To find out more about Miriam’s new record and how you can play a part in its production, see https://miriamjones.com/crowdfunding-campaign-unearthing-the-music-in-the-mystical-poets

In the enterprise of making music, there are a variety of entry points depending on the person. For me, the primary pull has always been language, especially what it does in the mouth and on the tongue, ‘performed’ and heard. Inwardly I maintain that I am not really a poet, though my closest loved ones tell me that I am; however I will concede at least that I operate as a poet tends to, favoring the world of thought processes and quiet considerations, chewing hard over words and reluctant to write anything that (in the spirit of Tolkien’s Ents) isn’t worth taking a long time to get on the page (and in turn into the microphone).

In 2024, desiring the solace of someone else’s thoughts and seeking fresh language, I picked up a small book of poetry by Christina Rossetti; reading the texts turned to singing them, and I found that they were rich with a pure kind of feeling. I dug up (figuratively speaking) other poets of the mystical, spiritual and romantic variety, like Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Thomas Traherne; these were poets who loved the natural world as well as the one they could not see because they knew that the two were not entirely separable. Explosive developments in science were expanding rather than undermining their sense of wonder, stimulating rather than silencing the dynamic relationship they each personally navigated with faith-mysteries. The prohibitions erected in more recent times around ideas of transcendence in the face of these other things called facts, had not yet asserted themselves and hardened hearts. Their voices are full of personality, too, and vulnerable, never hiding behind fancy words or obscure poetics.

T.S. Eliot spoke of “Romanticism” as having a quality of “sensuous thinking” or “thinking through the senses” to it. I like this. Letting these poets bear the brunt of the lyrical work, I have been enjoying where their words took me melodically, instrumentally, and in my own spirit. And what do you know? A record has emerged…

TREASURE

Treasure is the title I’ve chosen for this project, and there are a few layers to this naming: the Treasure we have in the Earth in all her particularities, rhythms and splendour; the Treasure of language when handled with care and playfulness, and with reverence for its powers; the Treasure of a cultural heritage shaped profoundly by a story that sets hope and Goodness at the centre of things, and offers redemptive possibilities on the other side of suffering, and in the midst of grief.

Some of the poems I have lifted verbatim and others I have condensed, sometimes taking material from more than one of the author’s poems and mashing them together. I’ve had the audacity at points to contribute some of my own words here and there.

RECORDING

I have begun the recording process in my space at home in Buckinghamshire: Raveloe Studios I call it, after the village in George Eliot’s ‘Silas Marner’. I think in a way, reading that novel, over and over again, was what lead me to being able to sit so long with Rossetti, and then with Bronte. Fiction, I believe, can baptise our imaginations in mysterious ways, and cultivate its own stillness in us.

My aim with this Crowdfunder campaign is to raise funds to bring a few other instrumentalists on board in September, October, November of this year—so far this includes Nashville, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Taylor, and Bristol based cellist Emma Hamilton on cello. I’d like to offer both CD and Vinyl versions of the album, and to otherwise get the record made and put out into the world.

I’d love for you to join me in facilitating this work! Head on over to https://miriamjones.com/crowdfunding-campaign-unearthing-the-music-in-the-mystical-poets and see how you can pre-order the album or become a patron.

Stay tuned here for updates on the recording process and fundraising progress.

Yours in creativity,

Miriam

There aren’t a lot of things that will get this girl out of the house and on the road after 6 o’clock in the evening—this is not a new feature that I’ve acquired with the passing of time, but something well and truly built-in since my youth. However, last night I ventured to the Arboretum in Charing Cross from the village where I live, hopping a train to Marylebone and winding my way south on foot through what has become for me the familiar territory of central London, to be part of the live audience in a conversation between Elizabeth Oldfield—host of The Sacred podcast—and tech blogger Jamie Bartlett, whose new book How to Talk to AI: (and How Not To) has just come out.

I won’t attempt a summary of the discussion, but there are some particular things that remain with me this morning which I wanted to record.

One is that I feel a lingering ache to hear more from and to connect more leisurely with the others attendant in the room, and to understand their situations and concerns. Societally our permission to converse openly and deeply with one another on various topics of great consequence, to question with sober curiosity the wisdom of what has been thrust upon us by “the proverbial powers”, has been acutely curtailed in recent years. Jamie pointed out the increasing creep of anger observable over the past decade or so, entangled with the rise of social media, and this has served as well in undermining fruitful, democratic debate, the space to speak out constructively, which is a thing tantamount to the freedom to think and to exercise conscience. It was good to hear the voices of others in that room last night, and to notice in myself how good it indeed felt, in fact. I need to be with people, to recognise my own being in them, to enjoy communion.

Another is the nature of the audience questions that I remember, 3 of which stood out.

A woman in her mid-20s talked about her Nigerian history, and how her mother had not been ‘educated’ per se, but possessed such knowledge of her local agriculture, of the soil and how to grow food. She was clearly aggrieved by the idea that her own very young children would be more or less cut off from this kind of knowing—the kind of knowing that A.I. cannot begin to touch. Jamie echoed this kind of loss in a way by confessing his own sadness of having seen the East End of London, where he grew up, fade during his adult life, the loss of the local fixtures that framed and gave richness to his young life and which were no longer there to be gifted to his own children, or indeed to offer hospitality to the outsider; in this, he recognised the failure of a generation, and the denigration of something that for him has a sense of sacredness and transcendence.

Wendell Berry, who died on August 31st, had much to say and to demonstrate with the life he lived on this subject. The particular, the local, our sympathies and affections, have always been the underpinning of our ability to love well and to care for what is entrusted to us. A.I., life online, seems to me to be at heart—the heart it doesn’t have—to be the enemy of these things.

A painter spoke of his medium and of its counterpoint to A.I. Like him, I had to agree that regardless of the so called “creative” potential or output of an A.I. system, it has nothing in common with the actual human practice of art making, and interests me not at all.

Another artist, a dancer, offered the final thoughts for the evening, mentioning process vs. output, how the former was absolutely essential to his art form. Again, any practicing artist will concur; friction, frustration and even suffering are partners in process.

I would say too that process is profoundly connected to making memory, memories being formative for meaning in our lives. This is true when we read and work things through in our heads rather than, as Elizabeth drew out, reaching dangerously for the mythical genie represented in A.I., but exponentially so when our bodies are involved. Incarnation, embodiment—we trade these in at our great peril.

My gratitude to Elizabeth Oldfield for her masterful hosting of this gathering, her prodding and compassionate questions for Jamie which drew him out personally on some wonderful levels, and which set such a tone of warmth and delight.

The Sacred

Powerful forces are driving us apart. The Sacred is an invitation into deep listening across divides - interviews with guests from wildly different perspectives which centre curiosity over contempt in an age of polarisation.

When he said it aloud at the table last night, I already knew

but then I cried.

No small matter is here in this reminder of time, that Wendell—our Wendell Berry—has died.

Jez and I married beneath Fisher Peak in a sweaty August, underneath the eternal, comforting gaze of the Steeples range in the East Kootenay of British Columbia in 2007; in September we were nesting ourselves in number 16 Heather Place, a red-bricked, corner-wedged terrace in the impossibly ancient and leafy city of Oxford, Oxfordshire, and by January of the new year we had brought an 8 week old Irish Terrier/English Pointer cross into our fresh life and christened him ‘Wendell’.

Newly-orienting as we were at this, the beginning of our marriage, neither of us with settled careers and only a shred of shared history (which crucially included Regent College in Vancouver and, ergo, a warm familiarity with Wendell Berry), we both had a longing to root ourselves as best we could in the area and community in which we found ourselves, despite all our uncertainties, and Wendell was a sort of marker—and in true fact, a practical outworking—of that goodly desire. We met so many of our neighbours as we wore the paths down between us and the dreaming Spires, by way of Wendell’s friendliness, and came to know the place with him trotting at our side. He died at age 15, having also acquainted us with the ecological wonders of Victoria, BC in his final years.

We now own an Irish Terrier called Rosa who is expecting puppies. Last week we had a video call with prospective owners, a couple in Devon, one of whom is a tree feller, the other a church minister. When we mentioned that our first dog had been called Wendell, they piped up “Wendell Berry!” Our mouths fell open. We’d had no connection to these dear folks before, and they’d found us only by word of mouth as they enquired among the small world that is Irish Terrier breeders. I admit that there was an immediate instinct to move to Devon so we could just hang out with these people!

For those of you who have known of Mr Berry, there is nothing for me to say except “me too”. With you, I share in this sense of mourning for his departure from us.

If you haven’t discovered him—oh!—you really must, like so much treasure in a field.

I’m working on a new record using poetry from writers who, like Wendell Berry, identified deeply with the natural world and who saw and celebrated both its infinite and pleasurable immanence, and its mystical, metaphysical, and prophetic brilliance too.

I look forward to sharing it with you soon, and meanwhile, the Maker be blessed, Mr Berry—we are grateful for your life.

Spring greetings from Raveloe Studios. I’m not gifted in the art of flowers, but whether by a previous tenant’s intentions or the soil’s own precocious designs, I have tulips in the beds—yellow out front, red in back—and the monumental birch tree that crowns the garden is filling out in brightening perfection.

With the weather warming, I find I can make myself comfortable again in my music-making space which I am fortunate to have, its insulating properties not withstanding.

A quote from Austrian poet-philosopher Rainer Rilke:

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!

This is both evidently true and famously forgettable. Oh the despair when nothing does come, nothing is made—the existential agitation—and time seems only to pass and pass and rush on and leave one behind, empty.

But the sap does rise.

I’m offering this track here now rather than storing it away for a grander moment or larger context because, well - one runs out of patience, really, or with taking the long view or whatever, and I’d like to share it in its freshness. I made it recently, the day before the birthday of somebody who I am deeply tied to; wrote it for them, meditating on their particularities of person and circumstance. I believe that is why it assembled itself so readily, whereas most everything else I’ve attempted to write lately, promising yet grounded still in abstraction, refuses to find its way.

I’ll leave it here for now and let you listen. I do feel that in general, after a wintry season of infernal/eternal patience, the sap is on the up. Indeed I am working on a new record which I’m excited to tell you more about and hopefully interest you with in coming weeks.

With thanks to Fleming Rutledge.

Listen to Fanny Lou Hamer’s ‘Run Mourner Run’

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shame is a shadow and a blight

the devil uprooting your beautiful life

we eat with the angels who return to pick a fight

reach for the morning every night

the weight of a millstone to the mud for the bullies of faith and simple trust

waiting on God is not like waiting for a bus

reach like the children that you love

a child who plays in the kingdom - a child who plays for the kingdom

come find your place in the kingdom

savor the fire in your blood

the pain when you cannot block it out or shut it up

looking for love is every reason, it’s enough

to reach for the morning like it’s all you want

desire your way to the kingdom

desire a place in the kingdom

don’t hide your face from the kingdom

where were you when I was up my tree carving out a sung identity

where were you when I was blossoming filling up with shame and subtlety

‘cause I needed you to call out come down from there

I’ve been looking everywhere - your song circlin’ higher and gone

where were you when I was up my tree drowning out the devils I’d heard speak invisible, braced inside the bark

‘cause I needed you to call out come down from there

I’ve been looking everywhere - your song circlin’ higher and gone

come down I’ve been watching you all along…

bird of this paradise crying to me precious and prized for your golds and your greens

I can see everything from the top of this tree no sooner you’re seen then you fly and I’m falling…