The End of an Age
• Hazel Marshall

I will stand on its soil and soak up its atmosphere through the very soles of my feet. My mouth will fill with its tales and I will have new ones to tell at last.

The first years of any century are important for they hold the feeling of the age. And so when it came time for me to set off on my travels once again I was happy that it was at the start of, not only a new century, but a new millennium. I could feel the ethos of the era stir my blood and make me impatient to move, to move onwards, upwards, outwards. Just move. On. Much of what I had learned in the past I now have to forget. I want to have my own Renaissance and my own Enlightenment, not to share in someone else’s. Will I set sail once again and if so, to where? This time will I sail in the great silver birds who now fill the skies? They strike fear into me but their presence still fills me with awe. They have a beauty all their own and it is one which sums up both the terror and the beauty of this new age. I have not yet decided where I will go first. Perhaps I may return to my own land although I have heard many of the stories from there. It may be time to search out yet another land and listen to what it has to say. I will stand on its soil and soak up its atmosphere through the very soles of my feet. My mouth will fill with its tales and I will have new ones to tell at last. The old and the new still tear at me. The old world remains old. Some say it gets older by the day. Some of it is falling into decay. Some of it is pulling other bits apart. But throughout it all is a central wisdom which has to be maintained. But the same cannot be said for the new world. It does not learn. It does not grow old. Instead it is returning to its infant state, bawling out its unfairness like a spoilt child. Once it was like a teenager and yet every day it is crawling back in time to become a screaming toddler, content only in satisfying its own pleasures. First, I shall return to what I knew before. I shall take with me the new skills that I have learnt in my most recent travels. Here I have learnt from the power of the sea, its rawness, its strength, its constancy. And always to look for the horizon, which is always there and always changing. The sea holds its secrets close and so I chose not to spend time trying to find them out but instead enjoyed its mystery. Stories bubble within me all the time, as they should. Some may never come to fruition but will remain forever in a seed like state. Some will drift out, like the steam from a coffee pot and float away to land on some other storyteller’s shoulder and whisper their secrets into new ears and they will tell the story better. Some I will store for later for it is too early for them to come out into the sun. But there are some whose time has come. These I will harvest and nurture and tend with love and, with luck, they will grow, and bring much pleasure to their creator. But all know that stories are fickle creatures who will not be moulded against their will and if they are, they become stunted and out of shape. Patience, determination and that small elusive wisp of luck will be my aids in my great task. Stories, after all, were made to be told. In the old world and the new, they stand waiting to be plucked from the air and shaped anew. But always there are some stories that only I will hold, whose time will never be.

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