Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn't care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers.

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn't know we needed and take us places where we didn't know we didn't want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.

I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.

There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.

You can only see one thing clearly, and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that, and cling to it through thick and thin.