It's been said that the locals don't know what they have, usually that comes from people who are not native to the area and perhaps it's true. Everybody has seen the sea and the colours that change within it, or the crashing of a wave against a rock but have they seen the majesty of Mother Nature on a stormy day? Perhaps they've walked the foot-trodden paths over and over again but never really stopped to see the minute details and colours of a tiny wild flower that change hues with how it catches the sun. Or perhaps didn't spot a distant rock formation that, in the shadows beneath a tall cliff, might have imaginatively been the ruins of a long-abandonded coastal home. Few have thought that the farm implement they passed by was once pulled by a horse, and what it had cut was gathered by labouring hands. Had so few known it had been a farm implement and what it had done?
This is what I want to explore in my own small neck of the woods, to find the perspectives that few see and even less look for. To capture and freeze, in a fraction of a second, the wave as it crashes against the rocks and throws itself dissipated across the scene. Then become the sea itself again, like a metaphor of Life itself. I want to find wonder at the colours and delicate patterns of such a small, seemingly-insignificant flower that many have never even noticed never mind actually seen. In a distant bay almost hidden by the shadow of the cliff and the mists lay what looked like the ruins of a long-abandoned house. Who would live there so close to such a raging sea, how did they get there when there was no road, seemingly? The house was a rock formation, but how did these columns of tan-coloured rocks come to find their way onto a black rock-covered landscape? I watched them use such farm implements as a boy.
A picture paints a thousand words but who can read the story?