Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

Do all religions include some form of this repetitive movement? It feels ancient, superstitious. Walking in circles, bowing and prostrating, kneeling and standing. What is its purpose? Eradication of the ego, in some way? Denying the human craving for newness, or escape, or surprise? Returning and returning and returning, a prescribed revisiting.

‘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.

used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.