“For every appetite, there is a world. The dreamer then participates in the world by nourishing himself from one of the substances of the world, a dense or rare, warm or gentle substance clear or full of penumbra according to the temperament of his imagination.”
(Bachelard 178)  

The appetite of my imagination that craves the ocean craves the sublime depth, width and fury of the sea. The ocean is a waterbody of movement in waves, rivulets, curls, vortices, currents, storms, tides. Reverie with the ocean is one of diffusion as the substance of thoughts follows the rise and fall of tide and wave and intensifies along the thin slip of horizon. For there is always horizon with the ocean, always the love-affair between sea and sky. Ocean reveries are dreams in color: emerald green-gold light, white blurred beachbreak spray, the tiny sky-colored mirrors on every water surface, and the soft blue wash of memory. Ocean reveries illuminate the breath of salt water through bodies and within bodies as currents and tides. This water-breath is a reverie in creation and creativity and adaptation and generosity and gestation and sensitivity and ferocity and luminosity and life and salt and blood and art.

“A poetic force leads these phantoms of reverie. This poetic force animates all the senses; reverie becomes polysensorial.” (Bachelard 162)

“Ah! how a passage which pleases us can make us live! …one learns that … at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent…” (Bachelard 162)

One learns that at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Reverie is an opening, a softening into the internal worlds of things. Reverie is the spill of light into water at the rising crest of a wave. Reverie is a depth where light flickers in curtains. Reverie is the palpitating shoreline of a descending night tide. Reverie is the wind-shift of oval-shaped reflections in ripples to jagged-edged wavelets. Reverie is backwards-bent curl of beach break spray. Reverie is the lace offering left by a wave at the land’s edge. Reverie is a ripeness, a fullness, an opening. So is art.

“In memories it is always blue, slow, light. Why?” (Bachelard 127)

Franz Hellens:
“My memory is fragile; I quickly forget the contour, the feature; only the melody remains within me. I have difficulty retaining the object, but I cannot forget the atmosphere, which is the sonority of things and beings.” (Bachelard 135)

Water is home. Not just any water, but the extreme surge of flood and ebb where northern salt water meets muddy river water. The memory of the sea lives in my body as slow, deep, blue, resonant and illuminated. I am oriented towards the sea. I feel the magnetic pull of salt water at my blood, as if my connection to the pull of moon or the pull of the cosmos is stronger on the shore than inland. Our asymmetry concentrates all our sensory organs to orient forward and all my sensory organs orient seaward.

Memory: saltwater from my eyes matched and trumped by the salt spray of sea.
Memory: shore scents of kelp, receding wave, burst seafoam, distant-born wind.
Memory: luminous green waves as the clear flood water pushed against the east wind, the sandbars, the river ebb; confused seas, choppy waters, wave pyramids collided and burst, simply burst into air; saltair filtered through my curled-back eyelashes as I looked into the wind, looked with the sun setting rays, stinging.
Memory: eyes unfocused at the frothing white raging horses of the boat wake.
Memory: fullness, safety, relief of high tide; excitement, danger, awe at the early a.m. sisterhood of high tide and wind; expectation, magic, curves of slacktide hightide fish.
Memory: the sleep of the fish, the waterdreams of waterbodies held in the cradle of the hull; a return.
Memory: body in a body; salt skin girl enveloped by liquid light waves.
Memory: breath.
Memory: motion.
Memory: light.