Move Like Water, by Hannah Stowe - Laura
Hannah Stowe’s debut, Move Like Water, is both a memoir that feels wise beyond its years and a personal love letter to the sea. It is a crying-out too, a bold reminder of the importance of our planet, and the creatures we share our world with, yet it never feels preachy or stilted by this. Hers is a story told with such passion that it sweeps the reader along, carried out in the tides of her own experiences, in the pain and joy of living a life unrestrained by pressures to fit neatly into workplaces or lifestyle expectations.
Born on the Pembrokeshire coast, Stowe felt increasingly drawn to the sea from a young age. She tells of seeing her first whale at age nine, dead and misshapen on the shore. Perhaps its death had been natural, part of a cycle, she says, but as she watched it taken away on plastic sheets, she felt “a resounding sense of sadness”, in witnessing its final journey from the sea draw to an end. “I wanted to know how it had died,” she explains, “but more than that, I was curious to know how it had lived. Where it had been, what it had seen…This was the first time I remember feeling that tug away from home and out to sea. And with each passing year, that feeling grew. It was a restlessness.”
It is this same, unrelenting curiosity that, some years later, pulls her from the safety of the shore, emboldens her to pursue a life spent largely at sea. Move Like Water takes us on a physical and emotional journey across oceans, providing insight into a vocation so few of us can claim to know much about. The narrative is split into chapters that each focus on different creatures she has studied, or felt a kinship with, in her time both at sea and during the more landlocked moments of her life.
“Like the ocean, we humans are never entirely still, nor should we be. We hunted and gathered, and then we settled. We made the irreversible switch from existing in the environment, where our behaviour and lives were controlled by the ebb and flow of the seasons, to trying to control that environment.”
Her own personal struggle with a surfing injury at the hands of the sea shows the potency of the very thing she holds so dear. For better or worse, the sea is a mighty creature in itself, used here almost as a dual narrator alongside her human voice, urging the journey forwards. Stowe’s description of the chronic pain she endures will surely feel like an affirming gut-punch to anyone who has experienced similar long-term pain issues. But in the face of this difficulty, she has been able to understand how such experiences have shaped her. “Pain is a curious companion,” she explains. “It is a lens through which a perspective on life can be sharpened, giving you a heightened sense of gratitude for those times before it dogged your steps. It can give you a determination, focusing your energy on what you will do, what you will achieve, when the pain subsides.”
Stowe’s is a story about personal ambition and drive, and the powerful emotions the sea conjures up in those of us lucky enough to hear its call. Inevitably, there is a rumbling undercurrent, an examination of how humankind continues to damage its beloved and fragile planet. “Everything we do leaves a mark, it seems, in one way or another. I wondered what trace I was leaving, and what mark the landscape had in turn left on me,” she writes. This sentiment speaks to the essence of the book as a whole; it is in part a stark depiction of nature’s precariousness, and an indelible tale of how crucial it is that we remain connected, each in our own ways, to nature, aware of the important mark the world leaves on us in small ways, every day. Despite all she has learnt and experienced firsthand, there is still hope here, for positive change. “We have known for too long that our lives cause damage to the oceans. The hourglass of time to change this relationship is nearly empty. The sand now runs faster than ever. It is nearly empty, but not yet.”
Laura
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