Soul Bites

December: Another Language

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Listen Here- Author Read

But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again.

Giorgos Seferis

Soul Bites: Photo © J.Millard

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The shape of soul. A glimpse. Not to understand. The soul imagines itself through me. Beyond the sentry of skin. Beyond the grip of words.
Another language.

Soul Bites.

I breathe in its smoke. Attending. I feel its knots and wrinkles. I know the scent of its light. I taste its shadows. I touch its poems. What once was imagination now arrives as a more solid thing. It fills my lungs. It shakes within my essence.
It scars the sacred into the flesh of my expression. It touches me.

Can I ever know what my soul has seen? What does a soul see through my eyes? Through my heart? What does it remember? What do I forget?

Blink and we miss it. A bridge. A threshold. A moment.

Do we strive to become who we already are?
Does who we already are strive to become us?

A coffee grinder serves the dust of its bitter serenity. Poured into cups
both cracked now. Chipped. Edged. The rim no longer contained. Broken. Free.

Something comes for us. The mystery sings us as a song. In absence, presence has a grip somewhere between imagination and a feeling.
Somewhere between what’s already happened and what is yet to come.

The Cézanne beyond the aesthetics of the visible. We don’t put ourselves in the picture, the picture puts itself into us. Ways of seeing. Always being.
Always becoming. Consciousness creates consciousness.

The light looking in. The light looking out. Holding hands with the shadows.
In full communication with each other. No longer a contrast, the darkness itself
a colour, woven into the fabric palette of the cosmos. Awareness.

Apples become bodies laid down on the bedspread of a table.
Flesh and memory. Matter and spirit.
My bones describe it to me, yet my blood can’t find the words to say.

Maybe art is a bridge where our soul and the universe meet?
Seen and unseen. An inscape.

Obviously care of the soul requires a different language from that of therapy and academic psychology. Like alchemy, it is an art and therefore can only be expressed in poetic images.

Thomas Moore

Another language.
We reach for something beyond us.
We return to be cracked open by what and who we have always been.

Soul Bites.

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Soul Bites

My eyes didn’t know where to look.

A book      fell off the shelf. 
Can we ever remain just one story? 
Covers unfolded. Pages swung ajar. 
Language cloaked and daggered 
in a remembrance 
climbing the kettlebells of time.

Do we make the mountains more
than what they really are? 
The mountains.
Do we think we know more 
about the universe than we actually do?
We return again and again 
in the same way.
We burn
wood. We eat food. We wash dishes.
Can we ever understand the bite of soul 
from the stance of our skin?
A dance      with a rippled apple 
of resonance.
Drawing itself out on a table 
bumping into the walls 
of flesh      and a broken whisper. 
Held up by an empty chair 
stained of memories. 
Every ending is a beginning.

Is there a waste to the taste of moments?
A wine. What gets in the way of seeing?
Swallowed in an assault 
on the great nothing. 
The way through it
always finds us trying to clamber, 
beyond it.
December is a cold moon. 
The sun looks away. 
The dark tells secrets. 
Her ghost 
edged in lace and open buttons.

© Jamie Millard

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December: Another Language. Photo by J.Millard

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Thanks for Being - Here.
December is definitely another language here in the Canadian North.
Soul bites into the bone and blood of darkness.
Another spiral. Another dimension. Another way of seeing.
Cracking open. Broken. Free.
Another language.
Soul Bites.

Lots of Love,

Jamie

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