Jamie, your beautiful, soulful words (and voice!) sing with the rhythm of blood and brine, as you flow effortlessly between the personal and the cosmic. Each word, line resonating deeply, inviting us to drink from the mirror of the ocean and immerse ourselves in its infinite, ancestral and mythic stories. Thank you so much for sharing this poetic odyssey that deepens the mysteries and touches the heart so deeply. I love the quotes you share here and made a note in my journal to explore these poets further. ❤️🙏
Thanks Deborah! There’s definitely something in that brine that connects us all! Collective soul. My blood definitely takes me there. Thank you so much for listening and reading. Thanks for your kindness. It’s nice to find a fellow poet who swims into the spaces between the lines. The Greekness tastes so mysterious to me to quote Blaga, I don’t want to unravel it, just deepen it further, to change it into an even greater mystery. I’ll live in to those questions even more, and sing along with those cicadas. Yes, check out those Romanian Poets! So amazing! Bless you! Thanks for Being- Here 🙏❤️
An hour ago, I turned the final page of "Cuoreosity: The HeArt of Being", its wonder still resonating in my soul. And as with all cherished books, I find myself drawn back to its depths now - this time, with the gentle, unhurried rhythm of the heart. A slower pace, to rediscover the hidden beats within your beautiful words. My thoughts, just shared in a review on Amazon UK, are offered as a guide, hoping to light the path of other kindred spirits to discover your luminous soul missive. May it be so. 🙏❤️
Thanks Deborah! You are a kind soul! Queen of Cups. You are lovely and I so appreciate connecting to kindred spirits and word weavers here. I hope to hold your books soon too! Like a first child that first book has sentiment and celebrates opening a door to the inside. Cuoreosity. My writing style has changed a bit since as am living into the questions and having fun playing too in this beautiful collision with Grace. Big hugs! Thank You 🙏 💝
You’re very welcome, Jamie! Each page, poem, line, word radiates L-O-V-E! Exciting times! I forgot to say, my name on amazon is : Deep in the JUNG-le. 🙏 💝
absolutely beautiful. You have captured your beloved Crete so well, the sounds, the smells, the colours, the breeze, the sky meeting the ocean, Aphrodite's island...
Thanks Veronika! Blood and Brine combine into a love song there. Beyond mere senses. A communion of a different kind. A Zorba kind. A deeper mystery calls that in some strange feeling already knows the way. Thank you for leaning in with me. Thanks for Being- Here 🙏❤️
Hi Jamie, the glorious cicadas — perhaps a message from Aphrodite, a soundtrack to the call of an "ancient wisdom" carried through the waters — "blood and brine". Such beauty in how you connect our expansiveness as part of the earth's animacy, encompassing every fragment of our ancestral being and calling — so evocative and very beautiful, the essay and poem. WOW. Thank you 😊 🙏 💜
Thanks Simone! I live a long way from the ocean. So when I’m near, I’m lost sensually beyond the senses of this body. I disappear into another dimension almost. I have no words to describe it. Put me in the Mediterranean and it explodes even deeper. I lose myself. I touch something ineffable that needs no name. Somehow I know every word. Bless you. Thank you for Being- Here! Thanks for your kind words and your support! Bless you some autumn magic 🙏❤️
No doubt the ocean transports you to those dimensions where our soul’s essence dwells, whose language is an embodiment beyond lexicon. Living on this island continent, most of us are connected to salt water, we largely inhabit her coastline. The Mediterranean runs through your veins, water is how our bodies hold memories of our ancestors. Brine and blood connect us all, as your post so eloquently describes. Bless you too, from my Autumn to your Spring. 🙏😊💜
My soul’s essence definitely swells there too! Into a profound presence. Water sees through everything. From your autumn to my spring! Bless you! The blinds are moving! 💝
Water, in all her forms and states is consciousness - our “mirror”. I feel most alive when l am immersed in the ocean … l am a Pisces 😂. Your blinds are moving 💗, John is probably saying hello and thank you for the connection 🍁🙏😊🌱
Wow, Jamie, what a love song fpr the soul you wrote there! I share the passion for the ocean with you, thank you so much for sharing your words with us! I can't decide if I love your poetry, your prose or your voice the most, or the spaces in between! 😊 You are and create beautiful pieces of the heART! 💕
Thanks Sadhbh! Collective Soul! I can tell by your writing, and your pictures that the ocean is inside your blood too. Her brine shines through your words! It must be so amazing to be so close to the ocean every day! Where I live is 1500 km away from the nearest ocean- Atlantic. If I don’t get out there every so often, I start to lose my mind it seems! My bones are calling me to get closer! So is my heArt! Thank you as always for your support! Thanks for listening as well! Thanks for Being- Here! 🙏❤️
Jamie I did not see this coming. Kriti... I cannot go back, it is 50 years since. Unborn poems form and reform in the sea waiting to be summoned by unnamed lips that can form beauty herself naked on waves.
There is yet an austerity to islands, There are many Nikos of thought longstanding on headlands in witness, chapels visible from the sea, waiting weighted with old care for the many children elsewhere.
Ooh Phillip poet of soul! Sometimes those children find their way home. No compass needed. Something in the blood that floats on the brine. Stripped naked by the winds. Kissed by the sea. Fed by the olives and the flowers. Aphrodite knew. Kazantzakis knew. Zorba knew. I know. Every word. Bless you. Thanks for Being - Here. 🙏❤️
Daughter Ruth has a book of walks. However, there is the final part of the old man walk to complete and maybe a deep dive into and amongst the Cuillins.
We are discussing this very islands. But next year. Next trip is to Orkney. Where I’ll be doing a bit of teaching and daughter can bag the peedywee parkrun.
I’ve driven over all the linked islands and ferried across Hoy. There is a bothy near the old man I dream of overnighting in. Fire in hearth, guitar few songs close friends and soothing sea on the stony beach.
Heart-blood connection crosses time and space - that's for sure. Love the sea pic; a doorway of altered perception. Take me there ... oh, you just did. :)
Thanks Josh. Yes, as you know, there’s something about the transformational powers of the sea. Thanks for catching the deliberate use of the pictures to purposely show a portal beyond time and space. Mirror? Enjoy your holiday and say hi to the sea for me. I’m surrounded by great lakes on all sides of me but I am 1500 km from the wild raw ocean. She calls me. Bless you. Thanks for Being- here! 💦🙏❤️
Thanks Jo! No, I am enjoying a snowstorm in march in Canada lol! It was from a recent trip, and some thing with olive oil and seabreeze opened it all up again! The cicadas are deafening on Crete! You can get up early like we both do as they sleep in a little bit but after those first couple hours of dawn it’s a dead poets concert! Thank you so much for all of your support! Blessing you a beautiful autumn, as I still pray for the start of spring. thanks for being - here Jo 🙏❤️
A snowstorm in Canada sounds equally as exciting to me but I can understand that you are no doubt well ready for spring. 😊
Well, despite not being on a warm and languid holiday you certainly brought Crete alive in all the senses. Just wonderful. Thank you.
I love cicadas. Very thoughtful of them to allow the poets and writers to get those words out first before they start their melancholy regretful song. 😊❤️
ggggoooooorrrrrrrrrggggeeeeoooouuussssss words and spaces and silences and whispers! Lovely, truly lovely. I could feel and smell it all. Thank you for sharing! XO
What a jewel! I can see between the words how personal and intimate this beautiful post is—how deeply human, touching different dimensions. It feels very Hermesian—remembering, returning, translating—and also very Venusian, as Aphrodite herself accompanies you on this journey back home, a home that was always within you.
Thank you for mentioning and weaving in the words of two of my favorite national poets. It made me very emotional—not only because they are Romanian, like myself, but because they represent resistance. They embody our resilience through culture, in times when poetry was a way to survive. So, thank you for this!
I adore it, and once again, it has made its way onto the screen of my notebook, handwritten properly to honor them:
"Poetry gives us a sense of being a part of the other. Connected to the whole cosmos that surrounds us. The brine of the world flows through us. We are truly never an island. What is inside me is inside you. The collective soul of poetry embodies the world’s collective soul. Remembering."
Thank you for remembering, for inspiring us all to return and recall that islands are parts of a whole—that our collective soul is what holds us together.
Thanks Katerina! Never an island. Always whole. Collective soul!
Hermesian, venusian, mysterious and revealing. Thank you for your beautiful Poets. Ana Blandiana might just be the most beautiful, I have ever read. The depth of metaphor and the context of the resistance shapes so much of her work before 1989. To then see what comes after it is inspirational. Thanks for sharing just how deeply words can touch a person, and a whole people. Never an island. Maybe in the end poetry is just remembering never to forget. Thank you so much for being here. Bless you Katerina . Olive oil and sea breeze 🙏❤️
Thanks Geraldine! Windows and Reflections are another door to the inside! Thanks for looking deeper! I’m laughing, because on any Greek windowsill, there are usually geraniums and basil! Just the geraniums on this one lol! But those windows are definitely looking back out at us too. Mirrors. Bless you so much and thank you for being here! I love that picture of Aphrodite, you keep posting 🙏❤️
That photo of your Greek window sill sure does evoke memories and a certain fragrance I always had visiting my grandmother who had a similar window sill with a view.
I love this particular painting of Aphrodite, I deeply feel her in my very soul, she is still in my hormones. I feel her sensuality sensibility and sensitivity she is still with me at 72, she is an immaculate sensation and Aphrodite is an instinct and an archetype.
Geraldine your sensibility and sensuality are contagious! You are a one of a kind archetype! Your energy and your passion for life is a widening rippling circle. You make me smile. 🙏❤️
Remember the film, Zorba the Greek, the dancing, the dialogue, the divineness (sacred); the island of Crete. Islands are places that have particularities, which explains why I love the Island of Montreal.
Not a sea, but two flowing rivers. Water surrounds it. Alluring, and both powerful and calming. Why it will always be home, as perhaps Crete is for you, Jamie.
Funny enough, on av du Parc, where I grew up, there lived a fairly large Greek community, many arriving after the 1967 coup. They opened many wonderful restaurants and brought such a lively culture to the area and to Montreal. Greek food is among my favourites.
Oh what a wonderful film! One of my favourite books of all time. I danced on the same beach in Crete. Yes Montreal has a vibrant Greek community still to this day. Thanks Perry as always for your support.
A side question : so many grackles this year! Normal or am I just starting to pay more attention?
Jamie, your beautiful, soulful words (and voice!) sing with the rhythm of blood and brine, as you flow effortlessly between the personal and the cosmic. Each word, line resonating deeply, inviting us to drink from the mirror of the ocean and immerse ourselves in its infinite, ancestral and mythic stories. Thank you so much for sharing this poetic odyssey that deepens the mysteries and touches the heart so deeply. I love the quotes you share here and made a note in my journal to explore these poets further. ❤️🙏
Thanks Deborah! There’s definitely something in that brine that connects us all! Collective soul. My blood definitely takes me there. Thank you so much for listening and reading. Thanks for your kindness. It’s nice to find a fellow poet who swims into the spaces between the lines. The Greekness tastes so mysterious to me to quote Blaga, I don’t want to unravel it, just deepen it further, to change it into an even greater mystery. I’ll live in to those questions even more, and sing along with those cicadas. Yes, check out those Romanian Poets! So amazing! Bless you! Thanks for Being- Here 🙏❤️
An hour ago, I turned the final page of "Cuoreosity: The HeArt of Being", its wonder still resonating in my soul. And as with all cherished books, I find myself drawn back to its depths now - this time, with the gentle, unhurried rhythm of the heart. A slower pace, to rediscover the hidden beats within your beautiful words. My thoughts, just shared in a review on Amazon UK, are offered as a guide, hoping to light the path of other kindred spirits to discover your luminous soul missive. May it be so. 🙏❤️
Thanks Deborah! You are a kind soul! Queen of Cups. You are lovely and I so appreciate connecting to kindred spirits and word weavers here. I hope to hold your books soon too! Like a first child that first book has sentiment and celebrates opening a door to the inside. Cuoreosity. My writing style has changed a bit since as am living into the questions and having fun playing too in this beautiful collision with Grace. Big hugs! Thank You 🙏 💝
You’re very welcome, Jamie! Each page, poem, line, word radiates L-O-V-E! Exciting times! I forgot to say, my name on amazon is : Deep in the JUNG-le. 🙏 💝
Deep in Soul! Thank you Deborah. Blessings 🙏💗
absolutely beautiful. You have captured your beloved Crete so well, the sounds, the smells, the colours, the breeze, the sky meeting the ocean, Aphrodite's island...
and then this ending:
"She does not need to speak.
I know every word."
just stunning 💗🙏 🐚
Thanks Veronika! Blood and Brine combine into a love song there. Beyond mere senses. A communion of a different kind. A Zorba kind. A deeper mystery calls that in some strange feeling already knows the way. Thank you for leaning in with me. Thanks for Being- Here 🙏❤️
Hi Jamie, the glorious cicadas — perhaps a message from Aphrodite, a soundtrack to the call of an "ancient wisdom" carried through the waters — "blood and brine". Such beauty in how you connect our expansiveness as part of the earth's animacy, encompassing every fragment of our ancestral being and calling — so evocative and very beautiful, the essay and poem. WOW. Thank you 😊 🙏 💜
Thanks Simone! I live a long way from the ocean. So when I’m near, I’m lost sensually beyond the senses of this body. I disappear into another dimension almost. I have no words to describe it. Put me in the Mediterranean and it explodes even deeper. I lose myself. I touch something ineffable that needs no name. Somehow I know every word. Bless you. Thank you for Being- Here! Thanks for your kind words and your support! Bless you some autumn magic 🙏❤️
No doubt the ocean transports you to those dimensions where our soul’s essence dwells, whose language is an embodiment beyond lexicon. Living on this island continent, most of us are connected to salt water, we largely inhabit her coastline. The Mediterranean runs through your veins, water is how our bodies hold memories of our ancestors. Brine and blood connect us all, as your post so eloquently describes. Bless you too, from my Autumn to your Spring. 🙏😊💜
My soul’s essence definitely swells there too! Into a profound presence. Water sees through everything. From your autumn to my spring! Bless you! The blinds are moving! 💝
Water, in all her forms and states is consciousness - our “mirror”. I feel most alive when l am immersed in the ocean … l am a Pisces 😂. Your blinds are moving 💗, John is probably saying hello and thank you for the connection 🍁🙏😊🌱
Wow! So much here - a sublime offering. I shall return to this. Thank you
Thanks Caroline! I will dive into your post this morning too! 🙏❤️
Wow, Jamie, what a love song fpr the soul you wrote there! I share the passion for the ocean with you, thank you so much for sharing your words with us! I can't decide if I love your poetry, your prose or your voice the most, or the spaces in between! 😊 You are and create beautiful pieces of the heART! 💕
Thanks Sadhbh! Collective Soul! I can tell by your writing, and your pictures that the ocean is inside your blood too. Her brine shines through your words! It must be so amazing to be so close to the ocean every day! Where I live is 1500 km away from the nearest ocean- Atlantic. If I don’t get out there every so often, I start to lose my mind it seems! My bones are calling me to get closer! So is my heArt! Thank you as always for your support! Thanks for listening as well! Thanks for Being- Here! 🙏❤️
Jamie I did not see this coming. Kriti... I cannot go back, it is 50 years since. Unborn poems form and reform in the sea waiting to be summoned by unnamed lips that can form beauty herself naked on waves.
There is yet an austerity to islands, There are many Nikos of thought longstanding on headlands in witness, chapels visible from the sea, waiting weighted with old care for the many children elsewhere.
Ooh Phillip poet of soul! Sometimes those children find their way home. No compass needed. Something in the blood that floats on the brine. Stripped naked by the winds. Kissed by the sea. Fed by the olives and the flowers. Aphrodite knew. Kazantzakis knew. Zorba knew. I know. Every word. Bless you. Thanks for Being - Here. 🙏❤️
That a lovely way to start my day, Jamie. A love song indeed. My island adventures start tomorrow with 4 days on Skye.
Oooh Charlie! Am jealous! Where will you wander to on Skye? 🙏❤️
Daughter Ruth has a book of walks. However, there is the final part of the old man walk to complete and maybe a deep dive into and amongst the Cuillins.
Nice! Walk well 🙏❤️ I loved the old man! The Cuillins I only just touched. Enjoy! Bless you a song! Safe travels 🙏❤️
We will be staying in the beautiful Cowshed hostel, perched above Uig. It has the most wonderful sunset views out across the bay.
Beautiful! You can see Tarbert on a clear day! Wow! Enjoy! 🙏❤️
You sure can. I’m going to be on the outer isles for around a month of this year. This years new island is Canna.
I love bagging those isles! I still need Muck, Eigg and Rum too! Sounds lovely! 🙏❤️
We are discussing this very islands. But next year. Next trip is to Orkney. Where I’ll be doing a bit of teaching and daughter can bag the peedywee parkrun.
I have only done South Ronaldsay and Mainland but wow wow wow energy up there! 💫🌙🌚
I’ve driven over all the linked islands and ferried across Hoy. There is a bothy near the old man I dream of overnighting in. Fire in hearth, guitar few songs close friends and soothing sea on the stony beach.
Goosebumps!🔥
It’s a song/poem…..
Heart-blood connection crosses time and space - that's for sure. Love the sea pic; a doorway of altered perception. Take me there ... oh, you just did. :)
Thanks Josh. Yes, as you know, there’s something about the transformational powers of the sea. Thanks for catching the deliberate use of the pictures to purposely show a portal beyond time and space. Mirror? Enjoy your holiday and say hi to the sea for me. I’m surrounded by great lakes on all sides of me but I am 1500 km from the wild raw ocean. She calls me. Bless you. Thanks for Being- here! 💦🙏❤️
Yep, thanks. We're both looking forward to a break.
Brine-blood bird brood us.
Poetry as nest, nod, node,
as never islands.
As love! Thank you Marisol 🙏❤️
Jamie, I just fell into the warmth of this post. Are you on holiday! I felt touched by this all. Olive oil, sea breeze and golden sun..... Beautiful.
And I didn't know that about cicadas- love it.
Enjoy your time away. ❤️
Thanks Jo! No, I am enjoying a snowstorm in march in Canada lol! It was from a recent trip, and some thing with olive oil and seabreeze opened it all up again! The cicadas are deafening on Crete! You can get up early like we both do as they sleep in a little bit but after those first couple hours of dawn it’s a dead poets concert! Thank you so much for all of your support! Blessing you a beautiful autumn, as I still pray for the start of spring. thanks for being - here Jo 🙏❤️
A snowstorm in Canada sounds equally as exciting to me but I can understand that you are no doubt well ready for spring. 😊
Well, despite not being on a warm and languid holiday you certainly brought Crete alive in all the senses. Just wonderful. Thank you.
I love cicadas. Very thoughtful of them to allow the poets and writers to get those words out first before they start their melancholy regretful song. 😊❤️
Those souls of poets know not to fuck with dawn Jo! Thanks for leaning in to the sun with me! Yeah, I’m ready for spring lol! Bless you 🙏❤️
😀🙏❤️
ggggoooooorrrrrrrrrggggeeeeoooouuussssss words and spaces and silences and whispers! Lovely, truly lovely. I could feel and smell it all. Thank you for sharing! XO
Thanks Danielle! Appreciate the read and kind comments. All five senses sang in this one. Maybe even a sixth….and seventh lol. Stay well 🙏❤️
Dear Jamie,
What a jewel! I can see between the words how personal and intimate this beautiful post is—how deeply human, touching different dimensions. It feels very Hermesian—remembering, returning, translating—and also very Venusian, as Aphrodite herself accompanies you on this journey back home, a home that was always within you.
Thank you for mentioning and weaving in the words of two of my favorite national poets. It made me very emotional—not only because they are Romanian, like myself, but because they represent resistance. They embody our resilience through culture, in times when poetry was a way to survive. So, thank you for this!
I adore it, and once again, it has made its way onto the screen of my notebook, handwritten properly to honor them:
"Poetry gives us a sense of being a part of the other. Connected to the whole cosmos that surrounds us. The brine of the world flows through us. We are truly never an island. What is inside me is inside you. The collective soul of poetry embodies the world’s collective soul. Remembering."
Thank you for remembering, for inspiring us all to return and recall that islands are parts of a whole—that our collective soul is what holds us together.
Thanks Katerina! Never an island. Always whole. Collective soul!
Hermesian, venusian, mysterious and revealing. Thank you for your beautiful Poets. Ana Blandiana might just be the most beautiful, I have ever read. The depth of metaphor and the context of the resistance shapes so much of her work before 1989. To then see what comes after it is inspirational. Thanks for sharing just how deeply words can touch a person, and a whole people. Never an island. Maybe in the end poetry is just remembering never to forget. Thank you so much for being here. Bless you Katerina . Olive oil and sea breeze 🙏❤️
Greetings Jamie, my spiritual interpretation of Blood and Brine, is looking through windows of words at a total eclipse of prose, poetry and art.
Blood and Brine a time of renewal and change the end of a cycle embracing a new beginning.
I can sense the fun you are feeling with memories and the freedom you are experiencing in your craft. Many happy travels, Geraldine
Thanks Geraldine! Windows and Reflections are another door to the inside! Thanks for looking deeper! I’m laughing, because on any Greek windowsill, there are usually geraniums and basil! Just the geraniums on this one lol! But those windows are definitely looking back out at us too. Mirrors. Bless you so much and thank you for being here! I love that picture of Aphrodite, you keep posting 🙏❤️
That photo of your Greek window sill sure does evoke memories and a certain fragrance I always had visiting my grandmother who had a similar window sill with a view.
So lovely! Remembering …is what those windows sing. 🙏❤️
I love this particular painting of Aphrodite, I deeply feel her in my very soul, she is still in my hormones. I feel her sensuality sensibility and sensitivity she is still with me at 72, she is an immaculate sensation and Aphrodite is an instinct and an archetype.
Raw, wild beauty wrapped in tenderness of soul. She glows! Opens up a sense of presence. An immaculate sensation. 🙏❤️💗
Geraldine your sensibility and sensuality are contagious! You are a one of a kind archetype! Your energy and your passion for life is a widening rippling circle. You make me smile. 🙏❤️
Well Jamie, there’s no time like the present to rock and roll, giggle giggle!
"The voice in my blood grows into the expansion of soul."
what a line, and what a poem, Jamie. there is so much int here that it deserves multiple reads.
Thanks Sam! Collective soul. Thanks for Being - Here 🙏❤️
Remember the film, Zorba the Greek, the dancing, the dialogue, the divineness (sacred); the island of Crete. Islands are places that have particularities, which explains why I love the Island of Montreal.
Not a sea, but two flowing rivers. Water surrounds it. Alluring, and both powerful and calming. Why it will always be home, as perhaps Crete is for you, Jamie.
Funny enough, on av du Parc, where I grew up, there lived a fairly large Greek community, many arriving after the 1967 coup. They opened many wonderful restaurants and brought such a lively culture to the area and to Montreal. Greek food is among my favourites.
Oh what a wonderful film! One of my favourite books of all time. I danced on the same beach in Crete. Yes Montreal has a vibrant Greek community still to this day. Thanks Perry as always for your support.
A side question : so many grackles this year! Normal or am I just starting to pay more attention?
Seems like an increase, but I also am paying more attention.🕊🦜🐦