editorial staff
Belvin Olasov Co-Editor in Chief
Belvin Olasov is the co-founder and director of the Charleston Climate Coalition. His background is in creative writing and he believes in bringing vision-making and art to climate work.
Sydney Bollinger Co-Editor in Chief
Sydney Bollinger (she/her) is a writer and editor affiliated with Surge and The Changing Times. She aims to connect communities to climate action through narrative and collaborative storytelling. Find her online @sydboll.
Visioning and creative counsel provided by Katherine Bartter Beachnik logo by Caroline Frady
Design by Belvin Olasov and Sydney Bollinger
Surge Magazine, as the Lowcountry Climate Magazine, typically features deep-dives into climate action stories, profiles on ecofuturist thinkers, and ecological art and poetry.
The Beachniks have taken over. In this issue: an introduction to the movement; a glimpse of the future, or a dream, or a prophecy; the untold story of Sullivan’s Island; a helpful guide to deciphering Beachnik slang; the Gullah Geechee present that will blossom and intertwine into Beachnik future; how surfing connects us to self, community, and planet; and a meditative journey through yoga and place. Explore your inner Beachnik with us!
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep! You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep! People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep!
–Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
Limitless and immortal, the waters are the beginning and end of all things on earth.
–Heinrich Zimmer
If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
–William Blake
By serving this world, we can save it.
–Chögyam Trungpa
To be beachnik
WRITTEN BY BELVIN OLASOV
Etymology of BEACHNIK:
BEATNIK (a member of the Beat Generation, ne’er-do-wells who challenged the staid 1950s with soul-bearing art, poetry, and literature; one who challenges the mores of conventional society; a cool cat.)
BEACH (where the ocean meets the land; briny portal, that great humming initiator into the enormity of life beyond oneself; lazy sand blanket, where soft shore holds you in warm, sticky embrace; home.)
We Beachniks believe in a lot.
We believe we are entering the Solar Age, a time of change, chaos, and heroes. We believe we can be light, rising to meet the dark.
We believe in joy, play, and scampery; spirituality and mysticism; art, music, and theater; activism and changemaking; all of this mixed together, brewing, alive.
We believe in this land; that our fate is directly tied to its fate; .
We believe in bringing harmony back to our world.
We believe in the movement called
theA movement that blurs the line between the cultural and political, that hearkens back to and evolves from the ‘60s counterculture, that is rooted in the land and spirit of the Lowcountry, and that is, as of publication, still in a state of becoming…
We believe in the beach as our spiritual home — the place where the land’s voice rings out the clearest, where joy and celebration come naturally, and where the community knows it can find a free and open gathering space.
We believe in facing the oceanic. Oceanic love — the light between us all. Oceanic grief — processing, or just being with, the overwhelming pain of life’s slings and arrows, with the loss of of our natural world. Oceanic mystery — the awesome and unknowable that lays behind and within the material plane.
We believe in the right of all peoples to a good life.
We believe you have a part to play in the flowering to come.
Beachnik
Imagine, if you will, that you’re living in the near-future. Gaze upon the Beachniks in full swell! The wave is rolling; the movement is alive.
WRITTEN BY BELVIN OLASOV
Community! Gathering, union, fellowship! Beachniks dotting the Lowcountry shore! Congregations in makeshift beach villages of musicians, petitions, art builds, lunches, teach-ins, tea temples, little libraries, seed shares, yoga lessons, reading groups, spikeball rallies, clothing swaps, or simply a group of friends who would like nothing more than to meet you — you can tell by the Beachnik flag whipping in the ocean breeze.
Changemaking! Questing for the world to come! Everyone you meet with a goal in their heart for collective growth! Activist gatherings imbued with adventurous spirit, be it carnivalistic bike parades for safer streets careening across town like raucous knights, native plant gatherings putting seeds in ground and seeds in minds with druidic wisdom twinkling in their eyes, justice rallies for housing and against poverty, for racial equality and against state violence, for harmony and against aristocracy, laying bare the ways we create hell on earth and fighting for human dignity with the fire and clarity of seers and monks! To be a Beachnik is to join hand-in-hand with your brethren in merry, openhearted, and devoted work and play and battle and peace!
Ritual! Acts of devotion, documents of revelation! Beachniks grasp at meaning in a world starved of the sacred! They gather rites, such as the mikvah from Judaism, ritual immersion in a body of natural water for purification — they submerge themselves for a sense of renewal, to mark a great loss, or to cleanse themselves of psychospiritual dust for trials ahead! They repurpose the psychedelic explorations of the ‘60s counterculture into elevated beach walks, all-day sojourns for self-discovery! Black Beachniks work together to rediscover ancestral practice, to share grandparents’ hoodoo, to grow in alignment with Gullah Geechee wisdom! And always, the Beachnik strives to balance the old and the new, to marry the grounded with the mystic, and to be attentive to what is ego trip and what is building relationship with the divine — no one wants to be a plastic shaman.
Art! Music, theater, paintings! A new Charleston sound emerging, surf rock and gospel and ‘60s-revivalism and folk blending together — a new craze of plays, everyone trying their hand at writing and directing, constant backyard debuts, a populist theater uprising — nature paintings evolving in novel ways, Lowcountry landscape remixed with ukiyo-e palette, Byzantine flourishes, marshes as window into the universal — Beachnik art as a movement, as fertile ground, as the collective genius of devoted artists in a flourishing scene!
FABLES
Sullivan’s Secret History
They say Captain Florence O’Sullivan was a wicked man, as most men with their name etched into history are. Born into servitude as an Irishman in the British Empire, O’Sullivan scrabbled and fought his whole life to become someone of importance — to never again be under the lash. He made a name for himself killing a hundred Frenchmen in Barbados and was soon recruited by Lord Ashley Cooper himself to tame the wilds of the Carolinas.
He took to the job with gusto. Ignorant to the particulars of surveying, he told his men, indentured servants from Irish towns much like his home village, to cut more, cut faster, cut harder. On an expedition to clear what would become Fort Moultrie, palms and pawpaws and oaks falling all around him, O’Sullivan found himself lost in a strange green haze. A figure appeared before him looking like Lord Ashley, but his cloak was made of leaves and his eyes were as briny and endless as the ocean.
“What is it that you’re looking for, Flannery O’Sullivan?” the figure asked.
“I want this to be my island,” O’Sullivan said, believing himself now to be blessed, to be chosen. “I want to be a part of history.”
“So it shall be,” the figure said.
The green haze lifted, and the oak behind him fell, and O’Sullivan was crushed where he stood. But his spirit did not go on to the place where spirits go. What remained of Captain Flannery O’Sullivan was shackled to the island.
As more and more trees fell to make space for plantation owner villas, O’Sullivan’s soul was sliced.
As tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were quarantined on the island, put into pestilence houses teeming with smallpox, tuberculosis, and cholera before being sold into bondage, O’Sullivan’s soul was blighted.
As Osceola, Seminole Indian Chief who led the resistance against President Jackson in the Second Seminole War, was imprisoned at Fort Moultrie and felled by malaria with his scalping knife resting on his breast, O’Sullivan’s soul felt the icy cold of dying light.
Then, as the 21st century turned, O’Sullivan’s spirit found some comfort. The maritime forest had begun accruing land, its canopy growing in Fort Moultrie’s shadow. He could escape his bondage by joining with the spirits of the migrating birds and the hatching moths – by being, for a moment, a part of the growing. And so he was revisited by the forest spirit that had once appeared as Lord Ashley, now appearing to O’Sullivan as the dark of a tree hollow.
“You have been a part of history, Florence O’Sullivan,” the forest spirit said. “Now guide the men of this earth to not repeat it.”
Today, Beachniks consider the Sullivan’s Island Maritime Forest to be sacred ground for the epoch to come. They say the Carolina sin eater is healing there.
Beachnik slang
netted to feel caught up, tangled, occupied by small things.
Example:
Beachnik A (BA): “How have you been?”
Beachnik B (BB): “Man, I’ve been netted.”
A silent transmission of understanding passes between the two. Life is, indeed, full of distractions and worries. We ensnare ourselves in them, our reality becomes defined by them, until the light shines through a crack in our armor and we feel awake again.
BA: I love you.
The two share a warm, beatific smile and embrace.
Strandverträumt (pronounced Schrant-fer-troymt) German compound word for the contented, dreamy sleepiness one feels after a day at the beach.
walking on dunes in a foolish and wayward phase of life.
briny containing nourishing grief.
Example:
BA: “I said goodbye to Laura for what feels like the last time today. It’s hard to understand how someone can be such a central part of your life and then they’re gone. There’s still so much love there. Where does it go?” A pause. “It feels right, though. The role she played in my life is already taking shape. I’m grateful for the lessons I learned being with her. And I miss her.”
BB: “Briny, dude.”
shabumi an expletive.
Example:
BB: [drops sandwich]
BB: Oh, shabumi!
PHOTO BY CAROLINE FRADY
ROOTS
Gullah geechee wayfinding
WRITTEN BY BELVIN OLASOV
Mosquito Beach was the safe place to be by the water. In segregated Charleston, where Sol Legare residents couldn’t go down the road to Folly for fear of white violence, Mosquito Beach emerged as a Black community hub. You could go dance to musicians like Honest John and Shake-a-Plenty at the pavilion; you could hit the clubs, join a boat race, play bumper cars; buy perfectly cooked crab from Joe “Kingpin” Chavis.
A Beachnik paradise before the Beachnik movement arose. Now that Mosquito Beach functions more as history (stewarded by Cubby Wilder), where does Gullah Geechee water connection flow? How will Gullah Geechee roots grow and intertwine with the Beachnik movement? We discussed this and more with some contemporary Lowcountry Black thinkers.
K.J. Kearney, Charleston Promise Neighborhoods organizer and founder of the James Beard winning account Black Food Fridays, would like to see Charleston center its Gullah Geechee culture instead of becoming “white At-
“The powers that be never allowed Gullah Geechee culture to be a central tenet of this city, like New Orleans does with their Creole culture,” Kearney said.
Kearney sees food as the one area of Charleston that has held up Gullah Geechee culture, as much as it’s
been appropriated (shrimp and grits for brunch, anyone?). He also sees food as a great unifier, a tool for bringing people together.
“I think about the Montgomery Improvement Association with Georgia Gilmore, and the Club from Nowhere, and how they sold chicken dinners to help keep the bus boycott in Montgomery going for over a year. Mary McLeod Bethune, to keep her school open, she sold sweet potato pies, right? The Black Panthers and the free breakfast program.”
Charmayne Planter is a researcher, writer, and founder of Planter Girl, a multimedia platform to engage young women of color in environmental justice. She sees one of the major barriers to Gullah Geechee flourishing in Charleston as economic –the housing is inaccessible to so many.
She also sees great power in nature practices as a way to reclaim feelings of agency and comfort for Gullah Geechee folks. After a recent Rising Rhythm outdoor yoga event, she saw something that should be replicated for more Black young women –and through Planter Girl, she aims to provide those spaces.
“It just felt like I was in a place where I belonged, even though there's so many stigmas around being Black and being in Charleston,” Planter said. “For a second, I didn't feel that way. I was just in my body, moving my body with the sun, moving my body with the trees as they swayed in the wind, and just being a being of the earth.”
Elder Carlie Towne is a producer, play-
wright, poet, historian, and Minister of Information for the Gullah/Geechee Nation.
Towne is proud of what the Gullah/Geechee Nation has accomplished, from UN summits across the globe to the Gullah/Geechee CREATE program to upcycle marine debris into works of art. Queen Quet, their leader and founder, is also a prominent climate activist. Their work isn’t just cultural preservation, but also active nature defense through advocacy.
“They say the water bring us and the water take us,” Towne said. “We respect the water, the land, the air. We don't see it as separate from us, but it's a part of us. It's like it's our family, so that makes us want to take care of it.”
She’s spent time recently making the film High Water with young Gullah Geechee creatives Tyquan Morton, Joshua Parks, and Brittney Washington – and she sees them as powerful torchbearers for the Gullah Geechee future.
“The future is vibrant. They have a blueprint,” she said. “We be Gullah Geechee anointed people.”
BRITTNEY WASHINGTON, "THE TIES THAT BIND"”
Blue on beachniks
Brittney (Blue) Washington is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and co-founder of Flowers for Palestine, a Black, femme-led group of Lowcountry artists and organizers. The follow is excerpted from our Beachnik interview.
What does the beach mean to you?
I actually grew up in Orangeburg… so the beach to me was something that was special. We’d be thrilled as kids. The ocean is huge and scary and exciting. It's not something I did very often, so it was pretty special to us.
I moved away from South Carolina for a long time, and I always thought that when I moved back, it would be to Charleston, it would be near the water, because the smell of salt water – it’s really grounding for me. It feels familiar to me. It feels familial, it feels ancestral.
Now that I live in North Charleston, I find myself wanting to go to the beach when I'm in need of clarity, cleansing – when I just want to be at that specific place where I can feel like this sort of reverence and awe and fear and smallness all at once. To remind myself of my place in this ecosystem, you know. My problems feel too big? Let's just go to the beach and be reminded about how actually small you are, and how anything that you're experiencing is not something that is alien or foreign to someone else. It reminds me of how small I am, and how a part of a fabric I am, and how interdependent my life is with others around me.
Ecospirituality and land connection – what’s the significance of that in your life? And for Gullah Geechee folks you know or are in community with, what’s the role of ecospirituality in their life?
The short of long is that my people don't exist without connection to the land, without deep ties to the movement of the tides, the contents of the soil. Being able to forage and identify herbs that are helpful, that are harmful, that can help you in spells, that can help you with digestion.
My ancestry comes out of the Green Pond Wiggins ACE Basin area, and then in Charleston and in the places in between. And so I have folks like my great-grandmother, and I'm sure my greatgrandmother, an ancestor whose name I won't know, ever, that practiced things like hoodoo. And had faith, spirituality and religious practices that would tie not only to Christianity, but
to the literal plants and herbs and the trees.
I had the opportunity to visit this farm called Soulfire Farm up in New York because I'm thinking a lot about how to transform the place that I am right now, my backyard, into a garden learning lab, where we help people reconnect to their ancestral lineage of being in deep relationship with the land, not only for food, but as a source of spirituality and grounding. And one of their t-shirts that I like a lot, says, Malcolm X, something like: all revolution is land-based. And so, our survival, our liberation depends on a deep connection and understanding of land. And again, an understanding, or sort of a divestment from human-centric, profit driven existence, towards re-contextualizing our existence in the context of being alongside land, animals, in that sort of ecospiritual stewardship.
What do you think is the role of joy and creativity in changemaking?
I find that in organizing spaces that I've been in across town and different areas, not only in the Lowcountry but I lived in D.C. for a long time, that folks tend to treat joy and play and expression. and even connection between folks as ornamental or icebreaker-ish, or tangential to the reason that we've come together to organize for this very serious thing. I would argue that organizing from a place of possibility and joy, what makes you feel joyful, is a really powerful place… maybe I can take a risk and say, perhaps the only sustainable, truly sustainable, place to organize from, towards what will help you feel joyful and that your needs are met and that you have access to self-determination.
When joy is missing in organizing spaces, I'm not sure how long they can last. How deeply people could commit to each other, or how wide your work can reach, and how long it can go for… when there’s light there is also shadow, so where there is made space for anger or sorrow there also has to be made space for joy and gratitude.
Creativity is the only way we could even fathom a different world exists, you know, could even fathom that organizing is a thing, building power is a thing. Creativity, we minimize it to if you could draw or if you can put together at Trader Joe's flower bouquet. But creativity is much more accessible than that. It's more like breathing than like drawing, in that everything that exists around us, everything physically outside of what nature creates, everything man-made, and even the way we shape nature – everything in the social realm and the political and institutional realm – everything that we experience today – existed first in somebody's imagination.
And so, really building that muscle of creativity and trusting it and leaning into it and prioritizing it, much like joy in our movement work, is the way to create different realities.
I love that. People associate creativity with craft, when it's more of a way of being. Exactly, and we all have access to it.
BRITTNEY WASHINGTON, SELF PORTRAIT
FABLES
The Fools of Folly
Folly Beach was colonized by a cadre of hippies who left Woodstock in the summer of ‘69 vibrating from the lifechanging experience of communal transcendence and wanting nothing more than to keep the party going. The dream was born the morning after the onetwo punch of the Grateful Dead into Creedence Clearwater Revival – an auspicious sign. The rest of the group that would become known as the Fools of Folly went to bed, but Randy Washoutton and Carmie Edgewitz couldn’t sleep, thanks to the three tabs of lysergic acid they’d bummed off an enterprising 14 year old. As the sun rose over the muddy fairgrounds, Bert and Rita hatched a plan: an ocean paradise they would create together, where the spirit of the hippie culture they’d come to treasure – freedom, music, intoxicants, and, above all else, love – would be the spirit of home, too.
Randy and Carmie led their merry troupe to the coast of South Carolina and found a nearly empty beach town to call their own. It even came with a name that doubled as a compelling warning for their quest: FOLLY.
Those first few years they set about sanctifying Folly Beach as a bonafide hippie enclave. They sat in quiet contemplation in fecund nooks of marsh and seaforest, to honor the spirit of the earth. They held ceremonies of welcome for all visitors, to honor the spirit of brotherhood and love. They threw great parties, to honor the spirit of parties. The Fools of Folly became known throughout the land as proud emissaries of the counterculture and a really good hang.
Randy and Carmie remained their fearless leaders for some time. But no reign lasts forever. The dream began to fray, in the way dreams do – money troubles, addiction, interpersonal drama. They found themselves at a crossroads, wondering what to do with their lives, with the hippie enclave they’d created.
Randy became a regular at Chico Feo. Carmie got her Realtor’s license.
The battle for the soul of Folly continues to this day. Though the rentals are growing in power, the spirit of the Fools of Folly remains in the land and the sunstruck revelers who still know how to have a good time. They say that if you listen closely to the surf roll in on a clear night, you can hear the opening chords of Bad Moon Rising (Live At The Woodstock Music & Art Fair / 1969).
WRITTEN BY SYDNEY BOLLINGER
Look out over the ocean and see the spot where the world curves, nothing beyond that point. The ocean’s size is unfathomable, an expanse we can look at on a map, but are not able to fully experience. And it’s the ocean and long, winding rivers that provide Charleston with our salt marshes, our beaches, our coastal wildlife and salty breeze.
“When I think of Charleston, I just think of how wild it is, how many different waterways there are, and how connected everything is,” said local surfer and lifestyle coach Mara DeMauro. Mara grew up in Miami, but didn’t start surfing until living in Charleston.
“Something I love about surfing is that it allows me to be super present in that moment. It’s very rare when we can disconnect…Being connected to nature in that way, for the first time in a very long time, came with a profound feeling of joy and peace.”
Connecting to our oceans and waterways through surfing
Surfing and surf culture are deeply intertwined
with environmental work, going back to the 1960s with writing in Surfer, a magazine printed from 1962-2020. The sport depends on a healthy, protected ocean and surfers and surfing organizations, like the Surfrider Foundation, have been at the forefront of environmental causes.
The Surfrider Foundation started in San Clemente, Calif. in 1984.
“We focus on clean waves, water, and beaches, and [easy] access to them for all people,” said Theo Hair, who serves as secretary for Charleston’s Surfrider chapter.
“Not only are we looking to keep our beaches and ocean clean, pollution-free, and plasticfree, but we also get involved with location action to bring campaigns and projects to the people’s attention, like [ordinances] and what we can to reduce waste, [especially] consumption of plastic.”
Theo, who like Mara grew up in South Florida, also learned to surf a few years ago after moving to Charleston. After beginning to surf, he
looked for ways to get involved with the community and came across Charleston Surfrider.
“I’d recycle, do this or that, and then I wanted to get involved in the community [and] learn more. Surfrider combines what you can do to make the community and the world a better place through environmental action while [working] with other people who enjoy our coast and surfing.”
For Mara, learning to surf meant becoming more aware of the tides and our water systems.
“When you love something, if you appreciate it, you’re going to have respect for it. You’re going to take care of it…None of what we do is separate from anything else. It all impacts each other.”
Communing with self and spirit on the water
Surf culture is embedded with creativity and self-expression, as well as living intentionally.
ANDREW SHELLEY / UNSPLASH
“I grew up dancing [and] struggled a lot with body image, so having my body exposed [when surfing] in front of people in order to learn something that felt good was a contradicting experience, but it was extremely healing to be like, ‘hey, I love myself,” Mara said.
“That’s what this is about. Accepting myself and where I am at the pace I’m going and being open to my playful said…It’s about enjoying the process.”
For many, surfing and art go hand-in-hand.
“There’s a mindset that surfing itself is a person’s form of art. How you express what you’re doing on the water is unique to everyone,” Theo said.
“You’re not doing this for anyone else.”
The energy humming beneath surfing is that of the self and the ocean, that great body of water linking us all together. With this sense of community and deeper connection to self, our experiences with the water guide us toward the work necessary to preserve not only ourselves but also the sea.
The ocean doesn’t stop because the seasons change
Even as summer turns to fall, the ocean’s tides continue to ebb and flow, and still need the care we can provide.
“A lot of [our work] is connecting with people who might not know how easy it is for their individual actions to be a positive thing down the road,” Theo said.
Charleston Surfrider offers chapter meetings as a way to connect with the community and hear ideas for actions.
“When individual people realize how much they can do to make a difference and that individual person becomes an entire community, the impact multiplies with each person who starts taking that action.”
Currently, the organization is working on an ocean-friendly restaurant program.
“We try to identify restaurants that either already are or are willing to take the steps to become plastic-free now…We’re [also] looking to launch a partnership with some local coffee shops to get people to start using their own reusable coffee cup.”
The group also works on eliminating cigarette cigarettes and has regular beach clean-ups to engage communities to lessen the impact of ocean litter.
“We’re going to make sure we keep focusing on [what we can do]...every morning I go out there to surf and I get less and less time because it’s not light enough to get in the water until later and later,” Theo said.
“None of this shuts off where we live just because it gets darker earlier. The beach doesn’t stop being there just because [the seasons change]. We’ll still find ways to get out there and keep doing what we’re doing.”
NANETTE
MOJA GOSPEL REUNION
COVENANT
DIRECTED BY SHARON GRACI
SUNDAY, SEP 28 AT 4PM AT GREATER ST. LUKE AME CHURCH MOREHOUSE IN THE LOWCOUNTRY: GLEE CLUB EXPERIENCE
SATURDAY, OCT. 4 AT 7PM AT DOCK STREET THEATRE
THURSDAY, OCT. 2 AT 7:30PM AT PURE THEATRE EUREKA DAY
THURSDAY, NOV. 6 AT 7:30PM AT PURE THEATRE MOJA: GULLAH COLLECTIVE
FRIDAY, OCT. 3 AT 7PM AT DOCK STREET THEATRE
A WAY OF BEING IN THE LOWCOUNTRY
On the Practice of Yoga in Place
WRITTEN BY KATHERINE BARTTER
Yoga connects us. I started to find yoga in all the spaces of my life outside of my studio experience, how the people that came into my life weren’t traditional yogis but were still yoga practitioners. You start to see that yoga is in the practice no matter what that practice looks like.
Tashi Marshall Founder of Rising Rhythm
What defines yoga here is the community. You take it in other cities, and it’s so quiet, so serious. Here everyone is talking to you, saying hi. It’s a social hour, a human connection.
Steven Willard Teacher at Holy Cow Yoga Center & James Island Yoga
The Lowcountry has a unique way of being. It is the way of the land, water, and each other. Despite our tensions and our turmoil, to love thy neighbor still holds true.
Life mirrors a tranquil fluidity that can easily turn into a tumultuous crash. It is the journey from estuary to sea. To live life, to practice yoga in the place you are in, is to move with the movements of the land and its people. It is to move with the momentum of a flood, to endure the oppressive heat of the sun. We endure by playing in the sand, laughing with one another, lounging in the tide pool, snoozing beneath the wide, old oak tree.
To practice yoga in the Lowcountry is to move with this way of being. It is to listen to the place we are in. It is to listen to the cycles of the climate, the rotations of the mind, the movement of all people and things and to see ourselves within. To practice yoga in place is to sit in observance of the push and pull of the tides, to move in rhythm with the seasons and the systems of which we are all a part.
This practice teaches us how to be still in the midst of turmoil; to witness without judgment; to be detached from outcome and to look with a calm,
open heart on the way of the world. This kind of presence and awareness is a constant rooted, mindful, and forward engagement with all that is. That is the practice. Eventually, through our practice, we begin to see the true self nestled within the union of all that is, and we see that when we integrate every part of our being, both inner and outer, we are able to move forward from a clear, rested center to perform yoga in action.
To practice yoga in action is to see with an open eye and an untarnished heart how we may be of use to others and to act in a way that does no harm or ahimsa. We acknowledge and learn from the greater context in which we are all situated without fear, and we carry our lessons from our mat out into the world so we may act with loving awareness.
I say a little prayer before my classes from the Course of Miracles: “Where would you have me go, what would you have me say, what would you have me do?”
Steven W.
This witnessing self, this loving awareness of all that is, is evident in our teachers of the Lowcountry. Each teacher is unique in their own way, pulling from a myriad of backgrounds and lineages, but they maintain a calm, playful, and powerful undercurrent of devotion and service to each other, to all of us, and a recognition that what our world needs most is connection, community, and loving presence.
Teachers are those who guide our way when we are lost, when the river feels too dark to see a way forward. They remind us of the eternal teacher, the atman, that resides in each of us. What makes the Lowcountry and its yoga so special are these teachers. They exist as reflections of our time and our place. When we listen, we can hear the Lowcountry itself speak through them, guiding our way to a foundational loving awareness, guiding our way to becoming the one who listens, the one who watches, the one who acts from a place of peace, of love.
Yoga is about revealing the part of us that is hidden.
Trace Bonner, Founder of Holy Cow Yoga Center
The atman, the witness consciousness, the eternal teacher, is the quiet, tranquil observer that watches the fluctuations of the mind and the
world without fear, without judgement at the center of you. It floats down a river of darkness, murmuring like a quiet flame.
Often our day-to-day can block our connection with the self, block the way to one another. Misconceptions, delusions, and entanglements muddy and cloud the atman’s voice in the form of hatred, fear, distraction, and greed; these misconceptions, or vritti, interfere with our sight, our movement, and our choices. Worst of all, they interfere with the generosity of our trust and our affection. Vritti are the blocks on the way to peace for the world.
To practice yoga is to remove these blocks by moving through them and breathing life, love, and clarity into our bodies, our spirits, and our minds. It is to stoke the will, the inner flame of recognition.
It is to recognize the other as you.
Alex Seaman, Founder of Yoga Is Us
In this newfound spaciousness and clarity that we create for ourselves, we are able to listen more carefully along the river. The river speaks. It says I am you.
It isn’t a selfish, grasping you. It is not an identity nor a projection of your own mind onto the other. In yoga, we say self because it is the closest term we have for god, source, ocean, or all that is. It is not separate from anyone or anything. It merely is and has always been. It is the overwhelming felt presence of joy, gratitude and love that is present when you lift the veil of untruth. It is not something you earn or gain. It only waits to be uncovered. It is the plentiful water that only wishes to give you a drink.
When we see the true self, it feels like coming home, being greeted by an old friend, who says, I am so happy to see you, I am so happy you are here. They embrace you after a long and harrowing journey, and they have prepared a bed for you to rest.
You start to see all that you have been given; the beauty and the blessings of the world. It is an act of opening the heart to the place that you are in, listening and dreaming to the sigh of the trees on a hot day. It is to feel and to become the rush of the wind in the reeds. It is the river, it is you, simple and breathing, the river atman.
The foundation of yoga is living with an open heart. We practice opening the heart on the mat…to then broaden it outward to the external environment and to meet our community.
Tashi M.
In opening the heart, you will see the great gift that is life, a great union, but you will also see and feel the immense heartache and wounds of the world.
You cannot become a witness to divine love and creation without a recognition of an ever-present, deep, and all-consuming destruction. It is not something you can escape or transcend. It is not to be rationalized because it isn’t rational.
It can be difficult to reconcile the benefits of the practice with the heartache of the world.
Alex S.
You must be able to reckon with suffering. That is the practice. To embrace suffering, to walk with it hand-in-hand, and to apply the balm of loving awareness to clear the way.
If your heart is open, it is meant to break over and over again. This is where we see… that there is an intelligence to the collapse, the falling apart. If we don’t look at it, there is no creating beauty, no creating magic.
Alex S.
To live in the Lowcountry is to look out into a dense, brooding night of forgotten neighborhoods; a choked marshland, consumed by a crawling, growing and greedy development that walks atop a mass grave.
To practice yoga in place here is to never look away, to never deny or make excuses. It is an ever present heart opening, a churning.
You rise up and embrace, love, and walk hand-in-hand with the destruction, the dead, the repercussions of history, and all of our collective ghosts.
We’re in the South. Think about the deep-seated, deep rooted energetic history of Charleston. You can’t wipe that away, you can’t ban it. It’s still there. You can feel it. The people who inhabit this place are the ones who have to shift that trajectory and shift that energy.
Tymi B.
Following loving awareness through Charleston can feel like following a pinprick over rugged, suffocating terrain, full of challenge, bends, twists, balancing acts, and falling.
To practice yoga in the Lowcountry can look like drowning, sweltering. It is to sink, to be bitten, to be consumed by the marsh and its demons, the wrath of the sea, the expanse of greed and capital. We become processed, broken down, decompositioned until we are still, stagnant, quiet, and crushed enough to dissipate, to dissolve, to cycle.
You can’t stop here. You must continue to practice. To continue to move through and out to sea. To practice is to shift and to transform as water over land.
The Lowcountry travels. The marshes are transitory. There is a constant shifting of sands, sediment, salt. Structures crumble, mud churns and moves with a swift tranquility back out into the infinite calm of the sea. In order to move through heartbreak, failure, cruelty, shame, and violence we must move, shift, and transform our vritti.
We must see and embrace our place for exactly what it is so we may listen and understand what is needed to dispel and overcome a great and brutal fear.
No knowledge is to be found without seeking, no tranquility without travail, no happiness except through tribulation. Every seeker has, at one time or another, to pass through a conflict of duties, a heart-churning.
The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi
It takes a courageous and momentous love with the power of a hurricane to hear and embrace all that is, including our flaws, our disgrace, and our disapointments.
When water rises, it provides the nutrients for life, the raw materials of creation drawn from its own destruction. It is an unrelenting deposit of compassion and understanding.
When I feel I have lost my way, I remember Krishna speaking to Arjuna in the Bagavadgita: Arise Brave Heart and Destroy the Enemy.
Trace B.
The enemy is fear. It is the source of these negative, destructive experiences. We must rise as the water rises: transforming, banishing fear with the loving ferocity of a flood.
By committing to the difficulty of the practice, by navigating the twists in the journey with discipline and persistence, you develop a skillfulness.
When you practice a practice that is always changing, you become more comfortable with the unexpected. You’re forced to show up for the unknown. That is life: becoming more comfortable with the unknown.
Tymi Howard Bender, Founder of James Island Yoga
Skillsets differ from person to person, and your personal skill becomes your yoga in action. Yoga in action is the service you give back to the world for providing you with the tools, the ability to live greatly and well. The service is always the same. It is to clean the river, to bring peace into the world. The way you do this, your particular skillset, looks different and changes all of the time as you move through each churning, each cycle, each lesson. But its purpose is always the same: om shanti, peace, peace, peace.
People who want to oppress you want you to be miserable and tired because when you are tired, you can’t act. Joy is an act of resistance.
Steven W.
Yoga provides us with the tools for us to follow the loving path with skillfulness and consistency. It prevents us from getting stuck in the mire so we may recover, get up, and act with peace, connection, and loving awareness amidst turmoil, mistakes, pain, and confusion.
There could be a very intentional plan to separate and polarize people. We need to resist and commit to radically loving our neighbor even when it feels impossibly hard. Alex S.
Skillfulness is to be discerning in the cultivation of work, rest, and play. It is a dynamic balance, a mindful shift back and forth between yang movement, sthira, or strength, and yin movement, sukkha, or the surrender of energetic effort.
Work cultivates strength, certainty, agility, and nimbleness in craft. Play creates connection to one another, the freedom to explore, to be curious, to be light and innovative in our movements. Rest allows us to reflect, recover, and repair. All three are necessary to develop your skill, your service, to establish peace.
When you play, you surprise yourself with your abilities, it’s empowering… We’re here to be in spirit with one another. Playfulness keeps us connected to joy.
Tymi B.
To listen and to live by the push and pull of the tides, to know when to
take on the heavy burden and when to surrender if your effort may cause harm: this is skillfulness.
I am responsible for my house first, then I can start to clean up my neighborhood, my city, my country.
Steven W.
From finding and integrating our whole self into our practice, we can move outward from a clear center that is steady, balanced, and compassionate. We cultivate a readiness along the path to challenge fear and adapt to tumult with strength, courage, and grace.
The physical place of Charleston brought me into my yoga journey. It is an inviting city, spiritually charged, the Holy City.
Tashi M.
To clear the heart of fear is like being washed by spring rain. You feel clean, empty, like a glass windchime. When you are empty, you are able to listen and to hear a call to return all your blessings and gifts, to utilize the skills you have been given.
You listen in communion, in community with the other, to your teachers, to the place that you are in. You hear how you can contribute, how you can fulfill a unique need. Your response to the call is always as if in answer to a prayer from a close friend, a neighbor.
Yoga is a way of being. It is to practice while listening to place. The river speaks, and when you establish a present awareness, you hear the call of the land, the water, and the people. By listening, you are able to strengthen your service and skills to respond to the call with dexterity, honesty, and effulgence.
Justice is in the listening and in the presence of one another. It lives in our relationships and how we show up for our community. It is a radical commitment to welcome all of the polarized, fragmented parts of ourselves back home.
Alex S.
Your home is the place you are in, the marsh, the river, the sea, your body, your mind. To clear the way back home is to see the true self, to see how
YOU ARE THE WAY HOME.
You are are the will, the momentum, the quiet, inner flame that is able to uplift, to rejuvenate, to imbue with love, life, wealth, and abundance the place you are in.
