MaraTime: Exploring Time Through Two-Worlds in Coastal Ecologies

This article is part of ‘Time and Tide’, a series of essays by Tasneem Khan. This is the first of the collection.

Phenology, in its simplest definition, is the study of seasonal natural phenomena—when cherry blossoms bloom, when swallows return, when leaves fall. It is time observed through our body’s memory and the land’s repetition. The phenology of the sea, then, is a witnessing of watery time: a way of reading the ocean’s calendar, not by numbers or mechanical ticks, but by rhythm, presence, and return. It is time felt in salt, etched in drift patterns, carried in the moon-led migrations of species and the luminous quiet of tide pools.

I see time as a mosaic of contrasts—where the precision of physics meets the unpredictability of biology, and where the factual gives way to the poetic. In these liminal spaces, time whispers its secrets in shades of blue and green, in the textures of the ocean and the songs of the wind.

This is an invitation to both witness and articulate the ever-unfolding stories of our coastal landscapes through the embodied processes of seeing time, telling time, and feeling time—a narrative etched in the interplay of tides, seasons, communities and climates.

My journey, rooted in the dual practices of two-eyed seeing¹ and slow looking,² has transformed my understanding of time from a sequence of moments to a creative cartography etched into the landscapes we inhabit. In my forays as a zoologist, photographer, educator and ocean explorer, I have come to perceive time as a living, breathing force that can be felt and heard in every grain of sand and every cresting wave.

At the edge of the sea, where land and water meet, time reveals itself in subtle yet profound ways. The shoreline is not merely a boundary but a dynamic interface where geological time converges with biological rhythms. Here, the slow erosion of cliffs and the gradual accretion of sediment are an echo of millenia. Each layer of rock, each ripple in the tide, is a record of change—a lexicon of natural forces that have been at work long before human existence. In this sense, the coast becomes a living archive, an ever-evolving testament to the passage of deep time, cyclic time, and parallel times.

Where Carl Linnaeus imagined a Horologium Florae, a flower clock to tell time by the daily opening and closing of blooms, we begin to imagine a “MaraTime” rooted in the coasts of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Not a clock of precision, but one of perception. Not circular, but tidal. Not mechanical, but living.

In this series, you are invited to witness time not as chronology, but as ecology. Time as circadian and lunar, biological and experiential. As taught by seaweed and seabirds, not sundials and screens.

It asks for a return. For reverence. For two eyes and all our senses. Let us look to the sea not just for answers, but for rhythm. Let our clocks be kelp. Let our hours be marked by tide. Let us write time by water, and let time write us back.

To practice the phenology of the sea is to return—to the same shore, the same outcrop, the same curve of coast—again and again, and write. Think. Sketch. Photograph. Float.

I notice the greening and decay of seasonal seaweed. I delight in bird migrations, mollusc spawnings, and marine invertebrate molts. I inhale subtle shifts in light quality and the scent of the tide. I witness community rituals, fishing practices, folk markers and sea-change. Over time, a pattern emerges—like a woven tide chart where science, story, and sensation entangle. This MaraTime becomes an artwork: one part poem, one part practice, one part planetary pulse.