Reflections riding on a blue wave

Its return shows that we need spaces where nature can communicate with us

- Gena Soh

The return of the bioluminescent waves to the Republic's southern shore last week brought me back to the first time I saw the sea come alive with its glow in March.

I had gone with the microbial ecologists from Nanyang Technological University who were there to collect samples and was persuaded to swim in the sea after being convinced of its safety.

With the water a void capable of making known it was alive, every movement I made created hellfire angels which flew away from me as I swam.

So mesmerised, I remember swimming out further, entranced by the light I was making with nature, that the water under my feet turned cold and I could no longer feel the ground. I was surprised by my compulsion to keep on swimming, as though I had been hypnotised by a mute siren made of light.

Sitting on the sand later, watching blue darts of light shoot through each wave as it crashed into shore, I recalled a bit from Merlin Sheldrake's book Entangled Life, about how truffles are capable of emitting a scent that "speaks a language so piercing and simple that even we can understand it", that we send pigs in search of them so that they can end up in our mouths.

It made me wonder what this luminous beauty, an impersonal chemical reaction between the enzymes luciferin and luciferase, was trying to communicate about nature to us.

Urbanites will be able to relate when I say it can be hard to know nature, especially in tropical cities.

There is a poem by W.S. Merwin called A Last Look that goes, "some of the friends will think of trees as pleasant in a minor way, much alike after all, to us" - as though nature is only a reflection of what we are capable of projecting upon it, as most tropical trees blur into sheets of green blankness, inscrutable and indistinguishable, a frame to one's own fantasy.