Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

‘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.

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.