Years ago my sister and I were swimming in the ocean as a storm was coming in. The waves were huge and powerful. It was nearly impossible to move from the near-region where broken waves grappled in churning knots, out further to where the wave dropped themselves in permanent quarter-ton suplexes, and further still to where we wanted to be, to where the curls were just beginning to form. Out there waves still had univocal thrust and could pick us up and carry us back over the violence and set us on the shore. But the closer we got to the break line, the harder it was to stand upright and advance. We would get knocked off our feet and thrown to the bottom, and washed back into the brown foamy shallows, our faces full of dirt and our bellies scored by sharp little shells.

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Where the water is deeper, it is more impersonal and disciplined. Out there, waves move through the ocean and the ocean feels the movement running through it. Each individual quart of salty water makes a patient circle like a rider on a ferris wheel, returning again and again to where it began.

But once the force of the wave hits hard ground, everything gets personal. The water at the bottom is smashed into the ground; the water in the middle loses its balance and begins to topple; the water at the top is overthrown and falls on its face. Here, water identifies with the wave and knows itself to be the mover. Every eddy strives to pull the rest of the ocean in its wake. A foaming brood of rivers coil, constrict, crush and swallow each other endlessly.

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Somewhere between the complacency of the depths and the ambitions of the shallows, where the waves touch bottom with the tips of their toes, there is motion that can move us. And when we are moved, it is the residual unified force of the deeper traditions, challenged by the dirty spasms of the everyday, to leap and push and bring order where there are too many orders.