Video: LUNAR full length

Watch the special full-length film LUNAR. Leah Dawson shares how the video came to be, and why this foreign land was a grounding place

Posted By Rhea Cortado on Apr 12, 2016

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Leah Dawson absorbs the sun's energy in Lunar. Photo by Mauro Ladu.

Grounded by earth and charged with energy by water, Leah Dawson is a solar creature influenced by the moon’s gravitational pull, like the sea.

Watch the special full-length film LUNAR to experience the treeless landscape of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands.

Here, Leah Dawson shares how the video came to be, and why this foreign land was the right place to nourish her artistic spirit by creating music, hand-shaping, and wave dancing.

LUNAR by Onde Nostre full length from The Seea on Vimeo.

Words by Leah Dawson

Days into our trip shooting Seea in Panama City, designer Amanda Chinchelli, her longtime friend and stylist Elisabetta dal Bello, and I began daydreaming of meeting again at Betta’s home base in the Canary Islands. Sure enough, the dream became a reality a few months later.

Amanda and Betta had gathered their friends and colleagues of "Onde Nostre," a highly acclaimed Italian film production team, to join us in an effort to create a beautiful short art film.

Together, for the sake of loving creation, we all embarked on a journey to capture and create a story of connecting to place. The first day I arrived in the Canaries, I walked barefoot atop the worn lava grounds. I've read walking barefoot helps cure jet lag, because it grounds us to the energy of the place we are.

Though sharp, walking dried lava requires awareness of every single step, making us stay present. I continued to walk barefoot as we explored the island because I felt energized from the ground.

There's a book called Earthing, which speaks to the transfer of negative ions from the earth to our bodies while walking barefoot. Negative ions are crucial to human health, yet much of our societies around the world are starved of the earths balancing properties. The ocean, waterfalls, mountains, rivers, jungles, the raw earth, all produce negative ions. It's our self medicine to immerse our selves in the magic of the earth.

Earlier in Panama, Betta had been riding my first self-shaped board named Smoothie. She made me promise I’d make her one after having a couple magical sessions. When I arrived to the Canaries, she had already organized for me to shape a board with local shaper Julian Sicre of Joyas Surfboards. Julian took me under his wing; he taught me a lot about using tools, the dynamics of board shaping, and glassing.

Julian also offered his surfing knowledge, style, and expertise for me to watch, mimic, and draw inspiration from. Having him guide me in and out of the sketchy lava rock water entry and exit kept me out of harm’s way, and steered me into the best waves while I was there.

We were able to shape and glass a Smoothie 2 in just two days, and I rode the board for a few sessions on the trip before leaving it with Betta—achieving her dream come true, too.

There's many gifts surfing brings us, and one is the desire to travel, to experience new waves, new lands and new cultures. For this keeps our perspective broadening, other ways of living are humbling and inspiring. We have opportunities to connect on a spiritual level with locals involved in surfing, because eventually wherever you go, there's going to be someone in love with the ocean, just like you. Surfing shrinks the degrees of separation within its community, therefore connecting us further to this wide web of surfers around the globe.

For me, life is about connecting with people on a heart level, and if we travel and surf with our open heart, we'll undoubtably connect with others.

Further, traveling to places so different from whence we came, gives us a fresh reality, an enhanced recognition of the vast variety our planet provides us.

It was an incredible experience to connect with the local surf culture through this way, as well as participate in creating another lasting art piece to be enjoyed in-motion. I look forward to returning to this wonderful land to continue exploring the vast waves and island culture, as well as nurturing our lasting friendships.