We Are the Fruit of Bones

The Scattered Seeds of Home

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Listen Here - Podcast Style

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We are dust and to dust return. In the end we’re neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Pablo Neruda

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Photo © Jamie Millard

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At the top of an ancient hill, behind an old gate worn by time, the bones of my ancestors turn to dirt and yellow flowers. They dance with the roots of the olive trees that they planted beside them thousands of years ago, reaching to taste the wild grapes entwined into the tapestry of land that now rests above them. Messenia. The Peloponnese. Greece. Hellas. This ancient barren mountainous land of heroes kissed on the horizon by a wine dark sea.

We tell family stories, yet those same stories are often telling us. It is often said that if we do not know where we come from, then we don’t know where we are and we don’t know where we are going.

A few old photographs wrapped in generations of stories, sewn together in a book of vague directions handed down to me by my mother, led me into the steep narrow lane labyrinth of the southern Greek village of Thouria.

As opposed to an inspiring new discovery, the dusty sweet intimate mystery of Thouria was accompanied by an intuitive sweaty feeling of remembering something that I had forgotten. A deeper voice was speaking to me from both beneath and beyond my own bones.

We honour by remembering. Bearing witness. One generation plants the seeds, the next tends to the trees, another gets the shade and yet another reaps the harvests. We are the scattered seeds of home.

The circle of life is never truly ashes to ashes or dust to dust.
We will always taste the sweet sweat of home.
We are the fruit of bones.

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In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.

Alex Haley

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The Fruit of Bones

At the lonely top
of a Messenian hill
Beyond a labyrinth
of narrow lanes
and tired old streets
with no names
The bones
of my ancestors
rest in the dark
and wait
For the children
of their children
to find
the arched gate
To walk barefoot
through the ancient olive grove
and wild grapes
Touching the soil
Caressing the roots
Hugging the trees
Tasting the fruit
that their flesh and blood
have slowly come
to Be

© Jamie Millard

Photo © Jamie Millard

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Poetry is an invitation to live into the questions. The questions that have no right to go away. The questions that deal with who we are becoming. Check out Cuoreosity my first book and enjoy the journey with me as I learned how to use poetry as a reflective ritual for growth.

I believe that poetry is meant to be read out loud. Reading, writing and listening to poetry is a meditative act and the words create an intimate encounter with the heartfulness of presence. Poetry is a wonderful addition to a spiritual practice.

Thank you for reading!

Lots of love,

Jamie