Listening to Billie Holiday in the Poustinia

The marguerites open their eyes wide and sway at the side of the path. The scent of grass, sharp and sappy, wanders into the air with the confidence that neither rain nor sun will exert fury on plant life during the growing season. I am in the poustinia, which at its origins means ‘desert’ in Russian, but in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and beyond has grown to refer to a simple dwelling where the poustinik stays alone in the presence of God. This poustinia, a converted garden shed in the grounds of a community in the Fenlands, has become my favourite place to write, think and sleep.

This morning, we celebrated the feast of St Boniface. Children are great false etymologists; the name ‘Boniface’ sounded like ‘bony face’, and I used to attach the same giggling awe to this eighth-century martyr as I did to Great Danes and other gaunt and severe creatures, even though the French and Spanish and Latin of the household made it impossible to ignore that ‘Boniface’ is a name of doing – face, faire, hacer, facere – not a name of becoming bones, but of doing good. Not to say that our bones do not do; walking along the road, an older Sister encouraged me to forge ahead, because she could go only as fast as her bones would carry her. Not for her Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lamentation that ‘Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house dwells’ – not unless we take ‘mean’ as measure and as means. The Spirit’s blade hovers with changeless alacrity to cut ...