The Ocean

I love watching waves. I've done a bit of it this last week and it was good.

One of the things I like about it - apart from the glorious colour palate which changes without warning as the sky changes (how cool is that!) - one of the things I like about the ocean is its power and disorder. If I were a powerful warrior princess with a large army (including elephants), and I had, like Alexander the Great run out of enemies to defeat, I still could not take on the ocean. It's just big and defiant and completely not interested in people: it treats us with a kind of merciless disdain. OK, so I'm anthropomorphising it a lot, but it's not like it doesn't ask for it. There is it, relentless, never still, forceful, absolutely beautiful and unable to be controlled, or even really harnessed. How can a person fitted out with an imagination ignore it as a powerful image of many things?

It always makes me feel small and timebound. The waves keep coming. There is so much water. The waves are so strong - how can water have that strong an impact? How can water pull someone out to sea? These and many more thoughts whirr in my brain. Eventually it makes me dizzy and then I start to write poetry.

If I were ridiculously wealthy, I would build a house on a headland somewhere with enormous windows. You would find me looking out those windows, speechless and grinning, whenever a storm was on its way.