Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

But still, it has surprised me, over the years, to discover how many people find the idea of habitual kindness to be somehow suspect: a mask or a lie.

Crossing the grass I made a clean track of footprints, deep green on the white spread of the lawn. It returned me to my childhood, to the sense of secret authority, imprinting one’s presence into a place with those clear, sharp prints. I exist.

There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

A ghostly feeling of threat, of portent. I shook it off, ashamed, because what could be more human, more natural or tender, than laying the bones of the dead in their rightful home in the earth?

‘We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.’ Simone Weil.

Anything that had lived could make itself useful, become nourishment in death, my mother said. I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the earth itself.