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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,