Plague Spring
Sensitivity to initial conditions in an unpredictable, foggy sea around us
“A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision.”
Annie Dillard
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
“I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”
Nikki Giovanni
“As the Albatross III groped through fog over George’s Bank all of one week in the midsummer of 1949, those of us aboard had a personal demonstration of the power of a great ocean current. There was never less than a hundred miles of cold Atlantic water between us and the Gulf Stream, but the winds blew persistently from the south and the warm breath of the Stream rolled over the Bank. The combination of warm air and cold water spelled unending fog.”
Rachel Carson
The Sea Around Us
Merriam-Webster defines “the butterfly effect as follows:
“a property of chaotic systems (such as the atmosphere) by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the system”
The surf forecast is often wrong. You understand, even if you don’t surf. It’s the same with the weather. Get just a few days out from the instant of Now and, although there’s a lot we do know—the rain, should there be any, won’t suddenly fall up from the ground to pelt the clouds— there’s even more we don’t know. This is what I reminded myself of as I sat on my surfboard in the cold water of early spring. The weather was different a few yards away from me where the sun shone full force. I was surprised and a little colder than I thought I would be. It wasn’t supposed to be foggy. That wasn’t in the forecast. But fog there was. Rain wasn’t falling up but the water had, in its way, arisen and was wafting all around me, enveloping, close.
The swelling edge of fog bank, unusually well defined for North Carolina, was hovering just above the line of narrow dunes with their sparse vegetative covering, Panic Grass and Sea Oats. Those dunes are still allowed, even encouraged to exist because of the storm protection they offer the million-dollar homes built on this barrier island. “Barrier island”—a phrase we use for these shifting piles of sand, formed and revised by an endlessly moving sea. Those well-painted, well-washed houses were gleaming in the early sunshine. 
But where I floated the weather was different. It was cool, soft, the colors of the water below my surfboard muted by the suspended water that hung low over my head. There was barely any swell and it wasn’t at all clear whether I’d be able to catch any waves if any happened to appear. The immediate problem wasn’t the size of the waves. I had been in bed for the better part of 48 hours, laid low by the first dose of The Vaccine. I’d decided to come out for a short surf despite the diminished but lingering weakness that still permeated me from skin to spine. It hung inside, and here, now, instead of an exasperating annoyance (this reaction was not what I was told to expect…no one is supposed to feel ill after the first dose) the vaporous sense of dis-ease felt almost like a rightful response to the call of the fog depended— above head, settling on shoulders. I sat, bobbing on the board, watching the edge of the shrouded horizon and, trying to keep my heart on the line, to be present to the possible. I slowly filled my lungs, breathing my torso as tall and as wide as the inflation of my frame would allow, stretching myself towards the hidden sky.
One breath.
Two.
Three.
An approaching line appeared, the barest hint of a dark, elongated bump like the edge of a letter of embossed print. I tried to read the text. Despite the soft, flat light, this swell had a slight but undeniable taper on the north side of its moving body. That taper, the shoulder of what I thought was probably a wave big enough to catch, seemed headed to a spot about 20 yards away from me. I turned and laid myself down and pulled my arms through the cold water— once again, trying to keep my heart on the line…
breath
presence
possibility
I gained a little speed, first from my own efforts until I felt the lift of a force not my own, and, after two more deep, long pulls I popped up to my feet, less graceful and more halting than I can usually pull off but now
Now
Now!
I was riding, or being ridden. Instead of breathing deeply and inflating from the inside, out, I was expanded from the outside, in. I was being breathed by so many forces— all here, all now. I wasn’t making this ride happen but I had shown up for it.
I came as I was.
Weak.
Imperfect.
Prone to error.
I flew over water, through the air towards the sunlit shoreline luxury that was barely noticeable behind all those converging planetary powers, meeting in this cloud of “me.” Then the wave petered out and I turned to paddle back towards the fog.
___
I found myself in the grip of this revelatory, unexpected passion in the middle of the journey of our life. This Waves to Wisdom project is the child of this great love. Unless you have just stumbled on this blog this very second, it will be clear that I mean the love of surfing. Cornell West says that justice is what love looks like in public.
What if West is right? If he is, then it was inevitable that the combination of my generally insatiable curiosity and a new love (of surfing, surf history, surf culture) would open me up to ways that that love might play out at different scales beyond the micro-moments of my own individual life. What would love look like beyond my own soaring joy in the unmappable, ever-changing zone of the ocean’s dynamic edge?
Counting from the week I sent myself off to surf camp as a 40th birthday present, it took me 7 long years to be able to pop up and steer the board, to perceive what the wave might offer and decide how I, with my many athletic limitations, could possibly respond. That meant I was 47 before I was really doing anything that can reasonably be called “surfing.” And it wasn’t 7 years of intermittent surfing. No, when I went to surf camp (believing I would just do this fun thing, an item on a “bucket list”) I could not have known that I was at the beginning of a new, chaotic moment in my life. One of unprecedented beauty, pain, confusion, learning, and loving. But I was at a beginning, in a set of initial conditions. And sensitive. That first decade was almost exclusively intense effort after intense effort and almost uninterrupted failure. Almost.
Mostly, I pearled (what happens when you bury the nose of the board in a wave) or went over the falls (what happens when you and your board get slammed from the crest to the trough), or just missed the wave altogether (what happens when you’re too weak to match the speed of the incoming wave or too scared to catch it late, for fear of going over the falls). Usually, my mistakes came from an inability to read the wave or from my own fear manifesting as hesitation, delay. But sometimes, every once in a long string of attempts, I would paddle, long and rhythmically, so hard, so hard, so hard for the gathering height of a wave, one that might have originated a thousand miles away but was here, now, approaching me from behind as I pulled my arms through the body of the sea. I would keep my head low, remember to look where I wanted to go and feel the lift of that water-borne energy under the board and the swelling thrill in my chest as I popped (or sometimes crawled) up to my feet and sensed the gathering speed, the flying spray, the light from sky and water and my own exploding heart. And I would feel carried by the ocean, by the last invisible force of a wave’s existence, here, now as it raced over the sand with me as its grateful beneficiary. Sometimes I even remembered to stay wide open to the combination of utterly unpredictable forces at work in that moment, and the next. The lip of the wave might suddenly speed up and pitch as it found a shallow sandbar. Or it might fatten and slow over an unseen trough. Then, if I didn’t sense the subtle slowing and remember to step forward, using my weight as an accelerator, I would be left behind. Or, one of a thousand and one other phenomena might unfold and it was my unending job to stay humble and receptive and nimble enough to respond to the lead. After all, each individual wave is the result of unknowable variables in its history and present. Each wave is the final expression of a complex, chaotic system and even a tiny variation between one wave and the next can make a huge difference in how each breaks. This uncertainty keeps surfing exciting. It’s also a mentor, an exacting one whose lessons are endlessly applicable to life on land. The uncountable failures and rare, ever-thrilling successes opened ways of perceiving and learning, considering and responding that I don’t think I would have stumbled on without this unexpected relationship, this connection between my aging mind and body, the ageless ocean, and its breaking waves— each wave at the end of its own journey of being in time, of moving through the world.
What I’ve learned has wrought a kind of alchemy that brought a gilt sparkle to even the most leaden moments. It’s the kind of light that reveals truth and, over time, lies. Especially the magnetic but caustic lies just under the surface of much of what our culture encourages us to value, to seek, to sacrifice for, and to be satisfied with. It’s the kind of illumination that lights love and makes everything else fall away into the background, into supporting roles— significant but subsidiary. I will never touch the bottom of the expansive, oceanic “thank you, thank you” I feel every time I get a ride and, in my more evolved moments, after I wipe-out.
And, yet, it’s often tempting to wonder what would’ve happened if I had known all of this sooner. What if I had encountered the nuances of this dance, of these particular sounds, and smells, sights, and bodily interactions sooner? Where would I have gone and who would I have become in the process? Now, writing this, it’s been a decade and a half and, by any technical measure, I’m still a mediocre surfer. If I’d started as a kid, when I first wanted to learn, I would be better now, practiced, and, as a result, expert. And sometimes in a day when the sun is still low over the water and the wind is calm when a knee-high wave peels under a lifting mist, tinted pink by morning’s bent light, I can almost feel what it might be like to be able to walk to the nose of that board with grace and expression. Sometimes, after those waves I think about that— what might have been. With a lot (a lot) of practice, that repeating thought has become like the pull of a slingshot that now, almost immediately, hurls me, again and again to the “thank you.” I thank time and the ocean and the agglomeration of circumstances that first kept me from this way of living and seeing and then, eventually, led me to it. But most of all, I am grateful that I am still so very “bad” at this beloved pastime. While I imagine it would be an amazing feeling to be able to do all the things I am trying very hard to learn to do, what’s really mattered has been the learning from scratch, the being not-good, not proficient. Instead, it’s been the relationship, the being madly, oftentimes literally, head over heels in love that turned out to be the tremendous gift of this mid-life love. It has re-created me and it keeps on doing it. It’s a recursive process of re-creation that is now apparent, not just in individual surf sessions but in the larger patterns of years and what happens during them— patterns of forgetting and re-learning about the nuance of season and swell, of heartbreak and healing, receiving and giving, weakening and strengthening, each in an endless whirling cycle— every instant resonant— but entirely new.
In this year, especially, I can’t help but feel that surfing (which, again, in my case means intermittent success and lots and lots of florid failures) has prepared me for spring. This spring’s rebirth comes after the year in which we were all reminded or, perhaps, made newly aware, that none of us can be sure of seeing these maple trees in flower or the early wildflowers (where I live, first meadow rues, and trout lilies, then trilliums and mayapples blooming on a woodland path. 
This winter of The Plague, reminders were everywhere— that we or someone dear to us might be gone before this pandemic ended, before the next solstice or equinox— the possibility of not-being feels almost as real as it is.
Almost as real as it has always been.
This time last year, when the broad shape of the threat was just emerging from the fog, I knew, without any doubt, despite the fear, and because of surfing, how I would want to spend my last months if these were to be those.
In love.
With my heart on the line.
In love with waves, with light, with shadow, but most of all with my people and the work I try to do well in the world. It’s work that surfing, and surfing poorly, has helped me do better and better, with ever-greater humility, always more present heart.
The beach, the place where waves end their lives on the sand, is an obvious edge, a liminal space between. We are all, always on some edge but there are places and times when we know change is imminent, real. And, although we think we know what might happen, unpredictable. This time of year, when spring is new, it’s easier to acknowledge our animal, planetary reality because we can feel it every time we walk out the door. And we can know the broad outlines of our seasonal direction.
It was colder than it is.
It was darker than it will be.
We who are still here all experienced yet another vernal equinox- this day in which we Earthlings can, regardless of mother tongue or merit, regardless of convention or culture, remember that we are together on this roundish rock.
Earth
Home
We live here on a smushed sphere where liquid water is the dominant feature, visible to any human eyeball looking casually at a globe.
But while we can see the longer days and smell the hyacinth or, where I live, the near-inebriating sweetness of Carolina Jasmine (native) and wisteria (invasive), there is so much we can’t perceive. The forces that bring the changes, the tilt of the earth, the manifold cosmic bodily interactions of gravity and inertia that make our home planet’s orbit and tilt what and where they are, even the sap rising in the Longleaf pines and sweet gums that border my urban yard or the flow of the Gulf Stream near the house where sit writing, in the lower reaches of the Cape Fear River basin—
these forces are all invisible. The spring is, as all seasons are, a visible manifestation of the complex interaction of huge and invisible forces.
Love, too is a huge and invisible force.
As is hate.
As are fear and hope and all of the currents we can see running through our life time, during our shift at or near the top of the food chain here on Earth, the source of all our food, all of our hearts and their rhythmically flowing fluid, all our chains of life and renewal. We are in the most predictable kind of time, spring follows winter as day follows night. And we are in the most unpredictable time. What will this hurricane season mean to my body, my home, my town, and all the live beings with whom I share this place? What consequences will come this season from the lengthening life-arcs of all the true-believing, well-intentioned, whip-smart youngsters who thought they meant to connect us all online? The ones, still so smart but no longer so young. Now full-grown robber barons holding onto the uncontrollable forces they’ve wrought, some still saying that more connections will only bring more good, on a larger scale in an endless recursive cycle of living our way towards techno-utopia. If only.
___
Do you know about Chaos Theory? Like all artists who reach to science for metaphor, please take this explanation with a boulder of salt. There is an idea, usually described as “sensitivity to initial conditions” or, more commonly “the butterfly effect.” It means that small, even infinitesimal actions or occurrences, over time, over the life of a system, or of an effort, or of a love, can spin the resulting cascade of events into a completely different realm of outcomes, of consequences. Those almost (or actually) invisible occurrences are not within our capacity to measure. Even if we could measure them, even if we could measure every butterfly wing’s flap above every rushing waterfall, blooming azalea, and fallow field everywhere, we probably still couldn’t predict the weather, or the surf, or our own lives, very far in advance. So we can’t know what will happen over time. For example, when we humans with our trained minds and big computers are trying to predict the weather or the waves we are very often wrong. Wrong about the sea and wrong about ourselves.
I recently had cause to read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us again. I read it once, in my young adulthood, I can’t remember where I was or why I picked it up— likely wanting something sweet to chase the beautiful but bitter truth-tonic of Silent Spring, which I read around the same time. Silent Spring warns of the dire dangers of our love affair with synthetic chemicals and their unintended consequences. The Sea Around Us is a poetic distillation of what was then the best scientific understanding of the oceans— where they came from and what they do, who lives there, and what remains unknown to us. It was 1951 when Carson published Sea, her first book, to near-universal praise. She devotes a chapter to the great currents, including the Gulf Stream. It sometimes comes closer, sometimes farther. Its changes, in turn, change everything about the place where I surf: the color and temperature of the water, the life that’s present, the weather, the waves— all can be altered by ephemeral forces of distant, invisible storms and by this perennial, invisible presence. The Gulf Stream is a warm water current which Carson called “that great and rapidly flowing river-in-the-sea.”
When two bodies of significantly different temperatures encounter one another and at least one of those bodies is fluid a fog results. It’s a straightforward meteorological fact. But Carson’s treatment of it is sheer poetry. She wrote of an encounter between her companions, aboard a sailboat called Albatross III, near two great ocean currents, the warm Gulf Stream and the cold waters of the George’s Bank (an undersea mountain range that runs from the coast off Nova Scotia south to a place off the shore of Cape Cod).
“[D]ay after day the Albatross moved in a small circular room, whose walls were soft gray curtains and whose floor had a glassy smoothness. Sometimes a petrel flew, with swallow-like flutterings, across this room, entering and leaving it by passing through its walls as if by sorcery. Evenings, the sun, before it set, was a pale silver disc hung in the ship’s rigging, the drifting streamers of fog picking up a diffused band of radiance and creating a scene that set us to searching our memories for quotations from Coleridge. The sense of a powerful presence, felt but not seen, its nearness made manifest but never revealed, was infinitely more dramatic than a direct encounter with the current.
Rachel Carson
The Sea Around Us (135)
An edge created by a great meeting. People meeting that invisible edge. She could have been writing about this morning, this year, this time.
A decade after Sea came out, in 1961, American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz first made the discovery that would generate new waves of perspective about what sort of certainty about our world was available to us as humans, as Earthlings. We can’t really guarantee the outcome of our action. We can’t really know the result of the systems we put into play.
We live in a time, this very spring, when great currents are meeting, each having its effect on the other. But the boundary, the fluid place where one runs into the other is, as fluid edges often do, generating a dense fog. Those of us who are paying attention and can admit to the truth of our emotional state, many of us are confused, unable to see exactly where we should go, unable to predict the effects of each direction, each set of actions interacting with the many vast and invisible forces surging around us. Like every meeting of currents, it is passage in a larger pattern and a time uniquely its own.
This is undeniably a period of sensitive dependence and, depending on how you count your history, we might well be in a set of initial conditions that will set us on the path to a new system. It will spin out beyond our individual control in ways we didn’t and couldn’t predict because all complex systems do. We are always in a system spinning out beyond our control. That prevents nor excuses us from doing what we can, from becoming lost, from failing, over and over again. With our hearts on the line. We must resist the temptation to look for final answers, for guarantees, for the desire to discover and cling to The One Static Truth that will free us from fog. While being lost, and failing might never become wholly comfortable, I have found the familiarity with the discomfort is better than anything you might have otherwise known. It has the potential to dissolve the barriers between your head and heart and, even more transformative between your heart and the many sacred beating hearts of the world, and the world itself.
We are always in the midst of chaos (just make note of this week’s forecast and have a look at next week’s weather). Chaos is forever the reality but it doesn’t have to be terrible. It can be liberatory.
___
I sit and await the nest wave, breathing myself up and out again, feeling the water underneath me, its rhythm every second the result of a mind-blowing convergence of forces, historical and contemporary. I paddle out a bit farther to get over an unusually big wave that’s breaking “outside,” seaward of where I’ve been waiting. If I were another surfer I would try to “turn and burn,” to turn fast and catch that outside, breaking wave. But I am me and I want to face it and the horizon and see it break over the nose of my board. As I crest the wave the water pitching off of the lip catches the light in such a way that it looks, impossibly, brighter than the sky— a film of thinnest sea transformed into its own celestial realm, is in some ways unpredictable and in many other ways utterly reliable. The wave adapts to changes in the ground without ever attaching to them. As I work to learn to read and respond to waves without thinking (takes too long), without prediction (impossible to perceive all the variables) perhaps, just maybe I can learn to get just a little better at doing the same in my land-dwelling life. As we all do, even Earth itself, I will drift towards and away from equity between light and shadow in my own heart, between hate and hope, between love and anger. The emotions are inevitable. How we flap our tiny wings (or our lips) is not.
The snow and cold have been here. These seeds have been here. Death and suffering and injustice have been here. And still, the water is warming again. We have seen failures on so many scales. We don’t need to regret them. We don’t need to figure out what might have been. We need to figure out what can be and how we might fail and breathe and, with intermittent success, love together.
Interview: Brad Turner
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Player at the bottom of the page.
I think will be very beneficial for everybody to take a look at the ocean, smell it, listen to if you're brave enough stick your toes in it. It will surprise you. There are some people who have a lot of fears about it but I believe in in learning about dangerous things that you deem fearful. You can go far. With knowledge there comes power. so a healthy education about the ocean with would definitely be a first step I would suggest. Theres a lot of learning to do but comes with steps or waves, if you if you will.
~Brad Turner
Photos of Brad courtesy of Lesley Gourley at https://www.photohunter.net/
Show Notes
Surfrider Foundation Activist Spotlight on Rhonda Harper and Black Girls/Inkwell Surf
Reuters Article on Solidarity In Surf
2021 NY Times Article about how black-owned coastal property and generational wealth were stolen
Psychology Today article about the benefits of Surf Therapy for PTSD
“On Being White and Other Lies” 1984 Essay by James Baldwin
A thought-provoking article on whiteness by a white woman
Blue Mind Research and References
Interview with Blue Mind instigator Dr. Wallace J Nichols on The Unmistakable Creative
*An update on Brad’s important work:
Brad has gone on temporary hiatus in his work with Black Girls Surf and Inkwell Surf. Check his Instagram for updates! In the meanwhile, this organization and the others listed above continue the inspiring and empowering work of addressing historical inequities and bringing equal access to the waves.
Transcript
Brad:
I think will be very beneficial for everybody to take a look at the ocean, smell it, listen to if you’re brave enough stick your toes in it. It will surprise you. There are some people who have a lot of fears about it but I believe in in learning about dangerous things that you deem fearful. You can go far. With knowledge there comes power. so a healthy education about the ocean with would definitely be a first step I would suggest. Theres a lot of learning to do but comes with steps or waves, if you if you will.
Intro
Maia: We are deep in the winter of the Great Pandemic. We are losing so much but we are also learning and growing in ways that seem long overdue and right on time. The same week in which I’m recording this introduction, Brad Turner and I did what a zillion other people did, we logged onto a Zoom call. It was a conversation that came about because Brad was and is a generous teacher and collaborator. He’s also walking around with one of the biggest hearts I’ve encountered in the world of ocean-loving humans. The particular Zoom was the latest step in a journey we’d just begun earlier this year, when we recorded this interview. On my Zoom screen were members of the Surfrider Foundation from all over the country logged on for a discussion with historian Scott Laderman author of the book Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing. For those of you who don’t know much about Surfrider, here is the organization’s mission statement:
The Surfrider Foundation is dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s ocean, waves and beaches, for all people, through a powerful activist network.
This conversation with Dr. Laderman was the second in an ongoing series Brad and I are organizing through our local Surfrider chapter and putting up on a YouTube channel for all to learn from.* We’re hoping to talk with scholars and artists, filmmakers and poets, and any other humans whose work can help all of us who love the ocean understand “access” in ways that are more cognizant of our country’s history at home and abroad and the ways the politics of whiteness have impacted access to the places we ocean lovers hold dear.
During one moment in a rich and informative talk Dr. Laderman discussed the way localism, the tendency of surfers to keep their own line-ups for and to themselves, reinforces white supremacy and someone asked him, what should be put in its place. He said, I don’t want to sound all airy fairy but we could just be nice to one another. Later he said (I’m paraphrasing) we need to enter these surfing spaces with reverence for where we are in this moment, mindful and informed about our past, so that we can be effective stewards of the experiences open to future generations.
With knowledge, comes power. Brad Turner has a tremendous amount of both to offer. Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Brad: My name is Bradley Turner. I am 38 and I have been surfing for going on 21 years.
Maia: Wonderful! We are on your front porch near Carolina Beach [correct] where we have surfed now a few beautiful mornings together. We had some good days— one of them I had to overcome terror more than once.
Brad: It’s okay, it comes…
Maia: Okay good so that there are so many exciting things about your life and your relationship to the ocean I hope we can get into but would you start by telling us a little bit about this nonprofit organization you are instrumental in. And my understanding is there it basically has two names two different legs of the body, if you could tell us little bit about that.
Brad: Sure I run the East Coast variation of Inkwell Surf which is based out of Santa Monica, California. Additionally Black Girl Surf, and we deal with coaching and mentorship for the younger kids and we also provide a release for them in the ocean and just a place where they can discuss how they feel will and have an opportunity to see things that they normally wouldn’t see.
Maia: And are these primarily children of color?
Brad: They are.
Maia: Okay and we’re in North Carolina and I started to surf, now it’s 14 years ago, and I played sports growing up in North Carolina and one of the first things I noticed when I entered what I thought of as a sporting space— I’ve come to understand it as something much more akin to a religious order [definitely] almost with a discipline and a worldview but at that point I was thinking of it as a sport and I noticed right away that unlike almost any other sports environment that I had been in, there were almost no people of color in the lineup.
Brad: I can agree.
Maia: And that, it was startling to me and set me on this path of figuring out why? Why that happened and I hope we can talk more about the ways that you have been working to address that disparity and and some of the history that got us to this conundrum but first, please would you tell everybody about how you started out your adventure as a surfer? Brad: I started my adventure as a surfer back in the year of 2001 to deal with what I was experiencing at the time in the military at Camp Lejeune which is in Jacksonville, North Carolina. The first place I surfed was on base at Onslow Beach. That, that is my home break. At the time I was bored in the barracks, it was a hot summer and a few of my friends, we decided to go out to Onslow Beach and I had taken a boogie board and ridden my first wave. I had never seen the ocean, mind you…
Maia: Wow! How old were you at this point? Brad: I want to say I was 17 at the time and that one that one moment it, it replays as if I’d press rewind over and over again. I’m sure like every other surfer they remember that that first wave it was magical. I took off on, on a boogie board and I’ve never stopped since. LAUGH
Maia: So you took off on that first magical wave on Onslow Beach— Were you a strong swimmer at that point?
Brad: I’ve always been a strong swimmer. I played in pools as a kid. Eventually in middle school to high school I was a maintenance man apprentice and began to work on pools with the chemicals and such and cleaning it and also enjoying the luxury of swimming in it. So, yes I’ve always been drawn to the water in one way, shape, or form. It’s always been a place where I’ve felt comfortable.
Maia: OK, good so you’re in Camp Lejeune, you take off on that wave, and did you know right then that you were going to come back?
Brad: I was hooked! I think Kelly Slater termed it once, it’s like joining the Mafia, once you’re in you’re never getting out [LAUGH]. Yeah, I was hooked for life at that point.
Maia: And did you, did you have friends who you were in the military with who were standup surfing at that point who you started to go with? Brad: I unknowingly found out that America’s best and brightest, the tip of the spear as we say in the military, I was, I was surfing around them. I slowly learned their names and their stories. Most of them were special operators and I learned that that’s how they be compressed. They did their job for America and they came home and surfed. Many of them are still my friends and we all surf to help deal with her different paths and journeys in life.
Maia: Interesting! I’ve never been in the military, I do have some— my uncle was a career Navy enlisted and then officer and it has always struck me that for many people who serve especially for more than just a couple years that there’s they’re repeated traumas inherent in the job description and we I mean we have with all sorts of developing and ongoing research showing that surfing is a uniquely or at least exceptionally effective way of dealing with trauma. So it sounds like you just what happened into this community who had figured this out for themselves?
Brad: Correct and it just so happened that drawing to become a Navy corpsman which is the individuals who are attached to the Marines— from the Army would call us the medic. We’re there for medical attention, for, in the field, religious purpose and so on and so forth. And it just so happens that, you know, we were healing together in the water— doc and Marines— we were redoing it together, on the same journey, healing together. Not knowing the terminology at the time but we were, were definitely on the same vibration.
Maia: You weren’t talking about it you were just doing it.
Brad: Correct!
Maia: And how long was that period of your life that you were surfing at Onslow Beach and serving as a Navy Corpsman?
Brad: I served off and on entirely throughout the military for five and half years.
Maia: And did you grow up in North Carolina?
Brad: I did not. I was born in Canton, Ohio— football Hall of Fame! Just about when I was two or three, my mother and I, we moved down to Georgia from Georgia to the military from Norcross, Georgia.
Maia: So you were in the military for five and half years, you learned how to surf with, it turned out people who form the tip of the spear [correct]? Fascinating! And then you transitioned out of the military…
Brad: I did. The transition was a little Rocky, to say the least. I was dealing with a lot at the time: divorce, getting out of the military, moving away from that dynamic and learning how to be a civilian again. All those things culminating together different. I can say that throughout that surfing definitely kept me afloat, as it were, and I can go even further and say that it, it went as far as saving my life [really?]. Yes, yes.
I’s been instrumental in many points that I‘ve been very much at the bottom of the barrel it is definitely been my, my place of salvation. Yeah, I don’t know where I would be without surfing if we were to to be perfectly honest and upfront about it. Right now, if I want to think about it I can’t I can’t pinpoint where I would be without surfing life so I’m pretty thankful, very grateful. It has me or talking to you!
Maia: Oh my goodness, yes! And I am so grateful for being able to be here talking to you and I never would’ve found you with, without surfing myself.
So, as far as I can tell, the primary audience for these interviews is not surfers and one of the reasons that I love doing this podcast is that I’ve spent— I’m 54 years old at this point and I have spent might my adult life on the very edges of grown-up employment And as many surfers do and even before I was surfing I always knew that I needed to have the what we think of is the real-world aspects of my life which basically means the economic aspects of my life. that those parts of existence needed to not undermine my relationship with the more than human world in my ability to be active in and learning from it. So, one of the great parts about getting older is that you start to understand what you have to offer in new ways and and I’ve come to believe at this point with the zeal of the evangelical that it’s not just we as individuals who need to learn how to work less and play more, and be in our bodies, and have relationships with the more than human world, it’s not just we as individuals who need that, although we desperately do, it’s actually the entire planet that needs us to [oh, yes] to temper our priorities with these relationships in this web of life [definitely].
So, I’m very interested in how you would describe the value, I mean, you’re really clear about saying. “If it weren’t for surfing, I don’t know where I would be. I think it could’ve been really bad. It saved my life.” [Right] How did it do that?
Brad: I don’t know how to speak outside of surfing [Go ahead. please do] so I apologize for those who do not surf. It’s, it’s been basically an ebb and flow, a tidal adventure, drawn by the moon if we’re to go that far!
Maia: Yes, please let’s go all the way!
Brad: Yes it’s um… it’s been very beneficial definitely when I got out there was a veil that was lifted from my eyes as a African-American who served our country I started to see and feel in the real world that, what I fought for as a black person, I didn’t feel— I don’t know how to describe it, the same when I got out but my surfboard in the ocean it kept me balanced throughout the waves of difficulty that I experience. Even with people with different viewpoints I’ve surfed with, been best friends and had deep discussions in and out of the water which I think of a lot of the world needs right now. I’ve sat on the beach Onslow Beach of Carolina Beach of Wrightsville Beach of many beaches and talked to people who are real who they have real stories to their life, purpose. The ocean despite whether they surf or not allow some the release what they may be holding inside. I mean I’ve been lucky enough to be a surfer in and all of that happened in the water and I get to ride the, you know everlasting vibration starting at one point with wind and forming a wave. I’m grateful I hope that everybody can discover the, the blue mind, if you will, be able to apply it to their life and heal maybe I can help you I would love to.
Maia: yes I think you can help a great many people and that will be sure and put up a link to J Nichols’ book Blue Mind which you and I both read and less it is essentially the idea is that just being near the water heater have to be in it for the surfboard but just looking at the lake looking at the creek even looking at a photograph of the water can lower your blood pressure and chill you out. Brad: yes
Maia: Okay so you were in the military and you had one idea of the America that you were serving [correct]. You left the military and what I heard you say was that America turned out to not exist outside of the institution of the military
Brad: through my lens that’s correct [okay] As an African American who served in the military yes okay that’s exactly what I would say my experience my personal experience was like
Maia and did you run into was it a difference in opportunity for you or was it a difference in attitude of your fellow Americans are what what what was different
Brad: I would check all of those boxes. On one hand the military, we were almost encouraged to work with each other to form one team and, you know, accomplish one goal and individuals from all around the world and all throughout the country working in a small knit community we have to get along and work through our individual differences. We worked as a team of blue, if you will, in the Navy or we all were green as we would say of Marines.
Outside of the base it didn’t feel the same, it felt divided. that American dream that we all talk about and reach towards it felt a little, a little more out of reach once I stepped outside of the gate. I used to hear the stories that my, my grandfathers and uncles who also served in the military talked about with regards to racism and you know their experience and you know for some reason as an African-American is served I was almost too naïve to think that we had moved past that as well because of the work experience in the military and it being so diverse it be calling each individual that I worked with family you are my brother you are my sister you know despite where you were raised how you were raised. I learn about your story you learn about my story let’s work together move together that’s how I thought America work outside of the military as well. I was quickly smacked in the face with reality as far as that goes.
I moved to a town called Wilmington North Carolina the history was a little overwhelming but through learning and my own personal experience it open my eyes in through discovery and conversations with locals it allowed me to learn where I resided and I know I just felt different almost ostracized from from that dream that I was you know I signed up for
Maia: Yeah I ‘m… I’m a white person in a country that has a long stubborn history of white supremacy so I can’t really understand what you went through but I do know that if something like that had happened to me it would hurt my feelings to the– on an existential level it would… I would feel betrayed um… and, and that would be traumatizing, a very difficult thing to come back from because if you— first of all you don’t get this years back of believing, that feeling duped, “I just did this thing is a big thing I did” this her and then to connected to a know that everybody in this community no this that there are people of color who are serving their country in this way and to still have those attitudes in touring and that history be you know as best swept under the carpet and at worst celebrated, It must be horrifying for you it, it’s horrifying for me
Brad: Well what I would describe it as my my experience getting out was more of awakening that everyone is, going through right now as we speak. An eye-opening experience. It was a trial by fire personally with me, learning my worth as a black man in America. Despite service, like, I was black at the end of the of the day. I was still a black man and my service, it was almost rendered, you know, moot.
Which hurts. It sent me through a heavy depression. I went through a lot of drinking and a lot of different paths that I had to reach out to the ocean to rebalance myself each time with those personal struggles. At one point throughout all of that I eventually met Rhonda Harper who runs Inkwell Surf initially out of Santa Monica where she mentored inner-city kids, and allowed them touch tanks to learn about the ocean, and how to maintain their environment and also keep the ocean clean and also to surf and allow them to know that it’s a space for them to be as well.
Inkwell initially was a space where only African-Americans could go in California. Ronald was instrumental in having the area recognized with a plaque for Mr. Nick Gabaldon who was of African-American and Latino descent and he was a great surfer. He surfed with the best of them and he he lives on to this day throughout, throughout all of us with his story. And I carry that on and pass it on to the next generation that I work with here on the East Coast. Rhonda has been instrumental in teach me the ways of what she does and I have implemented with her direction a program on the East Coast to do the same thing. And it’s been magical. It’s been a journey. I’m a disabled veteran and I take the rest of my income and apply to the program. And slowly we’re gaining traction. Unfortunately, with the demise of George Floyd we all had to take a moment and reflect what’s going on in the world. And from kids to the elderly we’ve all had to, I don’t know, pay attention to what’s always been there in front of our face the elephant in the room, if you will. The racist elephant in the room if you will. And Rhonda recently organized the paddle out that you helped me organize locally.
Maia: This is how we found each other [correct]I’m so grateful for that solidarity answer
Brad: Correct. That was a magical moment for me— meeting individuals like yourself that made me leaving in humanity again. That showed me that people do care about compassion and, you know, that we stand together against this wave of injustice and are just going to get on the wave or wipe out, here we are, we’re all surfing together, riding together in solidarity. I still haven’t really reflected on that day, it was it was that big was too jittery to write a speech. It just kinda just came out of me in I’m told it was a great speech [It was incredible!].
I haven’t heard it but you know it was very moving to say the least don’t think I can really place words on the feeling that I experience. Everyone came together the traditional surfing way were we paddle out and pay respects to those who have passed. And for everybody collectively to come and paddle out and say that black lives matter… it, it brought me to tears. It took the breath out of me. There was a young man that I’ve known my whole military career that showed up that day— He took the air out of me. Because he’s seen my journey up until this point I still surf with him on the regular at my local spot at the Pipe at Carolina Beach. For him to show up that day as a married older man when I met him as a grom on Onslow Beach and, and show up at that paddle out it was very moving for me it’s
Maia: It says something about your life for sure that and at that moment and especially now since you are, you’ve really stepped up and stepped into this role as elder, as mentor to, to young people. To see the results of a relationship, to see somebody grow into a compassionate person who is willing to take a stand it’s gotta be hopeful.
Brad: It’s been it’s been a struggle in my head. We all struggle with personal choices in our lives and I chose to help people heal, despite my own struggles and, it’s just the way I’ve have always been. I’m a very compassionate person. When it’s time to stand up and fight for what’s right you’ll usually find me there, whether it’s through surfing or art our any other medium that I’m capable of doing. You’ll usually find me there.
Maia: Tell us a little bit about your life as an artist.
Brad: It’s kind of been there as a release for me— before surfing. Where I was able to escape to and kind of make my own world. I graduated from Cape fear community college with my associate in fine arts and right there after they hired me as a tutor to tutor the whole program— printmaking, art history, photography, the videography program— what have you. I was there for the next generation in line. And I met some amazing people in the art industry in Wilmington, North Carolina. Unfortunately, with my health in decline I haven’t been able to, to work with my art as much but I’ve been busy with Inkwell and other surf avenues so…
Maia: And you’re a dad…
Brad: That definitely keeps me busy. I am the father of a beautiful nine-year-old going on 20— Bethany Alden Turner. Her first name is derived from Bethany Hamilton the surfer. More so for her struggle and still being a professional surfer despite the struggles.
Maia: she too has overcome true adversity
Brad: I just tip my hat every time I watch a video of her surfing. Her surfing with one arm puts my surfing with two arms to shame any day.
Maia: Well that is true and you are also an amazing surfer. She is just somehow on another plane.
So you and I just met a little while ago and, and we met through this paddle out and I want to tell the story briefly because it was such an important moment for me. So, I am in, as everybody else is, this post George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery moment looking for a way to do something I know not what. I just know that it can’t be about me and so I reached out to Rhonda after I saw that there was a Solidarity In Surf event in California. And said, “Okay I would love to have one of these here.” And she said “Well is Wilmington anywhere near Carolina Beach? “Why, yes it is.” And she said okay I will put you in touch with Brad Turner, and that’s how we found each other. And I have been so grateful, not just for that moment because it was really a turning point for me I would say in my entire really life as a surfer since those first questions came to me like where are all black surfers, why, where are they because literally maybe 1/100 maybe when I 200 surfers out there are not white never mind black.
Okay so so we meet at your Solidarity in Surf, which is incredible in such a beautiful, profound, moving moment, mostly white people– but one thing that I saw happened during that event was we’re in our circle on the beach the way these events work is you circle up on the beach you say some words you paddle out and circle up in the water splashing through flowers more words then you come back what I noticed happening as we were circling up listening to your incredibly moving speech were these two African-American families who came up and joined us and were so moved by what you were saying and I think by the whole scene there. And it really made me proud in a way to be a surfer that I have really not been. It many proud of our community surfers and I thought, “You know those kids just have suddenly gotten a different view of surfing than they ever could have gotten without you and that speech and that moment.” And it was so intensely beautiful and transformative for me
Brad: You know the family that you are speaking about I got to see that moment in photos and it’s pretty hard to look at them currently tearing up sorry about that at [no need to apologize] that was, was a powerful moment I can I can barely looked up at those photos because it was just a beautiful day and that, that very moment got captured and I don’t know if I can translate how it made me feel that day other than powerful and moving.
Maia: It was amazing and and and I— in no way do I mean to denigrate at all or minimize your service as a Navy corpsman but it made me realize that, I mean you’re still a very young elder. You are very youthful elder— it really put me in touch with the, the potential power of you to serve and I don’t, I don’t know if there are many people who can do what you did that day. I mean that, that seemed a unique especially in this environment— in this—
And we, you talked about Inkwell Beach which was an African-American beach in Southern California we had black beaches here [that is correct] as did many places especially in segregated states that really all over the country where it was de facto segregation is not legal segregation and those black beaches were, were crucial to African-Americans relationship to the water and just ability to decompress and reach this feeling that you have so eloquently described. And it was systematically and frequently violently remove. That access was removed. [Very much so] Mostly by white real estate developers and their allies who wanted that land for themselves [That would be the correct]. Freeman Beach [yes] yes is the name of the local beach which was owned by the Freeman family along with a lot of inland acreage as well [correct] and will link to this historian and some podcast interviews about it.
There’s a wonderful book called The Land Was Ours that you turned me onto and they’re a couple of podcast interviews with, with Dr. Kahrl the author.
But basically the disproportionate application of laws— one reading for, for the Freeman’s and another reading of the law for the white families. And the, the Army Corps of Engineers decisions to save white recreational fishing grounds after white fishermen complained and instead route this cut, which is not called Snows Cut, in a way that the environmental impact was all on the Freeman property.
Brad: That is correct.
Maia: And that kind of environmental racism has happened throughout our country’s history. The environmental movement writ large is dominated by white people who have worked to save their own playgrounds much as those white recreational fishermen did and in the act of saving “special places” in a lot of ways— and I’m not a historian, but a lot of ways in my opinion white environmentalists have at best ignored the disproportional impact of places that are very special to the people who live in them and love them and whose babies play in the dirt of them and the water of them. And it really feels like, post-Breonna Taylor, post-George Floyd, we have a moment in which leadership of these mainline environmental organizations is open in a way that they haven’t been before [I agree]. I hope that’s, that remains true you have what I think it’s just a tremendously beautiful vision. Would you please talk about your vision? Brad: Well, my vision for Inkwell and Black Girl Surf locally— I would like a safe space here in Wilmington, North Carolina— more specifically Carolina Beach that would be available for the youth to come and acquire mentorship, coaching, education— a space, much like I said, for release, a safe space, that’s their own, within reach to the ocean. Most of these kids that I plan to work with, and work with now are far from the beach and they live within the city’s reach.
Maia: Yeah, we’re were talking 10 miles which you for most of us who have cars and trucks is nothing but these kids have neither [correct]. And the busses where we live in Wilmington, North Carolina— there was at one point a streetcar line that ran from downtown to Wrightsville Beach. That’s why the street car was put in. The streetcar was taken out with many other streetcars in the 20th Century. The bus service the public bus service does pickup in downtown Wilmington but Wrightsville Beach, at this point, will not allow the buses to drop off in the town of Wrightsville Beach. This, to me, is a problem and that I hope at some point we can address. You hand I have been talking with an organization called Surfrider that is very focused on access to beaches, but you’re talking about the next level.
Brad: Correct, in my vision I would describe it as a surf STEM program with a little bit art included [Surf STEAM]. There you go that’s to summarize how I would describe the my vision for Inkwell Surf and Black Girl Surf to acquire a plot land and space where we can make those dreams come true, to have that opportunity to say “This space which at one time belonged to the African-American community, is now attainable to these kids.” And that’s a remarkable dream to think about and hopefully with the community’s help and Surfrider and a few other organizations we can make that happen.
Maia: I know from my own life that— you want to learn what you need to learn to survive always and once your survival is assured you want to learn what you need to learn to allow love to flourish. And people fall in love with the ocean… I mean they fall in love at the ocean— you got married on the beach very close to where you surf.
Brad: I did, my local break at Carolina beach— I got married right beside the Pipe there and I love it! It’s a very spiritual place for me every morning when I go paddle out with my friends I welcome everyone. Maia: I mean, your service is built around that love— You’re a healer this is what you’ve been doing your whole adult life and now you seem to be very clear on who you would like to help heal and how. And it strikes me as only good stewardship of our community resources that we, the collective we, of southeastern North Carolina put enough wind in your sails so that you can do the work that you seem to me predisposed, and uniquely able to do.
What would you say to, I mean, you are a responsible adult— you know how to maintain a disciplined existence, I could never make it in the military so my hat is off to you! What would you say to other sort of stressed, harried, overwhelmed grown-ups who don’t take time, or make time, or feel like they have time to get out into the more than human world, to get out into nature and be active. Make your best case for for why they should try
Brad: I think we live in a dettached world. We’re all intermingled and entangled into our electronics. I think we’ve taken our attention away from nature and, you know, a lot of pressure on everyone. We’re very stressed out people and I think will be very beneficial for everybody to take a look at the ocean, smell it, listen to it. If you’re brave enough, stick your toes in it. It will surprise you. There are some people who have a lot of fears about it but I believe in in learning about dangerous things that you deem fearful. You can go far. With knowledge there comes power. So, a healthy education about the ocean with would definitely be a first step, I would suggest. There’s a lot of learning to do but it comes with steps, or waves, if you if you will.
Maia: If you will. And you are married to a scientist right of the water quality experts I suspect you are all the time learning by osmosis [correct- LAUGH] in addition to your intentional study, which I know is that is also ongoing.
Maia: So, one of the driving assumptions and orienting beliefs around this Waves to Wisdom interview project is that as I entered the community of surfers I began to realize that surfing is much more than a sport and much more than a way to just get outside. It seemed to assume the role that religion or spiritual discipline assumes in the lives, not just of, you know, some devout people who go to church on Sunday, or go to Synagogue on Saturday or or pray a couple times, a week. But really much more along the lines of people whose full days are structured around this relationship to a higher power. It looked like surfers were, were very similar to you know, monks who had taken orders, or to devout Muslims who always know which way Mecca is, and are ready five times a day to make sure that they have in mind what their sacred power is asking of them. And it starting to feel like, for some people, not for everybody— some people are just out there for the rush, and they’re grumpy and not necessarily on a spiritual what we think of is a spiritual path but for some people this really helps them figure out meaning and purpose in joy and beauty and was a discipline. You think I’m on to something? Brad: Oh, definitely. I think we all feel the same vibration that’s in tune with the waves the ocean sends our way. And, it’s a therapeutic environment I dunno, it just draws you in, heals you without you even asking it to. I don’t know, it’s powerful. What can I say— it’s where I go and speak to my higher power. It’s where I go and release. I just feel it is beneficial for me to pass along to others as many as I can, old, young whatever dynamic you can throw in front of me. I just want to help people heal through water, through waves hopefully.
So wonderful!
Aside of that, I’d just love to crush of those stereotypical ideals that you know, black people don’t do this or that— fill in the blank. As a kid I heard a lot growing up in Georgia. To my surprise here we are doing everything from the moon literally to the bottom of the oceans, and the surface now— we surf, we swim. All the way in Africa around is in Senegal right now. Most people would say that you know those things swimming and surfing they are not attached to Africa but I would have to disagree.
I would almost say that, as a coastal people, they also had their own watermen’s story to tell…
Maia: Absolutely! And as a matter fact maybe one of the most famous surf movies of all time is Endless Summer. Plenty of people were not surfers saw that movie and one of the lies really untruths I don’t I don’t know that Bruce Brown did this on purpose he was probably just ignorant but they go to the West Coast of Africa and Bruce Brown, who’s narrating it, says this is the first time anyone’s ever seen surfing in Africa. And as a matter fact one of the first times that Europeans saw surfing, people riding boards recreationally in waves, was Cape Coast Castle, Ghana— long before [that’s correct] any white Americans had decided to surf. And we know for sure that people of color were surfing in Hawaii for centuries.
Brad: Right, and that very spot you’re speaking of, Ngor Island in Bruce Brown’s and Endless Summer that’s exactly where Rhonda is coaching local kids providing surfboards and lessons right there as Ngor Island at the local break making a change for the male and female population providing an education and mentorship right at that very spot but yeah in the video you can see Bruce Brown and the like surfing right there at the break and the local kids looking very tribal and cheering them on. you’ll now discover in that same spot that we surf too. Um, there is a hunger and a drive in the African and African-American, and each diaspora to surf. When we’re close to the ocean. It’s a beautiful moment to, to lay eyes on. You know, I started surfing very young and learning about the dynamics and the history and I am finding out much like my own Black history that there are gaps in surfing history that need to be told. and seeing it in Senegal right now is just beautiful. There are little groms with broken surfboards with the biggest smiles taking off on taking off on waves, you know, right there outside of their door. That’s something that you wouldn’t think would be tangible here in the US. As a matter of fact, I can’t really think of a place where that’s a thing here in the US where kids can go out the door, maybe a few yards from the beach and say this is my local spot.
Maia: Certainly not black kids. Plenty of little white kids.
Brad: Oh yeah, that’s the standard, I would say.
Maia: And we will link to some, some really powerful histories of how we got into this situation. And we actually live at the very northern tip of an historically African cultural community called the Gullah Geechee
down to Jacksonville, Florida— the southern tip of it. And until the transition of ownership around real estate values— waterfront real estate values started, there were really, especially on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, a lot of African culture endured. And so many of the things that we think of as Southern, like Shrimp and Grits, are really African!
Brad: Oh yeah!
Maia: And I don’t think a lot of people are talking about that. And I think it’s time we started.
Brad: Definitely! Maia: OK, good. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? Brad: Just like to let everybody know that, you know, as far as the surfing community goes, Inkwell Surf, Black Girl Surf, and many other organizations— we’re out here and we’re trying to make a difference in the community through surfing. Through surf therapy, through competition, through mentorship. And I think with this new wave of change we can all come together and make some things happen in the surf community to make it right. Make everybody feel like they belong at the beach and everybody feel comfortable. I can always use a hand. You can check out Inkwell Surf and Black Girl Surf and I would very much like for everyone to donate wherever they can— financially, with a surfboard, a wetsuit, your personal time volunteering. I’m a disabled vet so a helping hand would definitely be appreciated in any aspect and we’re looking for the whole community to come together and make a beneficial change for the surf community and hopefully let these kids know that, you know, they have a place on the beach just like everyone else. Hopefully, I can be beneficial to that happening.
Maia: Or instrumental.
Brad: Or instrumental. Thank you
Maia: Yes! We will make sure that it’s easy for everybody to find you and find your cause. And we’re still at the very beginning of figuring that out- figuring out ways to support you. So if anybody out there has any expertise, [yes, please] you know, fundraising or project management or any of that sort of thing we are wide open to your input.
Brad: Yes, very much so!
Maia: And I can hardly wait until the next time we surf again!
Brad: Oh, thank you!
Maia: Thank you! So much for your time in doing this—it’s been, as usual, a thorough pleasure.
Brad: It’s been a blessing, thank you.
Maia: And we’ll see you in the lineup very soon!
Brad: Oh, for sure and hopefully there’s another dolphin.
Maia: Oh my gosh, tell the story about the dolphin!
Brad: LAUGH
Maia: Do! Tell that story!
Brad: So, the day before yesterday we were all having a session out at the pipe and right in front of you pops up a beautiful, beautiful dolphin. You kind of have to make one of those split-second decisions as a surfer. To decide whether it’s a shark or a dolphin and it was a dolphin, so close that you could touch it.
Maia: I was amazing!
Brad: They often show up there and it’s always magical.
Maia: It blew out of its blowhole and I got spray on me! It was incredible! I felt like I was Baptized! It was to powerful and wonderful!
Brad: That’s how we do it at The Pipe!
Maia: Oh my goodness! Holy cow- yeah, I want that to happen every time!
Brad: Only way to make it happen is to show up and surf…
Maia: Keep showing up! I intend to do exactly that, Sir! Thank you so much for your time I am so grateful!
Brad: Thank you!
Maia: I want to end this interview with a few words about whiteness, my whiteness. When Brad talks about learning about what we deem fearful, he could be describing my own heart when it came to developing deeper understandings of the ways whiteness has played out in my life, what I’ve seen and, perhaps more important, what I’ve easily ignored.
Now, I hold a deep hope that these interviews offer something substantial to all humans, but right now, I have a few words for those of us who, to loosely quote James Baldwin and Ta’ Nahesi Coats, those of us who “believe we are white.” Unconfronted, the lie of “whiteness,” can make the expanse of what we don’t know, the territory of our own ignorance, oceanic in its scale.
Dipping your toes in the water of the knowledge that might reveal that ignorance might mean letting go of some long-held patterns and assumptions— It can seem terrifying but once you get those toes wet and wade out into the water, a lot like surfing, you can learn to value the tumbles and tossing you’ll get as you learn new ways of seeing. I began to relish every wipeout as I watch my ignorance evaporate, bit by bit.
Have I lost you? What does whiteness have to do with surfing? In its modern construction, especially in the popular imagination, ideas of whiteness are foundational to our understanding of what it means to live a coastal lifestyle. These dynamics continue to play themselves out on beaches all over the U.S. and all over the world even as people of color reclaim or claim anew the pastime, riding boards on ocean waves, that the ancestors of Hawaiians and West Africans and other people of color invented— and that some of them never let go of.
So when we, when I, went to the waves and felt afraid that the locals might make me feel unwelcome, because I was a stranger, because I was a woman, because I didn’t know how to surf, because I was old, or because I don’t look straight, or because of a million things I was scared of, either real or imagined, one thing I never had to worry about was the next level of vitriol that I might face if my skin were darker. I never had to contend with 400 years of systems that worked against my family building the wealth and a culture of access that allowed me to have the leisure and resources to get to the waves and be right! And in the process find so much more than surfing.
I never had to contend with a history that worked even more insidiously after segregation became illegal. As the poet Ross Gay says after the “Brown v. Board of Education…” Supreme Court decision, the U.S., north and south, ‘[inaugurated] an era of great racist innovation.” Increased entry fees at public pools where kids might learn to swim, increased parking fees, decreased public transportation, and a million other apparently race-blind decisions, had deeply disparate racial impacts.
None of this learning I’m inviting you to engage in means we, not you and not I, have to disregard or disconnect from the hurts we’ve suffered. It’s not about that. It’s about making time and space to learn our history and see who isn’t here with us and why. It’s about opening up to the truth of who we have been, of who we were taught to be without thinking, and in the process, opening up to, regardless of who and what we personally intended, the truth of who we are. It’s the kind of truth that must precede not just reconciliation, but healthy relationships– between humans, yes, but also our relationships with ourselves and with the more than human world.
Something comes in the place of these old patterns, once we start to dismantle them. What came for me was an unending gift I’m still, after years of wonder and discovery, just seeing the outlines of, like a massive headland emerging from the fog— it’s one that has a thousand promising and abundant paths for further adventures.
Now this one path, the one I began alone, the one that allowed me to find Brad at the Pipe during Solidarity in Surf— it made space for us to collaborate on a plan, to work with a local, predominantly white organization that hasn’t focused on barriers people of color. We drafted a proposal for a new volunteer position with the Cape Fear Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. I’ll put a copy of the proposal on the website for you to use as you see fit. Our collaboration is just at its beginning and it’s already been a profound gift to me.
The capacity of water to dissolve artificial barriers, not just between ourselves and others but between our deepest, most wounded selves and the healing we need, in whatever way we most need to heal, has been unparalleled in my life. So has dealing honestly with the way I was able to access that relationship with the ocean just because I decided to and, more important, dealing with the fact that it occurred to me in the in the first place to seek healing in the ocean and looking squarely at the ways that ease of access might be one aspect of whiteness, well has led to some of the most difficult, rewarding, utterly beautiful rides of my life.
I invite you white-bodied surfers to join me on this heart expanding journey of connection and healing. There will be links to the YouTube channel, to Inkwell and Black Girl Surf, and to many other resources on the Waves to Wisdom website, with this interview. I heartily, really, with my whole heart, encourage other surfers who believe they are white to ride some of these challenging waves too. I promise, Brad is right. With knowledge comes power.
Peaking waves: Nearing the end of The Plague Winter...
Last night I went out to photograph with a dear friend, another lover of light and shadow. It seemed like such a long season ahead of us when we both settled in to ride out The Plague Winter in Wilmington, NC. Now, only a couple of weeks away from the equinox, it is almost time for him to leave.
I’m so glad this winter is almost over, yet not quite ready to let it go. It’s a familiar feeling, this desire to stay here, to keep riding this one wave.
I’m pretty old. I know myself. I do not now, nor will I ever, feel ready. It isn’t how I’m wired. I’m a grabber on-er, a holder closer. But I have gotten just a little better at not fighting the losses. The waves come and then break. And there are always more of them.
Those of us still here, still inhaling as we move closer to the aftermath of this Great Plague, have The Great Gift, our lives, and an unusually potent lesson in the value of just drawing breath with those we love, of being close enough to watch them do the same.
I have a young friend who is facing one of the most painful challenges of loss all survivors have to face. This today, sent me back to the beloved and powerful teacher, Pema Chödrön (When Things Fall Apart).
She writes about our primal existential fears, and how they all arise from fear of death, from “Yama Mara.” But she sees a twist— really, what we fear, she says, is a fully lived life of presence and attention and love. Our deepest terror comes with fear of all of the loss and the awful, exquisite pain such a life inevitably means. The price of love is grief.
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again… So even though we say the Yama Mara is fear of death, it’s actually fear of life.”
By witnessing, by attending, by bowing in gratitude to the light in darkness and the darkness in light, and—even in the times of deepest darkness, when it seemed terrifying, or downright insane to do so— if we have still found a way to exist in love, then we have done what we can do.
We’ve lived.
Go here for a wonderful discussion of When Things Fall Apart between Krista Tippet and Devendra Banhart.
Love and cabbage
On the National Cabbage Day in the Year of the Plague
_________________________
LOVE
Let the more loving one be me."
"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
~ bell hooks, All About Love
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention...
~Mary Oliver
“We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?”
~ Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love
"Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny”
~ John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
CABBAGE (and fish)
~Cabbage: A Global History, Meg Muckenhoupt
“Give a man a fish, and he will be hungry again to-morrow; teach him to catch a fish, and he will be richer all his life.” ~Source unknown
___________________________
1.
If you’ve never encountered a braided stream, they are a wonder to behold.
According to the National Park Service, braided streams and rivers have multi-threaded channels that branch and merge to create the characteristic pattern. These sections of river “are highly dynamic with mid-channel bars which are formed, consumed, and re-formed continuously.”
I wonder what it must be like to be a fish who lives in one of these dynamic places. A watery world that is its own thing but also connected to, always and forever revised by, its relationship to the whole? What kind of piscine mind would you develop in the practice of charting a course through an ever-shifting stream whose reaches are, by definition, forever beyond, and contributing to the place you are? How would it be to know that today the islands which, to your fish-eye view, are mountains soaring beyond the top of your world, might be gone tomorrow? To navigate a topography of obstacles or hiding places that forms and disappears at the pace of storms? To live in a place where it was obvious that it, the place, and perhaps you the sentient being, are recreated anew by the luminous water that simultaneously shapes and is being shaped by the multiplicitous forces of your surroundings and your body in those surroundings?
2.
It was Sunday morning and the Zoom screen had the dozen-plus faces I’ve come to expect. Along with those expectations— the sort that can give us the closest thing we ever get to security, there is always the promise of surprise— an insight or observation, an expression in words or just in the tilt or bow of a head, or the lift or knit of a brow. So I was not shocked when the magic happened again— when both my Covid-shaped, unusually dynamic-and-static-at-the-same-damn-time day and world changed in a Zoom-y instant. Although I know to look for the unanticipated, it never fails to leave me a little awestruck, this flow from distant sources, unseen, around the bend from which these transfiguring, numinous powers mix and surge, reforming islands in my own solitary world and ,with them, my thinking and seeing…
But first I need to tell you a story of one person’s heartfelt effort and complete failure. I need to tell you what happened before, on this particular Sunday, the broom took flight, this wheel began spinning and a braided stream buoyed me to this day of revelry in celebration of a vegetable. For today, on this short winter trip from dark to dark in these United States, is the National Day of the Cabbage.
3.
It was just about a month ago when I assigned myself an essay. Ross Gay, who will return to this thought-stream soon, notes that the word “essay” derives from a French verb that means to try. By “essay” I suppose I mean, an attempt to form an ingestible portion of the gushing river of sentences that, in the last couple of years, has flooded the previously photo-dominated current of my creative life. An effort to form them into something someone else could take something from, perhaps something that might slake at least a little thirst.
The topic of this attempt?
Love.
The deadline?
Valentine’s Day.
I would be making this effort in my home on the coast of North Carolina, where I am not supposed to be in this cold month. When I decided that, for me, it would not feel responsible to travel to my usual winter home in Costa Rica, that I would remain here to, if possible, stay well and avoid getting or giving the Novel Corona Virus, I thought that perhaps I might also avoid all the viruses.
Valentine’s Day was three days ago.
I’ve read an inspiring, at times transformative pile of pages on the topic— love. The stacks of books that have become the temporary islands that channel my lugubrious COVID-time flow have included bell hooks and Valarie Kaur, Cornell West and John O’Donohue, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Audre Lorde, and, and, and
I live by love. I love love.
But, regardless of how much I wrote and read, and wrote and thought the sentences trickling out of me on the topic have been more breathless than usual, flapping about but under-oxygenated, frenetic, turbid with all kinds of sedimentary nonsense. In short, clarity was elusive and the stream was not one anyone would be interested in drinking from.
Meanwhile, somehow, I managed to catch a cold.
A damn cold.
Its origin is a mystery as I’ve been around almost no one and been inside precisely no indoor place for months. In recent years colds have been stubborn events in my life so, after riding a wave of outrage, I settled into what this viral battle would mean for the duration— little to no surfing which, in the current Covid-crafted society, means little to no daily social contact with the beloved humans with whom I usually share my wave-riding passion. In turn, this means little to no embodied contact, period.
But because of this self-imposed assignment— an essay on love—the outrageous reality of a minor respiratory infection also meant hour after hour to swim in the braided channel of various brilliant human hearts speaking through exceptional minds as they mused and theorized, evoked and created around this pervasive, elusive idea of love. I read a small but growing pile of shifting books and essays. With intermittent breaks to go outside and see what was happening in the winter light behind my house, under a copse of trees—sweet gums, live oaks, myrtles, and a holly. These weeks of angled sunlight and cold rain have been one of the most delicious, savory episodes of mild illness and spicy inquiry I could imagine. The time of these odd Covid months, by which I mean the temporality, the sense of time and its passage, can be so long and strange and, for some of us, lonely and sad. But this month of solitary, conscious focus on love as an idea has flown by like a delicious meal I wish I could start all over again with the moment of anticipation, of not even knowing what was on the menu. It was wonderful. This is true in no small part because my friends, the ones with whom I was not sharing wave-riding passion, kept texting me to see how I was doing, whether I was ready to get back out, and give me reports on the conditions.
I guess you could even call what they were texting “love.”
As I said, it was a great month, but there was this deadline… As February dawned, my cold hung on, and my mind and heart continued to be delighted and confused with swirling vortices of evocative perspectives on that greatest human emotion. I wrote every day. But my narrative sensibility couldn’t find a way to navigate. My writing mind was not steering, not even hanging on. I flailed and splashed. The sentences coming from my own pen flew by in what felt like a roaring rush of clouded understanding and murky expression and it began to occur to me that I might not be equal to this writing task. At least not in this timeframe.
Now, I get stuck in this place all the time— lost and swirling in sentences that come readily enough but don’t, won’t adhere to any purpose or pattern. And I often look to etymology to help me get my bearings, to find how I might possibly attempt to make truth, beauty, and meaning out of words (which, as far as I can tell, is what writing means). What with the Valentine’s Day deadline looming in only a couple of weeks, I went to “February” school.
It turns out that our word for this month is only about a century old.
“February" comes from the Roman Februa which means purification or cleansing and reflects the ritual purification feast held in this month. The Welsh called this month – y mis-bach (the little month) and the Saxons called it sprout-kale.
I thought I’d found no help from etymology. But, in retrospect, this was the first vegetable intrusion into my attempt.
I realize now the love essay was a ludicrous assignment for me. It’s the wrong word altogether. Like asking an Eskimo to write about snow or a fish to write about water. Love makes for the right life but the wrong prompt with a short time-window. Failure had arrived.
No problem! Half a life-span of making art- which is to say trying to do what I’m reasonably certain can’t be done— has left me comfortable with failure. I am easily distracted by the next effort although sometimes what form that will take can be difficult to discern for a bit. Usually, eventually, the flow between shifting islands becomes apparent and I can cheerfully begin to make my way downstream, to the next attempt, and failure with just enough intermittent success thrown in to keep me hooked. But in this case that reorientation took no time at all because just as I began to let go of the Love-Day deadline, my interior life was hijacked by cabbage.
Yes, the cruciferous kind.
4.
Remember that Zoom screen? The once from which magic emanated?
You see, when the pandemic first began to take shape and we Humans of Earth all entered an unknown chapter of unknown duration with uncertain outcomes and some unhinged political leadership, I responded to a request and announced an online group. We would meet on Zoom and engage with some creators and meaning-makers whose ideas and practices might help us find our way in this time. I hoped I might help at least a few people emerge having survived but also, on the far side of this braided, disjointed “now,” come out ready to do what was ours to do.
I’d never been a part of an online community of learning, or class so I couldn’t foresee how powerful the connections would become. In retrospect, I should not be surprised. I do know first hand from many years of teaching that groups of people who dive, with open minds and hearts, into a flow of demanding and abundant ideas and perspectives, often and automatically begin to collaborate in a mysterious process of their own meaning-making and wayfinding.
Now, many, many adolescents and the adults they grow into are understandably rigid when they think about what “classes” and “learning” are for. Traditional schooling can be life-giving— like going from not being able to swim to being able to not-drown. Learning how to navigate a concrete pool is a fine, often crucial first step.
But, although it usually stretches or blows our dualistic minds to try to get this, most of life is about being the water you drink which is the same water you must swim through (and with, and against) as you navigate life’s shifting islands and unpredictable rapids. Those rapids can be either terrifying threats or great rides (or both simultaneously), depending on your mindset and prior practices. One of the practices that can help you get a great ride (or, at least not-drown), even when the current feels (or is) dangerous and the water feels (or is) murky, is living with and through art, by which I mean carefully crafted communication of what matters most.
I suppose you might even call it an act of love. Both the engaging and the crafting.
As a teacher, my go-to pedagogy to get students to think outside the box (or pool) was to literally take them outside and, there, in the woods, on the beach, atop a mountain (anywhere beyond the boxes with roofs and the ones in our thoughts) and to get us to all read some thing that some other human had lovingly wrought. And watch. And talk. We would talk about what was going on outside as if it were in the same world as what was going on in the text.
We would read and be in place. We would read as if the world humans occupy. As if humans, including We The Readers were not just in but composed of the very stuff (earth, air, water) that made us... makes us possible. To at least try to read with others as if you don’t only live in but just plain are the world of connections between rivers and lines of text and meaning flowing on pages and blood through your own beating hearts. To work and play as we found new kinds of immersion in learning, in dynamic and shifting ways of knowing.
But most of that marching groups outside of the box was with students, self-described learners who had signed up for a class, one that was usually required. Such things are certainly possible (and just as powerful) with groups of not-students but Covid would brook no such togetherness. Now a context that meant being able to sense one another’s bodies in space, feeling the same clay, water, and air was off the table. We would have to find flow without our feet feeling the rushing water of streams while our consciousness, collective and individual, bathed in whatever current of discovery we were riding together. I was doubtful. "Online community" seemed potentially, perpetually diluted. In a word, virtual. Virtually, but never quite, real.
But that isn’t what happened. Instead this online community or class or group or whatever we are, turned out to feel a lot like the many waves I’ve been frightened of, then awestruck and, ultimately and dynamically, instructed by. The most unpredictable ones— waves that I’m not at all sure I should try— are usually the very ones that leave me basking in breathless, deeply satisfied gratitude. So, in an act of faith, when we started in March of 2020, we called this group Riding the Waves.
Almost a year has gone by. We have never been together, in an embodied sense. We are all loosely connected, not more than a few degrees of separation, but we are, as a group, not familiars, never mind intimates— or, at least, we weren’t.
When we began, I had no idea where to lead us. But as we started out talking together about contemporary research on play and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, I embraced the reality that my own ignorance and lost-ness has, when honestly articulated, often proven invaluable as a creative instigation to others. So, one of the prompts we're using is to consider ourselves “cartographers of meaning” as we move through this unprecedented landscape and follow the course of this unknown stream as it has shifted and reformed around us. Terra incognita seems to imply more stability than this moment, an epidemiologically, emotionally, and politically "dynamic" time offers. I prefer to think of us as charting a course through aqua incognita.
I know a brilliant historian who says a map is an argument about what signifies.
The “we” who formed in this online group is comprised of people who have, in the global, historical context, tremendous privilege. And we are gathering at an exceptionally pivotal time. It is the stuff of history and historic change. We all have the benefit of an education and respect the power of thought, and the dynamic, shifting natures of truth and hope. Occasionally, during one of the meetings, one of us makes something like a map, an argument, an offering about what has signified for us. The rest of us are assisted if not accompanied, in our wandering. In doing this exercise in existential cartography we’ve practiced serving someone other than ourselves and transformed ourselves in the process. The rest of us learn from those offerings that sometimes feel more like incantations than coordinates. And, when we are at our best, this feels absolutely and not at all about us, the finitude of humans represented by the gathering, figures of electrons on my screen. I think it's fair for me to generalize and say we are all grateful for one another and for the whole we formed, are forming.
After all, there’s no time like Covid Time to feel the intense importance of our social ties, and by extension, of the form and function (or disfunction) of our society. To extend the old “helping parable,” you can give a man a fish or you can teach a man to fish. I suspect that parable has a sequel we need to write together, one that goes something like this:
Or you can teach a man to fish and find ways to love him while he learns how to fish, then be with him as you both begin to learn that that fish sees and knows things you can't. So then you both fall into a deep respect for and attachment (one I suppose you could call love) to both the fish and the braided, shifting stream where you and it both draw life. And then, someday, you can watch in silence awestruck reverence as the man you taught becomes a teacher of fishing and of attachment. And, perhaps, of love.
5.
We are far downstream of the first time we met for Riding the Waves but, months later, we know we have only just begun to learn from, to integrate Viktor Frankl in our search for meaning.
This winter, as one of our possibility models and meaning prophets, we have been, at a slow, dripping pace of a few pages a day, ingesting Ross Gay’s Book of Delights. Gay, an effervescent, sometimes ecstatic poet determined he would make a daily practice of writing a tiny, complete essayette each day of the year. The subject? Something that delighted him. His capacity to feel delight grew strong in the process. So, it turns out, has ours.
If you are not currently reading this book I urge you to change that today.
For with delight, comes meaning, and a clearer course. Now, let me be clear. Although we, with the help of Ross Gay and many others, are finding our ways to meaning and to developing the capacity to share that meaning-finding, as any earnest cartographer would, there is plenty of room for being lost. We often witness one another's sadness, grief, and fear. There is plenty of space for shooting an occasional terrifying rapid of overwhelm or hopelessness. On the day I'm slowing meandering towards, the one in which the magic vapor of new meaning radiated from my Zoom screen, one of us was, in fact, having such a moment.
Solitude is good. Time alone is crucial. Reflection and rest, all good things. And warm sunshine in excess can burn the hell out of us. Too much of a good thing can, after a point, take on Biblical plague-proportions.
In this woman’s CSA boxes, the result of committing to support a local farmer year-round came huge wave after relentless wave of cabbages. The cruciferous kind. The accumulating vegetables seem to form an impenetrable, flow-stopping dam.
She was talking about herself but the magic, the alchemical whatever-this-is that keeps happening as these beautiful heartminds interact with one another through our technologies, was almost immediately palpable.
I wish I could tell you that some plot-worthy thing then happened. It didn't. We did not talk about the cabbage for long, although a couple of people did immediately share their favorite cabbage recipe. No problems were solved. And, if they had been, that would have been engineering, not magic. The transformation was subtle but existential. Like an adjustment of only a few degrees that dramatically alter the outcome of a long journey.
I don’t think any of us knew at the time that the indigenous Saxons called this month, February, in which we celebrate (mostly romantic) love, kale-month. That a surfeit of cruciferous beings in our midst might represent an ancient relationship, an eternal dance, another kind of love, a dance in which we are only the latest expressive embodying-forth... Well, I think it was something along those lines that happened in that tiny shift in our braided stream of consciousness. It was as if we all knew we had tripped over a place that needed a mark on the path, a signpost on the banks of the shifting forms.
On our way to efficiency or productivity (or some boxed-in version of love), it would have been an easy moment to overlook or denigrate as insignificant, that story about overwhelming abundance in darkness.
Encountering that dam of piles of cabbage was about coming to feel the gossamer web of being in and of a place from which you can't escape. Perhaps, in part, because you are it. And it was about nourishment begging for flavor, to be made palatable with the spice of connection to place, to farmer, to food, to water, to one another across the miles and the generations. It was about spicing up an offering for those of us who are malnourished, if not downright starving. And it was about ways we could reconfigure what is on offer, even if the task, the pile of things that need to change, is overwhelming.
One of the group pointed out that kale and cabbage (and broccoli and collards and Brussels sprouts) are all different varieties of the same species, brassica oleracea. They look completely different from one another.
We use different recipes to understand how they should come out.
But they are the same species.
Yet another subtle but profound shift.
Again, I wish I could tell you that the earth quaked.
That the Zoom Screen suddenly turned iridescent.
That lightning shot from the keyboard.
But it didn’t.
Nothing happened.
Everything happened.
There was no shift in any of my five senses.
But the water in which the body in which those senses gather information was altered by the telling of the tale of too much cabbage and of the artificial barrier we've drawn between cabbage and kale, Brussels sprouts and broccoli.
What I can tell you is that there was no longer too much cabbage. There was just enough for the monolithic CSA box to become something other than what it began as. It had become a delight.
I don’t know if we would have found our way, If I would have found my way as the group’s purported guide, or even been able to recognize the moment without Ross Gay. Without that Book of Delights. But, here’s the thing, I didn’t have to. Because he did what he did when he did it and we are all harvesting meaning from the bumper crop he sowed. We had plenty of steam to navigate this obstacle and to turn it into something else. The cabbage dam crumbled almost immediately. The woman broke into a large smile on my screen as she told the rest of her cabbage tale. The smile was more contagious than any variant this Covid monster can invent.
6.
So, I spent the last couple of weeks with this cold trying to stay warm and dry, patient and restful while the beautiful cold ocean waves broke without me. I was still reading about love, still not really writing about it while writing about it, but gave up completely on meeting the deadline for the essay on love. Instead, I opted for the lifeline of living with a cabbage.
Literally.
I placed a single purple cabbage on a ceramic vessel, a gift from one of the humans in the group.
I looked at it.
A lot.
Occasionally, I photographed it.
One day, as I was staring at the outer layers of these crumpling, curving, undulating waves of this mysterious cabbage something startling appeared in the background. It was a bird-like fluttering but gigantic, much too big to be a bird. Then the heat pump outside the window switched off and I could hear them. The giant-seeming flapping thing wasn’t a bird, it was hundreds of them. Robins to be precise. They were converging on the red holly berries on the tree at the edge of my yard.
I looked from the cabbage to the birds and back and forth and back and forth again.
I went outside, left the box, and was overwhelmed.
So many birds!
They were so loud!
I walked up the block.
Every yard had hundreds of birds, flying, pecking, calling. I hurried back to the house, put on half a dozen layers, grabbed a camera, and spent half an hour still actively not writing about love but out there, in the yard, as close to the holly as I dared to get, with the birds in front of me and the cabbage just inside the window at my back. So many birds. It was almost frightening. Almost. But, although my heart pounded and I kept catching my breath as the birds dove and ate, fluttered and sang, the feeling was of watching something mountainous form, knowing it would not last.
Then, all of a sudden, someone nearby banged on metal with metal, three loud clangs.
They all left.
Every last bird, gone.
My heart slowed.
I tried to settle with the feeling of what I'd just seen.
Annie Dillard, describing fecundity in general and dragonfly nymphs in particular, calls them “insatiable and mighty.” That is what I encountered in that yard with the cabbage at my back. At least in the context of my life, it was the most insatiable and the single mightiest form of the lingering wilds of the urban backyard.
I will never forget that feeling. 
If it weren’t for Covid I would not have been here in North Carolina.
If it weren’t for the cold I would not have been in the house.
If it weren’t for the cabbage head, I might not have been at the window.
And if I had happened past the window, I’d have likely moved away, gone back to the desk, my senses absorbed in the powerful magic of screens and sentences, words and pages, and the mesmerizing boxes they can form.
But because of the delicate but powerful draw of Fibonacci’s geometric beauty, because of the cabbages slowly desiccating outer leaves, I was there, looking outside for what had startled me from my focus.
Birds, sure.
But something the birds summoned me to.
Something we are both a part of.
Something I suppose you might even call love.
7.
After that afternoon, it seemed like the right thing to do to get ready to eat that cabbage. I had been a decent student of its teachings and was now ready to metabolize them in a new way. The birds had arrived two days before the next Riding the Waves meeting. So I would slice and cook and eat it the night before we met again. Its chemical compounds, its magic potions would be feeding me, in/forming the energy I brought to the group. If that isn’t a spiritual moment of deep love then I don’t know what is.
But, before I ate it, I would attend to it. Look at it. Perhaps delight in it. And, if it seemed right, make some photographs and write some sentences.
Our appointed hour came.
We met. We talked. Each of us calling in from the places we live, the clay and water and air from which our bodies emanate. The places from which, with the help of, among others, cabbage farmers, we draw what we need in order to keep, for now, meeting in this disembodied format.
We are keeping one another company as the mountains shift in the gushing, uncontrollable forces around us. But we are also part of the reformation, the flowing currents of one another's thoughts and lives.
Not much and everything that matters happens in these meetings.
Now, after a year, we know one another so well and not at all.
We have spent such significant time with one another and almost no time at all.
We have shared so many experiences and almost none at all.
Virtual?
Perhaps.
But also as real as life gets.
I know this possibility would not be on offer without pandemic, without this technology, without the political and climatological, and social threats and the openings they bring. Without the necessity, of embracing being lost as we revise our collective and individual courses, we would never have the opportunity of rediscovering what it means to be found.
Wayfinding.
Cartographies of meaning.
Zooming.
I suppose you could almost call it love.
So, although I failed utterly, for the moment, to write that intended essay for Valentine’s Day, I can without hesitation and with nothing but love in my heart write to the world, that I hope you, you individual human reading this, have a beautiful, meaningful, and love-filled National Cabbage Day!
Further Reading
Cabbage: A Global History
Meg Muckenhoupt
https://b-ok.cc/book/3696238/22c172?dsource=recommend
Further Reading
Cabbage: A Global History
Meg Muckenhoupt
https://b-ok.cc/book/3696238/22c172?dsource=recommend
The Darkness (and Light) of Unknowing
“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”
~ Gary Snyder
Taking place.
It’s dark.
Really, completely dark.
I can hear and feel the chunky gravel and its pointy rolling crunch underfoot as I inch my way down the long winding hill of the driveway. So, for a fleeting instant, I am almost, as they say, all ears— with a liberal dash of sole-sense coming up from the tentative, searching feet that have, at least during these first few yards, kept me from tripping over some unseen thing. The declivity, the palpable reality of the possibility of walking, and perhaps falling, downhill, feels exciting. Committed to wave-riding, I spend less time in this rolling and rocky country, and am up for a just few days from the flat wide Coastal Plain where the surf breaks. I fall down in the water all the time, but down is a different direction when you’re flying along the face of a wave with water to welcome you in. The surface my feet creep along now is impenetrable, hard, and not fit for human entry. The welcome I feel from this land is, in this sense only, purely superficial.
In addition to the twenty years I’ve lived here, at least some days and nights of the year, part of what makes this hillside feel like home is that I’m not so far from the subdivision where I grew up. The place where my first memories of exploration and discovery formed in relation to the fractal and chaotic shapes of the trees and branches, riffles and creek banks, and the rolling hills with occasional rocky outcrops that seemed to emerge from an enchanted underground world that began just behind our brick ranch— a house defined, as they all were, by the Euclidean predictable. This day’s darkness is one of the first subfreezing nights of the year here in the North Carolina Piedmont, in the upper reaches of the river basin where most of my 20,000 odd days (and nights) as a human in the world have taken place.
It’s a beautiful phrase.
To “take place.”
I’ve spent my plentiful awake-in-the-dark hours during these long nights of this 2020 Solstice season trying to learn from the darkness of the places, and of this time, instead of automatically obscuring it with electric (or electronic) light and all that the light brings with it. Instead of treating darkness like a not-place between real places that are lit, like an interstate, that needs to be sped through to get to the destination, I’m trying to feel the reality that darkness is crucial, even if it is a passage. So, after all, are lit days. But, especially this year, darkness feels like it might be a place of richer inception, even conception. Births, and deaths, the end of a love story, or the beginning of one, always take place in some form of mysterious darkness. Like taking tea, or water, or a rest, it seems there might be a way in which that phrase, “it took place,” is a verbal nod to the idea that the separation between a life and the place of its unfolding, between time and space, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Some combination of the nature of our human senses and the ways our story-telling language and habitual thinking distinguish life and place (character, plot, and setting) from one another encourages us to treat them as wildly different ways of discovering- like pipes emptying into a lake, rather than currents mixing and swirling in an ocean, forming one inseparable body. In our culture, we are dominated by a chronological, here-to-then and never back again, linear time-sense. And we naturally favor the bandwidth of perceptions that comes through our eyes, our sight. Most of our brain is busy working through incoming visual information most of the time. We definitely have a prejudice in favor of light. We kill darkness before knowing what it could teach us, what it intends for us. And so the ancient parts of us that know what to learn from it (Stillness? Vulnerability? Awareness that our eyes weren’t built to see all there is?).
I, a photographer for life, am a case in point. The contraption I’m carrying as I halt down this hill, obscured by a beautiful blackness, is screwed onto a heavy tripod so it can be still while it receives the light of the never-still universe, the visible kind of light, that is, the sliver of spectrum that we humans can see. The photograph will, if I’m wildly lucky, merit the attention of the other humans who take a span of their precious sacred life-time to look at the image these visible wavelengths will make from 0s and 1s. If it feels whatever brand of right-and-true I’ve come to look for, I will send this image through screens that stream light to people’s eyes in the very spectrum denied to me now. Perhaps it might spark a few, or even one to go out (or in) to the dark. I know in my brain and heart that there is some of that visible light out here with me but, at midlife, one of the alterations in vision I’m learning to appreciate is that my eyes are far slower than my feet in the passage out of a well-lit room into a moonless night.
Now, after 20,000 nights, darkness is more abundant with the gifts of longer study in the lessons of not-seeing, of disorientation, and of unknowing. On the other hand, falling down (the hill country kind of down) onto gravel offers a lesson I don’t need to learn again so the cautious crawling steps continue. I move by feel and memory of this place (it must be time to wind left a little… now back right). And I look up and down into the thick ephemeral darkness, the nothingness-for-now. This fleeting not-seeing is a delicious gift that won’t last because I’m really looking for the things that will allow me to steer without thinking, to become less aware of the impacts, every single one of them, of my feet— each one, on the ground—this ground. I will soon once again take them (and the ground) for granted. I’ll start to live the journey and not each step as I head for the vantage point, the viewing place I’m after. I hope it’s an honorable perspective, that place I made note of last night, halfway up the next hill where I thought I saw a possibility, a chance to take a photograph that might point toward the darker kind of knowing. In her beautiful book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes that we often automatically associate darkness with the tomb and let it scare us, as death tends to, not with the womb and all the hope of gestating future life. In doing so, we blind ourselves in ways that 20/20 vision can’t help with.
This bit of the Piedmont I’m currently blinded to gets its name because it is foothills to the ancient, worn Appalachian Mountains. This particular neighborhood in the woods has felt like home for a long time and, although most of my life takes place on sandy ground, this is and, I suspect, always will be, home. It’s a strip of land between spreading urban centers that is still just barely rural enough to have a time of day that feels like night, especially now. The slimmest sliver of the moon, nearly new, set just past sunset. So now it’s as dark as dark can be here, with uncountable sodium vapor lights a couple dozen miles in either direction.
Many small steps later, as I feel the hill of the driveway flatten out into the road, I can finally see stars. Slowly, slowly, the places that remain dark, the ones I can’t see those thousands of lit points from the past, begin to define themselves as the branching gestures of the trees who live with me here, in this oak hickory forest. To me they are not usually oaks and hickories (and beeches and cedars and sourwoods) in the same way my other intimate loved ones (the human kind) are not usually their broadest categories. My mother is, after all, certainly a woman of European descent but I don’t go around categorizing her as such in my mind- she’s just Mom. Instead, these trees are this long-loved one with that expressive shape (doesn’t it look like it’s in a state of exuberant praise?) and that one over there with that evocative form (have you ever seen a more determined posture?). And then that one (look how considerate it is, holding its crown in its own space, reaching for the tree next door while leaving it exactly as much room as it needs to grow).
This place, the one in which (from which?) my life events have taken place, is one of the greatest abundance, a neighborhood of towering privilege, to be sure. Here I am fortunate enough to share time and place with the beings whose shapes and textures and calls and snorts I have ingested into memory. It and they transform the present from a piece of linear time into a big country, an expanse without borders, filled with a kind of magic. This sort of woodland, the branches now newly bare, used to feel like it was full of giants looking down at me. And now, in this coming winter of the Year of the Plague, there have been so many books (Braiding Sweetgrass, Hidden Life of Trees and Mycelium Running) and shows (episodes of The Crown, repeated), more social outings walking than sitting, and more time in the places that don’t require planes and crowds of people. So, much more time to be with these long-loved ones. The additional time in these woods of home, through the spring and summer, and now, headed into this darkest of dark winters, has opened me up to the possibility of trees that seem to be speaking, who might be holding forth with a poetic Answer Which Is Really A Question– an expansive, open one, only lived, never answered. Just because they ask in a language I can’t hear, doesn’t make it less true or crucial. I don’t know if I’m listening well but I do see that now, with branches newly bare, their poetry is written with such spare elegance, all dressed in the arboreal equivalent of formal-wear, showing off their fractal glory, dispensing their most practiced, most sophisticated teachings about how the shape of a small acts replicates on a larger scale. They sing the songs of this theme slowly, over years, in a voice from above that sounds beyond my vision-heavy expectations of The Beautiful, stripped of flourish or flower, but with the clarity, the ancient authority of the anointed. This place, this home, is one I’d hoped to have already left by now. I was supposed to be somewhere warm, a place I have come to know as a second home in a jungle village on the northwest coast of Costa Rica. Because in addition to not being able to see so well in the dark, I have become less able to endure the cold waves of winter for as long as I’d like to be surfing every day.
At least, that’s why I first went to Costa Rica. Then there were, there are, all the reasons that came into focus as I kept going back. For one, it is a place where there really is a night. The development hasn’t reached the point of erasing the dark so, when you step out from the jungle path onto the beach, the stars almost knock you over with a wave of seeing and instantaneous expansion that makes you feel both tiny and part of the hugeness. It looks-sounds-smells-feels something like a sudden crescendo in an anthem rousing you with an irresistible calling about what you should now do with your life. And then it builds even further, this music about where your life is taking place. Perhaps the bounding, limiting walls you’ve erected in your light-time thoughts aren’t as close as you thought? Or as high? Perhaps your small acts of love and vulnerability might replicate on a scale you never imagined possible?
In other words, I was supposed to be in a place where I don’t have to work very hard to remember to look up into the darkness. And I don’t require discipline to look down into more darkness, the jungle paths that, I hope, offer safe passage between the many, many slithering, skittering, sleeping intelligences whose place-from-which-lives-take is in that tangled green of never-ending tropical growth. Looking up into the darkness-and-light of sky and the total darkness of a teeming forest all around is something we are losing or, perhaps, have lost. Most of us live in places where the night sky has disappeared, retreated. And, in what strikes me as a particularly significant upending of the ways we evolved and who and how we know, we now look down into cold electronic light so habitually that we have lost the sense that down and darkness can go together in the most instructive ways. Didn’t we, at one point, greet the darkness with fires? Fires that we then gathered around to talk story to one another, to join and recreate our interwoven threads of ourselves in place? Didn’t the light we looked down at in the dark bring us comfort and connection, rather than the separation and fear we so often encounter in our handheld lights-in-the dark? Firelight is also engaging and powerful but it’s a kind of light that comes with immediate, bodily understanding when it burns us. What if, instead of just looking at these powerful, lit portals to human knowing and doings we went, even just with our wonder, far enough down, there, beneath the ground? There would be a lightless place we can easily believe is there. It’s a place whose heavens we can feel with our feet and know that it is both teeming with and crucial to life. It’s an invisible place that holds our ancestors, and the mineral seeds of our progeny, a place where trees talk to one another, and care for one another, a place where all we know and love comes from and returns. And it could help us hold our longer memories, the ones we need as animals, as a species, as embodiments and stewards of our habitats, the places from which our lives take their livings. It’s a darkness of inherent meaning, beyond our senses and mostly just beyond us, and therefore, a source of mystery and, possibly, of faith. A place where something as ordinary as an occasional rocky outcrop, an emissary of the underworld, might once again enchant our days and nights. We can’t reflect on what we can’t see if we never open ourselves to the not-seeing, to the darkness.
But, it’s the Solstice time and I am not in Costa Rican jungle, where I’d expected to welcome the darkness of the longest night. This year, like many of us, I have decided to heed the public health advice and not travel by plane, not go south for the winter, not have a life that takes that place into its growing sedimentary layers of memory, into the having been-ness of its never fixed self. It is, of course, sad for me but, surprisingly, the sense of impending doom I generally feel when the water temperature drops is not the stiffest challenge. That turns out to be missing the other humans with whom I share so much passion for the warm waves, the green water, the jungle, and dark nights full of stars. But missing precious humans carries its own lessons and I am working on being a receptive, curious student.
So, this year I will be mostly back and forth between my usual Southeastern U.S. places, up and downstream in the Cape Fear River basin. Perhaps, after she gets her vaccine (but before I get mine?) I will drive to Florida to see my mother, who lives independently and hasn’t had real human company since before the vernal equinox. Like the rest of you, we’ve been Zooming and FaceTiming like mad but, well, you all know. You can’t simultaneously be on the Zoom and feeling the vast dark of night, of all there is, together.
All you can really share is human language with its best possible virtual embodiment in facial expressions and gestures. As thankful as I am for all of this technology right now, it makes me keenly aware of how important it is that at least some of what we share with our human loved ones, with our partners and friends, teachers and students, colleagues and neighbors take place in the more-than-human world. At its hard-won, rarely achieved best, our language is clear enough that it becomes a facet of a much more complex, indecipherable truth. It’s a truth beyond what it means to be a smart or wise or even visionary human. If we are honest with ourselves about what it means to be us, we know even our truest truth isn’t whole and never will be. Although it can reflect our visible spectrum of knowledge and feeling with its own awesome clarity, we lose something essential to being human when we only use our language and the light of our learning only to retell what we are told by ourselves. One way we repeat our own knowings and miss out on the mystery is by discerning what we feel and learn from being in the places where the very built and lit environment inevitably tells us what and how to feel, whether we realize it or not. It’s what allows us to read or watch The Crown late into the night but it also makes the dark a not-place between places. When we don’t take that elixir of mysterious, life-giving limits, of right-hereness, we weaken our capacity to inhabit, perhaps even to learn from and love, not just night but all of the cold darkness of life. When we don’t have a chance to speak or stay silent in a context, a place, a time that connects us to our not-knowing, and not-seeing, to how dark and big and, yes, after we let our eyes adjust, how light-filled the surrounding darkness the night sky can be. When there’s no room in our world to sense the other facets of animal, plant, mineral sensing and knowing, well, then we lose any chance of feeling whole, of knowing wholeness. It is its own kind of dis-ease. My own hope for this winter of so much hardship, so much sadness and loss, fear and denial, anger and outrage, is to be able to spend more time learning from what I can’t see and settling into not knowing what I can’t know.
I hope you all have a mysterious, beautiful, and healthy Solstice.
An Online Opportunity to Create Meaning
My name is Maia.
This is an invitation to join me in creating a virtual community of inquiry. We will meet on Zoom beginning on September 28th for 6 Mondays to discuss the ways some beautiful ideas could help illuminate and inform our lives in this moment. As our conversations unfold over the course of our 6 meetings, we will have a chance to find and create perspective, to connect and reflect, to deepen and revise our seeing as we ride the waves of the current time.
About waves: I love to surf. I love to be in the ocean because I feel most connected there. But, when the pandemic began, for awhile, I could do neither. And what that taught me was that, really, what I love is to love. And to be and feel fully alive. Riding waves is exquisite. But, offering what I’ve learned in the waves (and a lot of other places) to other humans, as it turns out, is even better. If this experience seems right for you, please join in!
Click here to access the Google Doc that describes our endeavor in detail.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—
to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
~Viktor Frankl
If you know you would like to register, you can do so here.
Our Scheduled Meetings:
Sep 28, 2020 5:30-7 PM*
Oct 5, 2020 5:30-7 PM
Oct 12, 2020 5:30-7 PM
Oct 19, 2020 5:30-7 PM
Oct 26, 2020 5:30-7 PM
Nov 2, 2020 5:30-7 PM
*Eastern Time
Interview: Dr. Antonio Puente
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Player at the bottom of the page.
" ...it was a very difficult time but then you know it's when things are falling apart is when you really get a chance to make things happen so as I tell somebody when I took over the position, I'm tenured, I got my citizenship and I don't give a shit."
~Dr. Antonio Puente
Transcript
Tony: it was a very difficult time but then you know it’s when things are falling apart is when you really get a chance to make things happen so as I tell somebody when I took over the position, I’m tenured, I got my citizenship and I don’t give a shit.
Maia: I’m Maia Dery
How do you feel when somebody or something with much more power than you have, knocks you down? Or tells you or maybe even shows you aren’t good enough?
What do you do about it?
Get back up?
Struggle to not believe the naysayer? Or ignore the knock-down?
Try to learn something so you can come back with more capacity and strength?
When I recorded this interview with Dr. Antonio Puente, who, among other things, is an avid surfer and celebrated neuropsychologist, we couldn’t know how much this pandemic would knock us all down. But I suspect that, had we known about the coming challenges, the interview wouldn’t not have been much different.
Surfing and all ocean play, after all, are practices of scanning, of seeking, of developing relationship with something powerful over which you have absolutely no control and, at least for the first umpteen years, of getting knocked down over and over again. The kind of play is also a way to connect, with yourself, with the more than human world, and with other humans. Whether you love waves or weaving, hiking or haiku writing, some kind of passionate, disciplined engagement in an endeavor that allows your body to come into nuanced collaboration with the wider world is, I believe, one of the most rewarding ways to inhabit your time. In Dr. Puente’s case, it seems to have helped him overcome some long odds and some powerful forces that might have kept him from becoming who he is now. In addition to being an inspiring surfing story this tale of an immigrant boy overcoming long odds is, I think, also a great American story.
This episode is dedicated, with love and so much aloha, to the memory of Tiko Losano.
Welcome to Waves to Wisdom
Antonio: I’m Antonio Puente, or Tony as some people call me. I started surfing I believe in 1964, in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. It’s been quite some time.
Maia: So, you were just little boy.
Antonio: Yep, on a wooden, woody surfboard. It looked more like a battleship than a surfboard. As you paddled out the waves actually broke for you.
..this is not, you know, as you catch the wave, as you paddle out, as you paddle out the waves would part for you.
Maia: You had a little Moses effect on them. Would you just talk a little bit about where we’re sitting right now? Antonio: Sure, this is a club called The Surf Club. It’s towards the north end of Wrightsville Beach and it’s a beautiful, small pavilion overlooking the ocean. And we’re very fortunate to be away from the wind but in front of the view.
Maia: And the sun has just come up above the water’s edge and it is a gorgeous morning here! Okay, I would love to start by talking a little bit about your childhood.
Antonio: Well, I was born and raised in Cuba. I was privileged. One side of my family was involved with rum. The other side of the family was involved with legal affairs. In fact, my maternal grandfather was head of the legal department at Bacardi. So we were well to do. Had my own nanny and a chauffeur at that. And then after Castro took over we came to the United States on November 6, 1960 with $300 and a change of clothes and no knowledge of what we were getting into. We assumed a good revolution in Latin America would only last a little while and we would return… well, that was 1960.
Maia: It was a while ago.
Antonio: It was a while ago.
Maia: Do you have any memories of Cuba from your childhood? Antonio: Yes, I do. I not only have memories but they’re reinforced on regular occasion by the family and especially my Mom and Dad talking about Cuba. And then subsequently I returned to Cuba, first almost 40 years later in 1999. And have returned pretty regularly since then. So, I left as a refugee and I come back as a decorated psychologist.
Maia: How about that! And did you and your family speak English when you came here with $300? Antonio: No, my mom did. She had gone to boarding school, high school in Philadelphia but my dad and my brother and I didn’t know. In fact I remember it being explained to me that “I know this is maybe odd for me to tell you, Son but they don’t speak Spanish here.” I said, What am I gonna do?” And she said “Ah, you’ll figure it out.”
Maia: Oh my goodness! How old were you then? Antonio: I was almost 9 years old [almost 9]— nine years old in North Miami Beach. We lived in a 1-bedroom apartment with two families, my brother and I were very fortunate, we had the kitchen floor to sleep on. [Wow] So we were the only ones who had a private room.
Maia: Wow, okay incredible— so you went right into an English speaking school system then I imagine? Antonio: Right.
Maia: So then you were surfing the whole time then, in Miami?
Antonio: No, in Miami I didn’t get a chance to go to the beach very often. We were just trying to figure out how to get food and learn the language. We subsequently moved to San Antonio, Texas when I really first came in contact with what I guess we call discrimination. I realized at that point even though I was a child, despite the fact we didn’t have food, and then at one point, we didn’t have housing as well, that there was very active discrimination and there was a pecking order, at least in the United States in Texas at that time. There were the white people and then there were the black peopled then there were the brown people. So considering that we were really out for the count and we were being discriminated against, it seemed to my mom and dad that, if we were going to suffer, under those circumstances, we might as well be among other people that were similarly like-minded.
So we returned to Florida where my family settled in Jacksonville, Florida
Maia: And there are waves— as opposed to San Antonio and even Miami there are consistent waves in Jacksonville.
Antonio: And that’s where I first came in contact with waves because one of my father’s friends Cezar Garcia, had a son that— who knows exactly how, he had been exposed to surfing and he was always willing to give me a ride to the beach. From 1964-65 on I went to the beach with him as often as he would and I’ve continued surfing ever, ever since then.
Maia: And you ultimately decided that you interested in psychology and went to graduate school and…
Antonio: Yeah as far psychology, I was really curious about how people came to understand and engage and successfully adapt to the world and it seemed to me that psychology was as good a discipline as any that that provided a vehicle to address those issues. It came to me in my first psychology course in a small community college in Jacksonville, Florida. It actually was a segregated grammar school that had just been given over to this fledging concept which was junior college in those days. So, I went there then subsequently the University of Florida where I was able to continue surfing and subsequently to, to pursue the career at the University of Georgia where there were no waves but on to graduate school and psychology as a formal career path.
Maia: What, what a fascinating motivation that the curiosity about how people adapt to the world. So, we’ve surfed together a few times at this point in Wrightsville Beach where it’s a home break for both of us, including it really spectacular surf morning a couple of couple of days ago.
Antonio: It was the vibe of Wrightsville Beach, aloha spirit all over the place with wonderful little waves.
Maia: It really was. So many people, it was very crowded, it was it was the kind of day when I normally would not have gone where we went, but because I was with you I did and I was so grateful because I was surrounded by people but they were the best people.
Antonio: We’re very fortunate.
Maia: It was wonderful, it was like being in a welcoming friend’s home, it was really fantastic. Okay so you went to graduate school and you told me a story previously that I hope you’ll tell again about wanting to put together what were then, speaking of segregation, two really separate areas of psychological inquiry.
Antonio: At that point I was curious about this issue of adaptability, understanding the world and moving forward and it seemed to me that studying abnormal behavior was really successful because some people would make it and others wouldn’t but the mechanism that would mediate the entire process to me seemed to be the brain. And unfortunately at the University of Georgia then, even now, the individuals that study abnormal behavior were the clinical psychologists, they were on the first floor. The people who study the brain were primarily studying animals and normal behavior, like learning, and they were on the sixth floor.
I wanted to bridge the gap between those two… I did so by getting a Masters in, what was it January 6, 1978 and then I defended my dissertation January 13th, 1978 so I did them pretty much in parallel fashion rather interactive which is what I was hoping to achieve.
Maia: One of the things that I have noticed since learning how to surf breakfast yeah one of the things that I’ve noticed since learning how to surf is, it looks to me as though, certainly from my own experience and from observing others, that many surfers, not all, but many tend to have the capacity to see past artificial barriers that we erect. And I spent 17 years in an academic world and there is really nobody like academics to construct some really impenetrable barriers, especially between disciplines. I wonder if your habit of surfing and all of this fluidity and these distant horizons might have helped you understand that these two things are not actually separate? Tony: Well, let’s go back to your comment, you said regarding academics, having been in academia formally since I was the age of 18 and continuing as a Professor of Psychology at the University in Wilmington, I can’t tell you how surprised I am, even after all these years, the unbelievable politics associated with academia. People fight so aggressively over so little to accomplish even less than that. It is beyond surprising.
You kind of wonder— there are certain places that life should be pure and the pursuit of knowledge and dissemination of that information seems to me that would be an obvious place were peacefulness, truth, collaboration, and collegiality should be present to try and move the big agenda of our world forward. I have to tell you it is still a surprise to me that that has not occurred. But that has been the place where I chose to pursue a career largely because of the opportunities that academia does have. For example, access to young people, access to thinking what you want, when you want. As long as you produce then maybe you’re in a position to do that, but academe has been the foundation for where I was able to pursue that.
Now at same time it seemed like a fulcrum needed to be established so I could handle that. Because, whereas I was very interested in the pursuit of knowledge and dissemination of what I knew, as well as having access to young people, and fresh ideas, etc. I also felt that that aggressive attitude that seemed to be so contraindicated in the pursuit and discovery, of knowledge— that I needed something that would help balance that. And for me that was living at the beach so I could somehow or other manage that, that difficulty which was present, ever since I came to the US, in many ways. And has continued even to this day. A place where I could disappear, at least emotionally and mentally, that would help ground and establish a place to, to provide a balance that can only be achieved if a fulcrum had been set up— on one side the motivation for the pursuit of information, knowledge, discovery, on the other side a sense of well-being and, as you sometimes say, wisdom, that really is hard to find anywhere else except when you come in regular contact with lots of water.
Maia: Yeah, we talked a little bit about this but there is a loose association of researchers and an idea called “Blue Mind.” People are studying something that many of us know intuitively that being around the water feels good and you go from the water back to whatever world you live in on dry land rejuvenated, relaxed, and potentially more creative and effective than you would’ve been if you had not.
Tony: Yes, I’m familiar with Blue Mind and actually we use it at the American Psychological Association, at least one branch of it. Yeah, to me, some how or the other I don’t know the science of it but I know the life of it. So it’s been part of who I am for that matter, my immediate, and my extended family.
Maia: Alright, well that observation is really interesting to me because you’re in a position to understand how the brain is actually responding to this stimulus much better than I am. You wrote a paper in which you were talking about the traditional mind-body split we have in Western culture and the ways that psychologists have approached behavior and brain over the history of the profession and you came up with the phrase “reverse epiphenominalism,” which is so interesting to me. My understanding if that is that it’s not just our brain that dictates behavior but that what we do in the world and the ways we think in turn create the ways that our brains act. Is that part of what was in the paper? Tony: Pretty much. It was my way of trying to get some understanding of how is it that we end up producing who we are. It really is an idea that emerges from the work of my intellectual mentor Roger Sperry who discovered the two sides of the brain. His concept was pretty straightforward, and that is that neural structures of the brain give rise to a mind or consciousness and in a sort of epiphenomena, upward causation and then the consciousness in turn dictates how the neural structures underneath end up functioning. And that’s sort of downward causation. So it’s a reverse epiphenomena because we think of epiphenomena as an outgrowth of something but this is the outgrowth of the outgrowth. So, it’s a unified system of function.
Maia: Interesting, okay so if someone, for example, like you had a multi-decade habit of, of going to the water as a way to make sense of, recover from, regenerate for life— especially that they sort of intensely intellectual world that you live in to have this embodied practice, it could potentially change the way your brain was structured and functioned. Is that correct? Antonio: I don’t know, certainly could be, I don’t, I don’t again I don’t know the science, I don’t do the science of surfing at all but I certainly do the lifestyle pf surfing and I think it’s been endemic and core to who I am and maybe has allowed me to maybe to engage life in a more successful fashion than I would’ve done otherwise.
I always wonder, for example, if I had been given the opportunity, which I was it and seized it, to go to New York University where I would work tons of hours a week and be exposed to asphalt rather than water, what would’ve happened. I wonder whether I would have ended up in the same place, unlikely. And I wonder if I would’ve been as successful, unlikely, and maybe as comfortable with life, most unlikely.
Maia: Really interesting. So, let me just, for anybody who doesn’t understand the significance of what you said, you were essentially offered what in your professional world would’ve been an extremely high-status job at one of the premier tier 1 research institutions in the country and you decided that it was more important to be someplace where you can access this lifestyle?
Antonio: Well I thought the lifestyle was really important to both raise a family and have a personal life but have a balance with my professional life and I… whereas I think being in a top-tier university may have been very useful in my career and probably in anybody’s career at the very beginning, there comes a time in a career where the institution stops caring a person and that person starts carrying the institution. And that lifestyle becomes really critical. I’ve never been one of the opinion that you should ignore your personal life as you pursue your professional one. In fact, I thought that having both successful would be very good. I often tell my kids it’s not that hard to be a successful academic but it might be not as hard to have personal life that’s also gratifying but it’s insanely difficult to do both and when you do both you and end up having great results.
Maia: Present company a testimony to that fact! Fantastic, so, my understanding is that you recently spoke at a commencement ceremony?
Antonio: Oh, yes that was, that was really surrealistic. I spoke the Department of Psychology commencement ceremony in Athens, Georgia. It was really pretty gratifying. It was a great audience, several hundred students graduating but was what was really unique— it was actually two things were unique. The chairman of the department was the mentor of my oldest son who graduated from the University of Georgia as I did. But also when I was a student there in 1974-75. Specifically, I recall being told that I didn’t know enough English to be able to succeed as a psychologist. And I was encouraged to to leave the University and possibly psychology. So I took a, a few weeks off, went surfing, to be honest, worked at a psychiatric hospital, the 11-7 shift. I couldn’t tell difference between the residents and me at that particular juncture of my life. But did that, surfed in the morning, and came to the conclusion that they were wrong and returned and off to the races I went.
Maia: Oh, my goodness, that gives me chills that the waves told you that or that you were able to hear that from yourself in those waves.
Antonio: Yeah, they were important in trying to reestablish that balance I had lost by spending nine months not being very successful. So it was really great to return. I’d been there as a student, an unsuccessful one and I was there as a parent cause two of my kids ended up going there. But this time I came back as a celebrated, distinguished alumni. When they invited me I said “Are you sure? Forty some years ago you guys were asking me to leave the program and now you’re you asking me to speak at your commencement. Their response was “That was then, this is now.”
Maia: It’s a different world in some ways, that’s quite something. And, and one of your, one of your many roles in addition to being a professor at UNC W and an avid surfer is you’re head of a branch of the American Psychological Association. Would you tell us a little bit about that? Antonio: Sure. I’ve been involved with organized psychology for many years in one role or another and I particularly was interested in making sure that psychology had a seat at the table rather than a line on the menu and the goal was basically to get this way of thinking more active in our society and, uh I decided to become or run for the position of president which after a couple tries I was unusual opportunity to you become that as 125th president 2017. That was a particularly tough period for our society, also for our country. I inherited an association that was essentially broke and fragmented largely because of the assault on such things as science and the importance of person and diversity in our society, largely because of the current administration. And it was a very difficult time but then you know it’s when things are falling apart is when you really get a chance to make things happen. So as I tell somebody when I took over the position, I’m tenured, I got my citizenship and I don’t give a shit. So, let’s make things happen.
You know. I left my country, left everything so no reason to be cautious during times of crisis. So we were able to turn the ship around and in the process we realized that we do not have infrastructure to do advocacy which is so important in our society. Somebody has to carry the flag of discovery, the flag of truth, and of diversity, and of decency. We didn’t seem to have that in any way, shape, or form. So we started a new association that is part of of APA and I took that over when it started earlier this year. So I finished my tenure as president, and took over in this particular capacity at the present time.
Maia: Excellent and so now you, having engineered the organization so that it can support advocacy, you are actively engaged in doing that.
Antonio: That’s right. We now have an infrastructure. We have 20 attorneys, a director of advocacy. 60% of the basic budget, the membership fees, excuse me, that comes into this association gets directed to this activity. So we now have an economic revenue source and we’re developing the agendas as we move forward with the basic foundation that if, if it has to do with human behavior and has to do with science then we’re there to provide direction and as much as possible advocacy.
Maia: Okay well to bring us to a level that people can understand what you mean when you say advocacy, what would be an issue that right now and 2019 your branch of the organization is actively engaged in trying to address?
Antonio: Well I’ll give you one very specific one and one that applies to me as well. For a long period of time back I did not have appropriate papers, I was an undocumented individual. In fact, in fact, in 1978 I entered the country from Grenada, West Indies, not realizing I was undocumented and had been undocumented for 10 years. So I’m one of those undocumented people we talked about. And also, as you know, the president of the Association and so, so involved in our society today. So, so we held hearings in Congress and now we’re trying to develop bipartisan support to make sure that we don’t separate children from their parents and that we come up with a reasonable approach to border security. I am not against border security but I am against dehumanizing people and causing trauma. In some ways what we’re doing to these children and these families will cost the United States a lot of money, a lot of pain, and more importantly, loss of direction of who we are a country.
Maia: Here, here. Yes!
It’s really quite a story for the ages and for this age in particular. You’re a living example of how somebody can come in with no skills relevant to the workforce, being a child who had no English, and wind up really changing our country for the better on a very high level.
Antonio: Well, whereas I appreciate on the surface the idea of, you know, let’s populate certain skill sets that we need, for example, computer programmers or coders and so forth, the idea that we are no longer going to value family as a way to populate the immigration system shows a lack of, of empathy, understanding of how human nature works. And also, also this is really important, we were founded on an open attitude about people.
Maia: Yeah, one aspect of your work that I think is particularly interesting is your legal work. Would you talk about that a little bit? Antonio: Sure. When I started this work on cultural neuropsychology the idea was to understand the role of culture and how is it playing in brain mediation of discovery and adapting and in the process it became more pragmatic in terms of trying to figure out what tests could be used to were measuring the construct in question. For example, intelligence, rather than some variable that was extraneous, such as time. So the, the idea became develop tests that were true to the concept rather than the measure of a variety of things that provided all kinds of problems and errors in our understanding of the client or the patient.
And in doing so, I started getting more focused on developing appropriate test for Spanish speakers which is a large population United States and a huge population of the rest of the world. There are very few neuropsychologists in general almost none who speak Spanish, about 50 of us in the United States.
And unbeknownst to me, some of this became interesting to the legal field. Specifically, individuals involved in the death penalty. Because it turns out an increasingly large percentage of individuals on death row are Spanish speakers and for what it’s worth it turns out that Hispanics are sentenced to die four times more frequently than Caucasians and for African-Americans is three times. So, a disproportionately large number of them were being sentenced to die and the question was, are we simply not understanding these individuals? So, I started being called upon first, interestingly, in a local county and then subsequently throughout the US. In fact, I have a case coming up next week in New York. The goal is to go discover what’s going on with this individual and make a reasoned estimate of whether their brain is affected.
So, along those lines I have been working on doing neuropsychological assessments of Spanish speakers that have been sentenced to die— I don’t know for sure I think I’ve done between 100-150 these cases throughout the US. It continues being a significant part of my work I see more patients who are clinical, if you will but the bulk of my time seems to be in these death penalty cases, that they take hours and hours and hours. I just finished a case and worked on for approximately 10 years, several hundred hours. I interviewed the family tested the went to their hometown, Mexico. When you, when you get to that level analysis not only do you know the brain, but you know this person probably be better than they know themselves. And the goal is to provide information to the court so they make a good decision, make sure that we’re not sending to do someone just because of their culture or other misinterpretations. The goal is to provide good data, as best scientific information as you can at that particular instance so the issues are just entirely legal rather than anything else.
Maia: Fascinating— yeah, seems so important because many of the people who are making decisions in court, the judges or the attorneys who are structuring the argument may not have the cultural competency to put the context to it…
Antonio: Could well be! I’ll give you an example. In Harris County, which is basically the county seat of Houston, Texas sentences to die more people in that county alone per year than the entire world combined. [Wow] There can’t be that many [unbelievable]. So, there’s something awry and my job is to bring an understanding to a very complicated situation. Justice obviously goes both ways— for that person who has been victimized as well as the person who is being sentenced. But either way the goal is to erode error and increase accuracy.
Maia: Wow, such important such important work. Okay, just to put this in a nice little package. You have a very busy academic post at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, you have graduate students, undergraduates, departmental responsibilities, you’re director of a branch of the American Psychological Association, you have this active practice as a legal expert providing this kind of crucial context in capital, mostly capital cases. You overcame a language barrier and economic hardships to achieve all this professional success. What do you think has been your greatest success? Antonio: Well, for me the greatest success, in general, has been raise— raising three very normal children, all who surf. LAUGH All decent human beings that contribute to society.
But maybe one of my greatest successes, at least this question was asked me when I was president, “What’s been your greatest success as president of APA?” I’m sure there’s something more tangible than I can provide than what I’m doing now, but probably one of the greatest things that came to my mind immediately was that I surfed in three different continents in one week as president of the US (sic). I surfed in Europe, and I surfed here in the states and then I surfed in South America. It seems to me that if I consider that to be a crowning achievement of my year as 125th president of United States, excuse me, of not of the US but of the American Psychological Association [wouldn’t that be wonderful if you were!]. LAUGH Oh that was a Fruedian slip! But if I could be president of the society and that was my greatest accomplishment one could argue that maybe I have my head in the right place.
Maia: I would absolutely argue that, yes! So it’s, it’s a very busy job, has you traveling all over the place and some of those places you are able to get in the water…
Antonio: If I have the opportunity, if it’s close to the water, I’ll make an effort to make that happen, which is always extremely gratifying and to my hosts extremely surprising.
Maia: You are a distinguished character and so to don a wetsuit or some board shorts and take a big board out in the water and you are a shredder, you know, to really catch and ride, gracefully, some big waves— I’m sure it gives them pause.
Antonio: Well, I’m not sure I’m a shredder, I’m probably closer to a kook but either way it’s a pause for those people who are not familiar with this lifestyle.
Maia: Do your children surf? Antonio: Yes, all my children surf and my wife, in her day, used to boogie board as well. So, in fact, all of them grew up literally a few feet from where we’re having this discussion. We bought an old house here at Wrightsville Beach and didn’t have enough money to establish a heating and air conditioning system but we did have a small tent that we would pitch up, or at least my wife would, every day and the kids would just spend their days on the beach. So they all grew up right here. And as soon as they could, put a little life vest on ‘em and then boogie board, after that a board. They all still do it.
Maia: So this practice has really been central to your personal life for your entire adulthood?
Antonio: Yeah, and for my kids [and for children] yeah, as a matter fact we try to take a family vacation every year and we’re going to do so, this year all of us. To where I took my wife on a honeymoon and I told her we’re going to some of outer island in the Bahamas. She goes, “What’s there?” I said “I think there’re waves.” And we’re going back to celebrate the beginning of our married life which started with riding waves in the middle of nowhere in the outer Bahamas.”
Maia: So wonderful! And how many years have you been married now? Antonio: I think 100…
Maia: One hundred years, ok good
Antonio: We were married in 1977.
Maia: Okay, beautiful and your children are grown now? Antonio: Yep. My daughter’s a psychologist in Melbourne Florida and she and the kids live the beach life. My other son, my oldest son, Nicky’s a neuropsychologist at George Washington University and he still surfs as well. And then Lucas, my youngest son, is married and has a kid and lives in Northern California and surfs from Santa Cruz to right below the Golden Gate Bridge, which is Fort Point which I always worry about because between him and the open ocean and lots of current is not much.
Maia: Right! Yeah that is a… it’s a dynamic ocean environment there. But talk about a selection of waves, wow!
Antonio: He gets the better waves of all of us.
Maia: Yeah…So, one of the papers that you wrote which I was particularly fascinated by, addressed cultural bias in testing children for cognitive impairment and in particular a relationship to time, would you talk a little bit about that? Antonio: Yeah, we’ve actually done research on the topic for a number of years. My area’s primarily neuropsychology and specifically the relation between culture and brain function and the idea of how culture plays a role in understanding how people discover it, understand it, and adapt to it, and the difficulties that some people have with it, and the success of others who are fortunate to have been able to conquer it. So we’ve dedicated many years of study on that and in many countries, whether it’s South Africa, Russia, Spain, Cuba, among others— we discovered that sometimes we misunderstand what the construct is that we’re trying to measure, to understand what is it that the person is all about. For example, in the case of intelligence. And that is, how is it that we determine whether the child is smart or not?
So, instead of telling you a story about our research I’ll tell you a story about myself. So, when I was first given these tests, I don’t recall much about them because I didn’t know English. So my mom just said “They’re going to give you some tests. Just do your best, be courteous.” And I’m almost sure that diagnosis to this day may have been “moron but friendly.” [Laugh- oh my goodness!] I had no idea what they were asking me!
“What are the colors of the US flag?”
“Whatever you’re asking me, I’ll just smile.”
So in that case they misunderstood intelligence with, with language. And in the case of people who speak Spanish, time is something that we enjoy. In the United States time is something you conquer. So, the faster you do something, the smarter you are. In our country, the more you savor it, the smarter you are. So when you have those constructs mixed, you may have a kid who enjoys the experience. As my own child, Nicki, when he took those exams as a small kid, he was enjoying it and he asked all kinds of questions so he got a low score as well. I said Nikki, “No, this is not what you’re supposed to do. So it had nothing to do with intelligence it had to do with your approach to problem-solving and sometimes we confuse the two. I sometimes say that I spent my time trying to figure out why people from Latin America score by 15 points, or one standard deviation lower than their counterparts in the United States? And why is it that after all these years we’re trying to figure out why they’re not as smart as people from US, here I am at 67, still trying to figure out why they’re not that smart but they all have retired back to Central America…
Maia: LAUGH— Who is the smart one?
Antonio: Who is the smart one?
Maia: Oh my gosh, that is, that is remarkable. Yeah, I spend a lot of time in this, in a Spanish-speaking country Costa Rica— this beautiful little, little village that has a lot of ex-pats, many of whom are fluent in Spanish. And my Costa Rican friends have watched me struggle to try to learn Spanish for five years now and get almost nowhere, and I’m pretty sure their diagnosis would also be “moron but friendly.” LAUGH
Antonio: As long as you try. [laugh] But we’re discussing, I think, more important than the construct of intelligence or even language is the construct of culture. Cause, one thing is to speak the language, another one is to appreciate the culture. And that’s a whole lot more complicated. Going back to Costa Rica, things just don’t happen fast. [never] And if you go with the attitude “I want this solved today” by going to a store or a government agency, it just doesn’t happen. And people are going to view you as an irritant, as difficult, as arrogant, when in reality you’re not. You’re trying to solve a problem. And you have to put in the context of that— that’s what the brain does.
And for that matter that’s what surfing does. It puts a context in place. Because otherwise, you get so busy and so full of “I got to get another publication. I gotta earn another dollar. I gotta fix another patient.” And then when you come here you realize— Well, it’s not that simple. It’s a bit more complicated.
Maia: Yeah, the late, in my estimation great, Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue said that that a lot of Westerners, Americans in particular, tend to be victims of their time instead of inhabitants of it. And I have found for myself and maybe you’re saying also for you, that surfing really does help me inhabit my time. It makes me able to live in this moment instead of according to the “to do” list.
Antonio: And to establish your true North because otherwise you get caught up in the system. We talked yesterday how religion very often provided a framework for many of us and then industrialization and consumerism has done that in the recent past but you know both have left us with big vacuums. In some ways surfing provides a way to resolve that vacuum which is so critical.
You know we’re in this for the long haul. This is a marathon not a sprint and I think surfing allows you to, to think of drinking that water during that marathon otherwise you get dehydrated and you lose.
Maia: Beautiful analogy! So the underpinnings and framework of the Waves to Wisdom project is that surfers’ regular involvement in the natural world, in this medium, this dynamic, embodied activity, and in general, adapting it for people who don’t surf or don’t love water, just a really important play discipline, a discipline of playfulness and embodiment that, that’s central to your life. That, that’s crucial and it’s something that’s missing from a lot of our lives in and I think our culture unfortunately has promoted this bifurcation where, you know, children can play for a minute… We seem to let them play in an unstructured way less and less, children can play but grown-ups have to settle down to the grim business of earning money and counting pennies, making sure there are always more and are there practical benefits that you haven’t mentioned to having this regular play discipline, that you can tell people about.
Antonio: I’m not sure if I can articulate it but I will say generally for me it’s a re-centering, it’s critical. I’m not sure if it’s the washing of the waves or the act of surfing or the disconnect. It’s really hard to be thinking about how to cut the grass or how to earn income when you’re out there. You just, it sort of absorbs you, literally and figuratively in a way that people talk about in contemporary terms as mindfulness. It, it takes away from the logical, sequential that were so focused on a day-to-day basis to the Gestalt, the emotional, and it just washes away all those worries and sort of resets, re-calibrates. I think for me that’s the takeaway.
Maia: Okay, I’ll just give you an example of something that I noticed when I started surfing, speaking to artificial barriers, I grew up in ACC sports country. I grew up in Durham in the county, situated between Durham and Chapel Hill North Carolina. And this is some virulently fanatical basketball culture and so there were very competitive sports teams in my youth and I’ve never been athletically gifted. And came out of youth with a little bit of a complex that I couldn’t hang with the real athletes, the strong big agile fast people. And when I learned how to surf I found that one of the many beautiful things about the sport is that kind of diversity. I can go out and have and have actually interviewed someone, I can go out with somebody who was a Division I college athlete, who is my physical superior in every athletically measurable way and we’re both having a great time, we’re both challenged and it really helped me dissolve that interior barrier that I had constructed over the course of my youth and that in and we’ve had conversations about that the professional we don’t have a ton of racial diversity in the surf line up where we are but but the professional diversity, you have plumbers and electricians and neuropsychologists, everybody is out there and nobody even knows what anybody does. [or cares] or cares! And so there’s this mental construct that I had erected in my life and surfing really helped me dissolve that barrier, helped me learn how to get up after I’ve been knocked down in new ways.
Antonio: Well, since you— I talked about the personal side of things it, it’s a way to recalibrate, and appreciate what’s important, what’s much less important. But you addressed the issue of the social side of things. Let me address that as well, and that is in terms of the “aloha spirit” as we often refer to. We don’t really seem to care too much about what you do for a living and in the lineup for that matter people don’t seem to be terribly concerned about whether you’re good at surfing or not. What they’re concerned about is more like, can you bring something to the equation? Can you bring a good vibe to this group. Can you give a good story? Are you the one that’s willing to share the wave? And for that matter, are you willing to give to the community which you are part of? So, nobody really is very concerned whether you’re “a shredder” but we are extremely concerned if you are willing to take off on people or if you’re rough. On Sunday will we caught those, oh Monday, when we caught those wonderful waves there was a guy that came out to the lineup who got right in the middle of us and one of the older guys, a guy from Hawaii said, “Hey, Dude, you gotta wait your turn.”
And the guy says “I’ve been here since the beginning, who in the hell are you?” This is not the kind of attitude that we want. As Tiko, the one I was referring to, he calls this our happy place. We, we don’t want you to come in here and give us what we call “aggro attitude.” This is not where it’s at.
And this carries into the community as well. We help each other when there’s a need. And one of us lost their husband she now has significant Parkinson’s disease so when she needed a roof we put our two cents in and got her a roof or when she needs her yard cut…
So, the aloha spirit starts in the water continues onto the land.
Maia: It really does and I’m personally not a churchgoer and had never really felt like I was missing that from my life but when I started to surf at 40 and it began to really, I think, occupy a lot of the place that church occupies for many people, I realized how important that community aspect of what sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence,” where people come together and celebrate something. And it really does feel as though surfers do that— celebrate not just the beauty of the ocean and the excitement and dynamism of the waves, but just the incredible gift of being alive to enjoy them together.
Antonio: Yeah, and that’s it that’s what happened— we didn’t plan it but the waves were fun, the water was clear, and the vibe was amazing. When people took off, “Go Maia! You go, Girl!” Come back, you might talk some trash, and yeah it’s, it’s sort of an ecologically valid church, if you will.
Maia: Yes, yes! That is exactly what it feels like! Is there anything else that you can think that you would like to tell people about? Antonio: Well, you mentioned play, I never envisioned surfing as play, it’s more of a way of life but it does have a play attitude. The consequences are really somewhat irrelevant. The focus is on the process and I wonder whether you could emulate that in other ways? I don’t know, maybe— the other side of the coin is there more to it than surfing yet we focus on to how it surfing is critical to me as a human being and and to us as a community one wonders if everybody surfed whether we’d find ourself in this terrible mess that we are in with our country for that matter with our world.
Maia: There’s a fellow named Stuart Brown and he posits that playfulness at work, the capacity to act and feel occasionally as though you’re willing to risk failure, you feel like doing something just for its own sake not just because you’re required to, or paid to— that kind of attitude is is crucial to be successful on the level that you are successful. You think that your regular practice of play in the water has allowed you to potentially at times when it’s appropriate be more playful at work? Antonio: Well maybe maybe not necessarily playful but, I think of my personal life as being relatively traditional and conservative but my professional life as being very unusual— the way I approached it, and how I managed it seemed to be very unusual and I don’t think I could’ve done that unless I had that foundation. In the United States— and I’m very involved in healthcare policy— it’s all about how you make money, but it’s very little about how you enjoy the experience and I think we would find ourselves in a much better place if we could balance the two.
Maia: In what ways were your professional maneuvers unconventional?
Antonio: Well, I went to a small school that had an ocean next to it, I was the first neuropsychologist, as far as I can tell, in the state of North Carolina. Those are two little examples. When I didn’t get promoted at the University of Georgia after my first year because of my lack of knowledge of the English language, I kept on going. When I was not given tenure at UNC Wilmington, I reapplied. These are not wise things to do but I understood who I was I thought it was a misunderstanding of the people who judged me. So I was able to maybe be more risk-focused?
Maia: Being a surfer myself I can absolutely see how a practice of surfing that set you up to get back up after somebody tried to knock you down.
Antonio: If things go bad to go surfing!
Maia: Yes, and then practice getting knocked down and get back up over and over again. That is so interesting!
One of the aspects of surfing that is is so powerful to me is the, I think the word that we have that best describes it is relationship, the way that the relationship between the surfer the surfer’s body, the surfer’s brain and body, and the ocean has to be the focus. You can’t be thinking as you say about mowing the lawn or earning more money and that regular requirements that we focus on relationship and all of the benefits that we gather from being present for that relationship, including and especially in our inter-human interactions. It really does for at least a subset of surfers, look to me like it enables us to go into the rest of our lives focusing on relationship and our bodies in relationship to our minds and relationship and worry less about the next level of meta-existence— the abstraction, the grades, the economy, the dollars.
Do you think that’s valid?
Antonio: Yeah, it puts it in focus. You stop worrying about accomplishing and start being more concerned about being there. Or just being mindful as the contemporary psychology folks are all talking about. We often think that success in how much money I make, how many publications I’ve achieved, or status in life, but we don’t measure very well, or even consider measuring very well, how much you enjoy living.
Maia: I can’t imagine anything more important than that.
Antonio: Well, we’ve structured an entire society and civilization where that doesn’t seem to be very crucial to our equation.
Maia: Yeah, we really have.
Antonio: You look at some of the statistics of why young men are dying or the opioid epidemic that we’re experiencing. Obviously people are trying to find happiness quickly in many cases unsuccessfully.
I think we’ve emphasized the importance of surfing as foundational. There must be, as the scientists and researchers involved in Blue Mind suggest, must be some foundation that’s scientific or empirically explained. I don’t know if, if I need that.
Roger Sperry who, as I said, was my intellectual mentor, the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize, said that our job with science is to anticipate what nature will eventually give us. Maybe in terms of waves to wisdom, the wisdom in this process is that we don’t need scientist to validate the wisdom that the experience of being surrounded by water and participating in the act of surfing on a regular basis provides you but that wisdom is provided to us in other ways. In my case since 1964. I think I’m past needing science. I do know that it’s a requirement for me.
Maia: Surfing is a requirement for you?
Antonio: It’s a requirement for me.
Maia: You are a model of what this kind of integrated lifestyle can do for someone’s success. I mean there aren’t a lot of sixty-somethings in the hyper successful professional world who are as fit, active, healthy as you are. And, you know the big smile you have on your face all the time is testament enough.
Antonio: Well, maybe people think I’m smoking pot.
Maia: Laugh- instead of surfing waves…
Antonio: But that’s not true. I will tell you it’s a requirement and it’s necessary just as much as other things like eating, sleeping, it’s just part of the equation. So, waves to wisdom… Or, maybe the alternative should be wisdom to waves.
Maia: I love it! Thank you so much for your time!
Antonio: Oh, my pleasure!
Maia: I hope you found Dr. Puente’s story to be as inspiring and instructive as I did. Sharing these stories is a great privilege but I also have the honor of playing a role in stories I don’t share. If you’d like to have a conversation about whether I might be the right coach for you, visit wavestowisdom.com
Waves to Wisdom Interview: Surf Sista Mary
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Player at the bottom of the page.
"...when I surf I could just sit there, and I know I'm black, and I can tell by some of the stares, people are going, 'Oh, look, a black woman.' But I can just sit there and shut down for a bit. That's nice."
~ Surf Sista Mary
Show Notes and Further Reading
Mary’s Blog: Black People Don’t Surf
Derrick Adams’ Water Paintings
NY TIMES Article about racism and American pools.
Trailer for documentary The Black Line.
Trailer for documentary White Wash about African American surfers
Interview Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Surf Sista Mary: What you don’t understand about being black or being gay or being, you know, Latino or Muslim is you’re always reminded of it. So if you’re white, you can just go through life and be white. But if you’re a different group something is always reminding you. The president says something or there’s something on the news or somebody goes to a mosque and shoots up the place. All those things remind you, oh you’re not like everybody else, even though you are. But when I surf I could just sit there, and I know I’m black, and I can tell by some of the stares, people are going, “Oh, look, a black woman.” But I can just sit there and shut down for a bit. That’s nice.
Maia: In a 1970 interview with the late great Nina Simone, the interviewer asks what freedom is. Simone says, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear… like a new way of seeing…”
This interview was recorded in the summer of 2019. A lot has changed since my shared sessions with Surf Sista Mary. The day I am recording this introduction is June 19th, 2020. That was unintentional but welcome coincidence. For anyone who doesn’t know its Juneteenth— a holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when a Union general announced to the African Americans of Galveston Texas that they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln had signed two and a half years earlier. Word spread quickly among Texas’s black population and previously enslaved people released themselves into the promise of freedom. In so many ways that promise was and still is that promise was delayed, and then just outright betrayed, through a combination of many legal and policy decisions, outright terror and violence, and all kinds of cultural currents and habits.
It feels to me like, in just the last couple of weeks, something 7changed. It has begun to feel like there is hope. Like there is reason to believe that the promise of an America of the people, by the people, and for the people might have some life left in it yet. That liberty and justice for all could be, after 400 years, a thing we on this land between two seas move towards together.
In other words, it’s started to feel like we white people are waking up to a world, and to a possibility that has been right here all along.
This episode was initially scheduled to come out in early March of 2020, but I decided to delay this season’s podcast. It didn’t quite seem right to be talking about all of the benefits of surfing at the beginning of a global pandemic that would clearly reduce everyone’s freedom of movement, including access to beaches and the joy they bring to those of us who surf. And then came, Amauhd Arbery, murdered while he was jogging, Breonna Taylor, murdered while she was sleeping, and George Floyd, murdered while he was pleading for air. The Black Lives Matter movement has garnered the attention it deserved all along and we are in a time of what feels like long-overdue national reckoning.
None of this, not pandemics, not police brutality, came up when Surf Sista Mary and I shared some fabulous waves in Southern California. We were, as far as I know, thinking about what surfers think about— waves and rides, rides, and waves. But while thinking of riding the ocean’s energy we knew the feeling we were chasing, and although there’s no good word for it, perhaps one that comes close is freedom.
Unlike early March, this seems like the perfect time to release Mary Mills’ voice into the world. What does surfing have to do with black liberation?
Simone’s eloquence and evocation come close to describing my experience as a surfer. Learning how to ride the waves has been the most liberating, empowering, and transformative practice of my life. Anybody who’s paying attention can’t ignore the fact that African-Americans are massively under-represented in almost all Surf lineups in this country. The history of modern surfing is inextricably intertwined with the history of colonial exploitation, of the subjugation of native people, of the systematic removal of African Americans from recreational access to the water over a period of generations. In other words, when Sista Mary sees surprise in the eyes of those who note that “there’s a black woman”, it’s no surprise that it’s a surprise. So few of my fellow surfers perceive that fact as a problem.
I have long believed that I understand why some of the most violent white and police instigated riots against African Americans during the civil rights movement happened during peaceful attempts to integrate beaches. If you want to keep people from loving one another, from coming to feel deeply tied to one another, from understanding how little separates us and the powerful, intense connections that come through shared, immersive joy, you’d better keep them from playing together in the water.
For my part, I haven’t pushed the issue as much as I could have and, let’s face it, should have. Surfing is the most liberating, instructive, deeply freeing practice I’ve ever experienced. As I’ve said many times in these interviews, it can dissolves artificial barriers in our minds, our bodies, our hearts, our lives. I didn’t learn to surf until I was 40. Breonna Taylor died when she was 26. It should go without saying but saying is necessary and not nearly enough. Everybody, no matter how much melanin, should be free to live and breathe and learn to surf if she chooses.
It seems so straightforward. But that freedom might require a radical restructuring of lots of unseen forces and assumptions and habits that have allowed me, and others like me, to throw ourselves headlong into this deeply rewarding and creative endeavor without much thought for who’s missing from the line-up. There’s a contemporary African American painter named Derrick Adams who painted a series of black bodies at play in the water. He notes that it is precisely when black bodies are shown or seen at leisure that white supremacy is most likely to rear its ugliest Hydra heads. Adams believes that the black body, freely engaged in leisure, at play in the water after and in spite of all the collective historical trauma, is a profoundly political, deeply radical portrayal.
In a 1976 live concert recording, Nina Simone sings
I wish I could share all the love that’s in my heart
Wish I could break all the things that bind us apart
Wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you’d see
You’d agree
Everybody should be free
Because if we ain’t then we’re murderous
Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Interview
Maia: Okay, ready?
Mary: Ready.
Maia: Awesome! OK, why don’t we start, if you are comfortable with you telling everybody your name, your age, and how long you been surfing.
Mary: I will tell you my surfing name, Surf Sista Mary. I am 56— I just turned 56 last week and I’ve been surfing 17 years.
Maia: Fantastic, okay. And we are parked on the side of a winding road in San Clemente and we can see the Pacific from where we are, the sun is out [gorgeous!] so gorgeous and will you tell anybody who’s listening a little bit about what we just did.
Mary: We just had a really good session at San Onofre. I didn’t think it would be good I was thinking I don’t know if I want to go is supposed to be windy and then it was gray when we got here, it was raining on the way but the waves were pretty darn good [laugh].
Maia: Holy cow it was so fun! You know I’m used to East Coast breaks and we just don’t have waves that go on and on like that. It was, there were such long rides.
Mary: That’s the best surf I’ve had in months.
Maia: And you know one of the things that’s such a treat for me is seeing people like the woman we saw who must’ve been in her late 60s who was just rippin’!
Mary: Which one? The one with the white hair or…
Maia: The one with the white hair I’m thinking but there were a couple out there, weren’t there?
Mary: Yes!
Maia: Fantastic, well you live in Los Angeles [yes] and this was our second session this morning we’d surfed earlier right at one of your usual breaks, El Porto, and I found you because of a blog that you wrote for several years. Your blog is entitled “Black People Don’t Surf” …
Mary: That’s the final name, the name alternated [okay] depending on my mood.
Maia: Fantastic talk a little bit about your moods and your rotating blog names.
Mary: Well, I like William Faulkner so originally it was The Surf and The Fury and then I got bored with that and I think I changed it to a different Faulkner title. I think he had a book called Light in August and I change that to Surf in August. But always people remark about me being black and surfing and, you know, the stereotype is black people don’t surf. So finally at one point I just changed it to that and left it.
Maia: It, uh, it speaks quite eloquently just, just like it is I think [laugh] and you really, eye-opening and you really you chronicled your, your surfing adventures for several years and almost session by session. What was the motivation to start a blog that you kept up for that long?
Mary: Well, I like to write. At the time I remember blogs were just starting and they were featuring them on Surfline and I thought I want to be featured on Surfline so I started a blog. And they did feature it on Surfline. That was part of why I did it because I wanted to be noticed for my writing and I also have such a bad memory that I wanted to be able to look back and see what I did when I was surfing and learning to surf. And when I look at the blog now I think, “I don’t remember that, at all.”
Maia: It’s good that you kept track that way. And something that you talked about earlier today which I find so fascinating is that moment when you first decided to learn to surf and the fact that it coincided with another really important event in your life. Will you tell that story?
Mary: Yeah, [laugh] now I’m laughing. Okay, I used to be a competitive cyclist so part of my route depending on where I was training would be to just ride slowly down the bike path and enjoy the ocean. And one day I passed a table that had a brochure for a women’s surf class and I thought “Huh, I’ve always like surfing I want to learn to surf and I finally know how to swim.” So I stopped and got the brochure but a little voice told me, “You can’t call them. Not yet.” And I took the brochure home and was going to call them the voice could tell me “You, you can’t —you can’t surf yet.” and it turns out I was pregnant.
Maia: Fascinating!
Mary: Yeah so I had to wait until I had the kid in the three months after I had him I started taking classes.
Maia: So let’s just let me just pause for second so you had a three-month-old you had just given birth to your one and I believe only child [correct, one and only] to your son and then you started to, to surf. And was that class a good class? Did you feel like you became proficient as a result of that?
Mary: No, not at all the class was good. I did not become proficient.
Maia: It takes a while, doesn’t it?
Mary: Yeah I think it was mainly to get women in the water it was run by Mary Setterholme and she was a former US surfing champ and I think she was just trying to get women in the water but was not proficient. I was good at popping up— they told me that.
Maia: And did you fall in love with it right away?
Mary: I think I fell in love with it when I was a kid? [You did?] Yeah, I wanted to surf since I was little.
Maia: And talk a little bit about that, where you first see surfing?
Mary: ABC’s Wide World of Sports! I think it was was it in black and white? No I think it was probably in color by that point but I remember having a crush on Shaun Thompson from South Africa.
Maia: He’s a cutie!
Mary: Oh my God. And I met him and he kissed me on the mouth and I almost died.
Maia: Did he really? Wow!
Mary: Yes, he did! But ever since then I kept thinking I want to surf but I’m a black kid with straightened hair and I don’t know how to swim. So I didn’t think it would ever happen. But then I grew up, cut off all my hair, learned how to swim and it was time to learn how to surf.
Maia: It happened.
Mary: Yeah.
Maia: So you saw surfing on Wide World of Sports. Were you tempted to learn then?
Mary: No! I couldn’t swim! And black people surfing? That’s not a thing! I mean I was little— probably like 10. Maybe, so, mm-mh.
Maia: So you saw surfing as a child you really wanted to surf as an adult he finally just happened upon this opportunity yes at that point you had learned how to swim
Mary: Yes at 23 I decided, Okay I need to learn how to swim because I wanted to do triathlons. So I chopped off all my straightened hair. I was never into hair and into all the trappings of what make you stereotypically attractive as a woman.
I’ve always been athletic and obviously I have always been black and black women are acculturated to straighten our hair and then you’re a slave to your hair because you don’t want to get it wet you don’t want to do this. And now women wear weaves but I always just wanted to go outside and play so 23 because I wanted to learn how to swim I chopped off all that straightened hair I just had a short Afro and it’s been on ever since. I have never straightened my hair again and never will.
Maia: You don’t miss it?
Mary: Oh, no! Why would I? I can go do whatever— I don’t even look in the mirror barely. Because I don’t wear makeup and I don’t do anything with my hair. I just get up, shake my dreadlocks and I go.
Maia: And you’re ready…
Mary: Yeah, and my man loves it so what’s the problem?
Maia: Well, it’s pretty fabulous the dreadlocks are pretty fabulous, I have to say…
Mary: And he said that he likes that I don’t wear makeup because of course then you spend all your time going, wait, I have to get ready. If he wants to go do something I’m ready.
Maia: You just go do something…
Mary: Yeah, [more freedom…] if it rains, it rains! just did is we just go more freedom if it rains, it rains.
Maia: Part of, part of what I’m doing with this podcast is trying to share what I believe I’ve come across which is this wisdom that surfers seem to me to accumulate from their embodied practice of immersing themselves in this more than human medium, in this dynamic environment. What did surfing teach you as you were learning? Mary: As I was learning? I think it taught me some humility. I’ve never been stuck up but I’ve always been a very good athlete so whatever sport I turned to I was good and boy surfing was different. So it teaches you patience. It teaches you humility and it teaches you you’re not in control, the ocean is in control. You can only control you, you can’t control that— I’m pointing at the ocean. You can’t control that. So at some point you have to give yourself over to it and you have to know when you can get in and you also have to know when you can’t and I think a lot of people don’t learn that. If the oceans angry you need to keep your little happy— do we swear? [we can we can beep it] you need to keep your little happy butt on land.
Maia: Yeah, yeah, it’s, it really is— and I don’t know if this is true for you but I tend to be a pretty anxious and controlling person at times and so that as you say giving yourself over to this powerful force, that for me, I have to practice that over and over and over again. It’s never something that I feel, I, I’ve got this now. I’m done. I need reminders all the time and surfing is so good at giving those reminders.
Mary: I don’t have that though and I think it may be because I’m black. I— there’s so little I can control— I can’t make people treat me equally and most people are nice to me so I’m not saying, “Oh I get treated badly because I’m black.” I get treated very well because I’m me. That’s what I’m told because people say you have a good attitude you have good energy. So people are always nice to me but as a black person and as a black woman I feel like I don’t control much of anything. So surfing is just part of me going alright, I can work within the structure I have but I try to control very few things.
There are so many forces at play when you walk out of your door. How can you control any of it? You know, people try to use their money to control it but that’s a good thing about surfing and I’ve said that elsewhere, the ocean doesn’t care you can have all the money in the world you can have all the privilege in the world, you can have all the beauty in the world, if you don’t know how to surf and respect the ocean, you’re not going to do well.
Maia: It doesn’t make any difference does it?
Mary: It doesn’t make a difference.
Maia: No, not one bit— and it is, I don’t know and, in my experience, you know I walk through the world occupying this body and it’s probably different from your experience— I have found that at many breaks once people figure out that you are competent, they treat with a certain measure of respect [they do]. Yeah, and it’s it’s [agreed] interesting because there are— we were discussing last few days I’ve surfed at Malibu and there’s about to be this huge contest there which means there are world-class long borders there, most of whom look like they’re between 20 and 30 and, you know they’re all of course, beautiful and, and showing off for each other, as is their job, that’s what they do, they are pro surfers and for the most part they, they ignore me but they’re also, really when it came to a point where I was in a position where I couldn’t be ignored I was treated with respect every single time and that doesn’t always happen out in the world.
Mary: Right, exactly, it doesn’t always happen at Malibu, so I’m [so I’ve heard] yeah yes so I was shocked!
Maia: I think the pros didn’t have anything to prove to me, that’s for sure.
Mary: One of the aspects of your outlook on life that has really been intriguing to me as we’ve had conversations over the last couple of surf sessions is your orientation towards work and I’ve said elsewhere in the podcast that I spent a lot of time in this little village in Costa Rica. And so I I’ve been lucky enough to befriend to be befriended by several Costa Ricans. And your attitude towards work comes closer to their attitude towards working than just about any American I have come across. [really?] Yes, of our age. Would you talk a little bit about your relationship with work?
Mary: American culture says if you don’t work you’re lazy. Well I have 3 degrees and I’ve had jobs. But sitting in an office typing in front of a computer— for what? I mean really for what? To make money and then to make money for what and for whom?
Maia: That’s a good question.
Mary: You know I’m the job I have now, I don’t get paid much— my boss makes tons of money so really I’m helping him. I mean, I’m paying my bills but it’s really— my attitude is you’re getting the best hours of my day to help you make money and really I’m not getting that much out of it. So I don’t I don’t understand why work is that important. We should be living. I mean yes we live in the United States, we have bills, we want housing so you have to work but you don’t have to have a career. I’ve never had a career. My kiddos my career.
Maia: And what a meaningful career that is!
Mary: Yeah, it’s the best job ever!
Maia: And what are your 3 degrees in, if you don’t mind me asking?
Mary: A BA in English, and an MA in English, and a law degree. And I hate work, that’s what’s so funny but I didn’t know it at the time when I was getting all the degrees. I thought I was setting myself up for a career and then I got in the working world and hated it from day one.
Maia: My Costa Rican friends who I know who, for example, are surf instructors they don’t hate their work at all but they do it in order to support the important parts of their lives where are their children, and their families, their parents— they live close to their parents as do you, you make that choice and there are other people of course you have grimmer jobs who have different attitudes towards them, and we have, you know, there are precious few jobs I think that don’t keep people like you and me hemmed in physically to a point where we’re just miserable [right] especially if you’re a thinking sort of person you get channeled into these jobs that involve sitting in a desk…
Mary: Yes it’s awful— luckily I have a standing desk now and I work in front of a window but if I didn’t have those two I would’ve quit. I’ve been there a year– that’s almost a record for me.
Maia: And you’re writing professionally now, right?
Mary: I guess, is it writing I don’t know, what I do, they call us technical writers [OK] yes so who cares? I mean, really when I meet people I don’t say to them, “What do you do for living?” [right] I don’t care what you do for living [yeah]. It’s not important, so it irks me when people say “And what is your job?” Are you gonna judge me based on my job? Who cares what I do! I go to job to make money to keep food in my kid’s mouth and, you know, pay the electric bill and all that but other than that and it doesn’t define me!
Maia: Yeah, yeah if you were going to answer that question in a way that that felt right to you, what do you do? What would be the first few answers you would give?
Mary: I always tell people, well before I have this job “I’m a mom.” [Absolutely] Yeah, now I say, I okay work for this company and write technical manuals for airline compliance, who cares? And then I always say, “Who cares?” (23:38)
Maia: Who cares— do you ever say you’re a surfer when people ask what you do?
Mary: No, in terms of a job, no.
Maia: It’s interesting because one thing I’ve noticed about surfers, American surfers is that if you asked them what they do many of them will answer with their job. But if you pay any attention to their lives that’s number 2. Unless they have a family, in which case maybe it’s number three. What they do first is sometimes family, sometimes what they do is surf. The job happens, it’s not like we’re not responsible but if that surf forecast is good enough, that job’s gonna wait.
Mary: Right?!? [yeah] That’s why working part-time now because I have an 88-year-old mom, I’m the only child. I have a 17-year-old kid, I’m a single parent, and I work full time I was not surfing, there was no time for surf. I finally decided I can’t do this. I need me time. So now I’m starting to surf again. I don’t have benefits anymore— I don’t care. I should care but my health is basically good so I don’t care and I’m going to get married in a year— I hate to— but you have to think that way I’m an American— I’m gonna get married in the year that I’ll have my husband’s insurance so I can hang on.
Maia: Yes, yes well and it’s interesting, insurance does not keep you healthy.
Mary: No, not at all.
Maia: But having a reasonable lifestyle— that can maybe keep you healthy [yeah]. So what other lessons has the ocean or surfing taught you?
Mary: That’s a good question. I don’t know it’s kind of what you were talking about— how people don’t judge you as much— if you could surf, you’re cool. So I’ve never had any kind of run-in with anyone based on characteristics that I can’t change. So nobody’s ever said, “You stupid woman” or “You stupid black person.” No, I can surf and people are, “Hey how are you?” That’s nice, that’s very nice.
Maia: Is that different from the rest of your life?
Mary: I think with surfing I can turn off my brain and that’s why I like it. That’s different from the rest of my life. One thing I tell people is, “What you don’t understand about being black, or being gay, or being you know Latino, or Muslim is you’re always reminded of it. So if you’re white you can just go through life and be white. But if you’re a different group something is always reminding you— the president said something or there’s something on the news or somebody goes to a Mosque and shoots up the place. All those things remind you you’re not like everybody else even though you are. But when I surf I can just sit there and I know I’m black and I can tell by some of the stares people are going “Oh, look a black woman.” But I can just sit there and shut down for a bit. That’s nice.
Maia: It’s a wonderful state, isn’t it? [Yeah] There’s a neuroscientist named Arne Dietrich who studies the neuroscience of flow? He’s looking into that and he said something really interesting in a podcast interview that I heard him give which is that states of flow and a lot of the states that we call “higher consciousness” are actually reduced consciousness. They’re states in which we can turn off the part of our brain that is always analyzing and always anticipating.
Mary: That makes sense. [Yeah] That makes perfect sense. Because when I first started surfing I would overthink everything— overthinking, overthinking brain going brain going. And as I got better it got more and more quiet. And now I just shut down pretty much and just surf. That doesn’t happen on land. I’m always thinking— overthinking always going.
Maia: It is a— I think at this point in my life and I have, of course, like everybody an evolving sense of what is working and what’s not working and the world that I move through but that tendency that you just described is one of the motivating missions of this podcast— that I think so few American grown-ups have that regular kind of a fully embodied immersive experience and it’s so important if you have access to it and it doesn’t have to be through surfing right but it looks to me like surfers have a pretty good handle literally they can grab a hold of and maybe more easily than some other sorts of athletes or practitioners but it really does feel so important especially now as computers and automation and robotics are taking over more and more of our physical existence to have some sense of connection and relationship and, and worth that comes through who we are as these human animals is just so important.
Mary: As just people! Not connected to your career or your things none of that matters I should be a Buddhist. I’m not but I should be a Buddhist.
Maia: There are aspects of what you say that, that strike me as very Buddhist to the extent I understand what that means.
Mary: I have little attachment to things like when my board got stolen I was mad because I like the board bag you know. I can get another surfboard, it’s gonna cost me something but I really like the board bag. But of course, most people would say the important thing was the surfboard but who cares. Whoever stole it , you better ride it well. I just feel like people are important things are important.
Maia: We were talking our way to San Onofre this morning and you were talking about your— let’s call it an ambivalent relationship with Southern California where it’s— I have to say I have has been here working but completely on my own schedule and able to control when I move around and still the traffic is untenable. So I can understand your impulse to want to move away from here when your life circumstances allow. And you said something on the way to San Onofre this morning which surprised me but, but shouldn’t given your non-attachment orientation which is that when you move away if it’s necessary to give up surfing you would. You would happily do that.
Mary: Oh yeah. I mean I’m trying to teach my son life is about balance and as much as I would love to serve forever I’m also 56. Which means I’m getting older and I’ve been athletic my whole life so my body is now I can start to feel it starting to fall apart. But I’m still in good shape! But I also have met the one. I mean he is the one. I want to go where he wants to go and neither one of us wants to be here. And I just want to be with him and I want to get old with him and die with him to be truthful. So if that means we don’t live near the ocean I give up surfing that’s fine. I’ve surfed! I’ve had a good time but my life is going to move in a different direction especially physically. I’ve have had a knee replacement I have an ankle with three screws and a plate. I’m getting older so I don’t even think I’m going to surf forever. So I’m ready to move on if I have to.
Maia: And I find it fascinating that your surfer journey began as your motherhood journey began and your son is now 17. So, you’ve done a really good job and he’s probably going to move on in the next few years and that these journeys might be paired and
Mary: I didn’t even see that I didn’t think of that until you mentioned it.
Maia: Yeah, maybe letting go of both at the same time even if you keep surfing and keep mothering— they’ll be different than they were.
Mary: Right. Oh yeah! I mean, you love your kids but once they hit this age you’re thinking, “OK you can go do your thing now.” Because you want your freedom and I’ve been a single parent for the last, I don’t know four years, five years, and that’s rough!
Maia: It seems nearly impossible from my perspective.
Mary: Well, he’s a great kid so it hasn’t been that tough but I think he wants his freedom. I want my freedom. We love each other to death but it’s it’s time.
Maia: So if there’s a segment of my audience, which I think there is, that feels like they would love to have some sort of disciplined play practice— cause surfing takes some discipline— but they haven’t, for whatever reason, they’ve they’ve allowed life or life has gotten in the way. What would you say to them?
Mary: It’s time to put yourself first. People don’t do that. They think they are supposed to go get that career, go get that money, go, that’s not putting you first. That’s putting what society tells you is supposed to come first. What do you want to do? Maybe you want to open a woodshop and just work on wood? Why don’t you do that? I mean I think part of it is Americans are fearful, we’re fearful. And there’s something in me, I don’t know what it is that doesn’t have a lot of fear so I’ll jump without a safety net. I’ll quit a job I don’t care. Now mind you I’m never going be homeless because my family has property but I can be moneyless! But I do… we’re not going be here for that long so you have to think about what it is you want out of your life. I don’t have a bucket list. If there’s something I want to do I do it and if I can’t do it then it’s not on the list.
Maia: That’s part of that letting go of control isn’t it? [yeah] So interesting! Yeah, it is fascinating sometimes to watch especially multi-generation families where it looks like everyone is sacrificing for everyone else— the kids are suffering trying to please the parents and the parents are suffering trying to take care of the kids and somehow we’re were missing the whole point of being alive and appreciative and grateful…
Mary: And you know let’s face it that comes with some privilege. Now if you’re an immigrant who was come here to make a better life for your kid or kids and you have to work, work, work and your wife or your spouse or whoever has to work, work, work, then you really don’t have the freedom like I think you do. But maybe you can take a little bit of time for you, you know… I get it. There is privilege. Even though I’m black I know I have privilege. I have middle-class privilege and I don’t deny that. So I can take these leaps of faith and know I’m not going splat on the ground. I’ll survive [absolutely] And I think other people need to know that too— you’re, you’ll survive. [Yeah] You will Believe it.
Maia: Yes. It’s Yeah It’s a really good point. Depending on who you are and what your circumstances there’s sometimes fear is not baseless but.. And many times it is.
That there, there is. And I don’t know if it’s cultivated in us or if we do it to ourselves but we do really have this “It’s Never Enough” orientation I think as a culture…
Mary: I guess, and for me it’s— I always feel like “That’s too much. I don’t want all that. I don’t want all those things. Which is why I want to get in the Class B with my man and drive off. We have this little box with four wheels and we have each other.
Maia: What else do you need?
Mary: Done. Good enough.
Maia: So beautiful! My gosh I hope that happens for you!
Mary: I think it will.
Maia: As I myself have moved out of working for someone else and began working for myself over the last couple of years I definitely have had a little bit of identity panic
Mary: Of course, you’re an American.
Maia: Which has been really interesting to see that in myself. I don’t think of myself— I’ve always been a little underemployed relative to my peers, if not a lot underemployed but it really has been fascinating to watch this and, and to see what I do when I’m not pushed with my time and I definitely rest more. I definitely take better care of myself. I eat better. I cook more but I also have this amazing capacity— and talk about privilege it’s such a gift— to follow an idea down and follow it right down to the ground if that takes a week or a year. And beautiful things are coming from that like finding you and your blog [thank you!]. You know I never would have had this incredible experience of of these days that we spent together and learning from you and, and seeing the way you interact with this environment and navigate all this nasty traffic and, you know, and talk to you about your delightful son whose, you know, whose growing up in a lot of ways is chronicled in that blog. [He is!] He’s not the center of it but he is right there in the center of it, if that makes sense.
Mary: He is— he was a little kid, now he’s grown. 6’1” 120 pounds, string bean, [laugh] hair on his face. He’s a great kid. I’m very proud of him.
Maia: He also writes, is that correct?
Mary: He does. He wants to be a writer and I spend all my money at Barnes & Noble. Either I spend all my money on food, even though he ways 120 pounds or taking him to Barnes & Noble to buy more books and how do you say no? “I want to go to Barnes & Noble and buy some books.” Okay. Alright.
Maia: Stomach food or brain food for that growing man.
Mary: Exactly
Maia: So what else have you learned in your life as a surfer or as your life as a surfer has interwoven with your life as a mother or a daughter? What have you learned from surfing that you could share with the audience?
Mary: What haven’t I learned from surfing? That’s really what I’m thinking! What have I learned? I don’t know, my life changed quite a bit because of surfing, because of the blog. I tend to be, as I’ve told you, a lone wolf. I tend to be a homebody but surfing took me out of my shell and got me some attention that I hadn’t expected. So I don’t know— surfing has changed me. It’s made me a little more open to being out in public, I guess. Yeah.
Maia: Well it’s interesting to some extent you are a little bit of a public figure in the Southern California surfing scene…
Mary: I think, was… I don’t know if I still am but I used to be. Yeah, but now we have a generational shift so young people don’t know who I am They just know oh, there’s that black woman who surfs. Older people know me from the blog or just know me because there weren’t that many other black women surfing. There was me, there was Andrea… That’s about it. But now it’s changing.
Maia: It’s changing for the better?
Mary: For the better. I’m seeing a lot more black people on social media who surf, and people in the water, now I can go to a beach and go “Oh, there’s a person, there’s a person.”
Maia: Do you feel, I may be projecting here but [Okay] do you feel like you might in some way have played a part in that cultural shift?
Mary: No, I don’t.
Maia: It feels to me like you were a leader.
Mary: I don’t think I was, no because there was always a Black Surfing Association and that predated me o, no, I don’t think I had anything to do with it. I think I was the one who was vocal and just said, “Hey! We’re out here.” But I don’t think I caused anything.
Maia: I was walking, uh, I have a dear friend who was down visiting me at my house at the coast in North Carolina and we were walking across the Boardwalk to access the beach and I didn’t notice It but there was apparently this little girl, six or seven years old and my friend said, “She saw that surfboard and she watched you walk 100 yards towards her and then stopped and turned around and watched you walk away.” [Wow] Well, I wonder, you know, if that interaction right there with this older woman carrying a surfboard changed that girl’s life [I bet it did]. Like suddenly she sees a possibility and so I bet that happens all the time with you and you don’t pay any attention to it cause, you, you’re looking at the ocean!
Mary: Right! I know it’s happened a few times where I’ve seen black people just stop and look, “You surf?”
“Yeah, I surf.” Shock. Shock and awe. And maybe (or women?] It inspired some people, women, yeah, but then again here I go if they have straightened hair, they’re not going to go get in the ocean [Right]. So we need to get black women to let go of the hair. I’ve said to people if black women stop worrying about their hair you’re going to see some surfing! You will see black women in the water.
Maia: That’s so interesting.
Mary: It’s all about the hair. Yeah.
Maia: Okay. Well, I think your hair is fabulous!
Mary: Thank you, so do I!
Maia: They are wonderful and we’ll be sure to post a picture of you and your fabulous dreadlocks on the blog. Is there anything else that you would like to say to an audience, I would imagine primarily of non-surfers that you’ve learned in this long delicious chapter of surfing?
Mary: I would say stop taking work so seriously. What are you working for? I mean, I know what you’re working for. To get the house and the cars but what are you doing to feed your soul? It’s not your job. So you need to figure out what it is.
The End. Thank you very much.
Maia: Thank you very much! I really appreciate your time and especially appreciate the shared waves— so much fun!
That was fun. You should have caught that last wave with me though!!
Maia: If you enjoyed this interview, please consider sharing it with a friend and taking just a minute to give us a rating.
Like many people, I’m in a period of intense learning and recalibrating my priorities around new ways of seeing. To some white people I know, this is a little overwhelming. To me Ii’s a relief. It feels like we are finally willing to think together about dissolving the artificial barriers of race that have been reinforced for far too long, especially near the water. Racism and white supremacy, in our hearts and institutions, brutalizes our love and our capacity for connection, even when there are no batons or guns anywhere in sight. Even when we are at play, on a beach, waiting for the next beautiful wave.
To find links to ways to make a contribution of your energy or money to the crucial efforts to address racial disparities in comfort and safety near and on the water, visit wavestowisdom.com/SurfSista.
Interview: Dr. Nathalie Arias
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Player at the bottom of the page.
"If you have the chance to get closer to the ocean that’s gonna be life changing. Maybe you’re not living the life you wanted or always expected to be, I think the ocean might help you a little bit to decide here’s my priorities now and this is what I want to do."
~ Dr. Nathalie Arias
Show Notes and Further Reading
Conocer: A Responsible, Socially Engaged Tour Operator in Nosara, Costa RIca
Interview Transcript
INTRODUCTION
My name is Maia Dery.
The Waves to Wisdom interviews are the result of an exploration into a world I discovered when I learned to surf at mid-life.
Some of these conversations aren’t necessarily with people who we would instantly recognize as leaders but they are all leading us in a direction I instinctively followed and have benefitted tremendously in the process. Some of them don’t have huge audiences, but they are living very large lives.
To me, these people all seem to have wisdom practices centered in their relationship to the more-than-human world, to what we usually think of as “nature.”
Surfing proved first revelatory, then revolutionary in my life. I thought I was creative, thought I knew and loved water, thought I took care of my body. But when I entered the world of surfing and waves, when I started to ritualistically return to a literal edge, I realized my vision for my life had been hampered by some artificial barriers.
Slowly, with each wave and wipeout, those barriers in my brain, heart, and body began to dissolve.
I began to wonder, what if we all had a nature based practice that cracked us open? Made us more creative? Allowed us to reliably let go with the abandon of play? Of unbridled joy? What if we all practiced vulnerability, risk and failure on a daily basis and they were fun? Wouldn’t it make our lives better? Wouldn’t it lead us to the places it feels like, in this moment of planetary peril, we need to go?
Whether you find full bodied and big hearted connection through waves or walking or digging in the dirt, I hope you find these conversations useful in your own journey of re-inhabiting your life with renewed joy, deep engagement, and increasing wisdom.
Dr. Nathalie: Dr. Nathalie: If you have the chance to get closer to the ocean that’s gonna be life changing. Maybe you’re not living the life you wanted or always expected to be, I think the ocean might help you a little bit to decide here’s my priorities now and this is what I want to do.
Maia: A couple of years ago, I left my full time job as a college instructor, one of the ways I dealt with the existential terror inherent in taking the leap into entrepreneurship and, even more frightening, radical freedom. I knew that, no matter what happened, I would be able to spend more time in the small rural community of Nosara Costa Rica, a place I’d fallen in love with because of its beauty and waves and light but even more, the open heartedness and zest for life of the of the locals and expats who live there.
Dr. Nathalie Arias is a physician, talented longboard surfer, and soon to be nutritionist who lives and practices in Nosara. In the process of facing her own health challenges, her professional journey took a turn when she became inspired to tend to and learn about her eating habits so she could continue to pursue her relationship with the ocean. Her story of a play practice leading to greater and more effective service is precisely the sort of narrative I keep running into as I deepen my own commitment to this pastime and all the embodied wisdom it has to offer to those of us willing to pay attention. I hope you enjoy Dr. Nathalie’s insight as much as I did. Welcome to Waves to Wisdom!
Dr. Nathalie: My name is Nathalie Arias. I’m 31 and I’ve been surfing for 5 years.
Maia: Five years okay excellent and we met in the water right off of Playa Guiones in Costa Rica and you are Costa Rican?
Dr. Nathalie: Yes
Maia: You were born where?
Dr. Nathalie: In San Jose?
Maia: Okay which is the capital city? [Yes] But you have family roots in Nosara?
Dr. Nathalie: My mom is from Nosara.
Maia: Okay
Dr. Nathalie: My whole… mom’s side is from Nosara.
Maia: And how did you wind up back here?
Dr.N: I mean I was always coming when I was little. Back and forth, back and forth for vacation and then I moved in 2014 after getting married.
Maia: So you married somebody who lives here? [Yes] And how is, how is Nosara different from San Jose?
Dr. Nathalie: Oh, everything.
Maia: Everything is different?
Dr. Nathalie: Yeah, I mean San Jose is like a small city, not so pretty, a lot of noise everywhere, uh, traffic, like every other city I guess…and you come to Nosara and it
Is just like a small paradise. Here on the peninsula, at least for me, I grew up there and now here every time I go back there it’s like, “Oh! Take me back to Nosara!” Yeah, it’s just like a different style of life and I’m just so used to be here now and we normally go there, and just like one or two days and then, back to Nosara!
Maia: If you were going to describe to somebody what it’s like to be here relative to in a city, what would you say?
Dr. Nathalie: It is… peaceful. Like, you are gonna see nature around you, birds, monkeys, yeah, it’s just like quiet.
Maia: So quiet. It’s just beautiful, isn’t it? [yes] Middle of the jungle really— it’s very rural here even though there are a lot of people coming through..
Dr. Nathalie: We have a lot of tourists here but we manage to have some quiet places.
Maia: So, did you learn how to surf when you moved back to Nosara?
Dr. Nathalie: My first wave ever was in 2012. [2012] But I didn’t have the chance to surf much or practice. My first green wave, it was amazing!
Maia: Your first green wave was amazing?
Dr. Nathalie: I have pictures of the whole sequence.
Maia: You do?!
Dr. Nathalie: It was a friend who was taking pictures and he took the whole sequence and I’m just like laughing really hard and I couldn’t believe it, I’m like looking behind me, “Whaaat?!?”
Maia: Oh, my goodness!
Dr. Nathalie: So that was like my first time ever, obviously but then after that I came back in 2014. I was not getting any better. I mean, I was really not strong enough because I was going once a week. My arms were like tired all the time. My sessions were like maybe three or four waves and that was like a lot already.
Maia: You were exhausted?
Dr. Nathalie: I was so exhausted and I mean it took me 2014-2015, maybe until 2016? I went like more regular like maybe 3-4 times a week.
Maia: Okay
Dr. Nathalie: So I feel like I started surfing like three years ago.
Maia: Wow! Okay, interesting.
Dr. Nathalie: I noticed what surfing was. It was like so hard for me just once a week and then now you go like, 3-4 times a week and, Oh! I can catch waves now! More than three or four every session. So that was pretty fun, actually.
Maia: But did you love it when you were only catching three or four waves a session? Was it still…
Dr. Nathalie: I did, yeah, no, it was good enough.
Maia: And how come you could only surf once a week when you first came here?
Dr. Nathalie: I was working from Monday through Saturday, like really early so I didn’t have the chance to. So Sundays was my only day.
Maia: And what’s your work?
Dr. Nathalie: I’m a medical doctor here in town. Yeah. Back then I was working in Nosara Town.
Maia: And Nosara Town’s about 6 km inland from [Guiones] the coast where we are now. And you were working, as I understand it, at the clinic?
Dr. Nathalie: Yeah, there was a new clinic there right after when I came and I was like, okay.
Maia: Okay, so that was the first couple of years. And then what happened that allowed you to surf more than just Sundays?
Dr. Nathalie: I moved out of that clinic and opened my own business, another medical office, like closer to the beach and I had my own schedule so I was able to go in the mornings— one, maybe two hours, 3-4 times a week now cause I was my own boss. So that allowed me to surf a little bit more.
Maia: And were you, I know you were learning to surf then, and I just want to say because, hopefully I’ll get to take some pictures of you before I leave to post with this interview, surfing, but you are an exceptionally talented and elegant long boarder [Thank you!] and when I was surfing for four years I think I was just figuring out how to turn the board. Uh, really you have a lot of natural ability and it’s just a pleasure watching you! [Thank you!] So, you were able to surf then three or four times a week, you’re still a medical doctor, you’ve opened your own clinic. What were you learning from surfing at that time in your life?
Dr. Nathalie: I think that I really wanted to surf and for that, I mean for me for me to be able to surf, I was learning also like how to eat healthy because I was not strong enough. My ams were like weak all the time, my back was hurting so I was learning like to stretch out more, to eat more healthy foods, sleep better and because I wanted to be more in the water. And it doesn’t matter, I was working the same, I don’t know, even more, like 10-12 hours a day but if I had like a two or maybe like an hour and 1/2 surfing in the morning, that was fine with me. I didn’t care like if I was working that much but I was being able to surf more during the week.
So I was learning like now I need to be able to work like 10- 12 hours and for this now I need to eat better, sleep better. I was not doing too good on my food because I was so used to the hospital like, like schedule— not eating sometimes, you know? Like during the whole day. So when I came here I was doing pretty much the same but then I was noticing that I was not able to surf good, or paddle, or even, like the waves were a little bit bigger I was like so done. And that that— I was not even in the lineup, it was taking me like 20-30 minutes, I was like, “Oh, there is something wrong with me!” I was just tired, I was not feeling my body, like the right way.
Maia: And surfing was teaching you?
Dr. Nathalie: Surfing was teaching me that it was really important to take care of your body in every aspect. I don’t know, like everything, I think was related to surfing back then and to learn how to handle the stress also from work, the patients and…
Maia: Okay— I find it fascinating that you had been to medical school which, in theory, is all about taking care of the human body
Dr. Nathalie: Except yours!
Maia: Except yours. LAUGH
Dr. Nathalie: Yeah it doesn’t matter you have to do everything for the patient. Yeah, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to sleep, you don’t have to eat because you have to work to help the other people, right? Like in an emergency room, you have like 50 people and it’s just insane sometimes and then it doesn’t matter about, you have to do your job, that’s it.
Maia: That’s it! Yeah, so you had to go to the school of surf to learn how to take care of Nathalie’s body?
Dr. Nathalie: Yes
Maia: Dr. Arias needed the waves, so interesting. That, that life of owning your own clinic and you owned the pharmacy next door, is that right?
Dr. Nathalie: Mm hm, pharmacy and medical office
Maia: Okay, and that’s no longer the case you decided to make a change?
Dr. Nathalie: Yes.
Maia: How come?
Dr. Nathalie: I think I was I was working to much, well, not that much but um, I was very, being very careful with every client that comes to the pharmacy, I was treating them as a patient and that was a lot for me because they were not my patients. I wanted to be able to help them— okay, why is the headache? Have you being hydrating good? Sleeping good? Or maybe some type of food you ate? I was trying to find the root of the problem instead of just selling the pill. So I was treating every patient as a client, I mean every client as a patient, sorry, and that became a lot also. A lot of stress because I was worried about, you know like the one patient who came to buy just like Tylenol, “Oh, what if the headache is high blood pressure?” But then they didn’t have the money to pay for the consultation so I was like, you know, I think I was almost working, like double. So I decided to close the pharmacy and just get my practice
Maia: And so now you just have a medical practice.
Dr. Nathalie: Just have a medical practice.
Maia: And only house calls, right?
Dr. Nathalie:Yeah, only housecalls.
Maia: And is the lifestyle healthier now that you’ve made that change?
Dr. Nathalie: It is, for sure. Yeah I have more time for… to study, to work out, to surf. Now I just see the patient that really needs me you know, they call me, they make an appointment and I go to them so it allows me to have more free time to do more stuff. And you surf more? You do surf more?
Dr. Nathalie: I do surf more now.
Maia: Okay, so you learned to surf as an adult, as I did, you were certainly much younger than I was. Really, the motivation for this whole project and all of these interviews is the pattern that I think that I have recognized . Which is that for some surfers, it helps them, as it has you, as you’ve already articulated, it helps them be better humans. It helps them figure out how to take care of themselves both in an immediate sense, in the waves, and in a larger sense, because they want to be able, be healthy to get out into the waves [yeah]. Are there other lessons or aspects of being a wise that you think you’ve learned from the ocean and its waves?
Dr. Nathalie: Yes, big time. I think one of the biggest lessons I have learned is how to handle pressure because I can see it with my practice and I see it in the ocean when the sets are really big, the waves are like, not as nice as you want, or like when there are a lot of people and want to get a wave and there’s always somebody in front of you. I mean, that, that lesson from there, I use it a lot of, in my life, like pressure, how to handle pressure, like in every aspect like with my patient, like emergencies that just show up at my house because they know where I live. Um, I think that’s one lesson I’ve learned from the ocean.
And, being patient also. You have to be patient waiting for a nice wave. Maybe you don’t want that one and wait for the other one and somebody ’s gonna be in front of you again or behind you and then you have to wait again. So being patient also is one of the lessons I have learned from surfing and the same, I use it in my everyday life. With everything, pretty much.
Maia: Do you think there are ways in which surfing has helped you be a better medical doctor?
Dr. Nathalie: Yeah I think so like I use it with my patients. Sometimes you want the patient to do, to follow your recommendations and they don’t because the neighbor always has better advice and then you have to be patient. So I think patience is one of the biggest lessons and I think it makes me a better person or doctor because you have to be, you’ve got to understand what the person is going through, or telling you and why he decided not to follow the treatment or, yeah, I think it that helps a lot.
Maia: It’s pretty powerful if surfing can help a doctor be a better doctor.
Dr. Nathalie: It’s a little bit of everything, like being patient, you have challenges in front of you like the same way you are in the ocean, like you go expecting the waves are going to be nice and smooth and not so big and then, all of a sudden they’re like, oh, the swell is showing up and now you have these big waves and that’s a challenge already and then in the medical practice, we are so far away from everything that everything becomes like a challenge. Cause you don’t have the equipment or you don’t have like the tools sometimes and you have to figure it out and and if not send ‘em to a bigger facility. So that’s one big lesson for me also.
Maia: You have to be adaptable when you’re surfing, you have to know your limits and it sounds like you’ve had to do that in this rural practice.
Dr. Nathalie: Sometimes you try to help the patient and you realize okay, this is not my specialty but the patient doesn’t want to go to Nicoya because it’s too far and then you have to take a bus and it’s like two hours and a half but then you have to set the limits like you just said it, this is not my work and now I need you to go to a bigger facility and I have to learn also to let go of that part because sometimes I get like really attached and I really wish I could do more but then, no, I have to send the person or the patient somewhere else to get whatever the studies, you know, ultrasound, blood tests and all that that we don’t have here.
Maia: We don’t have any of that. So, we had a fascinating conversation the other day in the water about the difficulty of some of the local people to take time off of work to pay for care. Is that something that you ran into frequently when you were at the clinic— that people’s employers would not give them time off?
Dr. Nathalie: Yes, sometimes they’ve got good employers and they take the morning off and they go to the public clinic but it takes a while for you to be seen by the doctor. If not they to a private office so they choose where to go but sometimes it’s hard for them. If you don’t have the money you have to go through the public system and then you waste pretty much your whole day which is like a day of work and that’s one ways pretty much already hard for people because salaries here are not great and if you miss like a whole day it’s gonna, and the end of the week or two weeks for sure you’re gonna be short that money. And if you have a little bit of extra money you can go and pay private but still, once you get the medicine it’s really expensive. Also, cause medicine here is really expensive, so it’s a little bit of everything and if you don’t have the money and you don’t have the time and if your employer doesn’t give you the time either you’re just gonna hold the pain or whatever you’re having until it’s really, really bad, you might go and then it’s gonna be late.
Maia: Then it’s late, yes, maybe too late to do something. Yeah, it’s really, it’s a difficult thing, there’s so much inequality here, things are very expensive in part because there are a lot of people who can afford to pay high prices. But then the minimum wage is two or three dollars an hour and food here is exorbitant and I don’t know if medical care is exorbitant because, knock on wood, I haven’t had to…
Dr. Nathalie: It can be.
Maia: Yes…So were you a an ocean swimmer before you learned to surf?
Dr. Nathalie:No actually that’s embarrassing.
Maia: It’s embarrassing? What’s embarrassing?
Dr.N: Cause I was like 25-26 when I learned how to surf and I realized I didn’t know how to swim either. I was not a very good swimmer so when my leash broke that was like my first experience, it was like, “Oh! Now I have to swim but I don’t know how to swim.”
Maia: My goodness! So you’re the ocean [I’m in the ocean], your leash broke?
Dr. Nathalie: And I’m like freaking out, like about to cry and I’m looking for somebody that I know, for like help, you know I need help, cause I don’t know what to do. I know I can float but I don’t know for how long and I was getting tired and then my husband came and said, “Just stand up! You’re like right there on the sand.” [LAUGH] it was like, oh okay! So that was very embarrassing and after that I think I figured it out— I realized that I needed to know how to swim for me to be able to go and get bigger waves so I did some, not lessons, but with myself I out a snorkel and a mask and I would just swim in the swimming pool— one you put on a mask you can figure it out a little bit. [Interesting!] Yeah, and then I did a free diving course. And I think in that, it was like a 2-day course and those 2 days, once I did that, to learn the technique, how to breathe, and the safety techniques if you’re in the water and somebody’s blacking out or something like that I think after that I became, not a better swimmer but I was very confident surfing after that.
Maia: Interesting, so you didn’t know how to swim and then you learned how to swim a little bit and then you took a free diving course? [Yes] For anybody who doesn’t know explain to them what free diving is.
Dr. Nathalie: Free diving is, so they put you in a swimming pool and they teach you how to hold your breath, sort of like a static breath hold, and you have to be able to reach three minutes with that breath hold. And after that they take you to open water, like to the ocean, and you have to go down the line. The first level goes down the line 60 feet. So you have to be able to go back and forth with one breath, so I did it.
Maia: Let me just repeat this— you went from not being able to swim to holding your breath and going 60 feet down a line in the ocean? Okay, interesting— an ambitious woman!
Dr. Nathalie: Yeah and then after that, I’m good, I can surf now.
Maia: You’re not scared?
Dr. Nathalie: Bigger waves, I can hold the sets, and yeah…
Maia: No problem? It took care of that fear? [Yeah] So powerful, just to walk right into it and not not accept the not knowing. [Yes]Decide I’m gonna know!
Nathalie: Yes, I knew I really wanted to better in the water like because I was always surfing but if the wave was big I was not gonna take it because I didn’t know how the end was gonna be, like the wipe-out and all that stuff. And what if my leash breaks again and “Oh, no I have to figure it out now.” And after that, after the free diving course I was like, “Oh I can take bigger waves now and go down the line and whatever happens down there doesn’t matter.“
Maia: It’s gonna be just fine. [LAUGH].
Dr. Nathalie: Just be careful not to hit anybody and not hit yourself.
Maia: Stay away from that hard board. So interesting and this, at least in my mind, one of the things I’ve discovered about you that is related, at least in my mind is this capacity you have to realize you want to know something that you don’t know and just run right into it is that you have decided to continue your education. [Yes] Even though you’re already a medical doctor— what are you studying now?
Dr. Nathalie: Right now I’m doing a Master’s in nutrition and Public Health.
Maia: So, did you learn much about nutrition in medical school?
Dr. Nathalie: Not a single hour of nutrition. They don’t teach you anything about nutrition. They teach you, I mean they don’t teach you how to treat people with the diet, which is like pretty important. I realized from working here, if I had a patient and I was explaining him like the foods that she or he was able to eat, that I was not getting there. So, I… you know, I saw that as a challenge. I need to be able to explain this better or to teach them better or to help them. Also, you know because the same thing, we go through the same thing. If you have money to afford the medical consultation you won’t have money to go to a nutritionist or something like that, to help you with whatever plan for you to treat your diabetes or any other disease. So, I saw that happening a lot with my patients and I decided to do it for me also and to help my patients in that way a little bit more.
Maia: So exciting— and are you learning a lot that’s useful?
Dr. Nathalie: Yes, a lot.
Maia: It’s really interesting. I find it fascinating and disturbing that the professionals who are tasked with our health don’t learn about nutrition which seems foundational.
Dr. Nathalie: Now I’m doing it, I think it’s, yeah, the foundation of pretty much everything. You can avoid, you can treat, and you can reverse sometimes diseases with just the right diet and that’s all in nutrition. If you don’t have any of that knowledge it’s kinda hard, you’re just gonna prescribe medicines all the time and that’s it pretty much, you know? [Fascinating!] But the idea, my idea is to help people a little bit more in that area.
Maia: And, I am making this link in my mind but I don’t know if this is a link that has any integrity to it, but I heard you say earlier that I wasn’t taking care of myself nutritionally, surfing taught me that I needed to eat better and now you want to pass on to your patients. [Yes] Is it fair to to give surfing some of credit for the fact that you’re now to
Dr. Nathalie: Yes, all the credits actually
Maia: All the credit, you think?
Dr. Nathalie: Because once I realized I needed to be healthy and it was easy, actually. I was sick all the time and as you can see, I am like, not a very heavy person, but I was way skinnier before, I was always under weight. I’m like 5’8 and I was like 49-48 kilos, [way too light] my whole life. Way too much, because I was not sleeping good, I was not eating right… Maybe not eating right, but not eating what my body needed back then? And I was always with so much pain, I was sleeping 3 or 4 hours, you know like, the food, I realized after, I was very sensitive to a lot of food but I didn’t know until I decided to invest more time in nutrition and once I changed my whole diet and realized what foods are good for my body everything changed, you know? Like, I’m a happier person, I’m sleeping better, I put a lot of weight also, well, not a lot but now I’m like my normal, you know like, body index mass or whatever…
Maia: Yes, you look great you don’t look alarmingly thin. [LAUGH]
Dr. Nathalie: But I was like, it’s just everything, if you’re not eating right your whole body’s like not working right. Once I learned that, maybe from surfing, now I was this, now I wanted to teach it to, or pass it at least to my patients.
Maia: And the not sleeping, well was that, do you think related to nutrition, stress, all of it?
Dr. Nathalie: A little bit of everything. Nutrition, stress from work, then I was working too much and then I was too tired to surf and then I was not sleeping good, obviously, like 3-4 hours and then I was in a very bad mood the next day, “I’m not going to surf today, because I’m too tired.” So it was becoming like a cycle also and one day I decided like, I’m not going to eat meat this month
And I was feeling good but not 100% there yet.
I decided to stop eating chicken, the next month pork, and the next month dairy, and the next month eggs until I finally felt my body was… this is how I was supposed to feel! I never felt that way before. LAUGH Until I got to the point I knew what my body likes and needed. Yeah, and then I put a little bit more weight I was able to paddle more, surf more, I was catching more waves and was like, this is great!
Maia: So good!
Dr. N. : It was so amazing and then I never went back pretty much. It’s been like 3 years. Like, once I realized there’s like a group for pretty much every health problem and you, I mean you’re able to fix things. So I was thinking having this really bad insomnia, now I have to take pills and they were like strong pills but I still was not sleeping great. Once I changed my diet everything just disappeared. I was sleeping way better.
Maia; Is there anything else about surfing and the lifestyle that you’ve crafted for your self? It’s very ocean-centered, surfing as a priority in turn affects on your other priorities in ways that obviously deepen the ways that you’re able to serve this community. Is there anything that you would want people who don’t have this lifestyle, they don’t have the opportunity to just prioritized developing some kind of love of physical activity out in the natural world. What could you say to them? Is there anything you could tell them that you’ve learned from this king of lifestyle?
Dr. Nathalie: I think, it doesn’t matter the sport, you like or practice but I think that’s like the key, you know? Once you have a like a passion for everything, jujitsu, or surfing, or running, you’re gonna be focused on that and you want to be better in that and then you want to be healthy to keep doing that you want to eat right, you’re gonna stretch, I mean you want to do everything to make that sport right and you know it’s gonna make you feel. You know, whatever the sport you do, if you’re healthy, you’re happy, pretty much! That would be my advice.
Maia; Choose to be happy, choose to be healthy?
Dr. Nathalie: Yeah! You want to do all the right things for your body. To be able to realize whatever the activity you like that’s equal to happiness pretty much in my case. Once I surf in the morning I’m good for the rest of the day. That’s it!
Maia: I wonder you know I get to come here some portion of the year, and every day is so magical. The waves the spray, the rainbows of the spindrift, and the monkeys, iguanas, it’s just incredible. Are you still able to feel that this place is magical? [Um] Or does it just seem like, meh, another day in paradise.
Dr. Nathalie: No, no, yeah I mean we live in a small paradise, actually and I find myself very thankful to decide to move here. I was not very excited at the beginning but after it was like, yes, this is where I want to be and every day is the same there’s nothing besides surfing, you know, Pilates, yoga, there’s some activities but if you are not interested in any of those it can be like very boring for you but just walking on the beach can be very nice. It’s gonna help you to relax a little bit, doesn’t matter if you don’t surf, just like walking and seeing all the nature cross in front of you all the time the sunsets, the sunrises, everything’s do special. And every day’s so different, every sunset and sunrise and wave conditions every day is so different so that’s what makes this place so special.
Maia: OK, is there anything else you’d like to say about this life?
Dr. N. I think if you have the chance to get closer to the ocean that’s gonna be life changing. Maybe you’re not living the life you wanted or always expected to be, I think the ocean might help a little bit to decide here’s my priorities now and this is what I want to do. Which is what happened to me. I had some other plans before moving here and once I realized, Oh I think I like this better, I do my best to be in the ocean almost every day now. Maybe it’s not surfing, maybe it’s like fishing, spear fishing, maybe it’s just like swimming just like walking, whatever I think the ocean is like a very powerful force that is gonna help you to set down a little bit and help you decide what’s important in your life. I think that’s a good chance if you have it I think you can take a lot of advantage from it.
Maia: Wonderful!
I wish I had this opportunity to get closer to the ocean when I was little, I was like 25-26 but that’s still good.
Maia: It’s good.
Dr. Nathalie: I don’t regret it.
Maia: No well I didn’t learn until I was 40 and I do wish I had learned earlier but I’m so grateful that I did.
Dr. Nathalie:Yeah, me too. I wish sometimes the same and then I was 25-26, like Oh! tThat’s perfect! It doesn’t matter, I was just on time.
Maia: Right, well you’re such a beautiful, elegant surfer and I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Dr. Nathalie: Oh, thank you for having me here.
Maia: Yeah, certainly, so fun! Thank you so much Dr. Nathalie.
Dr. Nathalie: You’re welcome, con mucho gusto!
Maia: To set up a free discovery call with Maia to talk about how she might benefit you, your group or organization, visit aavestowisdom.com.
Interview: Maureen McNamara
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Player at the bottom of the page.
"You're always evolving but at some point you have to discover your true essence, who you are. I’m Maureen and I'm a surfer and that's who I have always been.
And for most of us as older transitioners, who’ve been through what we've been through, we don't want to see younger kids struggle the way we did. We want to allow the younger trans population to experience themselves early. But for most of us older transitioners, it’s, you reach a point where it's transition or die."
~ Maureen McNamara
Show Notes
Maureen McNamara’s article about being a trans surfer in The Inertia
One of Maureen’s surf style heroes: Leah Dawson
The first mainstream surf documentary: The Endless Summer
A brief article in The Inertia putting The Endless Summer in historical context
Resources for transgender youth
A Few of Maureen's Photos
Interview Transcript
INTRODUCTION
My name is Maia Dery.
The Waves to Wisdom interviews are the result of an exploration into a world I discovered when I learned to surf at mid-life.
Some of these conversations aren’t necessarily with people who we would instantly recognize as leaders but they are all leading us in a direction I instinctively followed and have benefitted tremendously in the process. Some of them don’t have huge audiences, but they are living very large lives.
To me, these people all seem to have wisdom practices centered in their relationship to the more-than-human world, to what we usually think of as “nature.”
Surfing proved first revelatory, then revolutionary in my life. I thought I was creative, thought I knew and loved water, thought I took care of my body. But when I entered the world of surfing and waves, when I started to ritualistically return to a literal edge, I realized my vision for my life had been hampered by some artificial barriers.
Slowly, with each wave and wipeout, those barriers in my brain, heart, and body began to dissolve.
I began to wonder, what if we all had a nature based practice that cracked us open? Made us more creative? Allowed us to reliably let go with the abandon of play? Of unbridled joy? What if we all practiced vulnerability, risk and failure on a daily basis and they were fun? Wouldn’t it make our lives better? Wouldn’t it lead us to the places it feels like, in this moment of planetary peril, we need to go?
Whether you find full bodied and big hearted connection through waves or walking or digging in the dirt, I hope you find these conversations useful in your own journey of re-inhabiting your life with renewed joy, deep engagement, and increasing wisdom.
Maureen McNamara:
You’re always evolving but at some point you have to discover your true essence, who you are. I’m Maureen and I’m a surfer and that’s who I have always been.
And for most of us as older transitioners, who’ve been through what we’ve been through, we don’t want to see younger kids struggle the way we did. We want to allow the younger trans population to experience themselves early. But for most of us older transitioners, it’s, you reach a point where it’s transition or die.
Maia: Surfer, photographer, and healthcare worker Maureen McNamara and I spent a couple of very chilly days exploring the rocky, intricate, beautiful Maine coastline. Everything my body was experiencing from the winter wetsuit to the big fat white snowflakes falling in the dark water, grayed by a heavy clouded sky, all of this was a total nonsequitor to what my calendar said, that we were well into the spring of the year. As strange and alien as these days felt to me Maureen was in intimately familiar territory. Every time we drove around a cove and she told me what to expect, I was struck by how her exhaustive knowledge of the place was both product and producer of her nearly lifelong surfing practice. As is the case with so many of us who are dependent on activity in the more than human world, Maureen credits her surfing habit with saving her life. What I find unique and inspiring was the role surfing plays and continues to play as she recounts the story of how, midway through the journey of our life, Maureen found the strength and courage to finally confront the fear that had kept her from honoring her fundamental nature.
Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Maia: We usually start— if you tell us your name your age and how long you been surfing
Mo: Well my name is Maureen McNamara my nickname is Mo people call me either Maureen or Mo. What was the other question? Ah, my age 60 and I’ve been surfing for 45 years now.
Maia: 45 years, ok and we just had really quite a spectacular surf. Will you talk a little bit about where we are and what we just did?
Mo: Well this is Gooch’s beach in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Maia: And it’s, it’s early May and snowing. Actually, I think it just stopped snowing but it’s it’s not warm.
Mo: Well as I said a few minutes ago it’s a little bit colder than normal this time year but it’s not unheard of to have this sort of weather in May in Maine.
Maia: Michael Coleman, who was the subject of a podcast, recommended that I interview you. And he thought that you were a particularly inspiring and courageous surfer. Will you tell us a little about your background?
Mo: Well I started surfing in 1974. We used to vacation in Ogunquit. My family would rent a cottage right on the Ogunquit River and we paddled across or walk across at low tide to the beach and go surfing every day, all day. And mostly it was at summers at first because at the time we are living in Washington, DC. My dad was stationed at the Pentagon. And we move back into this area when my dad retired and that’s when I started surfing year-round. It’s quite a bit different in the off-season as opposed to the summer season. The surf is much better but it’s also very cold as you discovered today.
Maia: Yes! Talk a little bit about your relationship with your surfboards
Mo: Well, I told you yesterday how I had this instant reaction after seeing The Endless Summer which is what got me wanting to surf when I was very young— probably seven or eight years old, I can’t remember exactly. And it was a similar, similar situation with shaping surfboards. I surfed that first year, that summer of ’74, and I just got it into my head all through the winter reading Surfer Magazine, Surfing Magazine were the two big magazines at the time. I just, I don’t know what it was, I just had to make a board. I wanted to make my own board.
And so the next summer we came back, in ’75 and I convinced the local surf shop owner to order me a blank and some resin and supplies. He thought I was crazy because nobody did that around here. And I bought a little book that detailed the process from start to finish. And I went out into the garage, and I built my first surfboard. Dripped resin all over the floor, which is probably still there on the rented cottage that we were at, had a blue tint. I made all sorts of mistakes with the glassing but the shape came out pretty nice and I been making my boards ever since. It was just something I was drawn to. I guess, in a way I’ve always been independent and I like to do things myself even though I stumble and bumble my way through it. I like to do things independently and learn things. I take the hard way, the long way but I think it’s part of the process of learning, you know, something new that attracts me.
Maia: Yes, anybody who surfs year-round in Maine clearly is familiar with the hard way.
Mo: I had a natural eye for shaping. There’s so much technical detail that goes into it and it took me a long time, a lot of trial and error. Back before the internet we can have all the information that you have now. And once information became available on the internet, probably 20 years ago, I discovered all the mistakes I’d been making and how to correct them. Which was another part of the learning process. And now I’m pretty happy with the way my boards turn out. And I know what works, especially in this area. I know what works and what doesn’t and I have very strong opinions about it at this stage of my life. I, you know, will often kind of cringe when I see the boards people are riding because to my opinion they’re not really suited to the conditions and/or the ability levels of a lot of the surfers that I see.
Maia: Interesting, so it’s a different kind of local knowledge then that goes with the technical know-how.
Mo: Yeah, you know, we went through real stagnant period in the 90s where everybody was trying to ride the same boards Kelly Slater was riding. And it didn’t work for most surfers because 99.9% of the surfers are not Kelly Slater or anything approaching his ability. People were riding wrong boards— too short, too thin, too narrow. And now it’s it’s kind of cool to be a surfboard, designer, shaper, builder because we’re back into that free expression, experimental mode which coming right out of the longboard era and into the short board revolution, there was a lot of experimentation and for some reason people got away from that, mostly when competition surfing came in in the mid-70s late 70s.
And then it all became contest oriented and everybody’s trying to build boards for contest surfing and surf in that contest way and I never was aligned with that. For me surfing is not about competition.
Maia: Okay, so the driving hypothesis of these interviews is my experience that, for a certain subset of surfers, that surfing helps us make sense of our lives that it really grounds us and gives us a kind of a reason for being, helps us make sense of adversity and challenges, and the difficulties that come into life. Do you think I’m on to something? Is that a reasonable hypothesis?
Mo: Definitely, definitely. I listened to your interview with Mike last night and I was moved by it in certain places. It was nice memories of an old friend that I’d lost touch with but also some of the things that you talked about with him and his wife resonated and definitely you are onto something because I’ve always felt that way.
I think I mentioned to you yesterday how I grew up in an environment, in a family who kind of trivialized surfing and my involvement with it. Surfing can be whatever you want to be. It can be as little or as much as you want it to be. For me like I said I had that visceral connection with that the first time I saw The Endless Summer when I was 7-8 years old. I knew, I looked at the screen I said “I have to do that! I have to do that!” and it took me a few more years before I was able to buy my own board ‘ cause my parents certainly weren’t going to buy boards for us. And everything I did met resistance at every step of the way. And to me it was just so powerful connection that I had with the the ocean, the sensations of riding a wave, everything encompassing it, that I knew I was I was onto something and I think surfing— you live in the moment with surfing. And you have to. I mean we were just out there now and you caught a wave right off and it was, you know, kind of not a death-defying wave. It was kind of a mellow wave and you had a nice introduction to The Bunk and Maine surfing. And then a little bit later a set came in and caught both of us and we took few waves on the head…
Maia: A few very cold waves…
Mo: And that’s what surfing is you know? It will humble you. It will excite you. It’ll invigorate you. It will rejuvenate you. But sometimes you get to get a few waves on the head and you get very cold and you get tumbled under water. It, it gives you a connection to, not only the natural world, but I think our spiritual, soulful world that too many of us try and t disconnect from, I think. We spent a lot of time pursuing things that aren’t really important.
You know, I work in a nursing facility as a nursing assistant and dealing with people who are you know, at end-of-life and they have lots of regrets and things that they wish they had done. And I always felt like, why do we spend our time pursuing things that aren’t really that important? If you want to do things get out there and do them, it doesn’t have to be surfing. There’s many other things that you can do but I’m always a firm believer in pursuing once passions. First find a passion and then pursue it, you know?
I was telling my wife Jess last night that, it’s a different way of life. All the surfers I know, they structure their whole life, their whole day around prospects for surf or if there is surf they’re going surfing. And it’s not that they’re all a bunch of lazy dropouts. But they’ve structured their life so they have time every day to go paddle out and catch a wave or two and experience everything that surfing has to offer. Surfers, you go by the rhythm of the tides and winds and it gives you that tune into the natural, the natural order of things rather than the human, man-made order..
Maia: It’s one of things that I love most about surfing is that the ocean is always in charge, in charge of your schedule, in charge of what kind of time you have, and how many rides you get, all of it.
Mo: Yeah, I, you know, I mentioned yesterday about how I feel in our culture, our Western culture specifically, that we’ve gotten away— We have roots in that much like Eastern cultures or, you know, indigenous cultures of North America, South America, Australia. And for some reason in Western culture we seem to have disconnected and gotten away from that, even though we have roots there as well, as all peoples do I think.
Maia: You talked a little bit about your Celtic and [yeah] Scandinavian heritage?
Mo: Well it, you know, I’m part Irish, part Swedish and, you know just knowing the little bit that I do about my my heritage, my ancestry, I know that there’s that same connection to the land, the earth, the sea, the air and I’m shivering and hyperventilating a little bit right now because I’m still chilly but, yeah, we have a connection that we try and divorce ourselves from it. And we insulate ourselves in buildings and in cars that have heat and, you know, we don’t experience being out in the Maine water when it’s 40° water and 40° air and it’s, it’s cold and windy. And is that really the essence of what what our lives are supposed to be? You know, it’s an insulation and it’s, it’s not real. And, you know, I struggled a long time with people telling me that surfing wasn’t real and I’m like “It doesn’t get any more real than that!” And that’s the essence I think, that’s always been the essence to me.
Maia: It’s one of the things I love the most about surfing is that all biological life in some ways is a collaboration with water. Life doesn’t work without water as its fundamental material and we, most of the time in this culture don’t think about that. But when you’re surfing you are in a conscious collaboration with water and water is always in charge [yes] and I love the way it, it reminds me, helps me remember, as opposed to feeling dismembered, helps me remember how much my life is, is literally this continuation of other lives. I am part of the stream of life and of water that just keeps cycling around. It really is a powerful, it’s a powerful metaphor and fact at the same time.
Mo: Yeah, you know I can remember days surfing in the middle the winter and I look at the bluffs and the snow on the bluffs and snow pellets coming down and it’s cold, and it’s windy, and you’re out there. Maybe you’re out there on on a solo session and I’m like I’m living an experience that most people will never experience and how tragic is that? That they don’t they don’t get this essence of our connection to our natural world and in this case specifically the ocean. We have this experience called life and we’re here for a very short time. Working in the, in the the healthcare field that I do it’s driven home every every shift I pull— how limited and how precious our time is. I just turned 60 years old this year and I look back and my life was an eye blink. And I’m, I’m closer to the end than I am to the beginning and I feel blessed to have had surfing as a passion because I think it’s taught me so much. It’s given me that spiritual, soulful connection to what the life experience is. I’m not rich. I’m not… I haven’t traveled much like a lot of my surfing friends will travel to surf. I haven’t had the fortune to do that.
I used to lament and become very depressed that I would watch all my friends going off to exotic locations: Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Australia, Sri Lanka all these places all around the world which has always been some of my dream. But I haven’t had the opportunity for various reasons and yet I am intimately connected to this little corner of the world. I know every grain of sand and rock and pebble and turn of the coastline and, you know, in this area from Fortune’s Rock to Hampton Beach down in New Hampshire and this is my little corner of the universe and I know it as well as a Perry Winkle crawling around a tide pool knows that a little tide pool and it may be a very small little tide pool but in that small little world there’s still so much to see.
Maia: So much! Especially in this area, there’s so much variety in the coast here.
Mo: Yeah and it’s constantly changing, that’s another aspect of it. You know what you see now is not what you see in February. Yes, it was cold today but there’s a whole another level of cold that, you know [that I have no desire to experience] is not apparent today. I told you about surfing on a day one the water was 36° and the air was down to single digits and the windchill was in negative numbers. And I sat there watching it and the waves were just flawless at the River Mouth, my home break. And I watched for about an hour and I kept thinking how cold it was and I would be out by myself. And then I finally had to say, “You have to go out I mean you have to experience that experience of being in that cold, of being alone out there!”
And I did, I paddled out. By the time I got out there was a couple other surfers suiting up to go out so I wasn’t completely alone. But for the first wave I caught I was by myself. And I just had this flawless wave that went on for about 2 or 300 yards, it just kept going and I had that experience. And I only caught three waves and every one of them was, you know, one of the best three waves of my life. I don’t know I’ve lived with cold my whole life, I think that maybe there’s something in my DNA being Irish, Swedish, Scandinavian that maybe it’s in my blood, maybe the cold is in my blood? The only time I ever spent time in a warmer place I lived in Florida for a short time and had the worst sunburns of my life down there and I’m like, “This isn’t much fun!” And Florida is like loaded with sharks and I’m not fond of sharks that’s a little secret by the way.
As much as I’m connected and love the ocean— I didn’t tell you this yet— I’m scared to death of the ocean. I struggled down on Nantucket because there’s white sharks around there because there’s a huge seal population. I did not like surfing alone there. I do surf alone here. But I also had a near drowning experience back in the 80s down in New Hampshire on a big winter day and those two things really reinforced my fear of the ocean and I’m not always comfortable in either solo sessions or bigger sessions because of those two experiences. But I still force myself out there.
Maia: I really understand that. I’m a pretty fearful person by nature and one of the things that I love that surfing does for me is, is force me to face my fears just about every single wave I take off on.
Mo: Yeah it’s, you know, this other aspect of my life— I don’t know if you want to get into that but [absolutely] if— I always tell people if I could sum up my life with a single word it would be…
Maia: You are writing in the steamed up window “fear”
Mo: I lived for 50 years in fear and I let it rule my life. And in some ways I could say that I, I’ve missed out a lot on what my life could have and should have been. Looking back now I wouldn’t change any of it because that was the experience I was meant to live.
But fear can paralyze you. You know they always talk about when animals, including humans, are confronted with a dangerous situation it’s the fight or flight scenario. You either fight or you run. But there’s a third one that they don’t always talk about and that’s, you become paralyzed. I did that for 50 years of my life. And in a lot of ways even with surfing I have done that. I got into photography originally because I was supposed to go on surf trip, my first surf trip to Barbados with my brothers and some friends and one by one they all bailed. And rather than go by myself because I was fearful of going by myself on a surf trip to an unknown place, I used the money that I’d saved and bought some camera equipment and that’s what started me on photography [interesting]. And as a consequence I never went to Barbados and I never went anywhere else of any real surfing consequence but you know that was an aspect of fear that I dealt with.
Maia: You take some awesome pictures!
Mo: I try.
Maia: Do you want to talk about down why it was that he lived in fear for 50 years
Maureen: Yeah I’m, I’m transgender and I lived for the first 50 years in another mode, so to speak, which wasn’t me, was not my true self. And I lived for 25 years in a marriage that was doomed from the start. I got married at that time, I was 22-23 years old, I was 22 and turned 23 a couple of weeks later, because I thought it was what I was supposed to do and again it’s that conformity, that pressure to to live the life that everybody expects you to live. So I got married and had children we had three kids. I went through the whole suburban life I continued to surf which really probably saved my life because from a very early age— probably, you know, around the same time I saw the Endless Summer at seven or eight years old— I couldn’t really put a finger on what was wrong with me but I knew something was wrong, something wasn’t right. And you know I developed various passions to distract myself, to not deal with it because of that fear.
What if people find out? What will my family say? What, you know, what will people do? Back then it was very difficult.
Talking to a lot of my trans friends now, a lot of them went through some horrific experiences. I have one friend who was even put in an insane asylum for a time. [wow] And, you know, people were beaten, murdered, certainly made fun of. There’s a very high suicide rate and that’s what I lived with on a daily basis from the time I was not even 10 years old, I dealt with that. These feelings of “I just want to end it,” you know? “This is horrible, I just don’t want to live anymore.” And I dealt with that right up until I was out of that first marriage and I finally confronted myself, came out to myself so to speak. I had known it all along and I finally, you know, later on in my teens I discovered what and who I was but didn’t want to face it so hid it, was completely closeted and the only thing that kept me going were my two passions: surfing and writing.
And when my marriage fell apart I started doing some research on the internet, again the internet comes to the rescue, and I confronted myself and I was in therapy already seeing a family counselor and I came out to her. She was the first person I came out to and I got all cotton-mouthed and, you know, she was the first person in 50 years of my life, well I was maybe 48 at the time, that I’d mentioned this aspect of myself and the thing I discovered when I came out to her was a bolt of lightning didn’t come down to strike me dead on the spot. The world did not end, my existence did not end.
And she referred me to a gender therapist which is part of the protocols, the standards of care that’s required to transition. And you have to go to therapy then you have to get a referral from the therapist to get hormones. And then you have to live for at least a year before you can get a referral from not only that therapist but a second therapist, one of them has to be PhD therapist to get a referral for surgery. And once that the egg was broken and I emerged from the shell, I still had a long way to go before I became the full chicken, so to speak, to follow that metaphor, I’m famous for mixing my metaphors but I figured I’d stick with that one.
But yeah so, without surfing I don’t think I would be here. I used to wake up every single day, “What am I getting up for today? Why am I living today? Oh, I gotta coach soccer practice. The kids are counting on me. I gotta go. Okay so I won’t kill myself today.”
And this was a daily occurrence I would spend you know a 1/2 an hour, hour in bed just trying to will myself to get out of bed— this is more towards the end of my first marriage. I think maybe there was some residual guilt and shame that I was brought up in a Catholic household and even though I didn’t follow the church anymore they put that stuff in your head from birth and it’s a brainwashing of sorts in my opinion. I bought into it all when I was young and then I saw the hypocrisies inherent in what was being said what was actually being practiced by too many. And so I turned away from it but I still I think it was that residual fear that or maybe I will go to help, you know? Surfing kept me going and mostly it was a distraction. When I was in the water, like I said, you’re in the moment. You don’t have time for anything else. You have to be present in that moment and put everything else out of your mind and that’s, that’s what got me through and I would just get away and distract myself and it was a constant struggle to distract myself from the the inner self that was trying to emerge.
And I had an epiphany coming home from a good surf session. I actually wrote an article about it in, an essay about it in The Inertia, which is a surfing webzine. I used to have these feelings in my head that “I need to be a girl. I need to be a girl.” And I was out the water one day and I caught this amazing wave and I paddled back to the line-up and I sat there waiting for the next set and I’m like “See that’s all I need! I don’t need to be a girl. That’s all I need in life is just to catch one of those waves every once in awhile and that’s good enough for me!” And as I was driving home that day it suddenly occurred to me. I came over the crest of the hill and the sun was coming in my face the sun was setting and I’m like, wait a minute… if in that moment of ultimate euphoria and glorious, you know, adrenaline rush from that one wave you’re still having that thought in your head then that’s not all you need .
Maia: It’s a powerful thought if it’s intruding into your surfing bliss.
Mo: At the highest moment [absolutely] it was still there. And so I knew right then. It was still a few more years after that before I finally got past the fear and it was hard. You know, one of the things my therapist told me early on, “You have to be prepared to lose everything.” and I was like “Oh Yeah,” and she says, “No, I mean everything.”
And at the time she said it didn’t really resonate with me but over, over the years during and after transition it’s like yeah I lost everything. But like somebody who’s depressed and I was clinically depressed and suicidally depressed, a lot of times when you’re depressed to that level it’s almost like a cloak of comfort that you can pull around yourself and like “Okay I’m just gonna sit here in my depression and that’s what I feel comfortable with and it’s my old soft shoe and even though I hate it and it smells and it’s uncomfortable it’s still comfortable at the same time and that’s what you live with and you’re afraid, once again fear, to to give that up because you don’t know what you’re giving it up for— an unknown. And what I discovered was that everything I gave up was hard. I lost my family, I lost my home. I lost two homes ultimately because after the divorce I got a cash settlement on our home and I used that both to fund my transition and also to purchase a very small little bungalow which ultimately I lost to water damage and foreclosure but I lost my sense of place in the community, estranged from my family— lost everything but after all that loss I gained myself and the interesting thing about that Is like so what is myself and a lot of my trans friends they told me that at you know you’re going to give up a lot of those things that you used to think were so important. Then they would tell me “Oh you’re not going to need to surf anymore and you will, surfing was your compensation to get you through the pain and the torment.” I’m like “Damn I don’t want to give up surfing!”
And what I discovered the true essence of me, Maureen is I am a surfer and I didn’t give that up because that from the get-go was part of who I truly am and surfing was a powerful influence. It was as powerful as this inner torment that I had in the later revelation of who my true self is. And I was so grateful for that because I am passionate and I love surfing and I was afraid to give it up and then I discovered I don’t have to. It is who I am and once it’s in your blood I don’t think It goes out, I mean it’s like the ocean that our blood is connected to it’s you either you have or you don’t like I meet a lot of people who surf who aren’t really what I would call surfers—
Maia: It doesn’t play the same role.
Mo: No, and that’s okay it’s just for me I discovered part of me, who Maureen is is I’m a surfer. And I remember many many years ago arguing with my father about that and him saying, “Why do you have to be a surfer? Why can’t you just be somebody who surfs?” And I’m like, “No I’m a surfer. That’s part of my…” and I actually said the words. “That’s part of my identity.” And he laughed and he pooh-poohed that and he ridiculed that which was very hurtful. And now you know I’ve discovered that there’s nothing trivial about surfing.
Maia: So wonderful, do you know the character from Greek Mythology Tiresias?
Mo: Not to familiar with that one.
Maia: Tiresias was both a man and a woman … Well, Zeus and Hera had a bet and they asked Tiresias “Who enjoys the sex act more, a man or a woman?” and then the story goes on from there but it’s so interesting to me is that you have experienced this powerful set of sensations which to many surfers’ minds is just as powerful as sexuality. You’ve experienced it as both a man and a woman and I don’t know anybody else who has. And I wonder is when is there a difference? Did people treat you differently? Was your relationship with the ocean different?
Mo: The one, the one caveat to to any answer I would provide is I didn’t really experience it as a man.
Maia: You were always a woman on the inside…
Mo: Right and that’s the thing that a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their head around but…
Maia: But nobody else in the water knew that for a long time.
Mo: No and I kept… and I was I was recently talking to one of my female surfing friends which I, after after transition I, I developed more of a relationship with the female locals and she confided to me that I was a real asshole out in the water and because I was so hyper aggressive in going after every wave and you know I intimidated a lot of people and I’m like, I never felt like that. Is that what I was projecting and how horrible is that and that’s not what I felt inside but I guess that’s how It manifested. And it makes sense because the relationship I have with my kids especially. I was not a very fun person to be around. And that’s to put it mildly. I was angry and depressed and, you know, I took out some of my anger on them, mostly in a verbal way I mean, I was never physically abusive or anything like that I but I was verbally abusive. I grew up in a verbally and emotionally abusive family. That’s, that’s the model I had and I’m not using that as an excuse. It’s just that’s what I knew and I guess I projected that when I became a parent myself. But that was one of the things that was shed as I transitioned. And I was very fearful, again fear, “How’s my surfing community going to react to all of this?” And almost to a person, they were all cool with it, you know? They were like, “As long as you still surf and that’s all that matters.”
Maia: Isn’t that interesting!
Mo: You know, and there was a couple of knuckleheads who would— You know I had a situation where one of the local knuckleheads, and I never really cared for the guy much anyway but he ran me over in the surf one day. And then he gave this really rather insincere apology and he called me by my old name and I corrected him and he says “Yeah, whatever. “ And I’m like “You SOB, no, not whatever. Respect who I am or get out of my face.” and I just paddled away and I haven’t spoken to him ever since. But you know with with that in a couple of other exceptions I haven’t had any issues with people I used to know before and most of them have been very supportive and, you know, people say I’m a nicer person out in the water. And you know it’s funny because I didn’t really feel that I was being the way I guess I was. But I’m less competitive and satisfied with less and I give more waves and I catch myself and I don’t know If that’s inherently a female thing but
Maia: It’s inherently a generous thing.
Mo: Yeah, and I think the empathetic side of myself and you know the more generous side of myself was able to come out. I work taking care of primarily elderly but other people who’re maybe there are quite a few my age or even younger who have physical and mental issues I take care of in I learned that I have a very compassionate aspect of myself and I’m very good at what I do and I think it’s because I suffered a lot of pain in my life I’m able to provide them that compassion and that empathy for what they’re going through.
And all these things that were repressed before have come out and that’s who I am and that’s Maureen. And, you know, out in the water… It’s, I tried for two waves today and I blew both of them but it doesn’t matter. I was out the water I was engaged. The memories that I’ll take away from today’s session is, number one the wave that you caught and I was like “Yes! She caught a wave! So now she knows what it’s like the surf in Maine. And this image that is still in my head of the cleanup set that came. And the first wave you turned turtle on and you got the board pulled away and then all I could See was your head sticking up as the second wave came in and watching You trying to duck under it before I had to duck under myself and because I was knocked off my board as well and that was kinda like the essence of it. You catch a wave and then you get hammered by a wave you know, it’s snowing now but who knows the sun might come out later you know? You just deal with it, you roll with it and flow with it. Anyway I’m kind of rambling.
Maia: No, it’s wonderful. Really I love the… when I asked you that the question about Tiresias [Right] I asked you you know you’ve experienced surfing as both a man and woman and you generously corrected me and said you know I was always women and the thing that I will now take away from today as is this, just the power of of authenticity. The power of recognizing that there are, even though we all change over time and and that everybody’s self is a moving target. It’s a shifting and evolving thing but that really there are some aspects of ourselves that even that are so crucial to honor and that when you honor that whatever that authenticity is that’s trying to express itself it really does allow you to to be a better version of yourself in all these other ways [yeah] you have more to give and I’m so grateful that surfing help to you in in some ways keep an eye on who you were in a in an nonthinking moment to moment way…
Mo: Yes it’s, you know once I went through this process I thought back on some of the lessons of surfing and it teaches you patience. And in a way I had to be patient enough to go through what I needed to go through before I was ready. A lot of trans people will say, you know because we get asked questions that are very insensitive sometimes. I had a dentist, dental hygienist that I used to see every six months and for couple years every six months I would have an appointment with her and she knew me before and she knew me during and after. And she always asked this one question. We’d talk about this that and the other things, she liked soccer so she asked me about soccer But at some point she’d pause and I’m like “Oh boy here it comes.”
She was like, “Do you ever have any regrets about transitioning and I would always know the first time she said it I always give her kind of a flippant answer is “the only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.” And after giving her the same answer over and over and over It became kind of annoying I finally stopped going to let doctors but that’s what a lot of trans people say is the only regret is I didn’t do it sooner. You know how much of life did I miss out on but then I also have the feeling was… that I needed to go through what I needed to go through before I was ready. Part of this process of my transition, part of this process of my surfing connection is, you’re always evolving but at some point you have to discover your true essence, who you are. I’m Maureen and I’m a surfer and that’s who I have always been.
And for most of us as older transitioners, who’ve been through what we’ve been through, we don’t want to see younger kids struggle the way we did. We want to allow the younger trans population to experience themselves early and not live through the traumas that we live through. But for most of us older transitioners, it’s, you reach a point where it’s transition or die. You literally come to that decision I’m either going to do this or I’m gonna kill myself because I cannot live this way anymore.
Which is interesting to me I alluded to a near drowning I had years ago. I was under the water getting tumbled around and held under to limited my breath and my mantra used to be when I was held under the water “Relax, relax, relax, it’ll let go of you. If you relax you’ll conserve your oxygen. Relax!”
And I went through all that process and the wave wasn’t letting go. And I’m like okay this is not like it usually is . And I had bounced off the bottom and everything else. And I was so disoriented I didn’t know which way was up. When the wave finally dissipated and there was like a neutral buoyancy, almost at panic stage, so I said I gotta start swimming I swim literally into the bottom because I was so disoriented I know which way was up. So I did a somersault under water, pushed off the bottom of my feet started swimming the surface but at this point I was almost gone.
And I made a conscious decision, just like transition or die. I will take a breath and if it’s water I die. If it’s air, I live. And just as I opened my mouth for air my head broke the surface and I went GASP, the next wave hit me and I was under the water again so I got like half a breath. If it hadn’t been for that half, half a breath I don’t think I would’ve come up because I got that one little half a breath, little gulp that sustained me again as I tumbled again and when I came up I had the whole tunnel vision, seeing stars and everything else. My board was still attached by the leash I pulled myself on the board and I forced myself to paddle out instead of into the beach, which is really what I wanted to do.
And I sat out there for like two more hours too afraid, again fear,— afraid to catch a wave and the sun started going down. One by one all the surfers left the water. It was a huge huge day— probably 15 to 20 feet on the faces. I was ill-equipped with the wrong board. I should’ve known better but I was too full of myself as a surfer at that stage. I thought was nothing on the East Coast that can hurt me. I was wrong very wrong.
But that’s how my day had begun full of you know dumb ignorant pride thinking I had reached the pinnacle of my surfing experience. And I drove away that day thinking “I am nothing. I am humbled. I am— I don’t matter.”
Maia: It’s it’s really interesting to me how a lot of people hear something like that that kind of thought “we’re nothing” and I think it’s it’s an unpleasant thought but but is it can be immensely freeing.
Mo: Yes! And it took me a long time to to learn that. At the time I felt nothing but humility and just you know fear. You know I’ve never considered a myself super radical, vertical surfer, vertical airs are the big thing now with performance surfing and I’m more of a horizontal surfer. I want to sustain and I don’t know I bring it back to sexuality, maybe that’s a female thing you know where women prefer to keep things going a note here is not that it..
Maia: Maybe it is! Thats a good observation!
Mo: Not that slam, bam, thank you ma’am. [Maybe it is, oh that’s so interesting.] Well I can’t help but think that way, that’s the way my mind works but it’s like, I’m in it for the long ride not for the big impact.
But I dunno, surfing its is the coolest thing that anybody can experience it’s about the size of it.
Maia: That’s about the size of it, yes I think for it really is beautiful surfers have this intimate connection with this very dynamic medium, natural medium and surfing is not the right thing for everybody but I do think that surfers are a model for a way that connection to the more than human world can really enhance your life and and help, help guide it.
Mo: I was telling Jess last night as I was reflecting on the day we spent yesterday together and then now anticipating this interview that for so long I lived in that fear that I talked about and people trying to get all of us to conform like there’s some prescription for a way of life, a way to live a life and that and never sat with me. It was like why? Why do we do this? Why do we live the way that we live? We weren’t meant to sit on our butts in front of a computer monitor disconnected from people. I mean, I worked at one cubicle job where we were not allowed to even speak to our coworkers. Whose idea of a way of life is that to disconnect from each other?
You know, one of the aspects I haven’t touched on that I think is a huge thing in surfing, it’s not merely about the waves you catch, it’s about the people you meet. There’s a whole vibrant surf community
Maia: Oh my gosh, it’s so wonderful here too! You, because you’re pretty much exclusive to Maine, you wouldn’t know this but I walked into the local surf shop here Black Point and that they were so good to me and that is not always the case with middle-aged gray-haired ladies when you walk into a surf shop.
Mo: Yeah and I think especially from the female perspective and I, I was guilty of it before. you asked about that aspect of before and after. I will say and I think it’s true to some extent but not so much anymore because there’s more women out there in the water. But I was guilty of it myself of looking literally right through women out in the water. you know you saw a woman out there it’s like PFFT, you know “Yeah okay I can take off in her she doesn’t know what she going to do? Um cry?”
And there’s still the knuckleheads out there that will do that. I now have people look right through me. “Oh who’s that old fat broad on the longboard. I can take off on her.” and it’s frustrating.
You don’t only surf in the water, I’ve got Achilles tendinitis currently have had five knee surgeries, both of my shoulders have been scoped and I will tell you that estrogen is not a performance-enhancing drug.
Maia: I have heard this
Mo: I have lost a lot of the ability and strength, yeah. And I’ve had to adapt and I’m still struggling with it. I’m getting older but it’s still my passion and I still am trying to find ways to make it work.
Maia: I don’t know if this is relevant to any of what you’re going through but but I have noticed that to the extent that I engage with the mainstream surf media which is very limited that there is this sort of assumed a hierarchy of capacity or achievement that is extremely male in its focus. They’re interested in what men’s bodies at their most adept and most gifted do but you know for me coming into surfing late one of the things that that really drew me in was how beautiful female long boarders are. I mean, for me, that’s the pinnacle of surfing achievement.
Mo: I am very much impressed and very much heartened by the greater influx of female surfers because I do think that they bring a certain aesthetic and aspect to surfing that has been missing for a long time with this focus on this contest driven hyper, you know, agro big, bold, dynamic moves in, which is all well and good but I take pictures and and I watch surfers and and I sometimes tell ‘em take what’s offered. That’s that’s up an ethos that is lost in this day and age it take what the wave gives you don’t try to impose your your repertoire on every single wave you see you’re not the star. You’re that little insignificant speck. The wave is the star, complement the wave, okay? Don’t worry about completing yourself dance with the wave, complement the wave anyway that’s where I come from.
Maia: It’s a beautiful place and head to. Thank you so much for this, Maureen.
Mo: Well thank you and I, I apologize again for going on and on when you get me started
Maia: I’m so glad I got you started very generous!
Maia: I hope you learned as much from Maureen’s powerful story as I did. To set up a time to talk about coaching, a custom retreat, or an in-house event to inspire and energize your organization or group visit wavestowisdom.com