Hello, terribleness. This is the beginning. It is a short, squat beginning, it will move on thwarted legs, but it's a beginning.

William Least Heat-Moon says, "Beware thoughts that come in the night." I say beware those that come in the morning.

I woke up in the middle of our lives. I want to take a journey not downward but to a worse inferno.

What drew me so to Jewish liturgical music in my dreams was the voice of group in it, a definite plural, a bunch of people all singing together for the comfort that's in it. That old Christian music: too univocal for me. And the meaning of the parable is: how could a man believe in a faith he just then believes to be arbitrary? Makes you a better person? Because you don't eat the peanuts? This is religion?

A priest this weekend said, "And we, as people of faith..." What is 'people of faith'? I thought it was those who would submit to the governance of an order that was not their own. I now understand "faith" as an irrational belief that things might be OK. There's no reason to think so. In Munro's story, it is the doctor, the smartest, the privilegest one, the most reasonable of all, whose "lack of hope" is "honest, and reasonable, and everlasting." Those of us who think about the goodness of the world, and don't take it on faith, find no secure reason for it—for the world to be better than dead, even.

Yet I find there is this drama with myself. I read in a book yesterday where a monk said "I was afraid of what I really wanted." On entering the monastery he said that. So he turned to it, and entered. Work removes me, but contemplation reminds me: there is this self to be wrestled with, this self which wants (it flashes and yearns), and all but an ounce of the time, it is scared of its own damn self.

Thank you, my Unknown, for confronting me with what I want. Amongst friends it is not OK to be questioning. To have asked the question, you cannot say no. Once you have asked you are given to the answer "yes."

This is why I cried.