Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
A Vignette on Staying Anyway
Title: Portable Colour
Artist Statement
It travels with me.
As permission, beyond equipment. The palette sits quietly on the table, its circular wells holding pigments that feel less like supplies and more like emotional registers. Reds that hold heat. Blues that steady breath. Yellows that carry small, stubborn forms of optimism. I open it when the moment calls. Its presence alone is enough to remind me that expression remains available when language recedes.
What strikes me most is its containment.
Each colour held in its own boundary, yet arranged in relationship to the others. No hierarchy. No single tone dominating the field. It mirrors something I am relearning within myself, that emotions can coexist without needing resolution. That intensity and calm, grief and curiosity, fatigue and wonder can sit side by side without cancelling one another out.
In the context of this journey, the palette becomes less about making images and more about making space. A small, portable landscape of possibility. Evidence that creativity thrives even without perfect conditions. Only willingness. Only presence.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I have learned to stay anyway.
Before Dawn (1995)
The doughnut shop opened at five. I arrived at four-thirty to start the coffee, to arrange the trays, to tie on the apron that smelled of yeast and sugar and the particular exhaustion of people who work before the sun rises. I was twenty-five years old. I had three children at home. I had textbooks in my bag.
Between customers, I would pull out whatever I was reading that week. Introduction to Political Science. Organizational Behaviour. The pages grew soft from handling, spotted with fingerprints I carried from my shift into my afternoon class, and my afternoon class began. I had no idea then that I was living a paradox: surrounded by people all morning, profoundly alone in what I was trying to become. No one in my family had gone to university. No one I worked with understood why I would spend money we could barely spare on books I read standing up behind a counter at five in the morning.
I think now about what I was learning in those hours before dawn. Beyond the content of the textbooks, though, that mattered. I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos. I was learning that solitude differs from simple aloneness. You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose. You can be physically alone and feel accompanied by something larger than yourself. The space between five and nine, between the first customer and the last page I could read before class, became a kind of practice. I lacked language for it then. I do now. I call it alonetude: the contemplative, chosen engagement with solitude that allows you to be genuinely present to yourself rather than merely by yourself.
I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos.
The Long Middle
Years passed. I completed my degrees. I built a career contract teaching at Thompson Rivers University, standing in front of classrooms instead of behind counters, talking about leadership, ethics, and organizational behaviour to students who reminded me of myself. Some of them worked night shifts before my morning classes. Some of them calculated whether they could afford both tuition and groceries. I saw them, because I had been them.
But the uncertainty never fully lifted. For seventeen years, I have worked as a contract faculty member. Each semester brings the question of whether I will be offered work. Each contract is temporary. I have applied for permanent positions more times than I can count and watched others receive what I was told remained just out of my reach. The institution depends on my flexibility, my expertise, and my willingness to show up semester after semester without guarantees. I have learned to live in the space between being essential and being disposable. I have learned that staying anyway is its own form of practice.
When people ask about my research on precarity and belonging in higher education, I sometimes want to say, “I am living this from the inside.” I am living it. The international students I research, the contract faculty I represent, and my children, who need me to show up every single day, regardless of what next semester holds. We are all navigating institutions that claim to welcome us while refusing to secure our place within them.
You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose.
Title: Where Light Breaks Open
Artist Statement
It began with colour before it began with form.
The yellow arrived first. Unplanned. Released. It spread across the page with a warmth that felt less like sunlight and more like emergence. Around it, blues and greens moved in to hold it, to give it somewhere to rest, The horizon line came later, almost as an afterthought, a quiet gesture to ground what was otherwise dissolving.
What I notice now is the permeability of everything.
No edge holds for long. Colour bleeds into colour. Water becomes sky. Sky becomes field. Even the darker mass on the right, tree or memory or shelter, participates in the landscape rather than interrupting it. This is what happens when I paint from sensation rather than observation. The world appears less fixed. More relational. More felt than seen.
In this way, the piece documents a state rather than a place.
A moment where brightness felt held, where saturation was safe to carry. Where expression moved ahead of interpretation. I released the outcome. I let the pigments find their own conversations across the paper.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Thirty Days on the Sea of Cortez
Today, I stood on a malecón in Loreto, Mexico, watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez. I was three thousand kilometres from home, alone in a way I had forgotten since those early mornings behind the doughnut counter. Thirty days stretched before me. No students to teach. No meetings to attend. No one needed me to hold their world together. Just myself and the question of what I would find there.
What I found was presence. I began to understand that all those years of navigating precarity, of staying anyway when institutions offered no guarantees, had taught me something learned only that way. They had taught me how to be with uncertainty. They had taught me that safety lives in the felt sense, separate from the absence of risk, that you can meet whatever comes. They had taught me that meaning is woven into the walking itself.
I came to Loreto with a word: alonetude. This is a word I coined to describe the in-between place of loneliness and solitude. It names the experience of being genuinely present to yourself in solitude, of choosing to be alone in a way that restores rather than depletes. It requires four things: intentional choice, felt safety, present-moment awareness, and meaning integration. All four must be present. You cannot think your way into alonetude if your nervous system is screaming danger. You cannot force meaning onto empty time. But when the conditions align, something opens. You remember that you have always been enough, even when the world told you otherwise.
Title: Held in Stillness
Artist Statement I noticed the posture before I noticed the figure. Hands pressed together. Head slightly lifted. In pause, rather than performance. The stone carried a weight of quiet that felt older than the building behind it, older even than the palms rising into the sky. It stood there without announcement, without instruction, simply holding its position between ground and air. What stayed with me was the gesture of inwardness. Prayer, perhaps. Or reflection. Or the kind of listening that happens when words are no longer necessary. The surface of the sculpture is rough, almost weathered, yet the stance is gentle. It receives attention slowly, if one is willing to stop long enough. In that moment, I felt my own body respond. Shoulders lowering. Breath slowing. A subtle mirroring of the stillness in front of me. Recognition, rather than formal reverence. A reminder that quiet postures carry their own forms of strength. That stillness, too, can be an active state of being. Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Some things you carry with you. Some practices ask only for willingness. The conditions are secondary.
Staying Anyway
I hold what next semester brings with open hands. I hold whether the applications I have submitted will lead to interviews, to offers, to the security I have worked toward for decades. What I know is that I have learned to stay anyway. I have learned that the space between five and nine, between uncertainty and meaning, between isolation and alonetude, is where the real work happens. It is where we become the people we are trying to be, shaped by the precarity and carried through it.
The doughnut shop is long gone. But I still wake before dawn sometimes, still reach for whatever I am reading, still feel that particular presence that comes from being alone with your own becoming. Some things you carry with you. Some practices require nothing more than attention. They need only the willingness to stay, to pay attention, to believe that the doors of education are worth the cost of walking through them.
I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.
Title: Shared Horizon
Artist Statement They stood on the same rock but faced different directions. One turned outward toward the open water, body lifted, alert to movement beyond the shoreline. The other remained lower, closer to the curve of the stone, angled inward as if watching the rhythm of the waves meeting land. Two postures. Two orientations. One shared ground beneath their feet. What held my attention was the balance between them. There was no sense of separation, even in their difference. No competition for vantage point. Just a quiet coexisting. A reminder that presence rarely requires alignment. That companionship can exist without mirroring. That standing beside another means nothing about looking the same way. I watched them longer than I expected. The water moved constantly around the rock, never still, yet they remained steady within it. It felt familiar to me, this act of holding one’s place while everything else shifts. A small lesson offered without instruction. Stability as groundedness shared, across difference. Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I am still here.
I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.