Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

When I think about the phases of my life, it is as a series of rooms behind me, each with a door to a previous room left open, behind

which is another room, and another and another. The rooms are not quite empty, not exactly dark, but they are shadowy, with indistinct shapes, and I don’t like to think about them much.

But then, I reflect, there’s probably something sick about the way most people live.

‘And yet. Those are my two favourite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak. The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass.’ Elie Wiesel.

Self-pity is the characteristic I have always most despised in others. Simone tells me that’s because I have so much myself. We all hate the mirror, she says.

We don’t want to think of our bodies gradually breaking down, our tissue leaking softly into earth. We want death done with, vanished like smoke into air.

I 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.