nature – Paola Trimarco

Ocean awareness: an essay

Yesterday was World Oceans Day 2025, and today is the start of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice (I’m writing from Menton, further along the coast). While I cannot add to the tranche of news stories and statistics about our endangered oceans, I can offer this short essay intended to meld the personal with the spiritual and the environmental.

AMONG THE FISHES

I was not always a swimmer, and I have not always lived on the French Riviera. Being raised by a single mother, who did not want any of her children to swim, I grew up in Chicago as a non-swimmer. Over the decades, I have realized that mother operated on an axis of fear. Reprogramming my brain away from this phobia of water took years of swimming lessons, mindfulness, a patient partner and above all else the welcoming sea. Public swimming pools are not so hospitable. They are cacophonic with children, hard with brick and steel, harshly lit by fluorescent squares and taste and smell of chlorine. The sea has far more convivial sounds, textures, luminosity and chemosensory experiences.

From late spring to early autumn, the beaches of the Cote d’Azur are abuzz with talking and laughing, children playing and cafes clanking plates and hissing out espressos. Yet, as soon as I plunge into the sea, the beach sounds become muffled and dispersed. Better still, with my head underwater, a meditative silence imbues my being. Mindful, I adjust my hearing to the gentle hum, a sense of motion. I do not know if it is from the waves or inside my head when my ears are filled with water.

From late autumn to early spring, the shoreline is less populated. The sea is temperamental, with only the odd quiet day. Mostly, it is a symphony of waves, caused by a local rainy season and the movement of currents far beyond my sight somewhere between Europe and North Africa. These waves rumble as they hit the sandy shores and splash on to the shale beaches.

The sea water is soft, embryonic. The fluidity cleanses and changes shape as it undulates and foams and slaps my face when I come up for air. It feels icy but there is no ice in February and March, and I must wear a wetsuit. The rest of the year, it is refreshingly cooler than the air temperatures.

The seafloor can be grainy with fine pebbles or soft, pillowy with sand. Yet, in some areas, it is hard with rounded slippery rocks and boulders sharp with brittle edges. This textured tapestry of supple and coarse surfaces shifts with the movement of waves, sea creatures and interlopers like me.

After a storm, the feeling of the sea is disrupted by sand floating up but never reaching the top. It must have been under the mini pebbles. Pieces of flotsam – torn shards of palm – bob on the surface. The murkiness means I cannot see any fish. I want to run it all through a filter.

A strand of pearl-like lamps along the promenade lights up the beach at night. But the sea has its own jeweled magic as stars and the moon illuminate the surface, reflecting sparkles of frothy waves. The longer I stare at the sea and the night sky, the harder it is to distinguish them. They are with their own cornucopia of living organisms symbiotically connected. At that moment, I am meditating with my eyes open and feel that I too am part of this symbiosis. I dare not swim at night in the wavy darkness, not out of fear but of not wishing to disturb the sleep of diurnal fish. Like me, they have their circadian rhythms.

I can taste the salt of the water in the corners of my lips as I am one of those swimmers who breathes out of their mouth. Taste and smell go together, a kind of synesthesia, where multiple senses are experienced at once. I taste with my nose a saltiness that is not granular like table salt but smooth. Sometimes there is a smell of fish that is in the air, but which I know comes from above the surface, far from the shore. In the distance, I see the culprit. A fishing boat with its rods and rigs crisscrossing in the air has filled its deck with sea bass and hake.

There are fish to watch, even swimming close to the shore. Three types of sea bass wiggle below me, darting away from time to time as if I, someone else or something has startled them. The most common are small white sea bass, which in certain light look silvery. That is when I get confused with anchovies, also common in the Mediterranean. In summer months I have seen black sea bass with their broad white stripes and their negative cousins, a sea bass that’s mostly white with a couple of vertical black stripes and one horizontal one along its spine-like top.

Further away from the shore, the braver swimmers are treated to swordfish and tuna, that is if the anglers are not too close. Tourists’ boats edge out further still for the dolphins arcing above the waves. But this is a double-sided coin. Overfishing, tourism and resort expansion along the coast have done their damage. The French Mediterranean is one of the most developed coastlines in the world.

Worst still is the frequency of heatwaves brought on by climate change. While the heatwaves on land understandably make for dramatic and worrying news, the marine heatwaves get less attention despite sea temperatures breaking records. Last summer, the sea temperature off the coast of Nice climbed to an unprecedented 30C. With this, underwater forests, such as the gorgonian, are starting to perish.

I have gone from being a child fearful of the sea to one who is fearing for the sea. Yet, the vastness of the coastline and my ability to swim in it throughout the year make me forgetful of these dangers, blinded by the beauty and the repetitive motions and sounds which blend me into their rhythms.

Migrating South for the Winter

As a child in Chicago, I knew elderly neighbours and the grandparents of my classmates who escaped the snow and ice by living in Florida for the winter months. I used to think of these snowbirds, as they were called, with just a hint of envy and sometimes contempt – what made them so special that they didn’t have to trudge through snow or chip ice off their cars?

Now I’ve become one of those snowbirds – well, sort of. In addition to the harsh winter months, I do spend a month of the autumn and another in late spring in the south of France. Summers, and the remaining weeks of autumn and spring are in Cambridgeshire, Britain. Perhaps I’m more of a blackbird than a snowbird. Blackbirds can withstand the British winters, with most staying through the early winter months before migrating, if they bother to migrate.

But this isn’t just about the weather. My migratory habits also have to do with wanting to experience diverse cultures, practice different languages and break the routines of living in one place for a stretch of time. It’s all part of my self-psychotherapy (I’ll revisit this later.)

With this coming and going, I mark the seasons differently now. I don’t know if I should even call them seasons anymore. As I experience nature at its peaks – the winter harvesting of oranges and lemons in the south of France, the spring tulips and summer marigolds in England – the natural year is without a sense of death and renewal. It’s nearly always in bloom and constantly changing – or undergoing shorter lifespans, with no time for mourning. Time has folded on me, the years without stark seasons appear to pass more quickly, and the transience of life is more evident.

What I’ve been reading…

Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place is a memoir about the author’s love for flat places, like the fens in England (where I live for half the year) and Scotland’s Orkney Island, while coming to terms with complex PTSD. This form of PTSD does not emerge from a warzone or a traumatic incident. It forms slowly over years. In Masuud’s case from her childhood in Pakistan under a controlling father, a medical doctor, who could not relate to having only girls and who treated them medically and psychologically like ‘lab rats’ as Masud realises with hindsight.

When I read her description of complex PTSD, I recognised elements of my own life. Back to self-psychotherapy. It has taken me decades to not see the world through the filter of my dysfunctional and at times verbally abusive family:

‘…complex PTSD is a condition that only gains meaning beyond the situation that caused it. You adapt to the world you find yourself in….If you stay in that environment [your] instincts can help to keep you alive. It’s when you leave that environment that they become maladaptive. Then – and only then – are you a damaged person. You have to laboriously unlearn all those habits, and invent new ones, in a world whose very calmness feels frightening and unreliable to you.’

Masud ties together the solace she finds in the flat countryside with the need to escape childhood memories and learn to live in her new non-traumatising environments as a student, a colleague and as a friend. She turns the tormented memories of Pakistan into the stable sense of self found in the wonder and openness of the British flatlands.

I’ve also been dipping into the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli. This late 19^th century poet is one of the most read in Italy. In brief, Pascoli led a tragic life, losing his father, who was murdered by an assassin, at the age of 12 and later witnessing the early deaths of his mother, two brothers and a sister. Despite his poverty, he was able to attend university, becoming a scholar and a political activist in the emerging socialist movement. His writing reflects both the conversational vernacular of his humble upbringing with the elevated expression of a Latin scholar. Reading Pascoli in Italian makes this not only a slow pleasurable read, but also a formidable linguistic exercise. Having said that, in any language, Pascoli’s writing is accessible while giving the reader a little symbolism to deconstruct. In what I suspect was Pascoli’s journey into self-psychotherapy, this poem uses natural images to reflect on the ideas of family, memories and the brevity of life:

Night-Blooming Jasmine

(translated by Susan Thomas)

And the night-blooming flowers open,
open in the same hour I remember those I love.
In the middle of the viburnums
the twilight butterflies have appeared.

After a while all noise will quiet.
There, only a house is whispering.
Nests sleep under wings,
like eyes under eyelashes.

Open goblets exhale
the perfume of strawberries.
A light shines there in the room,
grass sprouts over the graves.

A late bee buzzes at the hive
finding all the cells taken.
The Hen runs through the sky’s blue
yard to the chirping of stars.

The whole night exhales
a scent that disappears in the wind.
A light ascends the stairs;
it shines on the second floor: goes out.

And then dawn: the petals close
a little crumpled. Something soft
and secret is brooding in an urn,
some new happiness I can’t understand yet.

Rethinking Nature

With the lockdown, many us of have had the pleasure of observing more creatures, breathing in palatably cleaner air and hearing birdsong on a scale never heard before. In some online circles, this has produced a ‘back to nature’ movement that goes far beyond the obvious need to reduce greenhouse gases to save our planet from becoming an over-heated death trap. Sorry to be so grim.

The Observer columnist Kenan Malik rightly criticised this wave of naïveté, its meme ‘The Earth is healing, we are the virus’ and much of the pro-nature public discourse around it (10 May 2020). It’s not that climate change or the toxic environment we live in are desirable. Far from it. But should we let nature take complete control?

For the first time ever I have seen goldfinches in a park and a private front garden in our town of Ely.

Nature is not entirely benign. I’m reminded of Tennyson’s image of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw.’ There is a litany of natural disasters that have destroyed homes and livelihoods and have brought about disease and taken lives for centuries. Humans have reduced some of the impact of these disasters by engaging in some nature-defying sciences and technologies for which any sentient being is grateful.

I inhale the cleaner air and notice the quieter streets as I jog through town.

Malik argues that romanticising nature is the preserve of those who live in rich countries with electricity, transport systems and access to medicine. I see the truth in this and saw this idea crop up a few days later when I was watching a lockdown YouTube video from the Royal Academy of Arts (Painting the Modern Garden: from Monet to Matisse). One of the expert horticulturalists pointed out that with modernity came the growth of the middle classes and the idea of creating gardens for pleasure. That is, gardening was no longer just about growing the potatoes and other veg to sustain lives. At least not in richer countries and this is still true today.

I have never seen an orange-tip butterfly until two weeks ago.

I’m left both enlightened and uneasy with Malik’s conclusion: ‘It is the poor, whether in rich countries or the global south, who must suffer from industrial pollution, are most imperilled by climate change and most threatened by the consequences of coronavirus. This is not because humans are violating nature, but because societies are structured in ways that ensure that innovation and development remain the privilege of the few, while deprivation and ill health are the lot of the many.’

This could be misread as a denial of humans violating nature. I trust that Malik knows that humans have violated nature, but they have also fought it in order to save lives, as Malik notes in his examples. It is also true that social inequalities have played a huge role in the climate crisis we are now confronted with. I think we can acknowledge these points, stay clear of romanticising nature, while still appreciating the ways nature has been showing off while much of the industrial world is in lockdown.