Mourning Surf
by J’aime Morrison
Upwell, directed and choreographed by J'aime Morrison, Oct, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
MOURNING SURF
J’aime Morrison | FEB 2023 | Issue 21
In the first few weeks and months after my beloved husband Jim died, I couldn’t read anything or even listen to music. Not even talk radio. A total blackout. I couldn’t go near anything that might plunge me deeper into sorrow. What did offer comfort in those early days, in ways I never imagined, was surfing. I surfed almost every day during the year that followed Jim’s death, even on small days or when the surf was blown out. In the face of huge swells of grief and sorrow, surfing taught me how to thrust myself forward into the curl of the unknown.
It might seem strange to think of surfing as a grief practice. Long celebrated for its “good vibes,” and for the fantasy of the “stoke” and sense of escape, could surfing have as much to do with mourning as it does with pleasure? My daily ritual of paddling out, whatever the conditions, provided a way for me to channel my sadness and to move into it. In these moments, the water was my mirror, illuminating and bringing into focus what was shadowed within myself. Surfing was a way to confront the fear, anxiety, and anger I felt at having been left to endure without my partner, to raise our daughter alone, to be alone. It was then I realized that surfing could bring things, sometimes dark things, to the surface.
I became attached to my morning paddle out. I loved listening to the sounds on the water; surfers chatting between sets, the cry of the gulls and the music of the waves. As I tuned in to the greater harmonies of water, wind, sea, and sky I began to interpret my surroundings; each wave a unique signature, each set a paragraph of mounting tension and suspense, each session a blank page to be inscribed. What is grief but an undercurrent? As I scanned the horizon for waves, I came to understand that there are waves beneath the waves. Later, I learned that waves are shaped by a disturbance, a disruption that moves through the water, pushed by winds from above and rebounding off the reefs and shelves below. The discernable beauty of a wave and the promise of its glide are formed by what goes on underwater or actually within water, and this process echoes the internal tremors of my own emotional disruptions. As Virginia Woolf reminds us, “Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon to her seemed limitless.” Perhaps it is as Woolf suggests, that we must plumb life’s unfathomable depths in order to surface — now and again we rise…
I have come to believe that deep grief unmakes us and that mourning is as much about grieving our lost love as it is about being forced to remake ourselves from the inside out even as we are submerged by longing. In paddling out, each stroke moves me towards a limitless horizon. My body tenses as I grab the rails of my board and push it under an oncoming wave only to be borne up through the surge of water at the back. I emerge just in time to paddle a little farther out before the next wave comes. Surfing, grieving, writing — these gestures swim in the fluid medium of the ocean and converge in the rhythmic poetry of the waves — this is my mourning surf.
J'aime Morrison is a theatre director, choreographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She is a Professor of Movement at California State University, Northridge where she teaches dance, movement and somatic theory, and stages multi-disciplinary experimental productions. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and was a faculty Fulbright Scholar in Movement to Portugal. J’aime has taught Master Classes in Dance and Movement in Lisbon, Shanghai, Dublin, Belfast, London, Los Angeles and New York City. With Mourning Surf, she turns her attention to grief and the body, specifically how grief is expressed physically and how movement is an essential part of the grieving and healing process. For the international organization Hope for Widows, J’aime developed a series of expressive movement workshops offered via Zoom throughout the pandemic and she continues to build on this work by offering grief movement workshops in collaboration with Waves of Grief Collective, Camp Widow, TwoCan Retreats and Reimagine, as well as private movement sessions. Her short film Upwell was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Santa Barbara Fine Art Film Festival, Best Original Concept at the Depth of Field International Film Festival, Best Experimental at the Experimental Dance and Music Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Cannes International Short Film Festival among others.