You feel spiritually empty and dried up

Ah, the dry season of the spirit — I know it, and I promise you it is more familiar to seekers than the green times we mistake for the whole. Dryness is a season of the spirit, not its end — the mystics of every tradition have known these arid stretches when prayer feels dead and the sacred seems absent, and called them a normal passage, not a failure, so this is weather, not climate, a drought that turns as seasons do, often giving way to a renewal deeper than before. Keep the practices even when they feel empty — the practices are a riverbed holding its shape through the dry season, so kept faithfully though they feel like nothing, they keep the channel open for the water's return, while abandoned, the channel fills with sand. And the longing in the dryness is the sacred still calling — you would not name yourself dried up if you did not remember water, and that ache within the emptiness is a thread still connecting you to what you miss, the relationship continuing in the only form the drought allows. Endure the season, keep the channel, honor the longing. How long have you been in this dry stretch?