acedia

"They talk about the desert as part of the spiritual journey. Some call it acedia -- a time, maybe a place in a sense, when everything dries up. This place, and this life, lose their meaning. You get hit with anxiety of the most terrifying kind. "You've wasted your life," a voice inside you screams. You've thrown it away. All your sacrifices, everything you've endured has been as so much water poured into a hole in the sand.

When it hit me, I thought I'd lost it. The faith. God. Everything. I stopped believing. I didn't go around broadcasting the matter, but I tried to fight it. To do something about it. Wrong move. I realized, it's the novitiate all over again. I had to accept God being present to me in a different way."

-- Dom Thomas Mary MacDonald, Trappist monk

I am surrounded by blunt archangels. Their wings sweep and probe me, push me off balance.

Standing at the back of a boat, one sees a wild flurry of green water, swirling passage, wide waters of the sound. That's how Microsoft looks to me right now, and my life. A busy wideness.

I feel the buddha and the dharma, ever-close. I feel a great lack of sangha.