MaraTime: Time as Decay & Renewal

This article is part of ‘Time and Tide’, a series of essays by Tasneem Khan. This is the fifth of the collection. Click here to read the other articles in the series.

The coasts we inhabit pulse with paradox.

Shiver. Ooze. Sprout. Echo.

Grieve. Drift. Rupture. Glow. Bloom.

Time doesn’t simply pass on the shoreline—it clings and cracks, ferments and foams, bursts forth and dissolves. It may even throw a dead fish at your feet while you’re enjoying a picnic, as if to remind you: decay is part of every beautiful panorama.

By the sea, death smells nostalgic. It wets the soles of my feet with slippery kelp washed up from underwater forests, it scuffs my knuckles against empty barnacle shells, tangles my hair with salt, attunes my ears and nose with crackling sounds from saturated sand and invisible whiffs of anaerobic decomposition. The end of time has an unmistakable smell, by the sea.

In spring, the air turns briny and electric, alive with the charge of birth—or rebirth. But rebirth doesn’t erase decay. Even as new life blooms and creatures moult into brighter skins, other parts of the system are quietly ending—becoming food, ground, nutrition for something else. In summer, time stretches, and decay might seem to slow, but it is only temporarily concealed by the sudden explosion of frenzied growth. Autumn arrives with a restless hush; the sea begins to rumble beneath its cooling skin, laced with bioluminescence that lights up our coves. Tiny marine ghosts pulse with seduction or desperation—some creatures glow to attract, others to startle, others simply because life is slipping away. Who’s to say which light is more magical? In the winter, time is suspended, as we witness a cellular slowing, where death is deferred, though not denied. The cold becomes a cradle for life that pauses, processes that slow down and time hibernates.

There is a Celtic concept or embedded idea that speaks of spaces where endings and beginnings, spirit and matter, slip into each other. Along tidal edges, where rot perfumes the air and renewal trembles just beneath the wrack line, this thinness is most tangible. And across the world’s littoral zones, the magical expanses between tides, we see the same thing: time rises, ebbs, flickers, decomposes, and regenerates. 

References to “thin places” appear in English-language Celtic Christian literature from the 20th century onward. The idea itself, however, predates writers and inscriptions. In Irish mythology, lakeshores, fairy forts, dolmens, sacred wells, bogs, and mist-shrouded coves were understood as portals to the Otherworld—places where time and matter warped, and encounters between what we call the living and the dead became possible. Modern Irish spiritual writers sometimes translate the concept directly as “Na hÁiteanna Caol” (pronounced nah hawtch-anah kweel), and pastoral voices refer to them as “Quare places.” These are not isolated references but pervade Celtic storytelling and holy geography—from Gougane Barra to the monastic islands of Iona and Skellig Michael. This idea was first described to me by an elderly fisherman, casting for mackerel off the rocks while telling me about the island of Great Skellig. He explained that there are places where decay and renewal are intertwined, where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous—and closer to us than we think. He said it against the soft zzhhh-thrip of his line slicing the salt-heavy air, the reel ticking and settling between tides, as if each cast carried both story and offering into the Atlantic.

Apart from its spiritual essence, it makes me think of ‘ecotones’. These are regions of transition between two biological communities, and are often richer in species than either of the individual systems. Whether we examine the idea metaphysically or ecologically, we co-exist with countless parallel realities, each inhabited by numerous lives whose senses and rhythms diverge wildly from our own. 

The shifting surface of the water is one of these thin veils. It transforms with temperature and moonlight: evaporates into mist, freezes into crystal, sinks and rises with its own heat and subtle breath. Peer through that surface and you enter a mirrored world obeying different laws, a science of thresholds. Light bends differently in water, slowing time optically, distorting forms and colors, reminding us that time itself is altered at these membranes. Movement slows but sound moves faster. Pressure doubles at ten meters, reshaping physiology itself. Plankton rise and fall in diel migration, following ancient circadian cues of sunlight through shifting turbidity. Even water’s specific gravity, affected by salt and temperature, determines whether something sinks, floats, or suspends, mediating all life beneath the veil. 

This textured and evocative idea of “thin places”, must have been imagined, described and experienced in the intertidal, the estuarine, the liminal ecotones.

A little further, into the deep, midnight blue of the pelagic ocean, beyond the reach of sunlight, where pressure thickens and sound as we know it is replaced by subsonic, ultrasonic and unfamiliar hums, trills, pulses and clicks, there drifts a creature so strange, so otherworldly, that it seems less like an animal and more like an idea come alive. Meet the siphonophore, a sinuous ribbon of life, trailing through the water like a tapering shred of living silk, its translucent body shimmering and pulsing. The largest among them, Praya dubia, can stretch up to 45 meters—longer than a blue whale—yet its body is no wider than a garden hose. 

But even the word “it” begins to fail here. The siphonophore does not live so much as unfold. Biologically, the siphonophore is not a single organism in the way we usually define one. They are, instead, a colony—a floating federation of individual animals called zooids. Each zooid is a genetically identical clone, and yet each is exquisitely specialised. Some become swimmers, and others become feeders, trailing venomous tentacles like fishing lines in the plankton-rich soup. Still others are digesters, turning prey into nourishment. And some are dedicated entirely to reproduction—tiny factories of sex cells that will disperse, fertilise and form future selves. Each zooid is an organism within an organism, defined by function, fused by necessity. No single zooid can survive on its own, but together, they form a coherent, purposeful whole—a superorganism that thinks without a brain, breathes without lungs, and moves as one despite being many.

And how many zooids might live within a single siphonophore? Hundreds. Sometimes thousands. A shimmering civilization tethered along a stem. Life here is not rugged individualism but radical interdependence. It is not protected by armor, but sustained by flexibility. When a zooid dies or is damaged, it may be repaired or resorbed and in some cases, shed—as the colony grows on, the growth zone buds fresh zooids to carry the function on. In the ocean, survival favors systems that renew from within rather than resist decay externally.

The siphonophore is not alone in this. If you could slice a coral reef like a loaf of bread, you would see its inner structure composed of generations of former lives, each one a foundation for the next. New polyps settle where others once lived. The massive reef is built not by the living alone, but also of and on the skeletons of the dead. It is, in this way, a monument to continuity: a structure where renewal depends on remembrance.

Creatures like the siphonophore, like coral, like Pyrosomes and Portuguese man o’ war—these are not evolutionary footnotes, nor curiosities. They are alternate answers to the question of how to be alive and what we mean by a lifetime. They suggest that life is not always individual, death is not always final and time in these spaces is not always finite. These creatures invite us to imagine not just other ways of surviving, but other ways of being—where the borders between one and many, self and other, renewal and decay are porous, shifting, and alive.