The rocks know; the moving waters know; the trees of the fields know; as do all the birds and all the land animals. Humans that want to know are the few of us who listen to the sounds of the past to help close the gap of alienation between ourselves and Nature. It is a tall order.
Thank you a million times, Jamie, for your work in closing that gap. It begins the healing, the removing of the dross of industrialization and computerization. It is important work, the work of a poet and seer.
Thanks Perry! Just ask the birds. If we listen close enough everything that has a shadow in nature has something to say. The rock has watched it all. You can’t just clear away soul with the soil. Thanks for being here! Bless you 🙏❤️
Beautiful writing Jamie. If history lessons at school had looked more like this I probably would have liked them better. 😅 I wonder how history would around different if we were telling the stories of what went well as opposed to keeping the stories of injustice and madness alive. What we focus on we get more of, I have witnessed that a thousand times. Sometimes I wonder if we keep the cycle going by how we tell our stories. Thanks for this poetic and philosophical excursion. Places carry energy, I can totally agree. Keep shining!
Thanks Sadhbh! In the end maybe they’re all just stories. Most are actually telling us? To be in a place that one is not from invites voices through. The threshold and veil is thinner on travels away. This one was more of a lament. Thanks for reading and stepping in the fire with me here. Blessings 🙏❤️
Thanks Jo! In the audio big shout out to Alistair MacLeod and his books: No Great Mischief and The Island. Glad it resonated. A wonderful place for the bones to visit on this side of the ground! You’ll feel the song as a slow lilt and you’ll sing along. In Gaelic. Blessings for a wonderful spring in NZ. Thanks for Being- Here! 🙏❤️
Oh, the Highland Clearances... some say t-history repeats itself right now, right here, through fires and storms, leaving destruction and loss in their wake.
But as you say, "the wind always brings back what gets thrown in the sea", including the memory in the bones, hearts, and dreams of the people.
Wonderful poem!
We might not be able to unearth every fact of so-callled history. But those who believe they can erase what happened to the ancestral people, know nothing of the stories carved into the rock, of nightmares that swept the landscape, of messages instilled in every drop of the ocean, shared with fish,birds, and all wildlife through every sip of water.
As I hear the sheep outside, enjoying the fresh green after the first autumn rains, I wonder about their language...
Thanks Veronika. We have to move outside the Anthropocene. Only the Symbiocene can meet us anywhere close. Beyond the words. Underneath the meaning. Inside the cosmic essence of what joins us all. What connects us to everything. That is what the rocks are singing and the sheep are moving to. It’s what guides the birds home. It’s what’s still vibrating in our bones. Meet you there. Thank you so much for leading the way to a deeper conversation. 🙏❤️
Jamie, what a 'landstory.' t took me a while to sit with it and just feel. That’s the
alchemical words of a poet—they don’t ever leave your heart empty. When we find words for what we’re feeling, they become ours, giving us comfort and clarity, rather than overwhelming us.
I felt your words come from a place of love, of a truth that is written in your heart: "Yet the groan of breathing bone tells us we were born here. Removed before we even arrived. Thrown to the sea. Sink or swim."
When your post arrived in my email, I was just listening to a podcast about how the earth, trees, birds, and animals are in a reciprocal relationship with us. It’s not only that we are connected to nature—nature, land responds to us in the same way. We are part of their mythology also.
Our ancestors' and archetypes wisdom are found more in mythology and folklore than in written history. I felt a sort of grief while reading your poem and stopped at this: "The stone bears witness
to what got cleared away
A sacred tongue
A people
disposed in the dispossessed deception of progress".
Whenever we lose ourselves, we can summon them by speaking to the land (especially now when this might sound like woo-woo nonsense), looking at the sky, and asking the birds. Thank you for this reminder of that connection, and for the re-connection, I am grateful for your writing in so many ways!
Thank you so much Katerina. With respect to the land and all that it represents, we don’t have the words to meet us at an understanding. In the end, we are left with some kind of prayer. It is incomplete, but nature never leaves us unanswered. We live in to the questions. We write on. Thank you for all of your support and meeting the words in the spaces that leave us with a prayer.
We leave space for prayers. We write on. We live and do our best not to forget, acknowledging and forgiving, reconnecting and remembering. The here and now will soon be the past, and that is how we influence the world. Thank you, Jamie 🙏❤️!
Good words Jamie. We can all stand with you on Handa. Reverie.
There was a lot of work. I remember a moment I heard the click and clink of spades on an empty moor ... Yesterday I heard a man say; 'Be of Good Cheer'. Words are welcome among the rocks.
My red-headed colleague Muir who became a friend showed me first places, one truly haunted if magical that coud be undone ... others alive with promise. And he also could explain correctly the mundane fulcrum of economy, the unbalanced mechanics of exchange, the fate of a human economy failing despite its bodily strength. By fortune I later met those who remained with the 'strong but delicate' spirit that writers, poets must always incline an ear to.
And in a few words Phillip you write a poem. There is always so much to a “story”. His-story. In the end what does remain? The spirit of the land inclines that ear back. We listen to the land yet in our vulnerability the land listens back. Where we meet at that crossroads is incomplete if we try to use words yet somehow not unanswered in soul. Blessings 🙏❤️
I agree. I was at a public poetry reading for the 80th birthday of McDiarmid/Grieve; poets contributing; Sorley MacLean/Somhairle MacGill-Eain, Iain Crichton-Smith, Robert Garioch and I think Norman MacCaig. I borrow I hope correctly from Grieve 'strong but delicate' and the inclining ear, 'Island Funeral'. I wrote a couple of tribute poems in more recent years.
Ooh! I don’t but love MacLean (in translation)-wish I knew Gaelic. I love MacCaig- hence I used Sitting on a hill at Handa as a MacCaig shout out to his poem “On the Pier at Kinlochverbie” Send me some Gunn and Grieve 🙏❤️
The Gaelic from MacClean was impassioned, but like you... I wish.
I'm so slow. I'm prompted to get the books down. MacDiarmid/Chris Grieve ... I only have the book. I have just looked him up ... that poetry bash must have been 1972 ... oh help! His portrait is in the National Gallery.
Neil Gunn, again the books... stories ... famous for The Silver Darlings ... my favourites Morning Tide and the extraordinary Green Isle of the Great Deep.
Thanks Simone. As we listen to stories I realized maybe its also about letting the stories listen to us? Its always a dance between the two. We are the poem. Blessings 🙏❤️
Ooooooh, yes ... the animate forces at play ... interdimensional energies — a shift from form to the formless ... everywhere, all at once ... reciprocal. Thank you ... blessings to you too 🙏💜
The landscape always remembers...always mourns and grieves for us and tells us stories, if we stop and listen. Such a solemn poem, so heartfelt!!! I loved, too, the paragraph after your poem, like an epilogue to your poem. There was more to say...there is always more to say. More to know. More to feel and more to sing. Can you imagine if your poem were in Gaelic? I don't even know Gaelic, but in a way, that is how I was reading it. It totally fits!! Thanks for sharing. XO
Thanks Danielle. The land knows. We might be listening to it, but it is listening to us. There’s a song that starts singing from us both. A dance. We both lead and we both follow. Thanks for being here. 🙏❤️
The Highland Clearances will be remembered through stories like yours for many more generations. It was the same with the Land Enclosures Act, enacted to drive people off the land into the factories in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, the Potteries, etc to power the Industrial Revolution. The right to self-determination significantly died even more in this era. Thank you for keeping the remembrance alive and kicking.
"Fire and time can never hide the lies" -- great opening line. :)
Thanks Josh. The Scots invented Canada we say. Definitely a resilient lot. Sounds like a lot happened in England at that time too. Thanks for all of your support and for reaching out. It’s fun to weave a little poetry with history. 🙏❤️
Lovely storytelling and scholarship Sir Jamie, a ritual procedure, it’s obvious you’re not limited by your imagination. . . !You are in the storytelling zone dear one, honoring those who have gone before us into the dark and who left us the legacies of their existence and the biography of humanity, as it was, an echo of their voices on the winds. Behold, they are ourselves! Have a sweet soul Sunday, granny G
Thanks Soul Granny G! Appreciate your poetic presence in the spaces. Yes the windsong and wine of those that came before still turn their blood to ink through mine own hand of communion. Blessings to a sweet Sunday and wonderful week. 🙏❤️
The rocks know; the moving waters know; the trees of the fields know; as do all the birds and all the land animals. Humans that want to know are the few of us who listen to the sounds of the past to help close the gap of alienation between ourselves and Nature. It is a tall order.
Thank you a million times, Jamie, for your work in closing that gap. It begins the healing, the removing of the dross of industrialization and computerization. It is important work, the work of a poet and seer.
Thanks Perry! Just ask the birds. If we listen close enough everything that has a shadow in nature has something to say. The rock has watched it all. You can’t just clear away soul with the soil. Thanks for being here! Bless you 🙏❤️
Beautiful writing Jamie. If history lessons at school had looked more like this I probably would have liked them better. 😅 I wonder how history would around different if we were telling the stories of what went well as opposed to keeping the stories of injustice and madness alive. What we focus on we get more of, I have witnessed that a thousand times. Sometimes I wonder if we keep the cycle going by how we tell our stories. Thanks for this poetic and philosophical excursion. Places carry energy, I can totally agree. Keep shining!
Thanks Sadhbh! In the end maybe they’re all just stories. Most are actually telling us? To be in a place that one is not from invites voices through. The threshold and veil is thinner on travels away. This one was more of a lament. Thanks for reading and stepping in the fire with me here. Blessings 🙏❤️
Your uncovering of the past and innate sensing is all coming to light here Jamie.
This is a huge important project and you are perfect for the job.
Beautiful photos too! ❤️
Thanks Jo! In the audio big shout out to Alistair MacLeod and his books: No Great Mischief and The Island. Glad it resonated. A wonderful place for the bones to visit on this side of the ground! You’ll feel the song as a slow lilt and you’ll sing along. In Gaelic. Blessings for a wonderful spring in NZ. Thanks for Being- Here! 🙏❤️
Oh, the Highland Clearances... some say t-history repeats itself right now, right here, through fires and storms, leaving destruction and loss in their wake.
But as you say, "the wind always brings back what gets thrown in the sea", including the memory in the bones, hearts, and dreams of the people.
Wonderful poem!
We might not be able to unearth every fact of so-callled history. But those who believe they can erase what happened to the ancestral people, know nothing of the stories carved into the rock, of nightmares that swept the landscape, of messages instilled in every drop of the ocean, shared with fish,birds, and all wildlife through every sip of water.
As I hear the sheep outside, enjoying the fresh green after the first autumn rains, I wonder about their language...
Thanks Veronika. We have to move outside the Anthropocene. Only the Symbiocene can meet us anywhere close. Beyond the words. Underneath the meaning. Inside the cosmic essence of what joins us all. What connects us to everything. That is what the rocks are singing and the sheep are moving to. It’s what guides the birds home. It’s what’s still vibrating in our bones. Meet you there. Thank you so much for leading the way to a deeper conversation. 🙏❤️
Jamie, what a 'landstory.' t took me a while to sit with it and just feel. That’s the
alchemical words of a poet—they don’t ever leave your heart empty. When we find words for what we’re feeling, they become ours, giving us comfort and clarity, rather than overwhelming us.
I felt your words come from a place of love, of a truth that is written in your heart: "Yet the groan of breathing bone tells us we were born here. Removed before we even arrived. Thrown to the sea. Sink or swim."
When your post arrived in my email, I was just listening to a podcast about how the earth, trees, birds, and animals are in a reciprocal relationship with us. It’s not only that we are connected to nature—nature, land responds to us in the same way. We are part of their mythology also.
Our ancestors' and archetypes wisdom are found more in mythology and folklore than in written history. I felt a sort of grief while reading your poem and stopped at this: "The stone bears witness
to what got cleared away
A sacred tongue
A people
disposed in the dispossessed deception of progress".
Whenever we lose ourselves, we can summon them by speaking to the land (especially now when this might sound like woo-woo nonsense), looking at the sky, and asking the birds. Thank you for this reminder of that connection, and for the re-connection, I am grateful for your writing in so many ways!
'We move on in our own migration. We write on.
We still know the way home. How, you ask?
Just ask the birds.'"
The pictures are beautiful too—complementary!
Thank you so much Katerina. With respect to the land and all that it represents, we don’t have the words to meet us at an understanding. In the end, we are left with some kind of prayer. It is incomplete, but nature never leaves us unanswered. We live in to the questions. We write on. Thank you for all of your support and meeting the words in the spaces that leave us with a prayer.
🙏❤️
We leave space for prayers. We write on. We live and do our best not to forget, acknowledging and forgiving, reconnecting and remembering. The here and now will soon be the past, and that is how we influence the world. Thank you, Jamie 🙏❤️!
Now that’s some good writing!
Thanks Robert that means a lot coming from a guy who actually lives it in heart and soul. Blessings. 🙏❤️
Ooo you posted that at 333
😉
Good words Jamie. We can all stand with you on Handa. Reverie.
There was a lot of work. I remember a moment I heard the click and clink of spades on an empty moor ... Yesterday I heard a man say; 'Be of Good Cheer'. Words are welcome among the rocks.
My red-headed colleague Muir who became a friend showed me first places, one truly haunted if magical that coud be undone ... others alive with promise. And he also could explain correctly the mundane fulcrum of economy, the unbalanced mechanics of exchange, the fate of a human economy failing despite its bodily strength. By fortune I later met those who remained with the 'strong but delicate' spirit that writers, poets must always incline an ear to.
And in a few words Phillip you write a poem. There is always so much to a “story”. His-story. In the end what does remain? The spirit of the land inclines that ear back. We listen to the land yet in our vulnerability the land listens back. Where we meet at that crossroads is incomplete if we try to use words yet somehow not unanswered in soul. Blessings 🙏❤️
Listening back.
I agree. I was at a public poetry reading for the 80th birthday of McDiarmid/Grieve; poets contributing; Sorley MacLean/Somhairle MacGill-Eain, Iain Crichton-Smith, Robert Garioch and I think Norman MacCaig. I borrow I hope correctly from Grieve 'strong but delicate' and the inclining ear, 'Island Funeral'. I wrote a couple of tribute poems in more recent years.
Do you know the writing of Neil Gunn?
Ooh! I don’t but love MacLean (in translation)-wish I knew Gaelic. I love MacCaig- hence I used Sitting on a hill at Handa as a MacCaig shout out to his poem “On the Pier at Kinlochverbie” Send me some Gunn and Grieve 🙏❤️
The Gaelic from MacClean was impassioned, but like you... I wish.
I'm so slow. I'm prompted to get the books down. MacDiarmid/Chris Grieve ... I only have the book. I have just looked him up ... that poetry bash must have been 1972 ... oh help! His portrait is in the National Gallery.
Neil Gunn, again the books... stories ... famous for The Silver Darlings ... my favourites Morning Tide and the extraordinary Green Isle of the Great Deep.
❤️
Hi Jamie, you carry us across time and space with your beautiful poetry and prose. Thank you 💜
Thanks Simone. As we listen to stories I realized maybe its also about letting the stories listen to us? Its always a dance between the two. We are the poem. Blessings 🙏❤️
Ooooooh, yes ... the animate forces at play ... interdimensional energies — a shift from form to the formless ... everywhere, all at once ... reciprocal. Thank you ... blessings to you too 🙏💜
This was so powerful, Jamie, wow. What a lovely and haunting tribute to the scars of a people and time and a place. Thank you so be much.
Thanks Jenn! Appreciate you 🙏❤️
My pleasure! Enjoy your weekend!
The landscape always remembers...always mourns and grieves for us and tells us stories, if we stop and listen. Such a solemn poem, so heartfelt!!! I loved, too, the paragraph after your poem, like an epilogue to your poem. There was more to say...there is always more to say. More to know. More to feel and more to sing. Can you imagine if your poem were in Gaelic? I don't even know Gaelic, but in a way, that is how I was reading it. It totally fits!! Thanks for sharing. XO
Thanks Danielle. The land knows. We might be listening to it, but it is listening to us. There’s a song that starts singing from us both. A dance. We both lead and we both follow. Thanks for being here. 🙏❤️
Yes!!! A dance. I love this image. I have felt that, if not seen it. It is gorgeous! I love reading your work! XO
Wow! Just wow!! 🙏
Thanks Shelly! Appreciate you 🙏❤️
The Highland Clearances will be remembered through stories like yours for many more generations. It was the same with the Land Enclosures Act, enacted to drive people off the land into the factories in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, the Potteries, etc to power the Industrial Revolution. The right to self-determination significantly died even more in this era. Thank you for keeping the remembrance alive and kicking.
"Fire and time can never hide the lies" -- great opening line. :)
Thanks Josh. The Scots invented Canada we say. Definitely a resilient lot. Sounds like a lot happened in England at that time too. Thanks for all of your support and for reaching out. It’s fun to weave a little poetry with history. 🙏❤️
such a beautiful post! also the title speaks to me deeply
Thanks Daniela 🙏❤️
Stellar photography, speaking volumes. The beauty and power of the landscape.
The pics don’t do justice! The energy is enormous. 🙏❤️
Lovely storytelling and scholarship Sir Jamie, a ritual procedure, it’s obvious you’re not limited by your imagination. . . !You are in the storytelling zone dear one, honoring those who have gone before us into the dark and who left us the legacies of their existence and the biography of humanity, as it was, an echo of their voices on the winds. Behold, they are ourselves! Have a sweet soul Sunday, granny G
Thanks Soul Granny G! Appreciate your poetic presence in the spaces. Yes the windsong and wine of those that came before still turn their blood to ink through mine own hand of communion. Blessings to a sweet Sunday and wonderful week. 🙏❤️