“Stormy Seas was one of my first oil paintings in recent years. This is a piece of decking and the painting was done with a nail.”
After writing two romantic novels set in Cornwall, Birte Hosken came back to art during lockdown. She now works with materials found on local beaches, some driftwood but also reclaimed wood. She produces wall hangings, paintings and small-scale sculptures. www.birtehosken.wixsite.com/author
All Storms Non-fiction by Chris Morris
CW: Mental Health, Abuse
I came to suspect that she hated me from the very moment I was born. Mother Nature is considered beautiful, divine, an entity which envelops the world in light and love and spectacle. But I have seen her true face. I have felt her furious, red winds and seen her angry skies. I have heard her deathly roars and tasted her bitter hostilities.
I have witnessed raw hatred in the dark heart of her raging storm.
A wild storm does not accept the decisions of the ships upon her waters, and neither does she tolerate the will of those who defy her. As a child, I tried to paddle my own way through her treacherous waters only to be met with disapproval and scorn. A child made from the salt of her own ocean, I should have been nurtured and made to feel safe. Instead, I was afraid and made to feel pain.
There be beasts in them dark waters. Monsters that will reach their deadly tendrils towards any passing ship that looks as though it is a little too comfortable on its journey towards a horizon that remains mysterious and enthralling. Those things will attempt to damage and even sink the ships that appear too settled. And in my youth, she appeared to protect me from them. Her storm formed around the essence of those terrible beasts and soon sent them on their way. But in the process, some of her own lightning burned me and left holes in my ship that were hurriedly repaired by my own criticised hands.
As I grew older, the skies surrounding the waters around me lost much of their fog, but the waves still leapt threateningly at my ship’s bow, and Mother Nature’s lightening still burned me, especially when I turned my vessel in a direction that she deemed unwise. I was assured that I was her pearl of the sea, and that sometimes a mother’s love seemed painful, but that it was what was best for me.
And then I had a pearl of my own, and everything changed.
My pearl was different to how I’d imagined. Her light was so bright and wholesome that it lit the paths before me in ways I had never previously fathomed. Her radiance gave me courage, her smile, joy. But all the while, mother’s vicious storm circled above us, threatening to come down hard upon the first sign of disobedience. And when it finally did, it burned my pearl much more harshly than it burned me. I knew then that if I stayed, there was nothing I could do to prevent my pearl from being wounded by the malevolent frenzy around us. The storm was too venomously intent on destroying me, uncaring for the pain that was suffered by the children of the ocean.
In the end, leaving the realm of her storm was easy. My pearl, young enough to have forgotten the tribulations of these miserable days, shone the way for me, even helped me to steer. And Mother Nature could only watch on with baneful aversion as we sailed away. Now she’s only a faint echo of a nightmare. Her raging storm is disappearing on the distant horizon behind us.
And all storms eventually die.
Chris Morris is a writer from Dundee in Scotland who has self-published three books and is currently working on a novel he hopes to have traditionally published. He is a writer, musician, teacher, and father. www.chrisamorris.com