Jan 14 2007
the seventh wave
Someone once told me the seventh wave to hit the beach is bigger that the six preceeding waves.
I picked a big wave and counted the waves that rolled behind it. Maybe 100 or so waves later, time lost behind the clouds, I reluctantly admitted that I couldn’t find a seventh wave as noticably bigger. I walked the beach watching the waves. No longer counting. Counting felt like a modern construction layered on to the ancient being of waves. Each wave unique, each wave with predictable components of foam, direction and a hypnotic rhythm. Seven days in a week, a predictable daily journey to work yet each day is unique. Waves unseen continue, are none-the-less beautiful, noisey, cold and enticing.
Alone on the cold December pacific coast beach was both the antithesis of being in the middle of hectic, heated, work activity and the hypnotic security of predictability. I have walked in the Northern Sea’s warmed by the winter sunshine and the monstrous beauty of the Teeside nuclear power plant. I have watched the sun set over the Basque Atlantic ocean warming my heart and the evening with fresh Beaujolais, garlic cheese, baguettes, and pale skinned dark haired, blue-eyed, motorcycling English boys.
At twenty-four taking a long summer lunch break from work in the company of a beautiful Irish boy. Sat on a canal bank. Our feet dangling in the cooling water. He asked “what do you want from life?” I didnt answer with “jet-fighter pilot” of age 12 or the Architect of age 15… …impulsively I blurted “I want to live by the Sea“. He laughed. On an Island like Britain it is easy to live by the Sea. We were sat in the heart of England, we couldn’t be further from the sea. Later, he took me to the nearest sea, to The Wash. A mystical place. A place of love and death, of madness and Serenity. Nearly 20 years later I know that fate has favoured me. Never having lived more than 2 hours drive from the sea.
My wealth is counting the waves on the coast, at work and in my dreams. Daily.
the seventh wave
