Broken Cistern #3,945 (But whose counting? Well...God)

This day seems empty. My words die the moment they leave my lips. My motions are a mime's pretense. Even a simple task--filling a glass from the faucet--seems empty and strange. The more complex tasks like reading or playing the guitar are almost impossible. Automation permits me to read a few pages or play a few bars, but I soon see how empty it is and must stop.

***

Well, the day is over, more or less. I needed to do something, but all action seemed pointless. I walked around the house, hoping that something might catch my eye. Then I walked to the back yard and laid in the grass. It was hot; the sun hurt my eyes. I checked my email, ate something, tried to read again, and so on. The emptiness never left.

Somehow (perhaps this was the first grace) I managed to get pen and journal together, walked again to the back yard (this time in the shade of our plum tree), and began to write. Of course my writing started badly. I began by sketching some nauseating thing about how all the books I've read run together into an unintelligible chatter. This sort of rumination always comforts me at first. But it leads to nothing. And today, for the first time, I understood that. No mound of verbiage piled atop my pain will ever free me therefrom. I have dug a broken cistern.

I attribute to mercy my spirit's rejection of the void. I cannot be content (for long) with my cisterns. The pain of emptiness drives me away, drives me to God.