Day 339: Form as motion

"From where I am standing the landscape presents a peculiar unity. My gaze takes in dunes and ocean, miles of water and sand lapping in either direction. They look like images of one another, though the dunes lie still and the waves keep churning towards the shore. This is an illusion, of course; in fact it is the dunes which are moving, some fifteen feet a year, walking south toward the highway, headed for town. The water's not going anywhere; a pulse moves through it, lifts, and let's go. In a time-lapse photo, over a season, or a year perhaps, the impression would be reversed: the waves must freeze to an average stillness, a little blurred at the edges, and the slow-moving dunes would be seen to crawl forward, cresting and tumbling over themselves, grain by wind borne grain. Quietly, in smallest increments over millennia, the waves turn to stone, and the dune dances..." -Cynthia Huntington, The Salt House