Every end is the beginning of something else.

You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.

Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.

Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past.

Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.