Sea Change

Oceans placental, but soon a new hydro of gone
Dennis Lee

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
Alan Watts

…the ocean contains the switch of life. Not land, not the atmosphere. The ocean. And that switch can be turned off.
Alanna Mitchell

The ocean nurtures and sustains us physically, ecologically, economically, culturally, metaphorically and spiritually. Womb of life on the planet, oceans produce most of the planet’s oxygen while their currents, winds and water-cycles regulate climate. Life on earth depends on the ocean’s finely tuned chemical balance. Scientific evidence tells us that temperature, salinity and pH balance are all changing. We are metaphorically skin boats floating in and inseparable from dangerously changing global oceans. Exploring the interrelationships between individual bodies and the body of the planet, this work proposes to re/search the myriad relationships, interdependencies and porosities between salt water and human bodies.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water
W. H. Auden

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Shakespeare

I myself am inclined to believe that no ecology is so crucial
as the sea, or so impossible to monitor or to repair.
Marilynne Robinson