Wild Walk

With magic lantern plans for Thursday, and the weather’s thundersome plans for Friday, today, the long walk, in the big coat, became the plan.  I want to expand my fair-weather walker habits, feel the benefits of negative ions released by the rain.

However, there was only a brief shower by the sycamores, before the day developed red as a russet apple, blue as petrol skimming puddles, white as Chantilly lace. 

Could hardly hear the sea for the wind, they clung to each other.  Ringing like a Swifty’s ears post-concert, hyped-up, ready to do it all over again.  Like a waterfall, all wind-wave energy absorbing into one long roar.  Battered trees blown inside-out umbrella-like.  The light surprisingly bright after storm-darkened days.  White horse waves dazzling against the sky, diamonds draping petrol blue taffeta.

I stopped at the Covid shrine; the railing at the first break of the sea.  I used to walk there in the lockdown hour of exercise, to weep and breathe in the healing air.  I still send prayers out to the sea, for those I love, in my thoughts, for Life, gratitude.

A polka dot of starlings murmured up from the storm-tossed wrack.  For all their surface chaos, storm waves are neat freak artists underneath, shifting and sorting the stones into a Goldsworthy wall, perfectly curved, pointed as a pyramid.

On the beach, a huge rock, like a fallen angel, had been lifted and laid.  Oystercatchers, housemartins, crow that watches, crow that follows.  Russet seaweeds in floral shapes, stolen rose for Beauty, footprints of the Beast.

Up, off the beach, the air dropped soft and warm, a parcel of oystercatchers strobed across the cove, wings flashing like a zoetrope.  A yellowhammer pottered on the path.  Sea, wind-sound and breath muted to a hush, not to scare it off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sngXz55b4bc

https://andygoldsworthystudio.com/archive/

Images for this journal have been posted on Insta @purplehaze_journals