It has been about a week now since I ruptured my achilles tendon while doing sprints at the gym.  It's been a real bummer but lucky for me I have the crappiest health insurance plan known to man so everything is just peachy.   Just kidding.  Sorta sucks I'll be down and out for the count for the next 4-6 weeks.  FYI I'm going with non operative treatment of the tendon vs. operative treatment, but more on that later.  So no surfing for me for a bit.  Whaaa!!!!  Oh the humanity!  So much for my adventurous surf stories. 

I know life could be much much worse.  I mean, I could have had my arm chewed off by a shark, or worse yet, been born without any limbs and never had the opportunity to surf or dance.  I know how lucky I am in life and understand things happen for a reason.   So in the true spirit of Bay Area San Franciscan, new age, granola-ness, I am taking this injury as a sign that it's time to focus on other aspects of life, like um, other aspects of  Brown Girl Surf TM!

So the past few days I have been doing some prep for the upcoming Okeanos performance at Fort Mason in San Francisco.  Described by Ariel Schwartz in her article for Fast Company, as the “The Cirque Du Soleil Of Environmental Science“ Okeanos artistically melds science, movement, dance, and acrobatics together to create a theatrical performance of a living ocean.  I know.  How cool is that? Being a dancer myself, I really can't wait to see how they use the human body to recreate the experience of the ocean.  As well, part of this weekend's production is meant to raise awareness around ocean issues. So in addition to the performance, there will be a lot of cool environmental groups on display at the event.  And yes, Brown Girl Surf TM will have a presence there too (so come check out our table).  But it gets cooler yet.   On Sunday I'll be participating on a pre-show panel with my BLUEMiND friends to discuss the relationship between the brain and the ocean.  The theme will be “Our Mind on Ocean, Our Brain on Memory." 

So given this is Brown Girl Surf's TM first public debut, there has been quite a lot of tasks to get done around here.  It's a little challenging to do it with one leg, but I'm getting used to it.  In the spirit of movement and theatrics, I thought I'd share with you this awe inspiring video on Brown Girl Surf's TM behind the scenes one legged prep for this awesome occasion. 

I know what you're thinking-- Target!?!?! OK, fine. I wish I could have chosen a more sustainable store as part of my quest for hangers, especially on a post about the living ocean.  And well, you know how I feel about plastic. But they did scrounge up their extras for me.  Qualified reuse? Please love me, don't judge me (just for the moment....just this once).   Perhaps this is your opportunity to chime in and let me know where I can get more enviro friendly stuff going forward.  Perhaps you couldn't give a crap.  Either way, I hope you laughed. 

So hope you'll join us this weekend for Okeanos and the BLUEMiND panel at Fort Mason at 6:30 pm on Sunday.  Click on the link below for more information and to buy tickets! 

Hope to see you there!  (FYI I got my new rolling scooter this morning.  It's almost as cool as a skateboard.....sort of.)

_Last I left you I was headed on the path to big-wave surfer-dom with a brilliant idea in the works, about to be disowned by my parents. Thank you for all the positive feedback and words of support you sent my way.  And thank you for still being my friend. Really.  It means a lot to my once sad and pathetic, soul.  Now, back to the story at hand.   
 
At some point I decided to put my big wave aspirations aside not because it wasn’t what was in my heart, but because I did not want to contribute to my mother getting more grey hairs.  Instead, I decided to go in the opposite direction.  What would that be, you ask? Longboarding.  Longboarding is a classic style of surfing where you use a bigger board on smaller waves (mostly).  It’s like a dance as the surfer walks up and down the board.  It’s not as treacherous as dropping down a 50 foot wave, but has its own set of technical challenges.  Oh boy, does it.    

Everytime I had watched longboarding, it always reminded me of a dance.  I spent the past 15 years training in North Indian classical dance, so I guess the dancer in me couldn’t help but wonder what types of connections there were between Indian dancing and surfing – both aesthetically and technically.  I wanted to explore this.  I also figured getting in on the competitive circuit for small wave riding could be a fun alternative challenge to the near death experiences of charging big waves. I’d still charge the medium sized surf for fun but dancing on water would be it for me!

_I didn’t even own a longboard, so that just gives you an idea of where I was starting from.  I decided to find a coach to help work with me on this newly refined delusion of a dream.  I started working with a pro who spent most of his life short-boarding, and eventually transitioned into longboarding later in life. So he could understand, at some level, my challenges.  And let’s face it, after I shared my ideas with him, I’m pretty sure he also thought I was challenged.  I would spend a lot of time talking to him about some of my competitive surf ideas - everything from my thoughts on infusing dance into longboarding to my girlish aspirations of one day being the great brown hope of surfing for my community. 

One day, my coach sent me an article.  It was about a surf competition in India and it boasted a fascinating mention – India’s first female surfer. The combination of those three words together was more than intriguing.  The only other female surfer of Indian descent I knew of was my friend Camille here in California and she was a rare anomaly at that.  I started doing some research and found more interesting discoveries.  A group of girls in the Gaza Strip were taking on surfing. China had a first female surfer. A young girl in Malaysia became their country’s first sponsored female surfer.  I was having a hard enough time piecing my surf aspirations together here in California, land of the global surfing empire. And here were these women and girls in countries with such limited surfing infrastructure, making waves of change in their communities and learning to surf under such interesting and oftentimes, challenging, circumstances.  It was more than fascinating; it was literally, history in the making.  

_I began to think that if these renegade women and girls were taking these types of risks and figuring out how to surf in their communities, that they might in fact be real trailblazers for change. So I decided I’d go on a journey to find, support and share the stories of the first female surfers from around the world.  In doing so I would also share my own crazy journey of my pursuit to go pro.  I’d be a certified surf explorer, storyteller come competitor extraordinaire!   I fittingly named this idea Brown Girl SurfTM, in honor of the first female surfers who were brown girls from Polynesia (and possibly the Seychelles).
 
I decided to get in touch with the Big Kahuna of female surfing research - Dr. Krista Comer from Rice University.  Krista spent the past decade studying female surfers and surf subculture partly as a way to study globalization and its impact on women in surfing communities. She ended up coming onto the project as well.   I continued to share the idea with other key activists, including ocean scientist Dr. Wallace 'J.' Nichols.  He too was interested in partnering on this project for his BLUEMiND work on the relationship of the ocean's impact on the brain.  (more on that to come!) I also got in touch with India’s first female surfer (Facebook is amazing) and and told her about our plans.   Soon, a Brown Girl Surf TM community of supporters started to form around this project.

The proceeds of the T-shirts would support our journeys and would also be used to support the first female surfers we’d discover along the way.  I felt that the purpose of the project was in the journeys themselves.  So rather than defining right away how exactly we’d connect and support these women and girls, we’d meet them first, share their stories and then support their ideas and desires for change in their communities based on what we discovered. 
 
  Alas, Brown Girl SurfTM is finally unveiled!   Behold! A mermaid!

_

__ Thank you to all those who helped me in the process to give birth to Brown Girl Surf TM.  You know who you are and  you are so friggin' awesome!  I believe so strongly in this idea and that it will have profound social and scientific research implications for women and girls, the surfing world, the ocean, conservation, our brain and our spirits. It also makes a pretty cool T-shirt line too!   Now, I want to personally invite you to hop on board with me for the journey ahead!  It’s sure to be a sick ride!
 
 
Signing off from Oakland, CA
Farhana