Our Brothers and Sisters in the Sea – Writing Prompt

“It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and The Sea

What we’ve witnessed during lockdown is nature rushing into the vacuum we left behind. Goats taking over towns, sheep on roundabouts, eagle shadows over the moors, birdsong louder than traffic drone. And it’s made us feel alive despite the isolation, we feel connected again to a living world of wildness. It’s a sacred thing, that blood heart joy we feel when we see something living:

Only animals
make me believe in God now

– so little between spirit and skin,

any gesture so entirely themselves.

From Migration by Mark Doty

Animals are of this world and in this world in a way that is wholly connected. In a way we struggle to get. This feeling of wonder is intensified when we see creatures who live in the elements we can’t access – air, ice, water. Whales beach or seals rest on the shore, people come to help. To watch. To wonder. In these moments we don’t see difference but kinship.  We breathe like them. We fear like them. We play like them. We hurt like them. That line between us – the shape of a body, a hand dissolves, we see fingers in fins.

There are many theories about our human relationship with the sea, rooted in our foetal memory from being nurtured in saltwater. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, though flawed, is an attempt to build a scientific story around the human body – webbed fingers, nakedness, subcutaneous fat, direction of hair, walking upright. The theory imagines adaptations made to enable humans to thrive on the seashore. The reason it endures is perhaps less because of reason and more because it speaks to a need to connect with water, the feeling that going under is somehow going home.

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

From Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich

Last summer, walking early with my son and partner on Saltburn beach we spotted a fin rising from the water, then another and another, then a shining back breaching the water. We kept looking at the sea. We looked at the people around us, all calling to one another to turn all eyes towards the sea. People rushing along the pier to get a closer look. This electric unspoken connection between all who were looking and the creatures in the sea.

The human obsession with understanding difference, to categorise and classify, to divide the species is dangerous and leads to the exploitation of wildlife. But there are places, like the seashore, where these divisions become meaningless. The seashore, rather than being a dividing line between us and the un-like, the uncanny, is a place of encounter. It is a place where we lose a little humanness and find the familiar.

Every peeping, clicking, barking thing here lives twice,

One wet, one half-dry life,

A fin is a finger is a flipper is foot

from Stonedancing by Carmen Marcus

I want to write something about this connectedness. I’d love it if you could share with your encounters with creatures from the sea and your experiences in water to help me to explore and understand how we live with and connect to the sea and its inhabitants – our brothers and sisters in the sea.

All you need to do is answer the following questions:

1. Do you go in the sea? This can be swimming, surfing, paddling.
2. How does it make you feel to be in the water?
3. Do you have a specific memory of going in the sea? Please share
4. What is your favourite sea creature? Why?
5. Do you have a specific memory of a sea creature encounter? Please share the story.
6. How do you feel when you see sea life?

I’m hoping to use these responses for a project I’m doing about a place without borders, not just geographical but the borders we erect between human and non-human. Please send your responses to carmenellen@hotmail.co.uk. Thanks for taking part, I can’t wait to hear your sea stories.