Listen Here - Podcast Style
All is a doubling. A belonging. Space and time, vision and object, body and body, water and light. In your absence is your presence.
Anne Michaels
I live into this life. There are no second takes. I look back just to see how far I have come. Somehow I always arrive in the middle. Beginnings and endings. Are both the same thing? Sequels or new stories? I still wear wounds underneath the layered pyjamas of implications. Most are my own, lingering in the clothes of memories stained by portraits in a wrinkled yellowing book of eyes. Matters of time.
Giving language to wounds. Wounds to language. Willing to let myself be guided. Willing to let myself be amazed. Willing to let myself be changed into who I was before regret started to write my story.
Something speaks through me. Asking to be felt. Not seen.
The tip of a taste only heard in the tongue of silence.
Briefly touched in a space between the teeth of bone and the heart of recollection.
A primal perception. Underneath the perfume of logic.
A scent buried deep below the carnal eyes of skin. An unseen urge.
Looking out from the musk of senses. Healing. Speaking in a voice.
That carries something beyond words.
Voice
You were taken from me.
A long time ago. I learned
to hide from you.
When you tried to find me.
I turned away. Running scared.
I did not recognize you.
You were a stranger
yet you were always there.
You were so quiet.
I could not hear you.
Somehow you carried me
away from danger.
When I heard your loud screams,
my screams.
As the chaos became quieter
you called to me. Nurtured me.
Nourished me.
I felt the warm embrace
of myself letting go
to surrender in stillness.
In sweet solitude.
I started to hear you.
In moments.
When my mind was quiet.
When my heart was full.
You greeted me warmly
with deep tenderness.
You came to visit more often.
I learned to listen.
With you. Within you.
Through you.
We became friends
I learned to trust you.
You grew on me.
You grew in me.
I started to love you.
To dance with you.
You brought me alive.
I was seen through you.
I was heard through you.
You taught me I could sing .
My own song.
Loudly. Accepted.
You have set me free.
I cherish you.
My beautiful voice.
Oh my love.
My soul.
© Jamie MillardI first wrote these words that are not just words during the pandemic in 2020. I was off work for the first time in 30 years. Looking back just to see how far I had to come. Still that amazed wide eyed child. Looking in, as a growing, healing man. The same eyes! Looking out in the wrinkled mirror of time. Underneath the chaos something kept getting louder. A belonging? An absence which held a presence. A becoming? A mortal gaze looking out from something eternal. An infinite contemplation looking in from a knowing that I had already encountered . A being? Remembering.
My voice.
A poem is never ending. It still moves. With me. Within me. Through me.
The wind oils the fire. I let myself be guided by it. I let myself be amazed by it.
I let myself be changed by it. A new shape to the original words emerges and I surrender to a feeling. I let go.
Something new surfaces from the light burning through the depths of darkness.
Is it just a sequel? All the phases of the moon? Wings arrive as words.
The book of events, as Nobel prize poet Wislawa Symborska wrote, always opens halfway through. Always interested on what is on the other side of the words. Something that enters into language that was never a part of language. A whole. Always more than the sum of its parts. So much more than skin. A voice.
My voice.
Happy (belated) Beltane! April came in on an ice storm and out on a spiralling new moon tornado. Everything in between felt like a soul fire. The energy has been beyond this year. Burning. Fierce. The maypole has arrived to celebrate. Halfway through the equinox and the soulstice. Summer is whispering hints in the north. Spring is in full blooming flow. The sacred feminine calls. This peak of verdant spring where this man of growing green dances with the maiden goddess of the moon.
A fiery energy of fertility. A sacred convergence.
Thanks for Being - Here!
May the waxing moon cast her shadows upon you as you lean into your own convergence. Flame for Flame. Revealing. Healing.
Belonging. Becoming. Being.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
PS. The original poem Voice is found in my first book of poetry, Cuoreosity: The heArt of Being from 2022. Found here. All proceeds go to support other creatives who are following through on their own creative works of heArt.
"But little by little / as you left their voices behind, / the stars began to burn / through the sheets of clouds / and there was a new voice / which you slowly recognised / as your own / which kept you company ..." (Mary Oliver, The Journey).
Finding one's true voice - ah, the journey of a life-time - beautifully depicted in your poem - and such an archetypal experience, losing our voice as children and then re-finding it after a long and tortuous journey - and life ... "it goes on" as Robert Frost said.
“Love is a language that needs no words.” ~ Jamie Millard, taken from 'Cuoreosity', p.27
Jamie, as I listened to your soulful words pulse with fire and depth, I felt such tenderness in the way you were describing the journey of reclaiming your voice. Of how you listened and surrendered to your own metamorphosis. It speaks to me of something deep and ancient, something woven into the rhythms of nature, time and soul. I call it 'the symphony of the soul of love' - the One song.
I love the way your beautiful voice moves through your poem. How it felt once distant and hidden to you, yet now a trusted companion, a force of liberation. That journey, from quiet restraint to full embrace, is one that resonates deeply. It reminds me of how words shape us, how they hold their own kind of magick, alchemy, how they can help us break the silence and find the song.
Your reflections on the phases of the moon, the burning passion and energy of Beltane, and the sacred convergence of seasons feel like an invocation - one of renewal, fierce growth and stepping fully into being. Thank you so much for sharing this with such openness and reverence. Your voice is a gift, carrying so much light.
And so, I opened your book ‘Cuoreosity: The heart of Being’, which sleeps and dreams on my bedside table, rereading your poem and the note that accompanies it. And as I let the words settle within me, I thought to myself - this is exactly how a ‘voice’ finds its way home, how it rises again, carrying the echoes of everything, everything, everything we’ve ever been.
Wow! Deep bow. ❤️🙏