I remember seeing Yoko Ono sitting on a rock in the low tide. (It is, after all, fun to sit freely on a rock that spends most of its time submerged in water.) She remained perfectly still as if pondering the rock’s other life. When I got close, I could see that her pockets were full.

“Seashells,” she said.

“Oh, that’s cool,” I replied.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a rock. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I just pretended like it was a seashell.

“Pretty,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

In her other hand she had a tiny knife and she began feverishly chipping the rock’s surface. In no time, she had carved a shell. She continued to transform all the rocks from inside her pockets, which were very deep, until there was nothing but a pale-faced Yoko sitting on a pile of pale seashells. I began looking for more rocks.

That dream came shortly after I had seen some of Yoko Ono’s work at MoMA last year. Icons have a way of doing this–slipping into our subconscious and entering our dreams to befriend us, to tell us things we want to hear about the world. That, in part, is why we love them. Yoko Ono, an artist whose own work in film, music and fine art was once greatly overshadowed by her massive celebrity profile as Lennon’s wife, has come to represent for me the painstaking persistence of good artists to transform their own place and value in the world and to, in turn, succeed in giving us reasons to search for more of their work.

Joan Tick, The Phenomenal Handclap Band (vocals and percussion)