One Small Bag
Revenant
Listen Here- Author Read Commentary, Post and Poem
Imagine life as a journey, and you’re only allowed so many things in your backpack. What are you going to carry with you? Do the things you carry sustain you in some way?
Sheba Karim - American Author
Is the mastered shadow a ruse?
Caught by the cameraed muse of deception.
Trying to convince us that we can fit our life into one small bag.
Maybe so, yet what is that life really like? Hats pulled down, shades on, ear buds pushed in and performance apps strapped to our wrist while we take our short trips packed into one small pseudo sack of integration. What do we see? Watching ourselves in a camera that always eats first. Existing in the world.
Are we entering into it?
Are we pretending to carry less so it is easier to hold? No matter how small the bag becomes, it is full of things we can’t see. Things that take up more room than something with a solid shape. Bag or no bag, we still hold it all. Without knowing it did we become that small bag we carry? All the while our storage closets of hubris are full of the coloured coats and coloured shoes that didn’t make the bag for this weekend’s journey or show up in this week’s choreographed photos.
Do we paint through the eyes of others and believe it is seeing?
Is imitation creation? In this new currency of attention have we lost our intention? What is vision as it rubs up against a life? Has communication become look at me as opposed to see into me? Into me, I see. Intimacy.
Something lurks from a place of obsession that keeps serving a master. It tells us what to do. What to put in the bag. What to leave out. What to hold onto. What to let go of. To climb higher. To run faster. It tells us where to go. Maybe it even tells us who we are. By trying to create a smaller bag maybe we become smaller too?
Do we carry the things in that bag to remember? Or do we carry them to forget?
Revenant The dead return to take the last word. Never left flat on the page. Nor held to paper by a covenant of ink. The specter of a half finished world searches blindly for a truth. Like photos that have the face of pictures that know they are being looked at. A dog with a master, obsession knows where to hide to feed the pain. Are we at home when we are on the run? Small bag on our back. Are we carrying things to remember? Are we carrying them to forget? © Jamie Millard
Thanks for Being - Here. Pondering into the questions of a self. Of the selfless.
The sins and lies. The dreams and the possibilities. The human condition.
Passing through life. One trip. One bag. At a time.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Dear Poet, oh how your rich words feel steeped in the old stories! The ones where the traveller is never just carrying objects, but carrying selves, shadows and all those unclaimed parts of a life. I hear Jung clearly in the way you speak of obsession as a master, and in the revenant who returns for the unfinished truth.
Your "one small bag" calls up so many myths where the hero is told to take almost nothing ... not because they need less, but because the journey itself will strip away what was never theirs to carry. Odysseus with only a skin of wine. Psyche with a single lamp. Orpheus with just his lyre. And (of course!) Persephone, who left with nothing and returned with seeds hidden in her palm.
There's an archetype to travelling light … not as denial, but as a kind of inner trust. A belief that what's essential will meet us on the road. I’ve always had that tendency myself, to pack little, to move with only what breathes. Perhaps it’s my way of refusing the weight of the world’s demands ... or perhaps a quiet faith that my psyche knows what it needs to bring for the journey.
"Are we carrying things to remember?
Are we carrying them to forget?"
Wow! What an ending?! Your reflective questions here feel like an invitation to look into my own bag and ask myself: Is this mine? Or did I pick this up because someone told me to? Is this memory for remembering … or is it for forgetting? Is this weight a burden ... or is this weight a seed?
Thank you so much Jamie, for opening your own small sack of words and reaching for your pen. Some poems ask for a full pack. Others ask for a single line. And in a lovely twist of synchronicity, I began writing a new poem yesterday ... an Orpheus and Eurydice descent my psyche's insisting I carry lightly. We'll see. 🙏💖
Hi Jamie, I love this one. So are you on the road travelling right now? Small bag on your back?
I relate.
To the quote by Sheba Karim that you begin with I answer with a loud YES! When you have to downsize your life, sometimes not by choice, you HAVE to carry what sustains. To stay alive. My bag/ my cabin contains treasured items only - favourite soul renewing books - John O'Donohue, Eckhart, Ram Dass, Mark Nepo. There is the incense, the notebooks, the collected stones and rocks, a bed with soft blankets to rest and restore, a desk to write. A photo of my children. Memories of my cat.
But yes I am still holding a lot, emotionally, the baggage, despite physically not having a home right now. And I am trying to honour and gently rest that grief and let go of some of the burden.
"Has communication become look at me as opposed to see into me? Into me, I see. Intimacy." This is the only communication I value now. See into you and see into me. Intimacy. I love your playing with that word.
I refuse to be told to run faster or climb higher.
Someone joked once with all my running " what are you running from Jo?" Yes perhaps I used to run from but now I run IN, within, right here right now. It's a remembering of what is important. And besides, I call it "movement in nature" as opposed to running for specifically that reason. It's the intention. I turn my ear pods off to listen to the birds. I slow down and pause to breathe in the crisp morning air.
I let go of things to Remember.
Sorry, very long comment Jamie! But this is such a great post and as you probably are aware there are many things here that are front of mind for me right now.
Happy wandering Jamie. Thank you for always pondering the dreams and the possibilities.
Love from NZ. xx💛🙏