Article

Awe and wonder

Culture

Sport

Wildness

10 July 2025

6 min read

Surfing with Dostoevsky: what waves taught me about the journey

The water draws things out of us that we can’t see on our own

Rick Hansen

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” For many, the true purpose of life is not merely a philosophical concept, but a fundamental inquiry. It's about uncovering something beyond our individual selves, an answer to the inherent question about the very meaning of our existence.

The place where I find myself pondering this mystery is on my surfboard. Whether anticipating a wave or carving along its emerging curl, the ocean consistently beckons me to meditate on a quest for a re-enchantment of our profound spiritual mystery.

I have loved surfing since I was young. I remember the first wave I really surfed in Southern California. I was 14 and an insecure high school kid who struggled with a severe stutter. It was so bad that I viewed everything in my life through the lens of my stutter. Consequently, I always wanted to hide in the shadows and never be seen, because any time I opened my mouth to speak it was a mess. But something happened for me that day that forever changed how I saw myself. On that wave, I saw my potential, my person, not just my stutter.

That morning the water was alive with a crazy energy churning just below the belly of my board. The waves were rolling in as beautiful lines etched against the morning sky. They stacked up on the outside reef and I picked my ride. I put my hands deep in the cold, blue waters and my heart began to race as I pulled and paddled toward the unknown. The wave that I chose rose to a perfect liquid wall. It was sheer beauty.

At that moment, it was just me and that wave. I realized I didn’t have to talk to anyone or worry about what others thought of me. Instead, I felt alive and free to be me. In this freedom, I could feel the exhilaration of pulling and paddling toward the horizon full of fear and excitement. I was caught up in the rush of the unknown size, shape and personality of the wave and what I would do once I caught it.

In a split second, I pivoted 180 degrees, perfectly positioned my body on the board, put my hands deep into the rising pitch, pulled in, and snapped up to my stance all in a single movement.

As I dropped in, my insecurities, my doubts, my fears …. my stutter vanished like the mist spraying off the curling wave. In that instant, I felt a connection to something beyond me as I found my line and carved up and down the face of the wave. I was forever hooked like an artist sculpting beauty out of a block of stone. On that wave I saw myself in a new and different light of potential. I converged with the board, the moment, with what needed to be done, and looked for what could be done. I found something more, something beyond me. "The experience of art is a cleansing of the spirit, a return to deeper emotional and imaginative states,” as Pablo Picasso put it.

You might say it’s weird but surfers have a deep sense of trust in the experience of surfing; the wave draws things out of us that we couldn’t see on our own. It inspires us to push our limits until we see and realize our potential, until we see something more.

Surfer Easkey Britton is the first Irish woman to be nominated for the Global WSL Big Wave Awards. She is a scientist, academic and social activist, with a PhD in Environment and Society and she is always one to look in places others aren’t for the answers to difficult questions. She said,

“A wave is like a mirror to our soul. Whether we paddle out and into the horizon, take a drop down the face of a liquid wall, or dive deep under a mountain of water as it crashes overhead, the wave reflects our fears, our willingness, our vision, our potential.”

Are we willing to look at ourselves in the mirror? Or better yet are we willing to venture out into the wild and let something else bigger than us show us … us?

I am not saying that wave gave me something to live for, but it did show me I was something more than my insecurity, my shortcoming, my limited view of who I was and what I perceived I could be. It revealed something outside of and beyond me. It acted much like that mirror Easkey talked about, and it revealed that I hid behind a cover, a disguise, a fear. In a melodic almost musical repose, it crashed on the shores of my perception and gently but powerfully rattled my forming identity and revealed something more.

Dostevesky speaks not of a moment but of a journey to find something, to find that thing that moves your soul, that stirs your being into that sense where we ponder “something to live for.” Surfing did that for me.

For the surfer the reward is the journey of the never ending search for the next wave. It’s not about just one wave, just one drop. It’s the whole experience of the journey, wave after wave; it’s the sensation of the ride and the work that gets us there. It’s where we find a sense of significance, a sense of something greater. As Henri Matisse put it, "Creativity takes courage.”

I remember when I was studying at Oxford University, I longed for the noise of the calming surf. Instead, all I could hear was the occasional buzz of traffic outside and the silent enchantment of academia whispering in the quiet, cold, majestic city parks. Yet like the ocean it too in its own way was quietly calling me to find that “something to live for.”

Surely now in a world of powerful currents and unsuspecting waves, we need more than ever to find something to live for—something beyond ourselves. This era of rapid technological advancement, instability, division, and volatility underscores a heightened need for deeper discussions about meaning, hope, purpose, and what truly gives life value. Like a surfer paddling out toward the horizon, dropping in on a wave, and finding her line, we need to never give up the search for the immeasurable and fascinate our soul with this journey. For the surfer there is a great, almost deep joy in finding that ethereal line stretched out in the emerging pitch.

The wave, though external, compels us to look beyond our individual selves. It pushes us to experience something vast, transcending the confines of our self-centeredness and exposing us to a world—and potentially a hope—far grander than our limited perception.

As I carve up and down the face of the wave like that sculptor, I continually deepen myself into this essence of something greater, something bigger than me. I am ever drawn to its soulful re-enchantment as it gently but powerfully confronts me with the microcosm of my ‘me-ism’, with the truth that I was created to live for something and perhaps even for Someone vastly bigger than myself.

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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