Julia Bonadies’s Reviews > Stone Yard Devotional > Status Update

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.

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.

A heavy spring frost this morning. Crossing the grass I made a clean track of footprints, deep green on the white spread of the lawn. It returned me to my childhood, to the sense of secret authority, imprinting one's presence into a place with those clear, sharp prints. I exist. The private, pleasurable sound of the finest layer of ice breaking beneath the weight of each step.