will happily abandon the whole enterprise to visit a person.

June 21, 2009 – I wonder sometimes about what the center of me is, who I really am when I cut away all of the defenses, anxieties, confusions and extraneous information that rains down on us all day long. There is hardly a minute in the day when I am not getting e-mail, s-mail, cell calls, phone calls, and I now almost obsessively avoid most of what some people call news.
  And I don’t even Twitter, or seek to meet everybody I ever knew on Facebook. The Information Revolution is looking more like an epidemic, and I am a big fan of the Net and many new technologies. Information is a different matter. We are drowning in it.
  This is one reason I admire Thomas Merton so much. He actually had the courage and will to be by himself and figure out what his life was really about. I haven’t gotten to the center of me yet, there are too many layers of crud still to wade through. I know who I want to be: loving, creative, encouraging, and able to find some peace.