Sound familiar?
Such enjoyment would need a good foundation, and I hoped to build it on the significant transformations I had undergone on my life’s journey.
What does it mean to have learned how to love, rejecting the fleeting pleasures of infatuation for the deeper satisfactions of commitment?
Read that line again. How often do we ask THAT question nowadays, eh?
Or to have apprenticed myself to the discipline of writing, so that I now crave the desert journey of revision as much as the initial burst of creativity and flow of words?
Or to have undergone a religious conversion, replete with fervor and gladness in this early stages, and now marked by aridity and pain?
If I find myself starved for the merest hint of spiritual ardor, I know I have arrived in a place where many others have been.
The monks and mystics of my faith all teach that persevering in a spiritual discipline, especially when it seems futile, is the key to growth.
-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.261