Necesito el mar porque me enseña.

I need the sea because it teaches me.

~Pablo Neruda

Surfing is cool.

Undeniable. Based on the runaway surf images and metaphors, surf cool endures and continues to compel. Middle age ladies, as a cultural rule, are the opposite of cool and compelling.

What happens to a life when accidentally, unthinkingly, you mix cool and anti-cool?

This is not quite how my 50s were “supposed to” look. A student again (with a powerful, oceanic teacher whose lessons will never grow repetitive), surf and surf-story obsessed. Not just an encore career but an encore existence.

I didn’t start out surfing. I learned late and hope to write much more about that in coming posts. But the best work of my eyeballs did form around waves and water. In retrospect, the work started early.

Long childhood summers at my grandparents’ house in San Diego were the staple of my imagination, even when I returned for the school year in my landlocked suburban ranch home in central North Carolina. During those magical summers I would awaken to the smell of my grandmother’s Sanka and rush outdoors to the driveway, where, the palpable smell of ripe plums often mixed with the salty morning fog. When the day cleared, you could just peak at the Pacific’s blue horizon from the driveway on Del Mar Heights Road. One of the last summers I spent there before adolescence distracted me, my grandmother, a painter, gave me a Kodak Instamatic and a roll of color film. She was not one bit shocked when I took an entire role of pictures of the water’s edge during one sunset. I’ve been photographing, mostly water, ever since. But until I began surfing, I’d always looked in from the outside, taking what care I could to keep the salt spray and water off of my lenses. The little box of the camera was the best vehicle I could imagine to help me escape from the bigger boxes that loomed, threatened to swallow my days and keep me inside of them, sitting in chairs. But still, I staid mostly dry. I took care of the little boxes. To stay dry when water has been your best teacher and muse- in hindsight, it’s Laugh-Out-Loudable.

After I learned to surf, truly learned to ride some waves, to turn and take a minute to see what you can see when you are a land mammal traveling at the speed of wave, the camera and I figured out ways to get wet together and show this new way of being sentient. Another kind of photographic practice, starting over as a novice when half the game is over could prove intimidating, but it hasn’t. The world is suddenly, renewably filled with building possibilities.

Waves to Wisdom now feels inevitable. When a swell is powerful, and you know you can ride it, it’s a shame not to have a go-out, even when you know full well you’re pushing yourself, taking a few risks and are going to fall down. A lot. These waves will feel different than any you’ve been born along by before and you’ll learn the same lessons, about beauty, humility, service from more exacting teachers.

This new Hydra-lic endeavor, feels like those “biggest wave yet” days, an open ended, full throated, large hearted and wave-centered website.

Waves to Wisdom is a creative endeavor, devoted to seeing honestly with the limited eyes I have, loving radically in the way the writings of Thich Naht Hahn and Martin Luther King, Jr. suggest love as a public good, and learning deeply from the ocean and its waves. Surfing is often characterized as a Romantic, transcendent, solo adventure. That hasn’t been my experience. Like this website, it’s a place to cultivate awe and share. Not because I or the ocean are particularly generous. But because it turns out that’s what is best about getting this far in life with your faculties in tact- the capacity to share your good fortune. If what you’ve stockpiled in your heart and neurons is on the weird side of normal, you might have some explaining to do before people take you up on what the writer Patti Digh, calls “your strong offering.” This journey is as unclear to me from this vantage point as the ocean is from a perch on that tiny, floating chunk of carefully shaped and constructed, post-industrial materials I’ve come to center myself around.

Here is what I know at the outset. This site and the larger project are woven of threads of water-lovers’ journeys of discovery, practices that recognize the more than human world as a sacred, wise teacher, and, above all, a way to pass on what I’ve learned from this tribe of ocean lovers.

Aloha,

Maia