“Constantly moving in a dance that mirrors the tempo of the human body, waves break in time with the beating of our hearts, the in and out of our breaths, like a metronome marking the present moment: now, now.”
                –Ran Ortner, artist statement (http://www.ranortner.com/#!/statement)

“This idealizing psychology is an undeniable psychic reality. The reverie idealizes both its object and the dreamer at the same time. And when the reverie lives in a dualism of the masculine and the feminine, the idealization is concrete and limitless at the same time.” (Bachelard 58)

What do I idealize about the ocean? What do I idealize about myself when I daydream of the sea? 

Luminosity. I idealize the light and clarity where the sea rises and thins to peaks and waves and collisions and spray. I idealized that moment when the low-angle sunset light and east wind gale split the green whitecaps and they burst into spray to illuminate the entire sky with salt particles which stuck in my wind-curled eyelashes. I idealize the way water takes light and bleeds it into its vortices. I idealize the fusion of light and liquid on the surface, and how the deep blue of darkness blends in from the bottom up. I idealize the way water holds sky and how water holds depth and dark in the same body.

Ferocity. I idealize the way waves are violent yet gentle. How they are chaotic and unpredictable, yet rhythmic and beautiful in their morphology. I idealize the necessary violence in the dance between wind and water and how it seeks to deconstruct all that is of earth. I idealize the shapes that waves take in the collision against shore. I idealize the strength and persistence of waves that continue in the same rhythms whether illuminated or dark, whether warm or icy, whether now now now or eons ago. 

Sensitivity. I idealize the tides. I idealize the great salt-water sensitivity to the moon as this body of connected seas around our sphere-planet ebb and flood around the continents to follow the pull of the moon. I idealize water’s ability to form sensory organs with motion, in each swirl and ripple, that catalogue the cosmos of that moment. I idealize water’s properties of stagnation and preservation and its ability to provide life through movement and interaction. I idealize the generosity of water in how it is capable of filling the smallest gaps along a shoreline and the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean. I idealize its capacity to engulf all that enters it (except air which always pushes upwards to rejoin the sky).