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There are times when we are overtaken by a kind of fatigue that scatters everything we cherish, as though it were cutting down at the root the very trunk of our emotions. We feel ourselves swaying inwardly, intoxicated by an unrelenting paralysis, sleepwalking through a temporary death, felled by what the elders call ennui, what the poets name acedia, what psychiatrists term slackness — or, more commonly, indistinctly, sorrow, depression, boredom.
When we are swallowed by this wave — and it is impossible not to recall the one Hokusai painted, devouring the poor fishing boats off Kanagawa — there is very little left to us, almost nothing, as though we lingered in an existence of ashes and silence.
And yet, along the great voyage of days and years, a few scraps of miracle remain. After the fatigue, the torpor, the stillness, there always follows a season of radiant openings of the soul. In it, as a flame rekindles among half-extinguished embers in the hearth, the meaning of existence is lit again — the thread of words, the glint of joy. It is the most wondrous time in our lives: the moment when the Self and Faith are rediscovered.
