MaraTime: Time as Movement

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

Time at sea is not merely observed.
It moves through the body, ankles deep in the lapping edge of a rising sea. It tugs at buoys, braids itself into seaweed, carves memory into rock.

Standing on a windswept cliff at Black Knob in Dunmore East, the Copper Coast of Ireland unfolds to my west—a layered memory of ancient oceans and sea-sculpted continents. Gusts tear across the headland, and I squint through the icy, salted air into the blur of motion. The light shifts in silvery puddles and strands across the wild surface, and the cliffs—grey, ochre, green, rust—are a cross section of island time. These are not just colours. They are strata. They are soundings of an ancient seabed, folded upward by tectonic swells, chiselled back by storm and swell. Sea stacks, formed from collapsed arches, rise like sentinels of transience. Below, kittiwakes, gulls and guillemots fly in and out of cliff crevices—their worlds oriented perpendicular to mine. Between their feet and mine lies sediment compressed over 400 million years, hollowed into caves by winter storms.

This shore has become a home to me. A teacher. For five years now, I’ve returned to this stretch of tide-washed stone over four full seasonal cycles. I’ve been tracking the presence and absence of limpets, sea wrack, the sizes of salt crystals, and swell—listening for the pulse of time as it moves in loops, not lines.

But I carry another sea within me—the tropical tide of the Indian Ocean, the tidal sway of the Andaman coast. I recall sitting two metres above the lapping tide, perched on an upturned root. Suspended between two worlds—the forest to my east and the sea to my west.

Here, toppled sea mahua (Madhuca longifolia) trees lay uprooted, with sprawling, shallow root systems like tangled arms reaching upward now. Their robust, impermeable, red-brown bodies extend a hundred feet at least, across beaches and intertidal landscapes.

These evergreen giants were felled by a tectonic movement that has left many scars along the vast and undulating coast of the Andaman Sea, a coast that connects the nations, geographies and sea-cultures of South and South-East Asia. The movement of the seabed in 2004 set a tsunami in motion, lifted shorelines and submerged islands. Years later, while the land is still catching its breath, these sprawling, radiating root systems have become synonymous with the intertidal contours of India’s emerald isles.

From that perch, I saw a Sundari mangrove seed—keeled, buoyant, ancestral—drifting on the receding tide. A vessel of potential. I wondered: which shore would cradle it next? What siltbed would it root into?

That was the moment I realised: islands are not isolated. Shores are not boundaries. The sea moves between them, connects them, carrying stories, sediments, and selves.

Each coast inhales and exhales. The moon’s pull choreographs this planetary breath—a slow, celestial inhalation that lifts oceans and pulls shorelines taut, followed by an exhale that reveals the body beneath: rockpools, seagrass, and silted remains. But, what are these tides? It’s hard to fathom how this enormous volume of planetary water is pulled gently by lunar and solar gravity. It’s mind-boggling to visualise the process by which spring tides occur when the moon and sun align; neap tides when they are positioned on perpendicular planes, at a right angle—each of these tides are symmetric, planetary bulges of ocean, with the power to shape every shoreline.

What does it mean to witness time through two seas? The Indian Ocean teaches in monsoonal sweeps. It folds time into ritual. The Atlantic performs time in drama—swelling, crashing, revealing. In the Indian Ocean, tidal amplitude dances in syncopated rhythm with the monsoon, gentle in temperament. On the Atlantic rim, tides are more dramatic—springing and neaping, rushing and retreating. 

Each coast is a time-lapse of exposure and concealment, of presence and absence, of wind and weather—each carrying its own grammar of motion.
One is the whiff of dusk heat and floating propagules.
The other, salt-stung air and slate rocks swept clean each night.

Yet, on every shore of every sea—the tide leaves behind foam, scars of objects and lives lived at sea, secret stories and new beginnings carried from far away shores.

Beyond the rhythmic back-and-forth of tides lie deeper, slower circulations—currents, the hidden arteries of the sea, ancient riverways of salt and heat. Ocean currents are not a single flowing belt often incorrectly visualised as a conveyor-belt: they are a shifting, branching, fluid web shaped by differences in temperature and salinity. Cold, salty water sinks; warm, fresher water rises. This engine of movement regulates climate, distributes heat, and carries planktonic sea-dust, biological wonders and meteorological whispers between coasts, and from the deepest trenches up to surface waves.

In the Indian Ocean, the Somali Current reverses twice a year—a strong and impactful oceanographic heartbeat dictated by monsoon winds, shifting with the seasons like the gurgle of a land drinking rain and emitting heat. In the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream stretches time and temperature across undulating bathymetries and latitudes—carrying warm water northwards, its flow dictating climate, migration, and even memory.

These currents are timekeepers and seashapers—not in seconds or hours, but in centuries of climate, in the seasonal spawning, growth and dispersal. In upwelling zones, deep water rich with ancient nutrients rises to meet the light—feeding plankton blooms that support marine life from krill to whales. These vertical movements are essential to the sea’s slow alchemy.

This constant state of movement can also be witnessed as lived patterns: fishermen in West Bengal speak of Jalchakra—the cycle of water—a knowledge of water passed down by gesture and tide-scarred eyes. In Connemara, west Ireland, generations remember the sea’s temperament by smell, by the shape of foam, by the flight path of gannets before a storm. Among many colloquial words that are specific to the nuanced language of seafarers, one of my favourites is Buacán, a wave that reflects back from the shore and collides with an incoming wave, creating a distinctive pattern. Here, time moves with shifting sands, migrating birds, the creak of boats moored to memory.

MaraTime, in these places polished by tides, is not worn on a wrist but felt under the fingernails, smelt on the breeze and tasted in the catch of the day. The tide marks time not with precision, but with presence.

And presence is perhaps the oldest form of timekeeping. Let’s observe and be present to the motion of MaraTime—as the planet’s breath moving through water.

If we listened deeply, we’d hear it. So let’s go down to the water, to a sea-shore, a river bank, or a lake: Observe the water in motion, the curiosities it has brought in, patterns left behind and the objects and invisible particles that get carried away. Water invites us to feel its rhythm. A world alive with a pulse and circulation.

The ocean is Earth’s great climate moderator—moving heat from equator to pole. But as ice melts and storms intensify, this pulse may falter. Understanding the language of the tides may be key to anticipating what changes next.