Treasure Trails

To my mind, there's a difference between 'Treasure Hunts' and 'Treasure Trails'. Treasure hunts require you to solve clues in order to reach the treasure at the end, but treasure trails are journeys were each point gives you a new experience/pleasure.

Take my journey from a January sale find, to a poet. It started years ago, when I found::

Treasure 1: A wooden jigsaw I picked up in York, on a dreary day in January. Made by a company called Wentworth Puzzles, there was something about its tactile nature that reinvigorated my childhood love of jigsaws. It became something I could share with my own children—and still share with them now, on occasion, even though they’re grown up and have flown the nest. Between that first puzzle and now, I’ve made it my business to keep a look out for more. This led to:

Treasure 2:  An artist called Stephen Darbishire (whose images, as above, I'd completed in jigsaw form). I hadn’t come across his work before, but I was captivated by his subject matter and style, right from the word go. There's such an air of light, familiarity and peace in the scenes he paints. Hard to describe really—the best I can come up with, is that they trigger an almost meditative response in me. And when I looked online for more examples of his paintings, I eventually came across two he’d done as book covers, for a poet called Kerry Darbishire (his wife).

As it happened, I’d been thinking about reading more poetry, but was a bit lost as to where to start. Then it occurred to me that Kerry’s poems might trigger the same reaction in me that her husband’s paintings did?  Enter:

Treasure 3: Possibly the best one of all—words. As a writer, I love them as a medium. But poetry uses words in a different way to prose. In a poem, words have the potential to blast you with emotions and ideas that (in just a few carefully crafted lines) can touch your soul, make you smile, cry or think more deeply, and take you somewhere you’ve never been before.

So now I’m wondering if there’s going to be a Treasure 4?  I’d like to think that I’ll learn a new word skill from reading poems, just as reading books led me to writing stories.  

That’s the beauty of Treasure Trails…they’re an ongoing adventure.