It has been so long since I blogged that I almost could not remember my password. I would have said it was ingrained on my memory but as it took a good bit of thought to remember, obviously not.
I have always been a prolific writer - mostly of journals and diaries and dreams and fancies and prayers, even the occasional blog post for fun. Yet for months words have been dry and empty. Sawdust in my mind stirring and settling in featureless patterns on the workshop floor and I have written nothing. I have prayed nothing. Prayer written or otherwise has been dark and deeply empty. Not in a good way. I have been shut into the echoing limited frame that has become my mind and body and spirit. It has been wearily bleak to find myself without the resource of prayer to carry me through the rough and the smooth. All my life, in the face of terrible wounding prayer has been my way out, my door to hope and joy and love and warmth and insight. Now there is nothing, and I grope about, lost in a blind silence. Deaf and blind and dumb in a world that I know to be so much more than the one my senses presently reveal to me.
Repeatedly I recall my retreat in early August and wonder what happened there that precipitated this blankness, this emptiness. This wavering, wandering spirit with in me that skitters like light reflected off wave ruffled water in the early morning light. The predominant sense was one of exhaustion, as I indeed was when I arrived at the Monastery. Yet in the days and weeks and months that have followed I have found within myself nothing but an unwillingness to pray.
And I today I find the courage to acknowledge that and to ask where did that unwillingness come from?
Perhaps the beginning is to simply surrender to what is and let go of what I think should be.
