Score #25: Remember your oceanic ancestors

From sunrise to the following sunrise, do not look at a clock. Instead, remember your oceanic ancestors, listen to the rhythms of your body, observe the celestial dance you are participant in and take note of other bodies moving with you (water, animals, plants, other humans). Through words or image, express your experience.

At this time of year, after full moon and when the water temperature is right, entire colonies of coral reefs on the east coast of Australia simultaneously release millions of tiny egg and sperm bundles into the ocean. Humpback whales, with their new babies, return south for feeding season, guided by internal biological systems attuned to the moon, tides, currents, and seasons. At the intertidal zone, female fiddler crabs time the release of their eggs with the nocturnal spring tide and oysters adjust the opening of their shells – narrowing as the moon grows fuller and widening with the receding moon phase. Just like our oceanic kin, humans also have internal networks of clocks – cellular, circadian, lunar and seasonal – that regulate hormones, temperature, mood, appetite, thirst, attention, sleep and more. Changes in environmental conditions, exposure to electrical light and increase of climate change stressors are disturbing the biological clocks of many species, including humans. This occurs more rapidly than organisms can adapt, affecting fitness, behaviour and long term viability of populations. What drives the daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms in the human body? How can we attune with, and tend to these internal timing mechanisms? What is revealed about life around us and the planet we inhabit when we do so?

Score and text by Caitlin Franzmann, living in Brisbane, Australia.
Calligraphy by Tomoko Momiyama, living in Fukui, Japan.
The word “heal” in old Japanese, sounding “iyu”or [ijɯ], written with the artist’s menstrual blood and her grandmother’s calligraphy brush on one full moon day

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