Wild Waves and Wild Thoughts

Wild Waves

When I retired and moved to this part of the world I was in fact returning to my roots. That being so it would seem that I would find it easy. The opposite was in fact the truth. There is some truth in the fact that you can never go back, life is an onward journey.


I thought I knew this place so well, the place of my boyhood. The place where I built gang huts with my friends, now covered by a housing complex. The friends had moved on, married and geographically separated. I was both a retired minister and retired teacher. Yet when I had left here I was in fact a butcher. The reality hit me I was a retired person and I had to do something. The one thing that I still did was sit as a judge in the court. A time consuming task, but not one that was going to fill the time created by retirement.

So it was that I found myself one day walking the coastal path on a windy day with the waves crashing on the rocks. I rushed home that day and painted “Wild Waves”. I did so in a frenzy using not brushes but my fingers. It was almost a new beginning. I saw that it was possible to express inner feelings with paint.

This painting sold the day I took it to hang it. Somebody saw me begin to put it on the wall and offered to purchase it there and then.

This time of incapacity has meant me looking back again over the three years or so I have been painting. As many of you know I have gone through a tortured period of struggling to find where I am heading with paint.

Susan suggested adding words to some of my paintings. Reluctantly I decided to give it a try. I am not at all sure that I am any use at all at writing poems but I thank her for prompting me in that direction. It has made me sit and think and to see my paintings in a new way. To feel again the emotions created. I am enjoying the process and finding it interesting that some of you are putting ideas into words that lie behind some of my words and paintings that I have thought and felt yet never said.

How glad I am that I have kept going in this blogging world, right now it is so helping me on the therapeutic road of recovery.

Now I have one very serious request. For those who read me on a regular basis and know me well please tell me when it is time to move on from the poems and thoughts.

This blog is linked to my other where I look again at the artwork above. Alone With The Wild Waves