An update from Marguerite
"...a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life." — Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
Rachel Carson believed that a child's wonder cannot survive on its own; it needs a grown-up willing to kneel down and feel the world alongside them. At Sentinel, this is what our students experience every day with our incredible team of coaches, a dedicated group of young people who come from the same streets as they do.
But lately I have been sitting with a tension in this work that I cannot easily resolve, and I wanted to think it through with you.
I have watched children change in the water more times than I can count, and it still undoes me each time. A child who arrived flinching from the cold, who would not so much as put their face in the water, lets go of their coach’s hand one morning and floats, and something in them quietly rearranges. By the close of a programme they are diving beneath the waves and speaking about the ocean as a place they belong to, and that belongs to them in return. The fear of the ocean was never argued away. It was outgrown, in about the only place I know that can do such a thing.
Wallace J. Nichols gave this its name when he wrote about the Blue Mind, that mild meditative calm so many of us feel near water, and what has changed in these past years is that the science has begun, carefully and slowly, to catch up to the feeling. Researchers have been gathering the studies on swimming, on surfing, on simply being held by the sea, and the picture taking shape is that the ocean genuinely helps young people grow more resilient and more able to steady themselves through hardship. Surf therapy in particular now carries a real and growing body of evidence, and an increasing number of community of organisations are committed to doing it with rigour and care. Some of the most moving findings have come from places not so unlike our own, from post-conflict Sierra Leone to these very shores.
I feel this most deeply in our Indigo Programme, where we open the ocean to neurodiverse and differently-abled young people, so many of whom have been told in a hundred quiet ways that the sea is not a place for them. What we are learning through our children is that a dysregulated nervous system is not a problem to be corrected but a child asking for safety, and there is something the water offers that a room with four walls so rarely can. To watch a child who cannot find stillness on land arrive at a place of calmness in the ocean, is to witness a body remembering how to settle. It is so often the children left at the very edge of these opportunities who receive the most.
And here is the tension I have been sitting with. I am grateful the evidence is arriving, and I know it will open doors to those who fund health and education and wellbeing, doors that stayed closed when all we could offer was a beautiful idea. But what concerns me is that the moment we reduce the ocean to a clinical intervention to be prescribed and measured and consumed, we begin to tame the very wildness that does the healing. The sea does not mend our children because it is a service. It mends them because it is wild and alive and utterly indifferent to our smallness, and because meeting something that vast asks them to come fully into their senses and their bodies, present in a way our distracted lives so seldom allow.
I deeply resonate with Thoreau who said that “In wildness is the preservation of the world”.
So we try to hold the science and the soul of this work together, and keep returning to Robin Wall Kimmerer, who reminds us that the deepest relationships with the living world are not transactions but gifts, met with gratitude and with something given back. This is why our children in our Turn the Tide programmes, do not only take from the ocean; they give something back as well, breathing in all that the sea offers and giving to it their own joy and gratitude. That reciprocity is the whole of it. The ocean is not our pharmacy. It is, as I have come to feel, our teacher and our elder, and the children who learn to love it will be the ones who grow up unwilling to harm it.
I am telling you all of this because, in a season when so much of this work is contracting, here is one of the few stories that opens doors rather than closing them, drawing conservation and health and education and wellbeing into a single conversation. And it places careful evidence beneath what this community has always understood in its bones, that a child who learns to swim, a child who finds calm in the water for the first time, a young person who comes to feel they belong to the sea as much as it belongs to them, is not a small thing at all. It is, child by child, how this coast raises the people who will one day defend it.
If any of this resonates with you, whether as a funder, a connector, or simply as someone who loves the ocean and wants to walk alongside us, I would love to hear from you.
With warmth
Marguerite Hofmeyr
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