Interview: Elsa Rivera
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Player at the bottom of the page.
"... my whole neurological being, body, mind, and spirit, is enhanced when I get in the water. And when I come out my perception, my storytelling about any particular "problem" is, it's just redefined.
I don't sweat the small stuff."
~Elsa Rivera
Interview Transcript
Intro
Maia: My name is Maia Dery. This episode impart of a series called the Waves to Wisdom Interviews. The project is a simple one. I seek out people I admire, surfers with what look to me to be ocean centered wisdom practices. I ask them if they’d be willing to share a surf session or two and then, after we’ve ridden some waves together, talk to me about their oceanic habits: about surfing, work, meaning, anything that comes up.
Elsa: Seeing these grown women who can connect with that joy inside themselves even with, when they’re on land, even on the dry sand telling, sharing stories about why that it’s possibly not for them, or it’s too fearful because they have circumstances at home that has have oppressed them, suppressed their joy somehow. They have access to that by getting in.
Maia: Elsa Rivera is a devoted surfer, committed community servant, immigrant, and successful business manager. Our conversation took place overlooking the Pacific on California’s incomparable Central Coast. We’d ridden the chilly waves of a spectacular stretch of shore where graceful arms of kelp and barking, splashing marine mammals can make you feel, for a moment, like you’re a part of a vast ecosystem, a thriving planet abundant with life.
Elsa’s clarity of priority and purpose, and the role her relationship with the ocean plays in that clarity, add delicious nuance to this ongoing story of the power and plain utility of cultivating and stewarding a relationship to the ocean. Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Maia: If you are comfortable with it would you tell us your name and age and where you live?
Elsa: Elsa Rivera, I’m 55 years old and I live in Monterey California
Maia: Excellent and did you grow up in Monterey?
Elsa: I’m originally from Columbia. I grew up in Columbia until I was nine and then till 1981 I grew up in Santa Monica.
Maia: This morning we surfed together for the first time
Elsa: We sure did
Maia: We did. We surfed at Asilomar. It’s a place that I have watched people surf before and it’s always been remarkably intimidating to me it seems, well it is very rocky and it also seems prone to wind, and changes… conditions change out there rapidly but it was fun we had a great morning!
Elsa: Definitely! Ah, it’s gorgeous, gorgeous out there.
Maia: And I took off on some waves that scared the heck out of me and that was good.
Elsa: Looked graceful doing it.
Maia: Thank you very much, you’re kind. Let’s see, we were paddling out maybe after a wave or just after having met, changing locations and we both spotted a harbor seal in the top of a wave…
Elsa: My boyfriend…
Maia: Your boyfriend, tell us about your boyfriend.
Elsa: My boyfriend, the same harbor seal, I’m convinced, shows up wherever I surf. I watch him signal to me to move away from rip currents and, kind of, spots to catch good waves.
Maia: That is fantastic! I think I need a boyfriend just like that.
Elsa: You have one actually.
Maia: OK, good! Thank you!
Elsa: He’s out there.
Maia: And we’re, we’re at the beach right now. Can you tell us a little bit about where we are talking to each other?
Elsa: Yeah, this is Del Monte, this is a part of Del Monte Beach and it’s a long, it’s one of the longest stretches of beaches in Monterey.
Maia: And how long have you been surfing?
Elsa: About a year and a half. I’d uh body boarded most of my early teenage life and so I was, I considered myself somewhat of a waterwoman because I never drowned in the ocean.
Maia: You tried and you clearly must of liked it because now you look completely proficient I couldn’t believe it when you said you’d only been surfing for a year and a half.
Elsa: Thanks a lot. For that. Oh yes, absolutely, I loved it from day one and I would just pound my way through whitewater just to get that feeling over and over again and just felt like I could do anything if I could surf.
Maia: I think that many of us feel that way and it seems to be mostly true.
So you have a relationship with the ocean that predates your surfing experience and you were body boarding from childhood, can you talk a little bit more about the role the ocean played in your life as a child?
Elsa: I grew up in Santa Monica, as I said and didn’t know for a long time just because of life, family circumstances that I was so close to the beach and right before junior high I realized that I could just walk to the beach and it was less than three blocks away, long blocks because there were a few hills, and I went to the water for solace. I felt like that was my safe place that could wash away some of the darkness I felt as a very young girl in my family life and at home and in my mind the ocean, being at the beach, and being submerged, even tossed around and tumbled in the in the water was my heart home for me.
(5:41) Maia: So it made you feel better even, even as a youngster [yeah] to get in the ocean?
Elsa: Yeah, I felt embraced and felt enveloped with this almost universal love that my heart was needing and hungry for. And that was my first feel of being embraced.
Maia: Wow, that is a powerful memory and you’ve maintained a relationship clearly and in and continue to enhance and develop your interactions with it and you said to me earlier when we were in the water and again talking just a bit before we began to record that it is a profoundly spiritual relationship for you, from your point of view. Can you talk little bit about your spiritual background and then how the ocean came to play into that?
Elsa: Yes, so I grew up in a very traditional Latin Catholic family and expectation of being, um an awareness of God being a very much Catholic, church-defined, is the best I can say it. But I was drawn to the feminine energy of Mary, the Virgin Mary. I didn’t really think she was a virgin but, so Mary, Mary was just a feminine symbolism in the Catholic Church that I, that I was more drawn to than the male God that was described to me and, over time I went to different churches and at, hidden from my mother, just to try to articulate what I was feeling about believing in a, maybe a greater force or greater spirit of life, without this other definition and I didn’t really find it in churches. But I, I felt at a very young age that I had spiritualism in me rather than Catholic faith and over the years the ocean has become more of the spiritual connection to a life force for me and some of that is defined with my recognition of an ocean deity who I know as Yemanjá and in many Latin and Afro religions. She is the deity of the ocean, she is the mother of life force and so I connect with the idea, the concept of the ocean being a feminine energy, a life source energy, emotional, spiritual, giving. And I, I learn a lot that way.
Maia: How did you learn of this ocean deity and, and, and did it resonate with you immediately?
Elsa: Absolutely immediately. I had come to know about her through, um, the Yemanjá Festival in Santa Cruz and I began to read about her and she became more and more pronounced in my life when I spent 18 months in Brazil. Yemanjá is very much revered in Brazil. There’re rituals, instead of just celebrating New Year’s, the month of January is dedicated to ceremony and rituals in honor of Yemanjá.
And then recently going to Cuba I was part of a casa paticular which is just a place in a person’s home that you rent, where during the week they were doing rituals to, for chosen people who be.. who would become saints in Yoruba religion and they spoke a lot about Yemanjá and her mother Oshun. So in Cuba and in Brazil there are many ocean deities and whoever you resonate with is your deity, like, only you know.
Maia: Interesting, you have a lot of control over who you choose to honor.
Elsa: Yeah, um, well she chooses you, she reminds you that in by way by demonstrating how inspired you are, how motivated you are to learn about her, to know that she’s, she’s your deity.
Maia: Daughter of Earth and Sky, Yemonja is a diety from the Yoruban tradition, which originated in present day Nigeria but took root through the Caribbean as the Atlantic slave trade spread Yorubans far from their homes. Britannica says “Yemonja has been likened to amniotic fluid, because she too protects her children against a predatory world.” Her name is derived from words that roughly translate to “Mother whose children are fishes” and she’s the protector of those on and in the water.
Maia: So since learning about Yemanjá… Now you have this focus, a way to think about, read about, learn about this relationship. Can you talk about maybe the ways that your relationship with the water in your opinion has played out in your life story?
Elsa: I feel that to this very day the ocean has taught me about the, the varying tides of emotions and experiences and the lack of permanency in our lives. To be very present-moment because once you’re in the ocean you, there’s very little you can actually process, think about, the mind chatter stops because your survival sometimes is based on your ability to stay aware of the sites, sounds, smells, ocean currents, what’s happening with other people and that becomes a very present moment existence and again just be happy about, whether you have small waves or big waves, if there’re waves at all, that there is an ocean at all to be the life force, that, that that moment is, the joy of that moment is not defined by the size of the wave but the ability to have the freedom to even be in the water.
Maia: And then getting out of the water in what ways does that practice, in what ways do those experiences manifest, do you think?
Elsa: It’s almost instant application. That– I subscribe to that Blue Mind experience. It says that my whole neurological being, body, mind, and spirit is enhanced and changes when I get in the water and when I come out my perception, my storytelling about any particular, “problem” is, it’s just redefined. I don’t sweat the small stuff. [Laugh] and that, like waves, emotions, especially high peak or low emotions, can just be watched and experienced without any sense of control, leaning into ‘em, like kind of how you lean into a wave to catch it. Just being able to be gentle with yourself and not push any extremes.
Maia: You told me a story. This is a terrifying story, about going surfing at night. [oh, yeah] Could you tell that story?
Elsa: Yes. So I challenged two other mermaids to go to Asilomar, your now favorite break, during a super moon. It was a beautiful, beautiful night. The moon was very, very bright on the beach, it was about 11:30 and we wanted to get in by midnight but the ocean was very, very black and tumultuous lot of seaweed too that day and high tide so I thought it was really smart and following a friend’s advice by making sure we all wore white T-shirts or white shirts so we can see each other in the darkness and I happened to choose one that was really too big for me. It was a men’s size medium or something that I got given to me in Brazil I thought this is good to be a good one I don’t ride, I don’t bike ride so this where I’ll be able to to use it. So we paddled out and we had to really punch through the whitewater quite a bit and the other two women had gone further before my, my board just jumped up against the, the lip of the wave and it tossed me backwards and tossed my shirt over my head and I began to essentially suffocate myself with my shirt and much like what she has taught me in the past, in other experiences about trust and submission, I just really let it, let myself go. I knew I could float to the top. There was something that I knew in that trust, that I could also just let, allow not breathing so hard and suffocating myself with my shirt, that would allow the shirt to float as well and that’s how I got air back in my lungs. I surfaced and tied the T-shirt back up pretty tightly so I could go right back in and not be afraid.
(15:29) Maia: What was it like surfing at night when you couldn’t see the waves?
Elsa: It was terrifying and beautiful, and mystical all at the same time because all your other senses wake up. You’re, you’re feeling the current in a different way. I, I was trying to explain to partners that were there that I could smell the seaweed exposed to air when the wave was forming or curling over us because I couldn’t see it at all and each of us had different experiences about how our senses woke up differently.
Maia: What an amazing memory [yeah] really just calling that up even through your memory I am amazed that you had the courage to go out there and do it and that you discovered these things about the way your senses interacted with the darkness, that sounds profoundly instructive the rest of the time when you can see.
[Exactly] We are missing so much because so visually dominated [yes].
Elsa: I’ve never seen the ocean so black, which was just gorgeous. And I’d do it again.
Maia: And you’d do it again? Then you probably will. [LAUGH] Good, and what, what is your profession, your professional background and has your relationship with the ocean do you think played out in that part of your life at all?
Elsa: Oh, yes. I’ll say that I was inspired as a very young girl to become a nurse practitioner, I wanted to be a midwife actually. And so that propelled me into actually becoming a direct patient care nurse and when I moved to Monterey I got my Associates Degree and continued with patient care and in-home care and decided that this is an avenue of nursing that was very much interesting to me in that it was a holistic approach to taking care of patients at home. So ultimately I ended up transferring my skills to healthcare administration and I ran a local home care agency for about 25 years.
Probably into my 24th year I realized that I had overstepped that caregiver to caretaker, part of myself that couldn’t say “no” when I was on call for a year 24-7, just really overdid it on the whole caring part. And I just reevaluated the fact that I could, I could really give, be of service in different ways and translated some of the stuff that is familiar or similar in all industries and administration and offered to help run a business of my friend’s for 18 months in Brazil with a completely different kind of industry, laser technology. So it was no longer direct patient care, didn’t involve patients, but ultimately resulted in a purposeful time there, helping this person understand the differences in, about the Latin culture and imposing corporate, Americanized ways of doing business in a country that was refusing to accept them.
Maia: Fascinating.
Elsa: And so that’s what I’m still doing, I’m doing business management, I outsource myself when people are short a CEO, an administrator in healthcare, a business manager, and other industries and I limit and I choose wisely and very specifically the type of clients that I, that I have because I feel influenced by what I’ve learned about the ocean and wanting to be in it all the time, that the quality of my life is not about what I do in my work, work is a means to an end just for the survival that’s important to all of us. But my life sustenance, my joy is really about two things, and that’s giving in my community to the service projects and continuing this, ever expanding lifelong relationship with surfing and the ocean.
(20:05) Maia: Another topic that you broached which I find fascinating and I work with young people and most of them, although many of them are going six figures into debt, most of them don’t have any idea about how important money is in their life and you, you talked a little bit about that in the surf session but would you talk a little bit about it, and the relationship with money which you already sort of brushed up against in terms of career but how important healthy relationship with money is to the kind of life you’re describing?
Elsa: Yeah, that’s actually another water symbol for me because I really do believe that that money is currency. I feel like I have a healthy friendship with the concept of money. I’ve made a lot of money in my life and, and I was comfortable with all my little, little creature comforts and stuff but really I define having money as a form of movement and freedom, which is a current, that I can have current in my life. So I worked really hard and very intentionally to remove all debt in my life and it, it allows for me to have a relationship with money where I don’t have a neediness to make money but I can choose to make money for exactly what I need for a plan or for the immediate moment and have more of my freedom than enslavement to the concept of making money.
Maia: And you are the mother of two children [I am] Your son, you tell me, is a big wave surfer?
Elsa: Yes, he is, he started, surfing was his deal so that’s why I didn’t surf for a long time, that was his sport. I was a surf taxi mom for most of his teenage years. He actively competed and he is still mostly just a big wave surfer.
Maia: And you, you clearly are fine with that, and trust him to not hurt himself.
Elsa: Yeah, I do. I was thinking that what I used to joke around with him when he, he went to Mavericks when he was 17 years old but didn’t tell me that he was going until afterwards and I said, “What was that like?” and he said, “Well it’s like falling off the 65 story building and then having it come on top of you afterwards.” So I sent him, “Ever think of taking up, you know, an indoor sport like chess?” but I never meant that I never meant it.
He was a boogie border and I went to Asilomar one day he was boogie boarding and I just got inspired and we have this thing now in life that whenever there’s something that we need to have a rite of passage about very close we’ll just say, “It’s time.” and so I went to Sunshine surf store over here and bought a board, I didn’t know what I was buying and I showed up at Asilomar, he’d been boogie boarding in the I was a standing on the beach with the surfboard and he said, “What, what are you doing, Mom? What’s that? And I just said, “It’s time.” and I gave him a surfboard [Wow] so I figure he said he said it best, he said people say, “Aren’t you afraid of sharks or getting hurt out in those big waves?” And he said, “Have you seem what’s on the street lately?” Even at a really young age he knew that the ocean was his safety spot too.
Maia: So smart! [Yes] and clearly you both share that love of the excitement and the ocean, all that it has to offer. OK, is there anything else about your relationship with the ocean or the way that surfing or being near or in or on the ocean has impacted your life that you’d like to share?
Elsa: I think it just goes directly to my experience teaching young girls to surf and through that vehicle empowering their, conquering fears and having a stronger self-esteem. Where I’m drawn to expand that, and I feel that I’ve been really successful at it and not successful like in the competition, competitive way but more like watching the same effects with older women or grown women, is taking women into, into the water for the first time. One story I’ll share is that one of the moms had been on the beach for a while. They came all the way from Greenfield and all the way I’m talking less than 45 minutes away but they’d never been to the beach, they’d never seen the water, and she kept talking about, “One day I’m going to try that. I’ve only been in the water up to my knees in the swimming pool.” and I, I didn’t even focus on , “Hay, I’ll teach you how to surf, or any conquer, help you conquer the fear of water, I just said, “Ever put on wetsuit?” She said. “No.” and, um, “I said, “That’s half the battle right there, want to try it?” So, then she was in a wetsuit and she talked about, while she was putting her wetsuit on she talked about her body being too big, she really needed to work out more, she was out of shape, all these body image things that are pronounced in women everywhere that we’re trying to change, in a wetsuit especially, that’s one of the reasons I love surfing in this area because we all look like seals and there’s, there’s not an immediate, competitive body image thing going on. So, so I tell her,
“Well, I’m a professional round person and I love my body and I like looking like a seal and, and seals like the water so we can just go try it.”
And so she was really tentative but I said you’ve already gone as far as your knees, you want to try that?” We started there. I said, “You know, one of my favorite things when I was a little kid is jumping waves, want to to jump waves?”
“Oh, okay maybe, I don’t know.”
So we started to jump waves. And the same delight in this 48-year-old woman’s face that we see in the six-year-old faces began to take over her and then she wanted to jump more waves. And then we thought maybe we could jump a wave and then go under a wave.
And it was just this progressive thing but really it was allowing someone to be in their kid again to play in the water and then she wanted to get down to business. “What about his board thing?” And before we knew it we spent quite a bit of time just having her now jump waves on the board and feel just that floatation and she just kept saying,
“This feels so good. I’ve never felt anything like this, I feel free!”
And that just continued throughout her whole experience and when she got out of the water, um, she said, “What can I do to practice my pop-up?” and I told her draw a surfboard on her on the floor with tape and all her kids and her can do pop-ups and all this other stuff. This woman just had so much joy that resonated through the entire time she was on the beach and every time I see her that same look in her face and she thanks me and it’s not even about that but she just comes to me with this feeling of like, “ I remember that joyful moment” whether she does it again or has the opportunity because of whatever obstacle she had before to continue, she’ll always have that experience that, that will relive itself and that’s very powerful.
Maia: Joy in and of itself is so powerful. It’s fleeting in its way but just to know that you have the capacity for that. [Yeah] especially as an adult [Yes] you may have had life circumstances that for one reason or another have separated you from that feeling [yes]. It really is a powerful force and it can do profound work in the world, when you get in touch with that.
Elsa: I believe that! I believe that. Seeing these grown women who can connect with that joy inside themselves even with, when they’re on land, even on the dry sand telling, sharing stories about why that it’s possibly not for them, or it’s too fearful because they have circumstances at home that has have oppressed them, suppressed their joy somehow. They have access to that by getting in.
Maia: After Elsa and I had this conversation her relationship with the ocean and desire to include others in its benefits lead her to an organization called GI Josie.
GI Josie’s mission is to provide single women veterans with an environment and opportunities that eradicate the suffering and suicides arising from the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Military Sexual Trauma that these vets often suffer with as a result of their service in the U.S. Military.
Elsa is profoundly influenced by the work of J. Wallace Nichols, a marine biologist whose most influential work popularizes research showing the mental and physical health benefits of being on, near, or under water.
Elsa launched GI Josie’s Bluewater project which gets these women on the water, sometimes to learn to surf, sometimes just playing in the waves or learning about the ecology in a local wetland. Many of these women Elsa is able to serve in the program face significant challenges. One veteran who had been bound then sexually assaulted was upset by the similar feeling of the tight wetsuit on her wrist. Ultimately she rolled up her sleeves and got in the water. Hers is just one of many similar stories of service-related trauma, too many of which don’t have happy endings.
To help the women overcome their initial fear, Elsa tells them about Yemanjá and asks her to protect each of them by name. GI Josie is actively fundraising to build a residential ranch to allow these women and their children to transition back to healthy, productive civilian lives. I’ll post information on the website so you can learn more and, if you’re able, make a donation.
Maia: Okay, so you also related to me earlier this, this just intriguing and artful interpretation, tell me that the ocean deity’s name again [Yemanjá] this interpretation of what is Yemanjá’s storied vanity.
Elsa: So Yemanjá of all the deities is considered a very vain deity and I dance Samba, so there are several songs dedicated to Yemanjá and uh we use mirrors and use our hands very much like hula to tell the story of her adorning herself at all times and wanting to be adored and wanting adornments and in the world and in religion people have taken that to an extreme by getting actual offerings to Yemanjá in different parts of the world. In Cuba, people offer animals, slaughtered animals, and toss them in the ocean as as an offering to Yemanjá. In Brazil people build small boats and they put jewelry and coins, and food and lipstick and all these things, which break my heart in a way because they’ve taken a materialistic approach to the concept of her vanity. But in my widening and aware need for, to be a part of conservation of the ocean and beaches, I see that as just a very, very simple, powerful request from her to keep her beautiful. To let, let those things that already naturally adorn her, the animals, the kelp, the shells, those things that belong to her, preserve them so that she can just continue to be beautiful.
Maia: One of the reasons that struck me is that it sometimes seems to me in my optimistic moments that we are in the process of and I work with young people and it feels like we’re the process of turning some kind of a corner in which maybe out of necessity because they know that their material lives are not going to be what their parents’ and grandparents’ were, that young people are turning towards experiences as markers of success and a life well lived in a way that causes them to turn away from material possessions but that, that kind of value and it’s, it’s absolutely understandable why in a world where struggling for material well-being at the most fundamental levels, you would give, give up things which were so hard won on to the deity that was most meaningful to you and it, I can’t wait for other people to hear your interpretation because it’s not just the interpretation itself that is powerful but your willingness to, to understand, to see what this story has to offer you not in the way of dogma but as a way of connecting with the needs that are all around you as you move through this, with this world.
Elsa: Yes, yes, she’s not really wanting for people to give her more stuff but to see their own duty in approaching her, preserving her so that they themselves can get her life force in her and her life sustenance in return, so less is more. She already has everything she needs.
Maia: Yemanjá has every thing she needs but clearly our oceans are in trouble. Elsa’s story and her work with GI Josie is not rare but could be much more common. Many of us know from our own experience the healing power of water. The Blue Mind concept I mentioned earlier, along with the book that bears the same name is a great place to start if you’d like to learn more about research explaining the effects of water on our brain. In the coming weeks, I’ll post about some of the research that tells the story of what happens our water-loving experiences through a scientific lens and the work that’s underway to show that surf therapy can be more effective than other forms of treatment.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, we’d be most grateful if you’d post a review on iTunes. Our next retreat is scheduled for March of 2019. If you’re interested in learning more or if you know of someone who works with a business who might be interested in sponsoring this podcast and reaching our growing audience, please drop us a line at info@wavestowisdom.com.
Sharks, painting, and patience
Joanna Frye, Untitled, 2017, Acrylic on Canvas
Sharks, Painting, and Patience
In our interview, artist and frequent ocean buddy Joanna Frye and I discussed the release from creative responsibility that comes with surfing. She said that when she surfed it felt like she was being painted instead of doing the painting. There is still plenty of creating going on when you surf or play in the ocean, it’s just not all coming out of your own limited human imagination and skillset. It’s not all dependent on your work. For those moments in the waves, you can’t even begin to lie to yourself about being in control of life, about dominating the world, or forcing an outcome. But you do, eventually, achieve some sense of control of your relationship to yourself and the uncontrollable.
Playfully, creatively tapping into a wider, deeper and, if you prefer, higher power is a practice that can, over time, change your mind and could do so, some neuroscientists think, by measurably changing your brain.
The research about the plasticity of our brains is thrilling but I don’t need a neuroscientist to tell me this: to catch a wave requires presence and acceptance: you can’t hurry things, or waste time thinking about the past or the future, or wish they were easier or more interesting. There just isn’t time for that. Not if you want to be there for that ride, to feel the rush and lift, and respond in whatever way your own body will allow, to be with that force for a delicious instant, to feel the joy of being on a planet with gravity instead of putting your creative energy into the futile task of working to somehow defy it.
One of the 20th Century philosophers I think is worth wrestling with is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He wrote that “[t]rue philosophy consists of re-learning to look at the world.” It’s a pretty inclusive definition and seems to include those of us who are honest and brave enough to know that we need to revise our vision as we, our insights, and the world change. Merleau-Ponty’s work focused on that instant of perception, a sliver of time before our scientific, categorical mind can take over and begin to catalog, dismiss, prioritize, and judge. He thought this moment of perception was the beginning of all creativity, all art.
He wrote that “it is the expressive operation begun in the least perception, which amplifies into painting and art.” He also thought painters were uniquely well suited “amplifiers.”
Carolyne Quinn wrote a wonderful, accessible article about Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and painting. Quinn writes that, for Merleau-Ponty “meaning is not found pre-existent in the world but is called into existence by the body’s own activity in the world.”
Merleau-Ponty’s work is more popular since his death than during his life because, as it turns out, his writing is more relevant to what we’re learning about our brains now than what we knew about them then. Think about it. If he’s even a little right, and we are dependent on our sensing bodies to help create meaning, what are our hyper-stimulated, scanning, swiping, fractured, and busy days doing, not just to our bodies, but to the meaning we call into existence in the world.
Quinn describes one of Merleau-Ponty’s most inspiring ideas, something called “reversibility.” Merleau-Ponty thought our body is both an entity that senses and an entity being sensed, and not just in the way your body is busy seeing and being seen by other partially dressed humanoids on the beach, but in the touch of a tree or a rock or a wave. You can be altered by the wave and the wave by you. Everyone who plays in the ocean knows this to be true. Merleau-Ponty just expands that intuitive understanding to encompass all perception. He thought that to understand either side of perception- being touched or touching, we needed to know they were not wholly separate, not either/or, and not one and the same. Instead, they overlap, both always part of any perception we have of the other. He thought most of us walk around with limited vision that ignores much of the rich, invisible depth of being sensed by the other. But not painters. According to Merleau-Ponty, while the rest of us (including photographers) couldn’t get at the real substance of perception, painters could render the invisible visible to the rest of us. Their paintings had the potential to render some of this fluid motion, this oscillation between seeing and being seen.
Because I live on the coast, because it’s the discipline at the center of my work and life, because it makes me feel sane, and is just too damn too beautiful to miss, I get in the ocean almost every day. A few weeks ago I hurt my rib in an unlucky fall and, while it’s been healing, I’ve been going in with my camera instead of my surfboard, photographing in the small, late summer waves each dawn and early morning. There are fewer black skimmers and the fish are starting to return in droves, each peaking shore break wave filled with dozens. My own species has begun its daily turtle walks. One one level, they’re out there looking for signs of nesting. But really, I think they are looking to call the meaning of hope into existence, walking with the hope that, for some perceiving moment in the future, they might dig a trench or hold a light that could help hatchlings, endangered as individuals and species, along their way. Even if they don’t save every turtle, they might save themselves.
Today, between sets of waves, a small shark swam from behind me, passing me on the right at a slow, leisurely pace— maybe there’s food aplenty. Rushing isn’t a priority. It must have seen me before I saw it, just so much inedible flotsam.The moment I saw its fin break the water, that instant of perception before I could categorize, the moment when my animal brain registered its size relative to mine (it was tiny, maybe 2 feet long), at its presence in the water, right there, with me, seeing me, and the resulting elation I felt at being seen (if it had been 2 meters long, I expect my perceptions might have been… different),— all reminded me of both Merleau-Ponty, and one of Joanna’s paintings that hangs on my wall, one that evokes something of immersion in liquid and light and motion, just like this morning. Reminding is a word we often say but don’t appreciate. To remind yourself is not just to recall, but to restore your mind to something valuable. I love that painting because it feels like the dissolution that happens to me in the ocean, the unimportant stresses and worries gradually losing concentration until they wind up just disappearing, and, even if they return, the wisdom and perspective that comes from the their intermittent disappearance endures.
Philosophers have been imploring us for a long time to learn to accept what we can’t change. The Stoics of Ancient Greece did it. Some Buddhists did (and do) it. The Serenity Prayer does it. But most of us still suck at it: quick to irritation or anger or a wish for a trap door into which you might dispense with or exchange the reality of the aggressive driver, the glitchy gadget, the broken rib- there are so many situations in our daily lives that regularly, reliably immerse us in stress, even when everything’s going “right.”
As soon as I realized my rib was well and truly hurt, that I might miss weeks of surfing these beautiful summer waves, I panicked. I didn’t want to miss waves. This was a disaster.
A minor one my brain scolded.
My feelings did not obey.
I began to focus on speed healing. Googling nutrition and bone injuries, stocking up on vegetables with Vitamin K (green cabbage has twice as much as red), doubling up on magnesium supplements, uncovering the miracle of comfrey (which is pretty miraculous). Maybe it was just a bad bruise and would be surfable in a few days?!? A couple of false starts over the next week helped me settle in. As a wise yoga teacher once told me, “If you get into a fight with your body, you are going to lose. Every. Single. Time.” Recovery would take exactly as long as it would take.
One of the primary, foundational motivations for this Waves to Wisdom project is finding ways to let others in on one of the central, grounding, and most useful working theories I’ve figured out in a long time spent figuring: our bodies and their perceptions are primary to what we create. What we experience when we are at play and deeply at home in our bodies, when these bodies we all have feel integrated into, even continuous with our larger home on the planet– these moments can be lessons that recast our lives; even the objects, people, and relationships that seem utterly familiar to us. We can perpetually see them anew and, in turn, be renewed in their eyes. The ocean is one particularly exciting and beautiful way to learn these lessons.
If, on the other hand, we spend all of our time scanning, slouching, and constricting, or dominating, forcing, and demanding, we can’t help but create meaning and methods to match. We value what will entertain or enrich us in our slouch instead of allowing ourselves the benefit of experiencing life elongated, expansive, fully oxygenated, and open to what’s right here and far away, open to the interdependence of self and other. We all sometimes allow the endless stream of information and news and wellness advice to overwhelm this moment, the only one we have, the one we don’t get back, the one in which someone nearby, a tree, a turtle, a neighbor, maybe even we ourselves, could benefit from some awareness of seeing and being seen.
That shark was today’s teacher and the painting it somehow called into my awareness the fortunate ongoing reminder of the lesson. I’ve been looking at it for a long time but I saw it anew today and it wasn’t anywhere in sight. I realized, without words, with the flick of the tip of undulating fin and tail, why I’ve loved it so much. That instant of sensing, of being sensed, being part of what Davis Abram calls “the biological matrix of life on the planet,” and being a person fortunate enough to return to walls and art and one painting in particular, was an exquisite episode of “reversibility.”
I owe that “unlucky” fall for the gift of this day sitting at my desk, rib healing, with the painting about as far away as the shark was, seeing me see it with reminded eyes.
For us too, if there’s enough food, maybe rushing doesn’t need to be a priority.
For information about retreats or to set up a free coaching session email maia@wavestowisdom.com.
Sources
Abram, David. “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth.”Environmental Ethics, volume 10 (1988), pp. 101-120.
Cheron, Guy. “How to Measure the Psychological ‘Flow’? A Neuroscience Perspective.” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016): 1823. PMC. Web. 31 Aug. 2018.
“Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)“. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Staiger, Christiane. “Comfrey: A Clinical Overview.” Phytotherapy Research26.10 (2012): 1441–1448. PMC. Web. 31 Aug. 2018.
“Stoicism.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Quinn, Carolyne. “Perception and Painting in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought.” Paris III, Université de Sorbonne-Nouvelle/University College Dublin
Interview: Joanna Frye
To listen to the interview scroll to the media player at the bottom of the page.
SHOW NOTES
Links also available in transcript.
Interview Transcript
Maia: My name is Maia Dery. This episode is part of a series called the Waves to Wisdom Interviews. The project is a simple one. I seek out people I admire— surfers, with what look to me to be ocean centered wisdom practices. I ask them if they’d be willing to share a surf session or two and then, after we’ve ridden some waves together, talk to me about their oceanic habits: about surfing, work, meaning, anything that comes up.
Joanna: Christians tend to isolate their spirituality from everything else. It happens on Sundays or in the early morning or some such and surfing, being in the ocean specifically, is like experience… experiencing God everywhere, all over, not just in my brain.
Joanna Frye is a visual artist and surfer who a few years ago decided to make a bold move. One of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard, once wrote
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
Joanna wasn’t entirely happy with the shape of her hours so she left her day job to try to earn a living by selling her paintings and found object assemblages. She’s a devout Christian who loves to paint the female nude and now a dear friend from whom I’ve learned a great deal. Maybe, most important for me, I’ve gotten a long needed understanding of how much my fear has gotten in the way of my connecting with others who don’t think like I do.
Joanna played a crucial role in my own gradual, halting process of gradually overcoming a nearly lifelong fear of Christians, spurred on by the rhetoric of the the religious right combined with the fact that my own life turned out to be not so heterosexual.
If our interview gives you just a sliver of all I’ve learned from this courageous, talented, and creative woman, you’ll leave this interview with an abundant gift. Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Maia: If you are comfortable with it, tell us your name, age and how long you’ve been surfing.
Joanna: Okay. I’m Joanna Frye and 37. I’m not quite sure of the next answer— probably 12 years 10 years 12 years.
Maia: Ok, so you were grown up when you learned how to surf [I was a grown up]. Tell that story how did you decide you needed to learn that?
Joanna: I moved to California and had lived there for a year and was watching people surf and thought it was really cool and was sitting there and just thought why aren’t you doing it if you think it’s so cool? And I had friends that were in the surf industry working for Surfline and so they kind of, on a trip to Mexico to camp and they threw me on a longboard and pushed me into waves and that was that.
Maia: Did you love it from the very first time?
Joanna: From the very first time.
Maia: Did you catch a wave that first day?
Joanna: I did. I don’t know I if I stood up I don’t really have a memory except for being freezing. I had no wetsuit I was in a bathing suit in, near Ensenada freezing. I got hit in the head with the board, I remember that [Laugh].
Maia: OK, and then you came back to California and what happened next in your surfer story?
Joanna: Next, I spent, I had $155 in my bank account and I spent $150 on a 6’6” little thruster, cause I didn’t know better and that’s how it all began.
Maia: Wow. And how long did it take you to surf that thruster?
Joanna: Woo… that was a humbling experience but you know I didn’t know that. I just thought, I would stand beside it, I couldn’t sit on it, I would fall off. So I would stand beside it, wait for a wave to come, turn around get on and paddle. But I had a cohort, Marie, and so, and we were obsessed. And so we just went every day. I bought an 80s neon orange and black wetsuit from the thrift store that said, I don’t remember what, something across my rear, just ridiculous and had holes all in it but we went every day. And then I eventually was standing and I couldn’t think of anything better. Ah
Maia: And where were you living in California at that time?
Joanna: San Clemente
Maia: And you are from North Carolina, [yes] tell a little bit about that. Where are you are from and how did you get to California.
Maia: I’m from Kernersville, K Vegas , Kernersville, North Carolina, it’s a small sweet little town grew up classically with lovely parents and a sister and, you know, tended the garden and went to sports practices and eventually went to school at East Carolina and then after that did AmeriCorps so made my way to Texas and then Colorado and eventually California.
Maia: And had there been anything prior to surfing that was similar?
Joanna: No.
Maia: No? Surfing was unprecedented for you? [Yes] OK, it felt different?
Joanna: Um… yeah, it’s the only thing that I’ve ever had that I actively wanted to do all the time and checked in on to see if I could, constantly.
Maia: OK, you have any idea why that is?
Joanna: Because it’s the best thing in the world [Laugh].
Maia: We concur in that assessment! And I want to say that right now we are sitting on this long couch with a long boxer in between us, named Rosie who is very comfortable and she is in your beautiful living room, in this old farmhouse in Wilmington, North Carolina. And this, you are the first interviewee who I know already we are friends now for, how long have we been friends?
Joanna: Three years, three and a half years—
Maia: I can’t believe there was a time before I knew you.
Joanna: Me neither, it seems like we have just always been [LAUGH]
Maia: LAUGH it seems that way to me too so lets’s talk a little bit about how we met, what is your memory of how we met?
Joanna: I met you, I was working for the WB Surfcamp, and you were working for Guilford College and I was an instructor for the kids you brought down, I guess that was August, or something. And you were the most exuberant person I had ever met. But really what I remember is that, I mean I was teaching a group of kids, I remember one of them being more challenging than some others, but not really much more than that about that. And then you came up to me afterwards and said something along the lines of, in the parking lot, “You were meant to do this! You’re so…” I forget what you said but you were so appreciative of me and automatically complementary and I was just, “Oh! Okay” And I just remember going home feeling like a champ, you know?
Maia: You were a champ! And I remember that individual who was particularly challenging, and I think a challenged in that moment [right, right!] she was far outside of her, anything close to a comfort zone, and you were so patient and kind, and reassuring. I think she stayed in that water much longer she would have in the company of any other human being I can imagine.
Joanna: I don’t even really remember any of that but, but then I didn’t see you again for what, I don’t know, a year or two years after that and I spotted you… mind you, I hide from people, for whatever reason, generally, but I spotted you at the farmers market where I was working and yelled out, “Maia?” So out of character for me for me!
Maia : And so pleasant for me!
Joanna: Yeah, and there were and then we were friends.
Maia: I have a very intense memory of that day at the farmers market where you were working, we’ll get to your work in a minute but you were working and I was in, just in the absolute nadir of dealing with a recently broken heart and it was so encouraging to have somebody excited to see me who I hadn’t seen and to ask to surf it was so fun and healing just in that very moment even if we had never surfed together it was so good so I’m am forever grateful he called out that day.
Okay so so we went surfing that day and we instantly bonded over a million surf movies and books [oh yeah, that’s right] do you remember you’d actually gotten out of the water and then came back out…
Joanna: To tell you about 180 South.
Maia: Right, exactly.
Maia: 180 South is a documentary by Chris Malloy that starts as a pretty standard adventure story. A young white American man is inspired by his heroes— two men who are, in my opinion, heroic, the late Doug Tompkins and Yvon Chouinard. These two are best known as the founders of, respectively, The North Face and Patagonia but are celebrated in the context of the film alongside Kris Tompkins and many, many locals of the Patagonia region of South America, for their work on behalf of conservation. The Tompkins, especially used their own significant financial resources to create the largest conservation area in, Chile and Argentina, over 2 million protected acres of mountains, valleys and coastlines in the Patagonia region.
Neither Joanna nor I are accomplishing anything on this scale but, still, her choices have served as an inspiration to me as I embraced what I knew was the necessary but nerve-wracking step away from formal education and its regular paycheck to more directly pursue my own right livelihood.
Maia: Okay so we’ve been surfing together regularly and in some ways you have been a primary inspiration for me over the last couple of years in some unprecedented ways because I’ve been contemplating making a big change in my life and watching you and the way that you have courageously pursued your right livelihood in this moment I think has really allowed me to get my head and heart and eyeballs wrapped around an alternative to what I’ve been doing for the last 17 years which is teaching at a small college, which has been wonderful and it was probably time for a change.
Maia: Can you tell little bit about what you do in the world?
Joanna: Okay well, I’m an artist, it feels really good to say that. I paint. I love to paint. I do other things as well because paying bills is important but mostly I love to paint and do prints and block prints and things like that and I go to farmers markets or art festivals and I do wholesaling and whatever I can do at this point to kind of support the lifestyle that I love and get to work at home with my dogs and sit on the porch and surf when I want and work in a way that makes we not wait for the weekend and feel like my day is real every day. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what day it is. I just know that it’s the day I wake up and I make art and I surf somehow there’s enough cereal and, you know, and there’s usually salad [LAUGH] it’s good.
Maia: Fantastic, okay and how long has it been since you quit your day job to become a full time artist?
Joanna: I feel like this is year three, maybe I’m going into year four of, no I think three, of being just an artist, solely an artist. Um, yeah, wow, it’s working.
Maia: Did you. It’s working. You seem fairly well-fed.
Joanna: I am well fed.
Maia: Did you, were you always an artist as a child?
Joanna: Oh yes, I mean Bob Ross was my best, best friend [Laugh] every Saturday at 11, I could not wait. Yeah I mean I was always… I remember sitting out on the picnic table in the yard with the Q-tips and those little watercolor things and making, my mom was a French teacher and so there was and she’s artistic in her own way and she’s very interested in culture and arts and so we, in class, she was also my French teacher, cause I went to a small private school where she taught for a moment and we would do the Impressionist painters. And so I would sit outside at home also and just make these little Impressionist paintings and drawings and I loved it. I would draw in the sandbox instead of build things, you know.
Maia: And you studied art in school?
Joanna: I did I got my BFA in painting and drawing at East Carolina University.
Maia: How was that? Being an art student?
Joanna: It was great. The instructors were incredible, the facility itself, the studios they provided us with, our personal space, but also working with other students all together, music, fun, it was great. I didn’t really feel like I measured up to what I thought an artist was.
There seemed to be more angst and just trying, people wanting to get something out on canvas. And I just like the act of painting and I love beauty and so I didn’t ever felt like I quite fit in that way but overall it was wonderful. I’m so thankful that I chose art by default as my major cause I had to pick something, you know.
Maia: Can you talk a little bit about the process of making art and the way that you think it was different for you from your peers who in turn led you to feel like you might not be a real artist.
Joanna: I think it there were sort of two categories of people, people went into graphics or they stayed in the fine arts and I didn’t want to do graphic art. Is Rosie snoring going to mess this up?
Maia: It’s perfect, Rosie snoring is perfect, what could be better?
Joanna: But I didn’t feel like things were falling on canvas and it wasn’t I wasn’t edgy and it wasn’t you know I like classic figure painting and I liked light and line and the physical act of painting and specific intersections of line, it was a different thing. So there was a moment though, the painting hanging behind your head. Right there is the first painting that kind of fell out of me ever and it’s probably the reason I still own it. And that was a moment where I felt like my art, my spiritual life, it all intersected and came out physically and so maybe I got a glimpse of what they were doing all the time or maybe they were just making it up all the time I don’t know but it took me a while to get there but a lot of the times I’m not there but I still enjoy painting and then something I am and it falls out. I don’t think it’s anything wrong with either way but I did used to think there was something wrong when it was more technical… technical’s not a good word because it sounds like drudgery… but I love, I love that aspect of it. I like the technical part of it. So there was just two different ways for it to come out.
Maia: This is one of the profound lessons that that my students, my successful students have to learn is that if your work in the world to be an artist, your work is to make art whether you’re inspired to make art or not.
Joanna: Right.
Maia: In the same way that a banker does not have to be inspired. We need the banker to be a good banker [right] and you have to show up and hopefully the banker is inspired at times [yeah] but the practice has to unfold regardless.
Joanna. Right, and I find that when I’m forcing the unfolding I eventually am inspired by what fell out. You know, and it’s not because I was inspired and it came out, it’s because it came out and it inspired me and I was excited because of it.
Maia: This insight Joanna offered is, in my experience, invaluable. It’s not always easy to summon the courage to maintain discipline and effort , or even to justify continuing to expend resources on any creative or design process, especially when the outcome is unknowable. This can be true whether it’s an art project or a redesign of some aspect of your life or an innovation at work you’re working on, But Joanna’s right, continued creation does, eventually, lead the struggling creator to be inspired by something they come up with or notice, just enough fuel to help them plow ahead with energy and momentum and faith in that unknowable outcome.
Of course, it never hurts to have some help and encouragement along the way. Soon after she began catching waves regularly, Joanna met and older fellow named Dennis who she now refers to as her surf dad. Dennis took her under his wing, showed her some local breaks and began introducing her to other surfing friends.
Maia: So, you moved back to North Carolina when?
Joanna: Seven years ago, I think seven.
Maia: And did you actively start making art again before you moved back or after?
Joanna: Before. I did have an art show in California near the end. I did a big painting for Dennis of of Middles from a photograph that he loved.
Maia: What’s Middles?
Joanna: Middles is the break just above Lowers which is a famous surf break in San Clemente, it’s on the World Tour, it’s a beautiful, a beautiful break. So I’d done this painting for him and then I kind of, you know, it got me going a little bit and so I did some pieces and had a small show in a hair salon there but I also his best friend’s wife was making these shell bottle things that I do now and so I worked with her some just for extra money but I’ve always loved bottles and antique bottles and such, and the ocean and he thought we would be good pair and we were. So worked with her for a couple years and learned how to use a soldering iron and just kind of, I really love making those, it’s fun because they don’t represent anything about me it’s two beautiful things coming together, they don’t make me nervous, I’m not scared to show them to people. I enjoy that kind of art, or craft. So that kind of got it going and that was kind of, thank God, because that was sort of my segue into the art world cause it’s the way I make money, most of my money here. Now it might be half-and-half with paintings but it was the way I got to shift over.
Maia: OK, I’m very curious in part for selfish reasons because I’m in the middle of my own shift. Was that scary, to decide, “I’m just gonna be an artist, I’m gonna find a way to make this work?”
Joanna: Yes, but I think that every move I’ve made I haven’t known what I was gonna do, I moved to Denver without a job, I don’t, but I do a lot of praying about stuff and then when I feel, I mean in a real way and I know what peace is and when I feel that I just go and it’s fine. But it was scary. I mean, yeah of course there was, there were some elements where I just thought, well… but I felt like that I still have no idea what happens next and I still go, “Well, I’ll probably eat.” You know, it’s fine.
Maia: It’s truly amazing to me to watch you do that. Yeah, it’s quite something.
Joanna: I’m sure it’s terrifying to my family but… LAUGH.
Maia: Not only are you eating but the dogs, the two dogs that are taking up the that the better part of your heart [yes], I think, most of the time also…
Joanna: That’s so funny that you say that I yet they eat and I I go back and read my journal sometimes and I did this morning, from… maybe it was February and I had literally written down, “I’m so grateful that Rosie and Ruby have food today.” because, you know, sometimes it’s dicey.
Maia: Aww, yeah yeah…
Joanna: But they did.
Maia: So you mentioned your faith, praying a couple of times. I have several questions about that but I want to start selfishly again, which is to say that you are one of the people and one of the, and being with you this is one of the set of experiences that have allowed me to, I think for the most part, overcome what had been a lifelong fear, prejudice against, fear of people who identify as Christian. And I think I came by this very honestly. My mother was raised Catholic and then became active in the Women’s Movement a little later than many of her peers, but in the 70s and she was pissed off about Catholicism and a lot of the lessons…
Joanna: I can imagine.
Maia: Yes. And in retrospect, she raised us quite Catholic, it was secular Catholic but the world view and the way that we look at good works and all of that [right] really very, very similar, analogous even. But the college where I’ve taught for the last 17 years is a Quaker college and Quakers can certainly help one, some Quakers at least, somebody who’s been raised like me in this classic academic brat, left-leaning liberal, what’s-so-funny-about-peace-love-and-understanding mindset, Quakers can help you get rid of that silly demarcation line between the scary Christians who, who judge you and are mad at you for being deviant in any way and people who are safe but really, I think our friendship has gotten me to the point where now, when people say something like “I prayed on it,” or “I prayed about it…” and, you know, “My faith…”, fill in the blank, no matter what that faith is, I don’t have an automatic tense…
Joanna: right “Must flee, must flee…”
Maia: I better watch what I’m saying and not tell them too much about myself and
I guess my question is do you have any response to that?
Joanna: I’m just so grateful that that has been the shift. I mean I understand why people are afraid of Christians and I know you can’t see my fingers but there are air quotes like, it’s awful, it’s awful and every group of people has some extreme people that are bad to other people but it seems that Christianity has a huge group of people that are bad to other people and it, it’s devastating, it’s heartbreaking and it hurts people terribly and I don’t want to be a part… I’m not that, you know. And it’s good to have gotten a chance to kind of talk it out with you and it’s helped me be able to figure out what I, how people of my faith are affecting other people because I’ve, I’ve seen your trepidation about it and to be able to relate that to other people that are Christians that I now and say. “Hey, hear what you just said? Here’s how it sounds to people. It’s been a good learning experience for me too and it hasn’t… I just think it’s so important that. I want to start this part over… I just kills me this whole topic is kills me, breaks my heart about all of the stupid Christians.
Maia: Well, you know I can imagine I think, I can imagine how difficult that would be, you know to have something that’s such a defining part of how you view the world, and your role in it, and how to move through it in ways that are meaningful and positive… you know, how difficult it would be have people use your stories, your way of defining truth, to do the opposite of everything that feels fundamental about that tradition to you.
Joanna: Right, well they’re just using my, the label of what is true and good in my world and putting it on something else that they’re doing. And it’s so destructive.
Maia: So one one of the, I think, the reason that it’s been so powerful to me to be close to you and wrestle with this fear of people who label themselves Christians, or talk about Jesus, or talk about praying is that we’re both frequently immersed together in this literal higher power that I don’t have any trouble getting my head around, being the boss of me. And and just the palpable similarity or overlap in the ways that we draw joy and meaning and, and priority and purpose from that interaction with the water. It’s really given me a way to talk about ultimate things with you and even develop the language to ask questions without any fear. What is, if any, the relationship between your practice as a Christian and your practice as a surfer?
Joanna: I think for me surfing is an expression, oh my gosh, I’ll get a little bit teary. It makes me, it’s so, it’s like a gift. It’s… so I sit here in the morning and I read my Bible, and I journal, and I listen to music, and I pray and try to listen, try to quiet down enough to listen but when I go to the ocean, I’ll go, if there’s something really big, I’ll try to go alone and be alone, and usually hopefully there are no waves so no ones’ out but, in those moments. But for me it’s just gratitude it’s just like this beautiful thing that he’s made and also, in Christianity, you know, God is in everything and all of creation worships him, including the trees, including the ocean, including any, everything he created it, it’s his and it worships him and to be a part of it and be immersed in it and to feel, it’s kind of like mutual worship, me in the wave, me in the sea, me in that the whole thing is this beautiful present of joy from him to all of us and it’s more, it’s that. It’s not a spiritual practice it’s like a Thanksgiving almost.
Maia: Wow. That is wonderful. Okay, so interesting. So in that way surfing is really different for you than it is for me and because instead of having an I and Thou relationship with the ocean it’s almost like you have a “We” and Thou relationship. Oh my gosh that is so interesting. OK, good. So what about your art practice? How does that fit in to this? Cause these are, you are one of the people I know who is disciplined in this regular participation in these activities, really almost daily your participating in each of these activities that the overlap of those is fascinating to me. So what about art and your faith and your practice as a surfer.
Joanna: There’s so much hard happening in the world and to find the meaning and purpose in doing art and how’s that important and how to… so it’s taken me a minute to get there but I feel like I have and I feel like I’m created this way. This is who I am. And if I am meant to be, you know they always talk about the church as a body, it’s something that’s in the Bible a lot, about how we’re all important, that ear, the fingernail, the brain, the whatever. I’m the artist and so if I continue on doing the things that aren’t the artist I’m a, not serving my purpose and b, not being as helpful as I can be. So if I just get it together, calm down and go paint, I can actually serve the purpose that I’m created for. And um I think that anything that feels so, so much an outpouring or an overflow of who I am— anything that feels like it just naturally comes out, like painting, or surfing should happen because when I’m doing those things and in my spiritual practice consistently I feel like I can give to people instead of need from them.
Maia: There’s a kind of abundance, there’s even extra to give as opposed to a deficit [right] with this feeling of scarcity. So, in a way I mean this reminds me of, of what I’ve heard from a lot of Buddhists who essentially say you should not, you should not worry about generosity until you’ve figured out what is yours to give. You have to tend to yourself and quiet yourself and take some steps along on spiritual path…
Joanna: Right, cause otherwise it’s giving out of duty, instead of giving out of love.
Maia: And maybe potentially giving something that’s not such a gift after all.
Joanna: Right exactly [yeah] yeah your intentions matter.
Maia: Okay, fantastic so can you talk a little bit about painting. I know you love to paint, especially and I know something about the various kinds of paintings you make, and we’ll put some up with the interview on the blog. Can you talk about the various things you paint and how you feel about them?
Joanna: LAUGH- Yes, so all through school I was, I did figure painting my senior show, figure paintings, the whole thing. I did, when I started working here as an artist I did a lot of figure painting and it was well-received some times and sometimes I got dirty looks from women that would hurry their husbands along or I got lewd comments from men, “Is that you sweetheart?” you know, just disgusting people. And I also got asked to take them down at a Kure Beach market, so that was cool.
So I definitely shifted I didn’t want to carry them around. I didn’t want to be nervous every time someone came up to where I was working, it just wasn’t worth it to me and didn’t feel worth it, nobody— quit looking at my stuff like I just didn’t want to show anybody. I didn’t it’s hard for me already to put my work out there I don’t want anybody to look at me or my things but that’s not what artists do so… so that kind of ruined that for a little bit. And so I did a little bit of figure painting style but I kind of shifted into some work painting the ocean which I wasn’t really trying to do actually, now that I think about it. I had one hanging in the back of my tent, just for background noise, selling bottles and a shop owner, Airlie Moon, where I sell a lot of bottles, a beautiful store, asked me if she could have it in the store. And I said sure and it sold that week. So and that started that. I really enjoy painting the ocean. I really love painting the sky also, a lot, the clouds… It’s just a different thing for me than… figure painting is more, I don’t know where it comes from, I just want to do it.
It doesn’t make sense in the way I grew up. I’m sure my family was a little bit on edge, they’re a very conservative Christian family you know. But it’s just what wants to come out it’s what I want to paint, it’s the beauty of the line and it’s always women and they’re just beautiful. And you know in my belief system God created women last and finally as the crowning glory of creation, as the beauty, not only the beauty, and it’s just true. I mean it’s just true. When you look around I think women are stunning, they’re curvy and or not curvy but they’re not angular like men and and I just love the lines. So that’s what I do.
When I paint the sea it’s just a different thing. I enjoy it. I live here. I like to see how people get excited about it when they see it on canvas.
Maia: As I’ve watched other people interact with your paintings of this place and I have my own, you would say, spiritual orientation, has a lot to do with the way we interact with the more than human world and our relationship with place, including my own, is so bereft. It’s… we’re all so disconnected and I work very hard to roll in the mud, and splash in the waves, and I’m an aspiring animist, I really want to feel like I am continuous with the planet and all of of life and not-life and just the whole place. So, one of the one of the great joys for me of watching people interact with your landscapes and seascapes is to see them get excited about the place or to almost sometimes feel reverent about the place in a way that art allows them to do. Because they don’t cultivate this connection in the same way that dirt rollers and wave splashers do.
Joanna: Well and I forget that it’s not regular to them.
Maia: Right
Joanna: And that it’s special and maybe they don’t live here when they come and see my work may want to take them home and maybe it’s just a different experience for them.
Maia: Right. Interesting so you’ve got, there’s a small painting that you made that’s hanging in my living room, I am one lucky duck, that is a little bit of an abstract seascape and a little bit of a figure painting. Do you, what your feelings about that? That intersection because that’s rare for you to do something like that.
Joanna: Yeah didn’t I know that, I just in my head that’s a figure painting. [OK] That was the first painting, I’d been so scared of money not being abundant that I had been painting so much to try to sell and then I finally after many conversations with you, decided screw this, paint a painting and don’t think about it.
That was the first painting where I broke out of being a fear-based painter and just painted. And it came out beautifully, honestly, because and I didn’t mean to but I remember just focusing on instead of letting myself look at the whole painting, looking at each you know 2 square inches that I was working on only. Saying, do you like this? Do you like this? Do you personally, you like this? And then eventually stepping back and it was done. So it was just a new way to start and I still use that I’m working on a big 36 x 48 up there and I still get in tight in those little spaces and make sure I like the little space I don’t care if it’s a knee or an elbow or a cheek it, I have to like that space and it’s been an important thing to to carry through for me.
Maia: You love the figures the most? These are really what are in your heart to paint. Can you characterize your approach, your technical approach, your expressive approach, is there a particular art historical tradition that you feel like you’re riffing off of? Talk to me about those.
Joanna: Mainly for me it starts as a drawing with paint. Mostly it’s about line work and figuring out the proportions because I usually just make it up on the canvas. I just start drawing a lady but…
Maia: So you do not work from photographs or models?
Joanna: I do not. I’m not opposed to it, I like model, I like live figure painting and drawing. It costs money and I tend to work, I want to work alone. There are classes here but I just prefer to do it in my studio so I make it up as I go and then, but I have, I do look at a lot of Egon Schiele, I love his work. Some of it’s too erotic for me but I think he’s a brilliant drawer, brilliant. And so sometimes I look at his, the poses of his fingers before I start, because they’re so angular and so odd and I like things that are a bit off. And then I, I just start to sort of fill in and move things around as it happens, but it starts as a drawing.
Maia: So do you have a vision of what you want it to look like or does it…
Joanna: Sometimes I do— it never ends up being that but it always gives me a jumping point. I usually end up needing to mess the canvas up because the big white blank so’s scary that I just stand there frozen and do nothing. But if I can get something wrong on there, I can fix it and then I move on from there.
Maia: I would love it if you would say something about the character of the paint on the canvas because your work is representational but it’s also a little bit expressionistic, it’s not, I wouldn’t call it chunky, but you’re, you’re a brushy sort of painter…
Joanna: Yes, part of what I was saying about enjoying the physical act of painting is how the paint feels. So I work hard to get a texture that feels a little bit gloppy and easy to glide around. I like the way it feels coming off of particular brushes I think I use maybe three brushes out of the 60 I have for the most part. I want the lines to have different weight to them in different areas and then I want to come around those lines with some glops of paint and mush it around make a new line. Yeah, the paint matters to me.
Maia: Is there is there a way in which paint and water are at all analogous in your practices of surfing and painting? Do you ever feel that way as surfer when you’re making, because you’re really quite adept… when you’re making lines as you draw on the wave with your board, is there any overlap or are they just completely different practices?
Joanna: It feels totally different to me, it may be intrinsically I mean…
Maia: How is it different?
Joanna: Because in painting I’m using my brain so much. My eyes are analyzing and I’m, I’m feeling the paint through the brush but I’m, I’m watching it mostly and a lot of the time it’s me leaving something that happens, like recognizing something good instead of painting over it. Most of it’s editing and not… most of it’s editing or editing out or leaving in something that happened and maybe I didn’t have anything to do with it just kind of woops! look how that, you know, that mushed down the middle the brush and went over here, thank God that happened and then moving on. Surfing is just pure glee and it’s… the lines happen, well, they also happen by themselves, but they don’t feel the same way— painting is more frenzied, I think, than surfing is, in that moment when I’m really in sort of a flow, I just have to keep going, sometimes I forget I’ll think of a new color and forget to put it on my brush and just keep painting with the other color by accident and I have to make myself switch out whereas surfing is just expressive and more of a release.
Maia: I wonder about this because this is true for me, that the difference between making, for me it’s photography, and being in a state of flow when you’re making art, or being a state of flow in your surfing is that when you’re the creative force you’re the momentum you, you feel a kind of pressure, a kind of responsibility that you don’t feel when you’re surfing [right] you’re riding this other momentum…
Joanna: Right! It’s like I’m being painted instead of being the painter.
Maia: Okay so, the premise behind Waves to Wisdom is that there are some people in the world who have an ocean-centered practice and especially surfers whose regular involvement with the ocean makes them better people, allows them to figure out how they relate to the big picture or what they should do in their life. Is that a fair characterization of the role surfing place in your life?
Joanna: I think that surfing reminds me how small I am and reminds me that I’m not just a mind, I’m also a body and that it’s important to connect them. And so for me it’s less that surfing in particular shows me who I am or how I relate but that it, it just keeps me in balance, keeps me in check. It reminds me of the truth of that what you were saying about your life, I am a part of all of it and that that’s the waves and me both worshiping, we are all doing that we are a we and it’s good to not isolate. Christians tend to isolate their spirituality from everything else. It happens on Sundays or in the early morning or some such and surfing, being in the ocean specifically, is like experience… experiencing God everywhere, all over, not just in my brain.
Maia: The necessity of attention in surfing does not allow you to get too far into your head.
Joanna: Right you have to be present.
Maia: You have to be present. It’s for me, it’s a practice that allows me to connect in ways, with other humans, with the more than human world, it’s a practice that’s not rivaled by anything else that I’ve ever tried and there are plenty of things that I also love: I love hiking the mountains love swimming in streams, I like paddling boats and plenty of other activities that make me feel close to what is big, and large, and powerful but nothing like surfing where it feels like it’s part art, part spiritual practice, all fun.
Joanna: I’ve never had anything bring me so much joy, so much joy.
Maia: And we got to experience some joy this morning, didn’t we? How was that?
Joanna: It was so fun, so fun! Tiny, lovely little longboard waves, sunshine, water’s warming up, all of it. It was the beginning of summer.
Maia: Okay is there anything that you would like to say that we haven’t talked about? About surfing, art, life ?
Joanna: I would like to say that in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible the second verse says that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. It’s my favorite of all time because he was the original, he loves the water, he was just hanging out on the water.
Maia: That is so good. thank you very much. I really appreciate all of this and all of you, and I’m so excited to share your story and your art.
Joanna: Well thank you, this has been lovely.
To see Joanna’s work, learn about coaching with Maia, Waves to Wisdom retreats, or Conservación Patagonica park in Patagonia, visit wavestowisdom.com.
Interview: Elizabeth Pepin SIlva
To listen to the interview, scroll to the Media Player at the bottom of this page.
"I think that increasingly as more and more women take to the water we are demanding that we are looked at differently than we have been in the past that we are athletes that we are courageous and confident and that that carries over into our everyday life. When I leave the water I don't leave those things on the beach I take them with me..."
~Elizabeth Pepin Silva
Interview Transcript
Maia: My name is Maia Dery. This episode impart of a series called the Waves to Wisdom Interviews. The project is a simple one. I seek out people I admire, surfers with what look to me to be ocean centered wisdom practices. I ask them if they’d be willing to share a surf session or two and then, after we’ve ridden some waves together, talk to me about their oceanic habits: about surfing, work, meaning, anything that comes up.
Elizabeth Pepin Silva (EPS): I think that increasingly as more and more women take to the water we are demanding that we are looked at differently than we have been in the past that we are athletes that we are courageous and confident and that that carries over into our everyday life. When I leave the water I don’t leave those things on the beach I take them with me every day and it has given me strength in my everyday life that I don’t think I had before I surfed, that’s a profound thing, to be able to just be your, your own person, to just be you and be okay with it.
My conversation with photographer, filmmaker, and writer Elizabeth Pepin Silva took place over two crystal clear California days. We spent time with her friends and family in her hometown of Ojai and had a chance to explore a couple of the nearby surf breaks. Elizabeth’s work as a photographer and filmmaker has heavily influenced my view of surfing and, more importantly, how I see my own place in that world. No surprise at all after seeing her films, her ability to articulate the story of her life’s work and the way it’s been fueled by what we generally think of as play as remarkable. I hope you enjoy her wise words.
Maia: if you are comfortable with it would you tell us your name your age and how long you been surfing.
EPS: I am Elizabeth Pepin Silva and I am almost 52 I will be 52 July 30th and I’ve been surfing for 31 years.
Maia: So, you are a photographer and filmmaker…
EPS: And writer
Maia: and writer. Can you talk a little bit about your work and the focus of it?
EPS: Most of my work has been focused on Ocean and water related things. I, excuse me, all of my personal work is always ocean related and often time of ocean -related and women and I’m really interested in that intersection between humans and nature and how that plays out in people’s lives and also the impact that we have on nature but also the way that nature impacts us in the and definitely that’s the case in oceans and coastlines around the world.
Maia and you are a surfer currently active
EPS: yeah I started surfing in 1980, I thought it was 86, but then when I actually this year I finally come about as I was my 30th anniversary I gotta like figure this out and then I realize that actually I had started surfing in the fall of 1985 and when my friend moved into this house in Marin, I wanted to serve before that but I had no, I didn’t have any money so I couldn’t go buy a board there wasn’t places anywhere to rent boards at that time. I didn’t know anyone who surfed so it was something I wanted to do but had no idea how to go about doing it and so when my friend moved into this house in Marin and the guy that had lived there before and had left a bunch of stuff in the storage space in the back of the house there was a board and she’s like oh you always want to do this, here have it. There was a pool, I put it in the pool and I paddle it around and I’m like, this is so cool! And as I was driving home it was sticking out of this Toyota Corolla, I had this little Toyota Corolla and it was sticking out cause I didn’t have a rack, it, I was at a stoplight in the Castro and this hippie walks up to my car cause it was open cause the board was sticking out, he was like, Hey I want, I wanna go to The Dead at the Oakland Auditorium or Coliseum or something you want to buy my wetsuit” And he had this bag and I was like, okay, so I pulled over, it was the same size as me I couldn’t believe it, it was like it was meant to be, it was so wild [what a story] that’s how I figured out when I started surfing cause I looked up when the Dead played in Oakland and they didn’t play that, do that in the spring of 86, it was in the fall of 85 so that’s how I figured out when I started.
Maia: You know exactly
EPS: Yeah, because of that Dead Head guy. So he gave me a bag, a wetsuit, a little vest ,and some trashed booties, which didn’t fit. And so that weekend I was like okay here we go.
Maia: What an incredible San Francisco tale [yeah] okay so can you let me just give a little background, I found your work because I have been incorporating surfing into a couple of the academic classes that I teach at this small college and woman, an academic name Krista Comer wrote a book called Surfer Girls in the New World Order in which you and your photographs are featured and I was I and many of my students were deeply inspired by your focus on women and your recent film La Maestra. Can you tell us a little bit about that film and how that came about?
EPS: Well La Maestra is my second surf film, I did a film before that with Sally Limburg called One Winter Story which is about the first woman to surf Mavericks, and then did some water-related film, educational films for the state of California and I wanted to make another surf film but Sally and I decided not to work together anymore because she lives in Hawaii and it was just too complicated and um, I just wasn’t finding anyone that was really, whose story was really grabbing. I’m not interested in most professional women surfers, because to me it’s obvious why they surf, that’s their job and they get paid to do it. And I just wasn’t finding a story that resonated with me.
I really wanted to do a story about a woman in Mexico but because my Spanish is poor there was barriers to that and I felt it was extremely important to tell the story of in the person’s own language and so it took a while. One Winter Story came out in 2006, October 2006 and Paul Farraris, who is a friend of mine, surf photographer from San Francisco called me in the end of 2013 telling me that he got this grant for teachers, art, art and media teachers he is a media teacher at a low-income high school in San Francisco. The grant allows that art or film teacher to hire a mentor, do a small project that will teach the teacher how, a new skill that they can then pass on to their students.
EPS: I worked at PBS for 14 years as a producer and so Paul wanted to learn how to make a PBS style documentary and then in turn teach his students and so his idea was to, he wanted to make a film in Baja. He is half Mexican American and his mother’s from Baja and so Paul speaks pretty solid Spanish and he loves going to Baja. My husband and I also love going down to Baja to surf and camp, and he wanted to feature these 2 ex-professional surfers, gringos from California who had moved to this very tiny surf community in southern Baja and I know who, I knew who they were and I just like I’m not interested at all.
That is not a story I want to tell. I don’t think they’re worthy of the story and I am just so tired of watching surf films about white people who go to other people’s countries and they tell the story of that country and you never get to hear from the locals that actually live there you rarely get to see locals surfing in these surf movies. It feels really colonial to me and condescending and I’m not interested in participating in that at all and site but I said I really want to make a film about a Mexican surfer in Baja! That completely interests me and you have the skills, Dude and let’s do this. And by the way I have the this woman that I think would be really cool.
In 2012 my husband and I‘d gone to this little fishing surfing village and I was shooting photos when this Mexican, young Mexican woman paddled out and I was immediately like. “Woah, who is that because that was the first time I’d ever seen a Mexican woman paddle out on a board. not only did she paddle out then she just completely starts ripping, like, holy cow who is this person and I’m taking pictures and I just used just beautiful, beautiful surfer and my friend who lives there, a gringo, pulled up, I’m like “Who is that woman?” She’s like “That’s Myra she’s a local teacher, she’s taught herself to surf, she’s good, huh? I’m like, “Yeah!” So Myra gets out while Karen was still on the shore and I was introduced, “Hi, Hi.” Just got some photos of you. “Oh, cool, great.” That that was our entire like one minute interaction.
So I told Paul about her and sent him the pictures, he’s like “Oh my God, of course. [of course] This court actually is so cool, we gotta do this.” So I said okay I’ll email Karen and see if she can contact Myra because that town is so small there’s no phone or cell phone service. People have, there’s a community grocery store for lack of a better way to put it, also like a community space at the same time, and they have a community phone and there’s a phrase in Spanish, I can think of it right now, what these phones are called but it’s basically a way for people in these tiny communities to be able to communicate with the outside world. And there is Internet service there. It’s poor, it’s through satellite.
So Karen went talk to Myra, Myra said she was open to it so we were emailing back and forth but she never really, besides that one minute, didn’t meet us until the day we arrived eight months later and said, “Hi, we’re the film crew. We’re here to film you.” and they were just amazing, her, she lives with her mom and dad and they completely open their lives and their house up to us and were, were game to do whatever we wanted them to do and we, like, “We don’t want you to do anything that you wouldn’t already be doing, can we just… We want to just film your life from the time you wake up until the time go to bed.” They’re like, “Okay come back tomorrow. I get up at this time, go for it.”
Maia: Such an act of the trust on their part [huge] it must feel like a big responsibility.
EPS: It does, it’s a huge responsibility and one that I, I try and respect I mean you are telling someone’s story and they are giving you the gift of their story and, I, in my films I like to let my subjects tell that story and sometimes and I try not to have an agenda. And of course there’s no such thing as a as a film maker that doesn’t have an agenda, I mean you put your stamp on it by your editing decisions by the, your questions to the person by the things that you film in that community, of course, you’re putting your mark on it and maybe someone else would’ve ask different questions, would’ve filmed different things, so there’s no getting around that but I try really hard to just let this film be told as the person wants to tell it. That’s why I’m not a big fan of narration um an you know sometimes, like in the case of Myra, whose kind of quiet and you know can make for a little bit of a slower film, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impact is any less valuable than some big splashy film with a character that’s very excitable and boisterous.
Maia: I’ve seen the film and shown it to students and it’s beautiful, it’s just it’s eloquent and it it’s really quite succinct I didn’t find it slow in the least and her surfing, even if there were no words, her surfing is just remarkable and at the fact that she is, my understanding, I’ve never been to Baja or even to Mexico but my understanding from books is that it’s actually rare for young Mexican women [yes] to surf and that that is changing but gradually and only in some places.
EPS: Yes
Maia: so for this to unfold in this very rural place is notable
EPS: and she got quite a bit of shit for it at first, some people were like like “That’s for gringo women not for Mexican women and why are you doing this” and “You’re wasting your time.” and most women her age were getting married and having children and you know in her little town she’s a rare woman that is has a college degree and a life of her own and interests of her own and no husband or kids at that time that she had to worry about. And so I think that, and in fact the people in the community said she was an inspiration especially to young girls of in opening up the possibilities. They’ve realized through their teacher, la maestra, that there was a world beyond that tiny fishing village. That they weren’t just restricted to being a mom and a wife and what else could there be? And there’s definitely, last time we went back down there to show the film a year later after was finished I couldn’t believe how many young girls were in the water.
Maia: Oh my goodness
EPS: It was cool [wow] really cool.
Maia: So, you were there at that moment and you saw that influence beginning to unfold.
EPS: Totally yeah yeah
Maia: What a gift!
EPS: Yeah, it was really neat, is really neat to watch the young boys and how, you know, there wasn’t any separation they were surfing together, the boys were helping some of the girls that weren’t as competent as some of the other girls and it to me seemed like a really healthy relationship between the sexes while
Maia: Wow, such a great story and a great story well told I think we’re all lucky you were down there to get it.
EPS: Oh, thank you
Maia: So, so this project, this Waves to Wisdom project is in its first phase and in the sort of prompt the creative prompt is that it appears to me that there are some surfers and certainly not all and I think you you know many surfers who don’t appear to be inspired to do things that are particularly wiser, or that seem particularly wise but the Waves to Wisdom project is based on my working theory that there are some surfers and ocean centered people whose regular contact with the ocean inspires and guides them and helps them do incredible and positive things in the world and you seem to me like an embodiment of that proposition. Would you think that is an accurate characterization? Is that an accurate characterization?
EPS: Totally I mean ever since I can remember I’ve been going to the beach and to the ocean and I think that it is a place that grounds me that allows me when I go into the ocean to clear my mind, and find my center and balance in my life, I think that it allows me to expand my creative side of me often when I’m stuck in my work I go there and my let my mind just go and I come out with ideas that I then, come back to my house and execute. I come from a long line of anxious women. My mom has pretty bad mental health issues I think it is a way for me to, not go, you know not not follow in the footsteps of the other women in my family, you know it’s definitely better than Prozac, that’s for sure.
Maia: we share that history in common, I have a history of anxiety in my family as well and I’m a completely fear driven person and it’s it’s interesting when I say that to people sometimes they, they find it bemusing that I chose surfing because it sounds like such a scary thing in and in fact it can be [right] but but it does help. Can you talk a little bit more about why you think it helps or how it helps?
EPS: It’s been proven over and over in studies that exercise helps people with mental health issues and I don’t suffer from that thank God, but I do think that if I don’t go surfing I definitely feel like I’m more anxious I get grouchier, I find it harder to be creative.
So, you know if I hadn’t found surfing when I did in late 85 I mean I definitely was on a somewhat self-destructive path and surfing I think steered me away from, you know, getting more into the whole sex drugs and rock ‘n roll thing. I was really into the music scene I was the day manager at the Fillmore Auditorium, you know, so I was staying up late and partying a lot and although there’s many, many surfers that have been hard-core drug addicts [absolutely] I found it challenging to be that kind of surfer I, I needed to go to bed. I needed to not drink and not do drugs if I wanted to surf and I was so taken with surfing from the very first time that I stood up, I was lucky, it was the first time I went surfing I stood up, that I wanted it, I wanted it badly and so that whole partying side fell away because I wanted to surf so much and so that healthy, you know, it led me to be much more to take care of myself a lot more which is cool.
So I think that also being in the ocean and specially surfing if your anxiety, filled with anxiety or anger it is really hard to surf I mean it it comes through in your body you’re stiff, you’re going to fall a lot, get frustrated and so again you kinda have to like let that go if you’re going to you decent surfer. So it forces you and there is nothing more like being in the moment than having like a five wave over head set coming at you and you better be only thinking about what’s going on right in that moment and not like you know worried about bills or you know freaking out about this or that, cause you gotta focus on what you’re doing make sure you gonna be safe and get through that five wave set. (23:20)
Maia: If you are a surfer who for whatever reason doesn’t surf big waves does it still help with that ability to be present you think?
EPS: Oh completely! I don’t surf big waves. I don’t like big waves I think there’s this really kind of over-the-top obsession right now with mainstream media about big wave surfing and I, believe me, I think it’s great, I have friends that are big wave surfers I made a film about a big wave surfer One Winter Story and I ,they get, they deserve all the credit because that is something that most people cannot do but I don’t think it makes you any less of a surfer or I don’t think you are a better surfer just because you can surf big waves the way you connect with nature and the ocean and that dance between you and the water gives you that release and that pleasure no matter if it’s 2 feet or 50 feet.
Maia: You’re a filmmaker photographer and writer and you focus on water and surfing. That sounds like a lot of people’s dream job. Can you talk a little bit about how you got to where you are? How you arrived here?
EPS: Well, it’s a dream job if you don’t like making a lot of money [ah, there’s a catch] I’m broke but I’m happy! Thank God for my husband! Yeah, it is a challenging way to make a living as far as supporting oneself but it is incredibly rewarding and being able to, to because of what I have the way I’ve chosen to express myself in my photos and my filmmaking, you know, I didn’t choose a traditional surf photographer filmmaker Path
Maia: and in what is that because the primary audience I would imagine for these interviews is going to be non-surfers so what is a traditional path?
EPS: So, a traditional surf photographer and filmmaker would be photographing mainly male, white male professional surfers and getting those photographs into magazines, the front and back covers, or magazines or the two-page spread are where the money shots are and always being on the lookout for the next big surfer because you want to set up your relationship with that surfer early on as their careers build they will carry you as a photographer and film maker along with them and then their sponsors will pay you to go on these trips to go film and photograph them and you’ll get paid again by the surf magazines for covering them.
But that whole scene does not interest me at all in the least. And I did photograph some professional women surfers but even then I wasn’t all that excited and so my path was I came out it first of all not because I wanted to makes surf photography or surf filmmaking for making a career, I came at it, I’d already, was already shooting photos and making films, and I was surfing and when I first started surfing in the 80s there in Northern California there were very very few women surfers but around 1994 I began to see a lot of women get in the water.
But the surf magazines in the surf media and surf industry would not reflect those changes in their editorial and visual content and the focus continued to be on white male surfers and the photographs you did see with, of women were them, blonde haired blue-eyed, skinny teenage girls standing on, excuse me standing on the beach watching men surf, you didn’t see them in the water and I started get really frustrated like, “Hey there’s a whole new group of people getting in the water. Why are you addressing their needs? Why aren’t you reflecting this change?” and I definitely think that’s because the makeup of the staff of these, these companies in these surf magazines were all white dudes from Southern California, you know?
Maia: Narrow vision
EPS: Very narrow vision and very narrow definition of what and who is a surfer. So, I brought, started bringing my still camera to the beach. And after I would surf I’d go and photograph the women that I met on the beach. And I was very influenced, again, unlike most surf photographers who shoot color and are influenced by recent surf photographers. I was influenced by the early surf photographer’s like Doc Baldy Leroy Grannis and my most favorite Ron Church who was Jacques Ceausteau’s photographer as well as being a surf photographer.
Maia: There’s a dream job!
EPS: Yeah, he was amazing, I really, his work, everyone should know about his were just beautiful, beautiful shots black-and-white, primarily. And so I was shooting black and white and of course this is film, this is before digital cameras and so from there I moved on to shooting, actually shot in the water before I shot with a long lens so I got a water housing then I started renting big lenses and got a big lens, but I was just doing it. It wasn’t like I was even sending them in to the surf magazines. Cause I didn’t think they’d be interested.
And I was just kind of teaching myself. I met, I saw a few surf photographers when I would go on road trips I saw them on the beach and would try to talk to them. They were all men they weren’t interested in speaking with me. I finally connected with two surf photographers in Northern California, Thomas Campbell and Patrick Trefz who are amazingly nice and answered all my questions whenever I had them and really helped guide me and I thank them profusely for that.
I just kind of found my own voice. And then soon after women’s, finally, although the mainstream surf magazines were not showing women surfing, women’s surf magazines started to appear. Wahine was the first. It was created by two women surfers in Southern California and so that I had a outlet for my work. And I also was, I was getting gallery shows that turned into museum shows. I had friends who were pretty who were pretty famous artists and so they kind of, Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen and really helped champion my work. So I actually started making money from it. And people were buying and it was lovely. It was lovely that people understood what I was trying to do, that I was trying to provide a different way of looking at women surfers than what was being fed to them by the surf media.
So it was good as I was really I was thrilled that people understood that beauty can come in all different forms and that we should be celebrating these women surfers as athletes not as objects that unfortunately still to this day continues, to that continues to be perpetuated that these women are being sexualized and there the focus is on their brief beauty rather than their surfing ability.
Maia: It’s one of the sometimes it feels to me like disastrous side disastrous side effects of the mainstream representations of surfing and and I think this is driven mostly by the surf industry, the big companies that dominate it, is that, as I’ve tried to encourage many young people and this is some men to be primarily women, to learn to surf they don’t think that they can because they don’t look like that. I mean that they wouldn’t use those words but fundamentally it’s it’s that’s that they don’t feel like they’re “athletic enough” or they have good enough balance but if you dig just a little bit beneath the surface it’s that they know what surfers look like and they know they don’t look like that.
So I think the work that you’re doing and others who are trying to represent surfers of all ethnic backgrounds and all shapes and sizes is so crucial not just to make a statement but to communicate to younger people that this is that this is a form of of and are participatory joy and embodied wisdom that’s open to every single person, varying abilities, varying physical abilities, all different kinds of people. Speaking of varying physical abilities can you tell us how you learned he is a dark room have had no funny because people where I learned to use a dark room?
EPS: That’s kind of funny because, where I learned to use a darkroom was at a camp for blind and deaf, actually was all ages, we had to each, it was two weeks and was varying ages, each session. So I, in high school, I didn’t really have much to do in the summer except for have summer jobs and so my counselor at school in eighth grade, her son was blind and she ran this camp called Enchanted Hills Camp for the Blind in Napa during the summer months between school sessions and she told me about it and asked if I’d want to come up and volunteer. So I said sure!
So from eighth grade to 11th grade each summer I volunteered up there and I was allowed to choose what departments of the camp I would work in, so I was an avid horse fiend so horses were a natural fit for me but then I was getting interested in photography and so I volunteered for the photography department. Which surprises a lot of people that you know why would there be a photography department at a camp for blind people? But in fact most blind people have some of sort of vision whether they can see shadows are light or dark or sometimes even outlines of people or fuzziness, most of them are not completely and totally, only see black and so I volunteered in the photo department and the college kid who was running the photo department taught me and the campers that chose to take that elective, photography, how to not only shoot but also develop our own work so that’s how I learned how to work in a darkroom.
Maia: Great story so that and how are the pictures from the blind campers?
EPS: The blind cameras actually took really interesting, cool pictures.
Maia: I bet
EPS: it was it was amazing to see what they were seeing because you know as a sighted person this is what I see but for someone that has limited sight like how are they, how they see the world and so this was a window into what they were seeing I thought it was a really really neat experience.
Maia: what it seems as though not only a neat experience but what an influential time for you to have that experience and to understand something fundamental about vision that maybe couldn’t you get I mean I’ve been a photography teacher this will be my 16th year and one of the things that I noticed is very similar to the to the surf media story we are all so heavily influenced by media that when most photography students go out and take pictures they’re trying to emulate the billions of pictures that they see and so if you were cut off from those influences it might in some ways be visually freeing.
EPS: Yes well it also open my eyes as to what as if it what is a photograph you know and what makes a good photograph versus what you bad photograph and of course that’s in a way subjective and but my friend Margaret Kilgallan the artist, who sadly has passed away, she said something to me once that I will I will I think about always probably till I die and she said that there is perfection in the imperfection and she’s absolutely right. I think that you can find beauty in almost anything if you look at it in the certain way and allowing your mind to be open rather than narrowly defined by the rest of the world. and you know I think the technique in photography is important but if you’re if you’re going to make mistakes and still print that photograph you better have a reason why like why is that mistake in there? And but I think that those mistakes can be effectively used in your imagery.
Maia: One my favorite photographers working and alive today is Sally Mann who has you know in her recent work just completely embraced these serendipitous quote mistakes and such evocative powerful expressive work comes out of it.
EPS: I love her work I think it’s it’s wonderful and I do the same in my work as a I mean I’m not equating myself with Sally Mann, believe me, in any way shape or form but what I what I mean by that is that I used to in my early surf photography chuck out all the ones that I didn’t, I thought weren’t perfect and you, luckily I was shooting on film so the negatives are still there and I, after few years started going back and looking again and realizing that I actually had some pretty beautiful photographs, they, if I just looked at them differently.
EPS: And in fact some of my best sellers were ones that I initially didn’t print
Maia: Isn’t that fascinating [yeah] So your vision about your own work, even work that you’ve already done has evolved over time?
EPS: Completely
Maia: So you are not formally trained as a photographer?
EPS: No I’ve never taken, I’ve tried a couple times to take classes I lasted like two or three classes and then I just I just got bored, I mean, I just wasn’t you my goal still before I die is to get it I’d like to get a degree in photography. I mean I do have a degree I just got my degree in journalism with an emphasis on magazine writing I think cause at the time when I was in school I just felt like I had I was pretty solid in my basic photography skills and I was a good writer but not in the way, not in the journalistic way so that’s I wanted that the skills to be honed so that I could go out and get jobs.
Maia: And I don’t know if this had any part to do in motivation but you certainly learned how to be a masterful storyteller comes through in your work and your still images and your and your videos your documentary.
EPS: Well, thank you.
Maia: I think that journalism degree must’ve played into that on some level.
EPS: Yeah, maybe. yeah
Maia: So our alarm just went off- yesterday we were just so fortunate to go to Rincon yesterday with a beautiful, what would you call that knee—knee to maybe waste at the most? Yeah, knee to waste although the outside sets people were getting like chest high waves.
Maia: it was now and you know I’m from North Carolina where everything is a beach break and those long point break waves are just magical it is going to take a force of will to get me on that plane back to beach breaks but we will, we’re going to go surfing now because the conditions are probably to be good soon you tides coming up soon going to get her but the student will pick this up afterwards.
Maia: OK, so we’re back from our surf at Rincon [yes] another really fun longboard.
EPS: It was quite lovely
Maia: With a relatively friendly crowd and not too many of us.
EPS: Yeah
Maia: Yeah it was good. Lots of women out today…
EPS: Yes, lots of young women I loved the mom with her two sons teaching them how to surf that was really cool
Maia: Absolutely
EPS: It was a good day.
Maia: It was a very good day. So one thing that that I’ve noticed in the last couple of days I’ve have been lucky enough to spend can hanging around and see how you do your work is how generous you are with other, other artists and documentarians. Can you talk just briefly about the documentary that I saw the other night that you put on for some friends?
EPS: So that was a film called The Great Highway and it’s done by two friends of mine from San Francisco, Mark Gunson and Krista Howell and I think that was Kris’s first time as a filmmaker and the reason it took them so long is that, one, as with most independent filmmakers it’s always money, trying to find it to pay for production costs which, although the equipment has gotten easier, it really hasn’t reduced the cost of making a film all that much and so finding that money is challenging, especially for surf films and especially for films that don’t focus on some surf rock star that a surf company would want to help promote through a film and helping pay for that film.
So, I have, when I learned to make documentaries I had some mentors who literally taught me everything. Peter Stein and Joan Saffa, both Peabody award-winning filmmakers at PBS who took me under their wing and taught me everything they know and I was very grateful for that. I didn’t go to film school. I have a degree in journalism, print write… magazine writing, print so while many of those skills are transferable to documentary filmmaking there still is the actual nuts and bolts, how do you make a film? How do you put together? And there are many more moving parts than when you’re writing the story. You have the visuals, you have the music, the sound mix, um sound sweetening, which is, like, like you know birds chirping, adding the ocean sounds or whatever you need and so they taught me that for free.
I mean it well not even for free I was getting paid, it was a job so with that generous spirit in mind I’ve always felt that I need to do the same thing and help other filmmakers with the knowledge that I’ve gathered over the years. And to me also with it’s a selfish thing, I guess, because not only does it bring me great joy to help other people see, help bring their creative endeavors to fruition but selfish in the way that I want more voices telling stories in the surf world and I’m not able to do everything myself so I wanted to help other people to be able to gather these important stories before they’re lost. Cause once these people pass and their, their stories go with them, we’re screwed. So, you know that’s that’s my way of giving back to people.
Maia: Do I remember correctly that that film took 12 years to…
EPS: Yes it took 12 years to complete for a variety of reasons
Maia: And how long have your two One Winter’s Tale?
EPS: One Winter’s Story [One Winter’s Story] One Winter’s Story took five years and La Maestra only took a year.
Maia: La Maestra only took a year?
EPS: But that was kind of self-imposed because we only had the small grant that Paul received plus we raised some money through Indi go-go so we had the money to go once to Myra’s hometown for a week and that was it. (4:29) What we got was what we got and I recognize that it probably would’ve been a richer story had we been able to go back a few times. There’s definitely things that I will wish could we could’ve included. I would like to have interviewed for example the principle of her school. We did try to interview some of the kids they just could not say anything on camera that did work out [okay] but I would like to have interviewed her parents. We just didn’t have the time for it [right] So it is what it is and you know that monetary restraint for most independent filmmakers is always a factor and so how do you get as much as you can with the money that you, money and the time that you have.
Maia: So let me just say this one more time since I got it wrong, One Winter’s Story.
EPS: Yes, it’s One Winter’s Story
Maia: So you are surfing regularly right? Almost every week?
EPS: I surf every, at least once a week and I try to surf 3 to 5 times a week. I usually don’t surf on the weekends the crowds are to large and I don’t have very much fun when that happens so I tend not to surf on the weekends but if it’s really good I know some spots that have fewer people and I will go out.
Maia: Can you say anything more about ways that you think surfing or ocean activities might be different from other kinds of sports.
EPS: waves are this incredible force of nature unto themselves and no wave is the same as the next even when there’s a swell and it’s coming from a particular direction and you are at a point break, so it’s breaking in the exact same spot every time nonetheless each wave is unique and unto itself and while that can be true of like I guess skiing, snow changes as the day progresses and gets warmer and then colder again, it’s not actively, it’s not actively moving what’s under your feet, the snow under your feet is not actively moving and you don’t have to react to it in a way like a wave, which is actively moving and you are trying to become one with that movement, um and connect with nature in that way that it’s up I think it’s pretty unique to most sports and I think it is that connection that you have with the wave that is profound in a way that doesn’t occur in in other sports.
It’s profound for me that’s for sure. I think the surfing is a pretty difficult thing to explain to anyone that doesn’t surf and even if you talk to a surfer right after they’ve surfed like maybe one of the best waves of their life or at least the best wave of that day when they try to describe it, it’s it really impossible and even recall the, what has just occurred in your own mind is almost impossible because it’s just so happening in the moment and then it’s gone and the wave’s gone and there’s nothing, maybe someone saw you on it maybe someone took a picture but really it’s just vanished you know and I’m not sure why, why that lends itself to being so impossible to describe but it is I think it, it unless, you can describe it but it comes off something little cheesy and you know cliché.
Maia: So you’re you have many creative outlets and endeavors if undertaken in your life your musician no I wouldn’t call myself a musician like lately as a way to play music took early see you play music and you photograph and you make films great books you write books and that I wonder about because I’m not a musically person much less musically inclined almost any other person I’ve ever met and music to me when you are a musician when you play music it looks from the outside very similar to surfing in some ways it’s ephemeral if you’re playing with other people there’s always this other force that you’re in concert with literally if it’s going well you must have to be powerfully focused for it to go well and can get to be utterly different from surfing can you talk to me a little bit and struck me as somebody who knows how to surf but knows almost nothing about music from a primary participant.
EPS: So, I don’t know that I’m a good enough musician to be able to answer that question I mean I don’t I played in one punk rock band when I was 17 in other than that I just play by myself for the most part we had these jam sessions in our backyard and I’ll be playing along but definitely as with surfing and with my playing if I start thinking about too much it doesn’t go as well as if I empty my mind and I just let it unfold and let my body and my emotion just take over and that’s what I think one of the the plagues of the modern world is that we get so wound up in our own heads and then go on the Internet and look as of now everything has to be now now now instead of just relaxing and letting go, and letting what needs to happen come to you. And when you are able to do that when you’re surfing, you’re definitely surfing a lot better, when you’re able to do that, I find, in the creative process, you create a lot better.
Maia: Do you think surfing has made you happier person?
EPS: Oh I’m definitely a happier person because I surf, without a doubt. As I said right, I come from a rather troubled family and, that continues to have issues to this day and I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t have surfing. It brings me enormous joy and even in those moments of sorrow like when my friend Zeuf Hesson passed away and I was profoundly sad and would just be gardening and suddenly be moved to tears at missing her so much, I was still able to go to the ocean and because she was also a surfer there was that connection as well but just felt like the ocean was there for me in a way and that I could just sit in that space and just be. And I didn’t even have to be surfing a wave, like I could just be bobbing around on my board and just kind of letting myself do what I needed to do to mourn the passing of my friend or to get through some heavy crap that was going on in my family and I always come out of the ocean feeling a lot better than I went in. Yesterday we surfed I was freaking exhausted I really, to be honest, didn’t want to go I just wanted to be by myself, it’s just I felt like I had people overload and I was just like, just wanted to take a nap and read my book and not talk to anyone for a while and I was actually very grateful that it’s like, we’re going to go and we did and I actually you know we went to a place that was small and mellow and I came out of the water feeling a lot better because of it. So it’s funny though sometimes you gotta fight those tendencies to just not want to do anything and sit on your butt even though you know that once you get in that water you’re gonna come out of it 1 million times better than you were.
Maia: I’ve never regretted going surfing.
EPS: Even when there’s like 10,000 people in the water, as long as they don’t hit me right I, you know it’s good.
Maia: It’s good, it’s good. Is there anything else that you would like to add anything that you have to say or that you’ve notices about having this regular contact with the ocean in your life about being a surfer.
EPS: While I don’t think that for everyone surfing is going be that thing you know but what I have found, part of what my relationship the ocean has taught me what I have found from surfing but if you are able to find that one thing whether it be the connection of the ocean and surfing, or hiking mountains, or gardening or what ever it is if you have that one thing that you are able to do that connects you with nature and allows you to be in the moment, I think you’re much happier person for it and in this, in our world that is ever becoming more technologically connected and less connected to the natural world I think it is evermore important to find that connection to the natural world because I think the world is suffering because of our increasing lack of connection. It’s it causes our human relationships suffering and it causes our relationships with the planet to suffer and I think we are seeing profound impacts because of that and so I hope that people find something that they can do that will bring them that connection because I think it is but it’ll make them far a more rounded I think it’ll make them a more rounded and happier person.
Maia: You’ve really focused your career as a surf documentarian on women. Do you have anything to say to women not just female server certainly female surfers but any women of any age that you like to pass on from what you noticed in this career?
EPS: well I would just encourage women to try and have a relationship with the ocean whether you sir for you simply wade around door you walk on the beach and collect shells or sit on a bench and stare out to sea. I think that there’s something about women in the ocean that, I’m not going be very eloquent about this.
Maia: You can take as many tries you want maybe the first time thought of it in those terms.
EPS: I don’t know why it would be different for a woman than a man, why a woman’s relationship to the water is different than a man’s but I have in my 31 years of surfing watched women who are struggling in one way or another develop a relationship with the ocean and their struggles have been minimized if not wiped away and I think that there is something very empowering about a woman’s connection to a powerful force of nature such as the ocean and you know it requires determination and strength and will and confidence in oneself that you can be in the ocean and not get hurt and that you also recognize your limits and keep yourself safe and not put yourself in situations that you could get hurt. And so in that way it allows women to test themselves in a way that may be other venues don’t offer.
Maia: Determination and strength and confidence are not necessarily attributes that the culture always encourages women to develop.
EPS: yeah but they should and I am not much for allowing I’m not much for having society dictate who or what you should be, I mean, I’ve always kind of rebelled against that perhaps too, at the sacrifice of monetary reward but I think that increasingly as more and more women take to the water we are demanding that we are looked at differently than we have been in the past that we are athletes that we are courageous and confident and that that carries over into our everyday life. When I leave the water I don’t leave those things on the beach I take them with me every day and it has given me strength in my everyday life that I don’t think I had before I surfed, that’s a profound thing, to be able to just be your, your own person, to just be you and be okay with it.
Maia: And unlike many people you’re part of a surfing couple.
EPS: Yeah, it’s it was it was it brought us together it was how our romance flourished I actually knew my husband since I was 18, he was just kind of part of the music scene that I was in but we weren’t like hanging out friends or anything like that I just knew who he was and we reconnected when I was 32 and he asked how I was staying fit and I told him that I had been surfing for a long while and so he said he wanted to go and learn so I took him and never got rid of him but it’s great I I honestly don’t see how for someone like myself the ocean and surfing is so much a part of who I am and what I do I don’t see how I could be partnered with somebody who didn’t have that same relationship to the ocean because otherwise I’d never see my partner so it’s good.
Maia: Having that kind of shared passion
EPS: Although we like different waves. He like big waves and I like small waves.
Maia: It likes seems like there’s some compromise in there somewhere.
EPS: You know we we find spots that have both.
Maia: That’s good will thank you so much for your generosity it’s it’s not just bestowed upon me but I’m particularly grateful.
Maia: Providing inspirational, transformative experiences is central to the mission of Waves to Wisdom. To learn more about our retreats where we use learning to surf as a means to guide you into a powerful capacity to envision and create, a more effective, fulfilled version of your self at work and in life visit wavestowisdom.com.