Stone Yard Devotional Quotes

“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.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“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.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“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.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Nobody knows the subterranean lives of families.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I’m used to it now, the waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“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.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“But then, I reflect, there’s probably something sick about the way most people live.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“In the hallway to the dining room hangs the famous Julian of Norwich quotation: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Nearby, in a little alcove, hangs something else – a boxed collection of pinned dead butterflies, orange and black, apparently a gift from some old priest of the area, long dead. I pass these two frames every day, but it happens sometimes here that one is suddenly struck anew by familiar things. During Vigils I am filled with mourning for those butterflies, for all the extinctions and threats, flooded once again with the knowledge that nothing outside these abbey walls is well, and no manner of things shall be well. And I know that inside these walls, Helen Parry is the only one who will face that truth. And I don’t know what my duty is to that knowledge, except to hold it.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“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”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“It's been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We all make saints of the dead, I said. It's the only way we can bear it.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“My mother said that anything that had once been alive should go back into the soil. Food scraps went into the compost, of course, including meant and bones, despite the general advice against this. Paper, torn into strips to allow air and microbes to move freely through. She would cut old pure cotton or silk or woollen clothes into small shreds and compost them too. Fish bones and flesh. Linen tea towels. She reluctantly left out larger pieces of wood, but longed for a woodchipper. She left cane furniture to rot and the buried it. She quoted a Buckingham Palace gardener she had once seen on television, who added leather boots to his compost bin. all that was needed was time, and nature. 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.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We all make saints of the dead”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I remembered Helen Parry coming down from the Stone Yard that day at the dam. It was Helen who found the place, who talked to Richard, who broke through the despair of inaction by showing us we could give permission to ourselves.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I asked my mother, near the end, if she was afraid of dying. She looked past me, through the window to the dogwood, and said in a quiet, even voice that she was ‘a bit nervous’. Later I would tell this story with pride in my mother’s stoicism and acceptance, her bravery, her strange faith (she said, another time, that she was looking forward to seeing my father, and her brother, wherever she was going; but she also said she did not believe in heaven or hell or an afterlife of any kind). Then I read in a novel these words: ‘ “Nervous” was Papa’s word for terror.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I asked my mother, near the end, if she was afraid of dying. She looked past me, through the window to the dogwood, and said in a quiet, even voice that she was ‘a bit nervous’. Later I would tell this story with pride in my mother’s stoicism and acceptance, her bravery, her strange faith (she said, another time, that she was looking forward to seeing my father, and her brother, wherever she was going; but she also said she did not believe in heaven or hell or an afterlife of any kind).”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“Palliative care nurses came once or twice a day, subtly blessing the house with their supreme competence and their kindness. I came to think of these women as sainted, though I know they disliked language like that. I think they found the language of religion somehow condescending, or silly, and I never said anything like this aloud. I heard other people call them ‘angels’ and I can see why that grated, too, with its mawkish evocations of mysticism, when their skill was not miraculous but medical, intellectual, hard-earned. And yet…there was also some other, instinctive giftedness in their work.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“As I swept it came to me that my inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me. I used to think that time, adulthood, would clean it away, but no. It recedes sometimes but then it returns and I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child. The fact of grief quietly making itself known, again and again.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“she had to prepare herself for what was to come. Only what was essential could be allowed to reach her now. I listened to her speak and did not know how to express my gratitude that she had let me come to see her that day.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“sweet-smelling ash-dust falling on your closed eyelashes.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“What I could not tolerate was the ‘falling in love with Jesus’ talk that I knew would come next, and it did. I find it nauseating; surely this life should be composed of something more sober than that. Something austere, and momentous, and powerful. Close attention, hard thinking. A wrestling, to subdue…what? Ego. The self. Hatred. Pride. But no, instead we have Sissy, and also Carmel, simpering that they are here because I fell in love with Jesus and want to live with him in heaven.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I never saw it either – not at the funeral, not before nor afterwards, but I knew this was natural for her, a deep need for privacy and stillness in her emotions, and I knew her grief was too great for mere tears.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it a creation of lines, or colours: if it is not religious, it does not exist.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“I shovelled the compost and spread it, shovelled and spread, preparing the soil and waiting for things to make sense. Tried to attend, very softly and quietly, which is the closest I can get to prayer.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

“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.”
― Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional