How to Find a Flow State on the Waves (and in Life!)

I'm Marcus Smith and this is Constant Wonder. Join us as we quest for the awe and wonder of knowing we are part of something infinitely larger than ourselves. Your host for this episode is Teneri Taylor. In the southwest of England, I met up with a surfer and we talked flow state. Not just a feeling he gets when he's riding the waves on a surfboard. It's all about the flow of life. It's complete concentration when you're getting it right and you're in the flow. Things feel easy, unencumbered when your body and mind feel aligned to the task that you've got whether it's surfing or riding your proposal or doing whatever you need to do. When everything comes together in the surfing example, you have to be really concentrated on that moment. You really have to be focused and when it's all right and you pop up and your feet are in the right place and you move the board into the right place on the wave and that sort of suspension of time happens and you're totally in that moment, totally in that moment. And I think that is a really enriching and nourishing experience. That's surfer Hugo Tagholm. Now he's not a professional surfer, but he spends enough time riding the waves that when we were standing on the beach at New Quay in Cornwall, England, he could make this connection between the weather at sea and his own body. Often the best waves are generated by storms far out at sea. That energy has time to arrange itself into neat sets of waves. The best waves come together and form distinct sets that arrive in a much more sort of consistent way at the beach. Then they can be groomed by sort of offshore winds and the sea state can be really smooth. And then those moments when your energy is in the right place too, when you're prepared for it, when you've put all of the pieces in place. Now a little later, we'll find out how Hugo puts all of the pieces in place. But let me just say up front that this is not an episode about surfing. Well it's not just about surfing. Our stories today are going to be more about that idea Hugo was just describing. The link between human energy and the energy of the earth, especially water. It's a relationship that Hugo would even say is spiritual. Hugo Tagholm is executive director at the conservation group Oceana UK. A team from Constant Wonder met up with him at his offices in Newquay overlooking the beach. The tide was out and since the sky was blue and sunny, the exposed sand gleamed golden. As we looked down on them surfers waded out into, well the water really was the color of sea foam green that day. Hugo pointed out some of his favorite places to surf and ocean swim and he also welcomed us inside. We've got another office in London but we want an office that overlooks the sea. I'm very connected to communities we work in. We're down in the southwest of England in Cornwall. Newquay is probably one of its most famous towns actually, particularly for the surfing, for the beaches, for the holiday makers. Also a fishing port with lots of small scale fishers working out of it just down here. What are they catching? Sea bass, mackerel, crabs, lots of different things. I mean there's beautiful marine life here. We've had humpback whales swimming in front of the office over the last winter, lots of seals, many seabirds. I got out of the water just down here on Monday morning and there were flocks of oyster catches everywhere. It keeps me grounded or should I say anchored to the ocean. Let's me access this amazing aquatic world. I was surfing on Monday and a small seal came and just bobbed up right next to me in the water between the sets of waves that came and turned around and there he or she was popped up right next to me. No further than this. Make eye contact? Absolutely and then it freaked out and it swam off and as soon as I gloved it. It's a special place, special for the waves, special for the community, special for the connection with the ocean. As a surfer and a sea swimmer you have to be connected and embedded in the community and that's particularly important at this age where there can be quite a divide between the environmental lobby and some of the businesses that live, work and exist around the coastline. In his work at Oceana, Hugo Tagholm coordinates with international groups, lawmakers and the media to support and promote ocean conservation. But he's not a native of the coast. I didn't grow up in Newquay. I've been coming to Cornwall since I was a small boy but I'm a Londoner born and bred that now lives in Cornwall. I've lived here for the best part of 20 years. I've raised my son down here with my wife Sarah, son Darwin and it's a great place to be. It's a pretty sort of harsh environment in the wintertime particularly, the weather, the wind, the rain and often people come down, they have a great summer holiday here and they feel they want to move and they come down and actually it's harder than they think and either choose you up and spits you out or you get really embedded and you learn to really adapt around it and it's a brilliant place to live. And the waves are better in winter anyway. Growing up as a child in London, even though he was a frequent visitor to the beach, Hugo didn't expect his life as an adult to revolve around the ocean. So I always thought I was going to be there to our naturalist or something. My heroes were naturalist David Attenborough was on the TV at a time when we'd all sit around as a family and watch Life on Earth or those early documentaries in the sort of 80s. He was a hero, other scientists and explorers were heroes. I have always been passionate about nature and the sort of wild world around us. As a kid I endlessly collected things, you know, whether it's on the beach or in the woods or anywhere, broken birdsegs, shells, you know, shells on the beach, rocks, snakeskins, whatever I found. I was fascinated by it and I sort of documented and collected all of that and our collection in my room of sort of wild and wonderful things. They felt like a mini museum really many times. How old are you at this time? This is when I'm 8, 9, 10. It was spanned into my early teens. And your mum was okay with you having a collection? No. I also had animals so I had like chameleons and lizards and snakes. My mum was phobic of snakes or is. And she let you have one? A live one? Reluctantly. And she actually won it. The biggest one escaped for three months and I had to pretend for that time that it was in the cage or the tank, the varium. Because she wasn't going poking around I guess. No, but then also she did come across the snake on the stairs one day. She's the one who found it. The truth will always out. The truth did come out on that one. Did I hear you say once that your teacher brought your entire class to your bedroom? Yeah, I'm not sure if that is like a sort of a cool thing or not. But yeah, my class did come to my room because I had so many interesting things and they wanted to see them. I think at the time I probably thought it was okay. And this was in junior school so I was pretty young. But now it sort of seems bizarre thinking about it. It wouldn't probably happen these days. I think it's amazing. It was a thing that happened. And so that was, I thought I was going to go on a traditional journey. And I think hindsight gives us an opportunity to retrofit a perfect story about things. And so I'll do that. And maybe as a human tendency to go, these things fit neatly in a bracket and this is how the things happen. But I do also believe that you sort of make your luck and you often end up where you're meant to be. Hugo's childhood passion for the natural world became more focused as he got a few years older. He fell in love and fell hard for the ocean when he was a teenager spending time in France. I was spending more and more time in Southwest France with my family initially and then with friends I made out there. And I fell in love with France, I mean deeply. And I believe that we're sort of at certain periods of our life, our chemistry is predisposed to falling in love with people and places, to making friendships, a very strong sort of emotional response to almost galvanize the network of people you need around you in your life. And that happened to me in Southwest France. And I made some of my best friends that to this day are my best friends. I was thinking about them just the other day because I pulled out an old cassette tape of a band called In Excess, which I loved at the time. And I opened it up and it had all of everyone's addresses written in it from the first time that we had all met on the beach. And it was a very sort of poignant thing to think about. And so I fell in love with France and it took me on a massive right turn. I was suddenly like, I'm so into surfing and the beach and the ocean. I so love France and I was just immersed in it. And so I said, I'm going to pivot, I'm going to do French. And that's what I did. Throughout our chat, Hugo Tagholm returned to this idea of purposeful connection, of bringing focus and fascination and preparation to meet the moment. And so it was in that spirit that he studied French and philosophy at the University of Exeter. A school chosen as much for its proximity to good surfing as for its academic offerings. After university and a few years into his career, Hugo, despite not being a professional surfer, was able to make surfing a part of his job. In 2008, he signed on as CEO to revitalize a nonprofit called Surfers Against Sewage, or SAS. Their energy was focused on forcing change in the water and sewage treatment industry. The water industry was not in a great shape. It was a national sort of industry. And there was a lot of sewage pollution going out into the ocean. And and it was privatized in 1989, 1990. And part of that privatization meant that there needs to be a lot of investment to stop that that sewage pollution. That was part of the sort of mandate of these these companies coming in. So this is a historical problem. Yeah, sewage is released into rivers and ocean. Yeah, SAS were were sort of well renowned for their sort of campaign stunts and activities to draw attention to this promotion. I mean, you know, people with sort of inflatable turds down on the beach, gas masks and surfboards being waved around to draw attention to the change that needed to happen. There was sort of underway with investment from the newly privatized water industry. But at the same time in the 90s, what was happening is that those water companies, those privatized water companies were building up an amassing debt. And they did not fix the problem in the long term. They did not future proof any of the sewage infrastructure that we needed. And I had the opportunity for SAS to to reignite the campaigns on water quality, to expose the wrongdoings of the privatized water industry, to expose what we now see today as the sewage scandal in our rivers along our coastline. The whole situation is referred to as a scandal because these companies were paying out huge dividends to their stockholders while taking on massive debt and at the same time lobbying against government fines for pollution. See, while they were paying out profits, they were, and according to critics, still are, releasing sewage into rivers and the ocean around the UK. But in the odds, people thought there had been a quick fix to the problem. The sewage campaign is a great one to talk to you about. Ultimately, in 2008, people didn't think it was a problem anymore because it was hidden out of view. So SAS decided that they needed a really dramatic image to bring the problem back into view and convince people that this problem wasn't solved. So this is an image, a campaign image that we had of a guy with a surfboard basically covered in sewage and you can only see his eye. This was a shoot we did in 2010, maybe. And when we did it and the image came out, people criticized me. They said, there's not that much sewage in the sea. You know, what are you talking about? But we knew, I mean, of course, it was a dramatization. And I'll tell you the story of the shoot because it was a... I never name him, but it was a friend of mine who is a very good surfer, like one of the sort of best surfers around, a guy who can ride any size wave, any craft on those waves. And a very nice human being. And I said, come along and do this shoot for SAS, please. And we did the shoot up at the other end of the country with an agency that donated all of their time, all of their creative skills, all of their cameras, all of the equipment, everything to do it. We went up and we got there. And then he realized it wasn't going to be a shoot where he was going to be in some sort of cool clothes and looking amazing. Don this, Don this sewage suit. The two makeup artists were covering him in, in the sewage and applying fake turds and everything to him and toilet paper. And then what was it made out of? It was made out of wallpaper paste and brown food coloring. Anyway, so he was gay and he did it. And we were on the beach and I was stood behind the cameraman as they were taking this straight down the lens shot of him in the suit in front of the sea with the surfboard. And you can only see his eye. And to this day, I look at that picture and I can see the sort of semi-hatred or anger in that eye directed at me. You or the other side of the camera. In a funny sort of way, I see that. It's like, how am I on the beach covered in this sewage at this moment in time? And so I really loved that shot for that. And I love that shot too, because it was the challenger shot. It was leading with that campaign, putting our money where our mouth was, putting our our reputations online, say there is an issue. We know there's an issue from these tens of thousands of sewage pipes that are discharging into our rivers and onto our coastline. And I think within campaigning, you've got to be bold enough to to to be at the leading edge of things. And it turned into what we now see today as one of the top issues of this government and one of the pressure points from the public into the policymaking space. So that was a combination of campaigning tactics, real time data, new information, health reports, innovative campaign films and stunts and really bringing the public together behind us. We built a network of hundreds of thousands of people who believed in that movement and wanted to see change, whether they were surfers or swimmers, whether they were dog walkers or beach goers and holidaymakers. Everyone felt outraged by the wrongdoings of the privatised water industry, both an environmental scandal and a financial scandal. The populist things we see and the things that make it to the top of the media agenda and into the political sphere, they were once unpopular and it took people to be committed to them, to invest in them, to make them popular. And of course, lots of people want to jump onto the bandwagon of issues once they emerge and once somebody's done the hard grind when it's... But you're going to welcome them onto the bandwagon. No, but no, this is the thing and this is what I'm coming on. I say lots of people want to come on board and that's when you know you've succeeded because that's when all of the tide is lifting all of the boats, that it's become democratised and suddenly the issue is not an organisation, it's everyone's and I really love that moment. Hugo Tagholm is an impassioned spokesperson for the environment for sure. You can hear the conviction in his voice, but he's not just promoting an idea. Just as he insisted on having an office overlooking the beach so that he could be part of the ocean community, it's people, the marine life, the tides and the waves, he thinks we can all refocus our attention in small ways and big so that we're more responsive to our neighbours and to the earth. In his work at Oceana, Hugo, gratefully, he says, doesn't spend much time talking about sewage anymore, but he's still very keen to talk about surfing and the metaphor it is for improving life here on what he calls planet ocean. More on that coming up. I'm Tennery Taylor and you're listening to Constant Wonder. Dramatic tensions in life can be overwhelming. Working through them can be well worth it if we see that our efforts are genuinely helping to secure justice, to lift people up who are downtrodden. BYU Radio has a new original podcast that gets right to the heart of life's classic conflicts and tensions. It's called Conflict Coach with Dr. Emily Taylor. On this podcast, Taylor, who is a certified mediator with a PhD in psychology, helps real people grapple with real conflicts from disputations at home to tensions in the workplace or community. Conflicts are part of life, but they don't have to ruin it. Each episode reveals strategies for developing better relationships, even when there's disagreement. Learn how to find what's actually at the bottom of a specific kind of interpersonal tension. The podcast's great value comes when you get to witness actual situations with participants being coached through real difficulty by Dr. Taylor. Look for Conflict Coach with Dr. Emily Taylor on BYU Radio or wherever you get your podcasts. Surfers always have company out there in the waves. If you're surrounded by different animals, dolphins, of course, are an amazing animal to surf around. We've got lots of dolphins in Cornwall, and I've had the good fortune to be out when pods of dolphins swim by pretty close, basking sharks. You know, one of the only sharks we see with sort of regularity in Cornwall. Of course, toothless, it's a filter feeder, a plankton feeder. But I've literally surfed with basking sharks swimming under me sort of in the wave, which is, you know, an incredible experience. How far below your board was it? Look, it was one of my favorite spots a few miles down the coast called Perrenporth. And look, I know lots of people who do proper things with proper sharks. Photographers who swim with great whites and tiger sharks. And my experience is with any wildlife pales into insignificance to that. But for me, one of the really memorable moments was at this spot that I love the most, Perrenporth. Really good day of waves. People started chattering in the line up. There's a shark, a basking shark. It was not a huge one, but still big cruising past. How about how long? Probably two and a half meters, something like that. You know, big enough. Yeah. And I turned to get the wave and it swam, swam sort of under me and sort of through the wave. So like an amazing experience. And that stuff sort of happens, I think, regularly to people here. And we get very used to seals popping up everywhere, as I've said, and to just the wild world being around us. It's not as rich and abundant as in some places. You know, I spend time in California where big wildlife is so regularly seen, you know, the migration of gray whales, flocks of pelicans swooping over the lineups in trestles or Dana Point or any of these places. But for me, this is home. And this is where I get my greatest experience. I could go anywhere else in the world and have a bigger experience. But this is where I feel most nourished from being in and around the water, because it's where I live and so close to, you know, my home. Let's talk about what's going on in your mind as you're surfing. I have never surfed, so I don't know. But never too late. I would think it would require complete concentration. It's a good question. At its best is complete concentration when you're getting it right and you're in the flow. And I think the flow state is something that is a state that we all sort of look for in anything we're doing. When things feel easy, when they feel unencumbered, when your body and mind feel aligned to the task that you've got, whether it's surfing or writing your proposal or doing whatever you need to do. And I think when everything comes together, because it's sort of more complex in the sort of surfing sort of example, because you're dealing with a dynamic environment, you're dealing with a moving piece of water and everything has to do with it. You have to be really concentrated on that moment. You really have to be focused. And when it's all right and you pop up and your feet are in the right place and you move the board into the right place on the wave. And I use each part of the wave in the right way. And then I kick out of the wave and, you know, that sort of suspension of time happens. Your time is almost suspended with it. You're totally in that moment, totally in that moment. And I think that is a really enriching and nourishing experience to get. If you're completely immersed in a moment, it's so rewarding. It's sort of a metaphor for life. Each time you go surfing, you'll have sets of waves, a bit of energy that have come from often a storm far, far away. They're the opportunity, as it were in life. They come at a certain time. You've got to try and be ready and prepared and have your energy and chemistry fixed for that moment. Life comes in waves and there'll be opportunities you need to seize. You want to be best prepared for those. Particularly in this age, our attention is demanded by so many different platforms, channels and needs. To be able to just suspend almost time for that moment. To feel the connection between your own mind, body and the moving piece of that storm that raged out in the Atlantic Ocean. Then suddenly that is fantastic and, dare I say, it sort of sounds corny. It's sort of a spiritual sort of experience. We don't think that's corny. Well, look, I mean, just from a spiritual perspective, this is a flow of energy that you're sort of tapping into. A moment like in time where that energy that's come from a storm that's been generated by other energy elsewhere has created this wave. The waves have organized themselves, marching across the ocean. They've arranged themselves that the best swells will be really arranged. They would have come from far away. So the sets will be defined. The energy will be ordered. And you'll know that you will have ordered all of your thoughts and energy to be able to converge with that energy. You will have ordered your schedule and time. You will have spent years understanding where you want to surf, at what tide, why, because the wind's blowing in the right direction. And you'll position yourself at the spot on the beach. You'll have the biggest chance to get that wave because you have this embedded knowledge. And so it's this convergence and confluence of energies. And I believe in the sort of spiritual sense of the transference of sort of positive energy. And I think this is all about the sort of most positive part of that energy. And I think it's the same with sort of human energies, as you're transferring your own energy to other people, to other things. I mean, not to go too deep into my thinking about that, but the spirituality and that sort of transference of good energy and positive energy is an important thing in our world. I do want you to go a little deeper into transference of energy in the human world. And maybe in the context of Oceana. Well, look, I'm a campaigner, you know, at heart. And campaign is about influencing sort of hearts and minds and creating change. You know, it's about communications. It's about connections with people. And so doing that in the right way is so important. And I spend a lot of time running on the coast path, swimming out in front of the office. And I do sort of wonderful swims where I see lots of other marine life aggregations of spider crabs beneath me and sea bass and mullet and lots of different things. And surfing and for me, a lot of that athletic endeavor or sport, a lot of that is about actually also engineering your chemistry. And engineering one's chemistry and in my case, I mean, different for everyone, is about being my best self and about feeling good and having a settled mind, having my synapses well connected, able to make good, clear, calm decisions and bring positivity to any situation or meeting that I'm in. So I'll often do a longer run or a longer swim or a surf ahead of big important moments, whether I'm talking at big conferences or pitching or speaking in parliament. I'll often do that because I want to turn up as the best person. And why do I want to do that? Because that's how I'll have the most positive impact and how I'll communicate my energy in the best way to affect change as to be the best, best person I can be professionally. And as a husband, as a father, as a friend to people. And so I really believe in people cultivating and managing their own chemistry and ecosystem of energy and being conscious of how they are the best possible version of themselves. I think normally human stresses and challenges are about an imbalance of chemistry internally. And if you can really manage that, you can take control of the external situations. Hugo is hopeful that the energy that he and all of Oceania, UK has brought to the cause of conservation, that that energy has met its moment. He gave me an example of the work they've done recently to curtail bottom trawling. That's when big weighted nets held open with metal frames. These nets are dragged along the ocean floor to catch bottom dwelling fish like cod and haddock. In areas that aren't well managed, the sea floor is essentially plowed under by trawling nets. Not only that, in poorly managed areas, 80 or 90% of the catch in these large nets consists of non-commercial fish. And coral and sea plants, these are often just discarded dead back into the ocean. The UK has about 38% of its seas in marine protected areas. But sadly, many of those, 90% of those are trawled by bottom trawlers. We do just ignoring basically. Well, it's permitted that the protection doesn't actually offer protection, which is the public is outraged. Yeah, that makes no sense to me. One of the most destructive industries to marine life can operate in those spaces. Oceana has done many exposés on the scale of trawling or suspected trawling in these areas. Tens of thousands of hours every year in our supposedly most protected areas of the sea. But they're not breaking the law. No. And so we've been challenging the government on this and we've just had a big success in Scotland because of our work and the work of our allies. We've protected it over definitely over 50,000 additional square kilometers of our seas from bottom trawling in those marine protected areas. We're about to do another 30,000 square kilometers in English sea. So this is big, tangible, measurable success to limit an industry that is one of the most destructive, as noted by the UK government's own advisors, one of the most destructive and damaging industries to those spaces and to our seabed. I'm really proud of that. A bigger win than even sort of all of my successes with surface against sewage. Have you seen a change of heart in the public in the last, I don't know, decade, five years? Can you, I know that's not as tangible as knowing how many square kilometers you've protected. I think I've seen multiple changes of heart in that sort of time, sort of period. My mindset and my view is global. We live on planet ocean. The ocean connects us all around the world. The ocean is becoming the zeitgeist or part of the planet that people are really thinking about in terms of conservation now, similar to how the rainforest was in the 1980s. I mean, the rainforest, of course, is still front and center of people's minds too, but the ocean now is a very serious part of people's consideration as the public realises that a healthy ocean is important, not just for the people and the fishers and the communities that live by the sea, but for everyone, whether you live in London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin, New York, wherever, a healthy ocean is fundamental to our existence. It regulates our climate, it provides the oxygen we breathe, it provides protein for millions and millions of people around the world every day. It's a source of energy. It's really important that we have a healthy ocean that acts as a generator of life and resources for the things that we depend on as a society. And how do we do that? We need to make sure that we don't overfish our seas and take too much too quickly. But you're not opposed to fishing in general, full stop. This isn't a one size fits all thing. We're opposed to some damaging parts of the industry and the unsustainable nature of overfishing, but we're actually really supportive of those communities and those allies at the beachfront who depend on healthy seas and who are the lifeblood of those communities. And also very knowledgeable in terms of what we need to do and how we need to conserve our seas. So they are our friends and allies. Can you point to a conversation maybe that you had with somebody like that who's a local fisher and taught you a principle maybe of conservation or sustainability? I think of, is a woman called Catrine who works on this Sussex kelp recovery project on the South Coast of England. Her father was a fisher and his turned environmentalist and saw the damage that trawling was doing to kelp beds off the South Coast and the damage that was doing then to fish populations. And with very localized trawling bounds that they campaigned for, they've seen the recovery of the kelp there and the return of breeding fish populations. And the return of abundance. And this is what needs to happen around the world. This isn't a conflict between environmentalists and fishers. This should be a collaboration of how we achieve those sort of forever fish really, the fish that will keep coming back. How old's your son? 17 and a half. Darwin he's called. Yeah. What's your outlook for the world he's inheriting? I hope that we'll be able to pass on a planet that is livable and plentiful to Darwin and his children beyond him if he chooses to have them. And look I think one of the things I'd say is that we can never lose hope and it really frustrates me when I hear people being too negative and too binary about the outcome of where we're at of it being we either completely win or we completely lose when the truth is it's going to be somewhere in between and we all need to try and do everything we can to make it a better future for people. I think there's plenty of hope spots around the world where we see the impacts of coming together the impacts of multilateralism of good decisions. Let's take one of those in the oceanspace the 1982 international whaling moratorium that took because of countries coming together and that being implemented. There's some countries that you know have infractions and don't do the right thing but that took some whale populations from the brink back to abundance and that's a good news story. We saw how the pandemic meant governments could actually respond at pace by mobilizing trillions of dollars creating solutions to the pandemic very quickly. Of course governments can move at pace in the face of an emergency and if they need to they can act faster on nature. They can protect nature faster they can limit the worst types of business faster and they can create a new model. So I'm hopeful that there are the sort of lighthouses out there that show us the way to go that will mean that we can learn from our mistakes particularly with the ocean do things in a better way. That was Hugo Tagholm executive director of Oceania UK. We met up with him in Newquay England. In just a moment we'll hear from someone who had an experience just up the coast from him an experience which brought her closer to other people and to the earth and it was also through ocean swimming an experience being cradled by the sea in just a moment here on Constant Wonder. I'm Tennery Taylor. Have you grown weary of news coverage that feeds off anger and division and yet you still want to engage with important issues? Well let me introduce you to Top of Mind. It's another podcast from the BYU Radio family. Each week the Top of Mind team with award-winning host Julie Rose undertakes a careful analysis of one tough topic. The goal is learning how to stay open and curious when confronted with perspectives that challenge us. Best of all every episode will leave you feeling hopeful and better able to become an effective advocate for what matters to you. Top of Mind listen wherever you get your podcasts. We now return to Constant Wonder. Catherine May is an author from the UK and she's also an outspoken proponent of the quest for awe and wonder. She's known internationally for multiple books including Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. Like Hugo Tagholm, she's an ocean swimmer and her stories also highlight that kind of connection of human energy through experiences in water that Hugo described to me. And so we wanted to share a couple of her water stories here as a bonus to our conversation with Hugo. The very personal nature of Catherine's stories is truly a lovely compliment to the more regional and global campaigning efforts that Hugo described earlier. Here's Catherine May speaking with host Marcus Smith about an experience from her childhood when her grandfather would toss her into the ocean waves. This would have happened very close to Dungeon S which was the Great Stone Beach that we used to go to every summer as a family and I've always been drawn to the water. You could never keep me out of the water and even as a two-year-old I once tried to take a swim in the local duck pond in my full coat because I just couldn't stay out of the water. And so when we used to go to the beach I'd always be trying to swim and my grandad used to go in with me and would spend literally hours picking me up, throwing me into the waves and I'd giggle and get back on my feet and run back up to him and he'd pick me up again and throw me in. And he used to get tired and bored but he'd do it anyway. And I always, I mean I've always cherished that memory but it's also what made me feel so safe and confident in the sea like specifically been thrown into the waves and invited to get back up again has made me feel like I can cope in those environments and it's given me something that takes me deep into adulthood that I still use to soothe myself now. But I only learned as an adult when I, he'd come around for dinner one day and we were talking about that treasured memory and he said I've always been terrified of the water. I've always been too afraid to swim but I never wanted to let on to you that I was afraid because I wanted you to love it. And it moves me so much to talk about that because what a beautiful gift to give to someone. You know so many parents and grandparents try to give their children something that they themselves didn't have and it's not always about money that can be about a confidence to go out into the world and that's definitely what he gave me. I want to go to the other side of the south of England way over near Devon is it called Heartland Key and the topography there is a dangerous place. It's a place of ocean but black rocks, jagged rocks, you've been swimming there. That's complicated. It is complicated and in fact I've only ever visited Heartland Key when it's winter and at that point in the year the sea is violent. You know it's crashing onto these jagged black rocks in these great big foaming waves and there are enormous peaks of water and I love walking on that landscape. It's so beautiful, it's so wild and rugged and it feels like you're really surviving something just to walk through it but my friend moved there, well she moved just before the pandemic and I as soon as I could go to see her I went to visit and she said we're going to swim at Heartland Key and my first instinct was like are you sure? She was like actually there are no currents running under the water and I still would never have done it without her and it also seemed like we were swimming out very far but we swam out to this this zigzag of rock quite a way out through the bay and it's called Life Rock. We swam out in a group and what was incredible about that was that the sea is so clear at Heartland Key so even as I was swimming I could see all the way down to the seabed and once we got to the rock itself there's a channel in the middle of it which we all swam into and there you get rocked very gently by the waves and everyone's aim was to get to that point so that they could then sway in the middle of the rock and what an extraordinary experience because the geology of that area is some of the oldest geology in the UK. These incredible rock formations are such that you can see how at some point the earth has folded on itself into chevrons and to be lying there cradled by this rock between life and death as far as I'm concerned everything is in that space and to feel coddled and cradled by it while you watch these ancient rocks from the other angle that you're used to I will never forget that. Well when you're there and you're experiencing that do you think of that place as more than the sum of its physical properties? It is to me and that's partly because of the people who swim there. I swam with a large group of quite older women who all go there regularly and they passed on their meanings to me. They passed on the stories they tell about it. They were full of information you know as we're swimming along they're shouting about how old the rocks are like back at me and that's part of the specialness of that place is that these people have gathered together to tend to it by visiting it by being there by telling stories about it by inviting others to come to it and I felt hugely privileged to have actually swam with that group rather than alone. It made a difference we're a congregation. Catherine May author of Enchantment Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. I'm Tennery Taylor. I produce this episode with help from Jess Govil, Hailey Harris and Mamie Teoples. On-site sound engineering by Trent Rimeshussle and Clark Jackman. Studio sound design by James Cole. Constant Wender is a production of BYU Radio.