Ten days to build a foundation.
Perhaps small, you might think.
Too brief, it seems, for anything significant.
But foundations are built to be solid, never showy.
They are meant to hold.
Hidden underground, bearing weight,
making everything above them possible.
I came here exhausted.
Sleep fragmented, thoughts scattered,
body braced for threats that never came
but whose approach I had learned to anticipate
with the precision of an expert meteorologist
reading the weather that only I could see.
Ten days to teach my nervous system:
The emergency is over.
The storm has passed.
You can stop bracing now.
Ten days of the same evening sequence.
Ten days of the same morning light.
Ten days of pelican fishing at predictable times.
Ten days of waves maintaining their patient rhythm.
Ten days of data accumulating below conscious awareness.
And somewhere in those ten days,
my body decided to believe it.
La fundación sostiene.
The foundation holds.
Without forcing it.
Without earning it.
Without proving myself worthy.
Because I maintained conditions.
Because I honoured rhythms.
Because I stopped interfering
with processes wiser than conscious thought.
Ten days.
Diez días.
The Sand Shadow
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Translation Note
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com