Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Annotations from Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Lauds, like Vespers, goes for half an hour. After this comes the Eucharist (which might also be called Terce?) at nine o’clock. During Lauds I found I was thinking, But how do they get anything done? All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.

In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what’s happening but I’m drenched in a weird tranquillity so deep it puts a stop to thought

perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.

When I first saw all that packaging I couldn’t stop my tears coming, which was ridiculous. But something about the nasty little packets overcame me; it was to do with splitting everything into awful, unnatural fragments. The loneliness and waste of it. And a polluted feeling: even here, the inescapable imperative to generate garbage

I struggle to see the relevance of any of it to these women and their lives. What is the meaning of this ancient Hebrew bombast about enemies and borders and persecution? What’s the point of their singing about it day after day after day

the process is strangely beautiful. Sister Bonaventure says getting caught on a word is the point, and that if you remain troubled or confused by it, you just ‘hand it over to God’. This is so antithetical to everything I have believed (knowledge is power, question everything, take responsibility) that it feels almost wicked. The astonishing – suspect – simplicity of just … handing it over

He quoted Kipling: ‘When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.’

at every step of my every attempt I have only worsened the destruction. Every email, meeting, press release, conference, protest. Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat, causing ruptures of some other kind. Whereas staying still, suspended in time like these women, does the opposite. They are doing no harm.

endlessness of the night sky here pours a wild, brilliant vertigo into me

Girls and boys, I can give you one piece of advice in this life: don’t worry about anything; pray about everything.’ I thought that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.

I think she is mourning not only Sister Jenny but something in herself. Some secret, wrestling work is taking place, and I feel pity for her lonely labour.

read somewhere that Catholics think despair is the unforgivable sin. I think they are right; it’s malign, it bleeds and spreads. Once gone, I don’t know that real hope or faith – are they the same? – can ever return.

What I don’t understand is how eating all these things – electrical cables, wax, concrete footings, according to Richard Gittens – doesn’t kill them. They survive, driven on by this relentless, ferocious appetite.

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

Watching Helen Parry, the term apex predator came to me and then I was ashamed. Once supper was done and I was safely back in my room for Compline, I felt sorry for her. She must be lonely, to seek out our company. I did feel that sympathy for her. But that doesn’t mean I want to see her at our table again.

IF YOU DON’T live the life you are born for, it makes you ill. That’s what Helen Parry told us this morning, dispensing wisdom.

Helen’s Buddhist friends in Thailand say it is a matter of your dharma, she said. You must live according to your own dharma, even if you could be very successful at living someone else’s. If you don’t live your rightful dharma, then you will cause grave spiritual injury to yourself

I remembered an artist I knew in my twenties. He said an unfinished painting was a form of malignance. He said an artist must complete their work, good or bad, lest it make them sick.

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

A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time. Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting. Something is getting ready to resolve itself

The fact was that Annabel was so disgusted by greed, by the ruination of the natural world because of it, that, like ascetics before her, the only action she could take was to remove herself, bit by bit, from the obscenity of this excess. ‘Her suffering was an existential and a moral problem,’ he said. ‘Not a medical one.’

It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.