What stories would the waves tell you if you knew how to listen to them?

As a surfer, my life is lived in intimate relationship with the ocean, exploring the power of the ocean to help us reconnect with ourselves, each other and nature. In the crises we face, the loss of our emotional connection with the more-than- human world, especially the ocean in all it’s wonder and aliveness, is of deep concern. To restore our connection requires a deeper form of listening; to reflect and reconnect with what matters most, to allow for new ways of noticing to emerge.

Part of my reflective practice has led me to explore more deeply the relationship between the surfer and the wave and how that might translate into living a more attuned life. It’s a journey that focuses on the process, not the product – that shows how relationships of reciprocity amplify everything.

I’ve been learning to listen to waves my whole life. I live by their whisper, rumble, roar, hiss, crash, slap and swish. I’ve been following their story from the moment they were born, thousands of miles off the western coast of Ireland in the North Atlantic, on the edge of the Arctic circle where the cold surface water of the sea is met by the heat of the sun, creating wind.

The wind passes her energy through the water causing it to move in a circular motion, the beginnings of waveform. At first a chaotic choppy mess of ‘fetch’ with no discernible pattern. Until, if the wind blows long and steady enough, these waveforms sustain themselves becoming swells, radiating outwards, a cosmic pulse formed by the union of fire and water.

Birthed from the unseen, they move beyond their source, carrying the energy of the wind with them. Travelling together in groups, unimpeded across a vast ocean they grow in power and speed. The frontrunners moving as fast as 60 nautical miles per hour towards the wildly indented and rugged coastline of home, Ireland.

These oceanic waves become surfable only when they meet the seabed in shallower coastal waters where they begin to slow down. The wave’s ultimate form determined and shaped by the contours of the coastline, geology, tides and local elements. The wavelength, the circular motion beneath the surface, shortens and crests, the wave appearing to rise up out of the water.

This is when the surfer moves to meet the wave. She chooses this one over all others… making herself available to possibility. The take-off is a moment of total commitment and letting go. Fully present to the intensity of dropping into the wave’s embrace. No two waves are the same, this wave will never be ridden by another.