SurfWriter Girls: 2014

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

A Silver and Gold New Year

Friendship – the Perfect Blendship for 2015

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.

That popular campfire song of old is just as relevant now as we start the New Year.

To make 2015 a better year, SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel would like to see us all reach out the hand of friendship to the people we encounter in our everyday lives.

Putting aside differences and disagreements, now is the time to focus on the things that unite us and to celebrate our shared hopes and dreams.

As writers who are out in the community, SurfWriter Girls are fortunate to meet new people practically everywhere we go…at beach cleanups, talking to small business owners, at civic events, and more.

Along the way, many have become our friends, like Ocean Friendly Gardens expert Greg Goran...

Surfrider Foundation volunteers Alex and Norma Sellers...

Up, Up & Away Kites owners Melissa and Jason Natanson...

International Surfing Museum workers Cindy Cross and Dave Reynolds. The list goes on.

Think of your own list and all the people with whom you come into contact. How many potential new friends are waiting there? How many old friends are hoping to reconnect? You might be surprised.

If you’d like to find out, it’s easy. Just make the effort. As the saying goes, “To have a friend, you have to be a friend.”

Motivational speaker and author Dale Carnegie, once said, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

While focusing on friends – both old and new – may not seem like such a big thing, President Woodrow Wilson felt differently. Recognizing the importance of friendship, he stated, “Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”

SurfWriter Girls Sunny and Patti definitely agree. Sunny and her friend Cynthia Mejia Giudici have been friends since first grade, staying connected through marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and distance.

Patti and her friends from Culver City High School – Lynn, Barbara, Linda and Mickey – still get together every year for their annual CCHS Girls Thanksgiving Lunch.

True friendship is like a velvety rose bud that, when nurtured, develops into a thing of beauty. With friends you can share special moments that you delight in, enjoying the small, but important things, that occur and the interesting places where life takes you.

In the words of noted theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, “Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.”

So, if you want to make a positive difference in 2015 – in your own life and the lives of others – just open your heart and mind and reach out to someone, offering them the gift of friendship.

Now that all the holiday gifts have been unwrapped and put away, this is one more gift that can last a lifetime… turning from silver to gold.

Happy New Year!

Patti & Sunny

SurfWriter Girls

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Monday, December 22, 2014

A Sea of Gifts to Discover

Celebrating Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

During the holidays when much of the focus is on gifts – what to give and what we’re hoping to receive – the best gifts of all may not be in stores, but waiting for us to discover on the beach.

“The beach is not the place to work, to read, to write or think,” begins Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her much-loved book, written in 1955 – Gift from the Sea.

“Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines…One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea, bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by the tides of all yesterday’s scribbling.”

With “patience,” Lindbergh writes, one will come to experience the “gifts from the sea.” Whether it’s a rare shell or a perfectly-rounded stone, a strong emotion or a new sense of awareness, the gifts will come.

Lindbergh, the wife of famed American aviator Charles Lindbergh, found solace by the sea and shared her musings in her books.

In keeping with this, SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel wish you a Christmas stocking filled with your own gifts from the sea:

Simplicity. Studying a sea shell found on a walk, Lindbergh observes how simple it is. “One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding, how little one can get along with, not how much.”

Solitude. “It is a difficult lesson to learn today…to practice the art of solitude,” writes Lindbergh. Yet, alone on the beach, she “watched the gulls…dip and wheel and dive for the scraps I threw them.” And, felt a kinship. “The beauty of earth and sea and air meant more to me. I was in harmony with it, melted into the universe.”

Friendship. Lindbergh savors the gifts of friendship exchanged on the beach, openly and freely. “The pure relationship, how beautiful it is!” she notes. “Strangers smile at you on the beach, come up and offer you a shell. Nothing is demanded of you in payment, no social rite expected.”

Home. Gazing at the oyster beds, Lindbergh recognizes the importance of home and of “forming ties, roots, a firm base.” She sees each oyster “has its place on the rock to which it has fitted itself perfectly and to which it clings tenaciously.”

Balance. Lindbergh’s closeness to the sea with the ebb and flow of the tides gives her a “balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing.”