Winter Has Arrived

The Rubble of Being

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Listen Here- Author Read

With chips and shards, a rubble of being, we construct, not You but our hope of you.

Denise Levertov

Photo by J.Millard

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Everything reappears to the tongue of time. Sleight of hand. Sleight of mind. Place is presence. Patience a proclamation. In the taste of a life.

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Being

I shift shape
Whatever this I is.
This body more a membrane
than a barrier.
I enter into all things.
Not from the outside.
From within.
What comes to take its place
inside of me?
It can only give me what I lent to it
for what I lent to it 
is only what I took from it.
It knows itself through me.
I through it.
We meet as an invasion and an invitation.
Who leads and who follows?
We are inhabited of the same possession.
Surrendering to the shadow and light 
of Being.
Convening as a gesture.
The flesh of the flesh.
To touch is to be touched.
To see is to be seen.

© Jamie Millard

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The body is lived.

We Engage. Descending into lightening. Chin tucked. Turn of neck. Head flexed. Twisting sideways into a spiral. We emerge. A cardinal passage.

Is language lived? Words breathe and thoughts burn.
We repeat ourselves and then we repeat our repetitions.
Every spoken sound is a canvas. Every conversation is a painting. A ceremony.
A gesture. A prayer. Speaking into things.

Do I create the words or do the words create me?
What binds the words together? Syntax? Meaning?
Not every sentence is the sum of its words. Nouns. Verbs.
Has the word become flesh?

Does what we see hide behind words?
Revealed by what is left out. What is left in?
We write from inside of language. What holds us together?
Thoughts and feelings.
The flight of ink and blood.
Coin or promise.
Bone and skin.
Rags and remnants.
We can’t sum ourselves up.
Fragments. Pieces. Make us whole.
Bound to Being.
Do we come apart only to come together?

Two eyes one image.
Two halves one self.
An identity grasping for an invisible ghost of emergence.
Does the self invent the self?
If only for the gaze of a moment. We are.
The rubble of being.
Virginia Woolf’s splinters and mosaics.
An endless parade of moments.

We are two minds.
Two lobes.
We converge. We come together. We emerge.
A moment in the flux. Stolen or just seen?

Consciousness observing consciousness.
Can we ever truly understand?
Truly know this body lived. Everything around it. In it. Of it.
The fire is still burning. Through it. Thinning and thickening.
We reflect into the feeling of feelings. Only and Always.
We contemplate existence. Beginnings to Ends.

Bridging the divide. Fact and mystery. Language and the ineffable. Flesh and soul. Experience has no acronym. The questions ask us what this journey has taught us about ourselves.

Attending. Crowns. Grief. Beauty. Pauses. Preparation. Transformation.
Winter has arrived.

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Thank You for Being- Here
May you lean into winter and all that she brings.

Lots of Love,

Jamie