Gauguin's Storm

The storm swept towards me and even in my dismay I was transfixed by the watercolour wash of golden light behind sheeting rain, bruised thunderheads and open ocean. But soon the horizon was lost to me and all about were heaving mounds of water and it grew very cold very quickly. The rain reached me and I wrapped myself in a sea stiff and rather fishy piece of sail cloth from the fore of my little vessel.
I am quite partial to a storm when I am sitting up in bed, beneath a tin roof, nursing a cup of hot milk and honey. It is quite another thing entirely when one is consumed by its elemental fury. I felt every lightning lash and thunder rumble in my blood, and bones and stuffing. Darkness was a moving beast. I experienced a moment of communion with all those poor souls who have foundered since humanity first lashed some logs together with vines and set tentatively out onto water. After that I became almost peaceful, and though it's hard to believe, I slept, and it was as if my sleep soothed the Sea God's savage temper and I woke to dawn breaking on a flat horizon.
That red and gold glowing green enamelled sky was the great awakener. For suddenly I knew why I was there and why I had to suffer the storm, be humbled by it and live through it. Gauguin was present. I did not see his regal nose, nor read that wild and barbarous look in his eyes, but I know he was there. The colours revealed him and he them and all the great raw symbolic possibilities surged through me, riotous, as I realised I had survived. I floated in this beatific chromatic state for some time when the skiff scraped against something and I became conscious of the slip of land towards which I had been, trance like, moving for some time.
Practical considerations took hold. I braved some rather treacherous footing and managed to push my coracle over a little reef and into a clear lagoon.
The atoll curved around the lagoon, a sandy strip leading to a fringe of palms. I stumbled up the beach. Coconuts were strewn around, Poseidon's apology perhaps. I managed to break one open and feast on it's sweet milk and white flesh.
It wasn't long before the rescue party, mounted by Mrs Piko, found me. Though it seemed impossible, I had not floated far from civilisation, yet I have travelled far and seen much.
The rest of my trip was a dream. I was able to harness new energies and produce this video which was the pretext for my journey. My thanks of course to Mrs Piko and to the Anonymous Patron. I have tried to capture the moment when one comes through the storm to calm waters. It is my homage to Gauguin, to the sun, to beauty and to the turn of the seasons which is life.