Poetry by Timothy James

i learned to love people before i could read a balance sheet. fourteen, behind a butcher's counter in the old guernsey market, taught by men who called everyone sir and madam and meant it; taught most of all by bob elliston, who loved everyone, and was loved back. i thought i'd left that boy behind. it turned out he was the whole point.

by seventeen i was in a boardroom. for twenty years after that i built and fixed things in finance, ready always, bag packed, the answer always yes. i mistook the holding-it-together for strength. then it broke; the kind of breaking that doesn't damage a life so much as rearrange what you thought one was for.

what put me back together wasn't a fix. it was being met, and held, in the place i'd kept hidden from everyone, including myself. and the strangest thing happened on the way back; the boy from the market was still there. the listening, the serving, the calling everyone sir; it had never been the opposite of the work. it had been waiting underneath it the whole time.

so i went looking for how to give that away. i sold my house to sit with one question; how do we prevent one more life being taken from suicide. and i've never stopped sitting with it. it became the revelations of love; voices from six continents, poets beside neuroscientists, all asking what love really is. but the question is older than that, and it runs underneath everything still; every conversation, every poem, every person i hold. none of it was the plan. all of it is the path. some of my work has found its way to ITV and the BBC along the road; never the goal, just part of it.

i hold people, and i hold the ones who hold others. i'm a poet, a mentor, an embodiment coach, and still a technical accountant somewhere underneath it all; i don't hide that man anymore, i bring him. and the search for love, the real one, the one underneath the question; it led me to Jesus. not to doctrine, but to the Man who showed perfect love. i kept asking who teaches it better, and i never found anyone. so now i try to meet people the way He did; in love, before anything is asked.

i didn't come from nowhere. two grandfathers arrived after the war and made guernsey home; two grandmothers were already island girls. from the welsh valleys came the chapel and the choir, the land that made poets of working men; if there's music in the writing, it comes from there. from exeter came a line of service and standing up, which i still feel in how i lead. and the island itself raised me on two shores at once; the old spiritual life, and the finance that arrived and quietly split it. i've carried both ever since.

i'm drawn to the old tongues; guernésiais, the norman french of this island, and welsh, the language of those valleys. i don't speak them yet, but i'm learning, slowly, the way you learn to love something. the four poems here wear their guernésiais names on purpose. a language carries a whole way of being in the world, and when it fades, something of the soul fades with it. so i keep a little of it alive, and try to bring new meaning to the old; which is, i think, the whole of what i do.

most of this happens in a cottage at the island's edge; le coussinet, guernsey-french for little cushion. there's a way the light falls here, and a quiet the island keeps, that i hope finds its way into everything on this site. the tide is never far.

i walk barefoot when i can. i've come to believe the art of living is a poetic one; that love, and poetry, and nature, if you let them, will guide you most of the way home.