I now look on the period since the age of 48 as the greatest period of creativity in my life. Perhaps its source was in the many jig-saw puzzles I made in my middle to late childhood, or the tulips I drew by the hundreds when I was four or five. I had enjoyed those activites, but for some reason stopped doing them. I think it was their repetitiveness; I got bored with them. That was true of all sports, eventually: baseball, hockey, golf, football, cricket, inter alia. This recent creativity after age 48 may be a simple desire to move beyond those simple, mechanical tasks.

I'm not sure whether the explanation of the source of this new creativity is to be found in old memories, in trusting hunches and intuitions about my childhood and adolescence. Creativity and activity has moved inward. -Ron Price with thanks to John Bradshaw, Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, Judy Piatkus,, London, 1990, p.280.

There are probably many things
in those early years
that could explain the sources
of this poetic burgeoning:
two generations of writing,
books and more books,
my mother reading poetry
in the garden; I can see her now
with Edna St.Vincent Milay
under the tree by the clothes-line;
my grandfather's poem 'Seagull',
a restless energy that got tired
of sport and eventually career,
needed some place to go,
or perhaps it was not so much
these things, but:

a great weariness of life,
an emptiness that I fill
with this sweetness of words,
this airy substance,
this vibration of utterance
in which I create a spiritual world,
some result whatever the thought,
some of my child cloaked in mystery,
a dance of aloneness, a sacred silence
where my mother is gold,
my father silver-haired
and we hold each other close,
absorbed, encircled, included
in all the colours of life
back in those first years
which dance and play
and jump into my memory,
unannounced, unbeknownst.

Ron Price
1 November 1997
to April 3rd 2006