The Life Stories of Stones: Trauma, Alonetude, and Learning Through Deep Time
I have come to understand that stones carry life stories.
Las piedras hablan. The stones speak.
Stone Wash
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
They speak through surface and fracture, through accumulation and erosion, through the long patience of matter shaped by time. Sitting with stone has shifted how I understand trauma, recovery, and the specific quality of solitude I am calling alonetude: intentional, embodied, chosen solitude as healing practice. The land has become both witness and teacher, offering forms of knowing that sit beyond language yet resonate deeply with what scholarship on place, embodiment, and healing has long described.
This is methodological work. Nash (2004) argues that Scholarly Personal Narrative honours lived experience as legitimate scholarly data when properly contextualized within theoretical frameworks. What follows represents this integration: a personal encounter with stone, theoretical frameworks that help me understand what I am experiencing, and the development of alonetude as both a lived practice and a conceptual contribution.
The stones offer what I am calling the pedagogy of deep time, a form of land-based learning that operates at a geological rather than a human scale, providing perspective on trauma recovery that conventional therapeutic timelines cannot access.
Aprendo del tiempo profundo. I learn from deep time.
What the Tide Leaves
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Story of Transformation: Holding Heat Without Burning
One volcanic rock face appears frozen mid-flow, capturing the precise moment when molten lava solidified. Its early life was shaped by intensity and force. Heat moved the land. Fire restructured matter.
Over time, that same surface has become a place of quiet shelter. Lichens grow. Birds rest. The stone carries the memory of heat without reliving it.
Recuerda el fuego sin arder. It remembers the fire without burning.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Linking to Trauma Theory:
Herman (2015) describes trauma recovery as occurring in stages: establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma narrative, and restoring connections with others. But she acknowledges that recovery is neither linear nor complete. Some trauma leaves permanent marks even as healing proceeds. The volcanic stone embodies this precisely. The violence of eruption is permanent in the stone’s composition and structure, yet the stone is also transformed—cooled into something that can be touched, that can hold life, that functions as a foundation rather than an active threat.
Van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma resolution occurs when the body learns safety again rather than through cognitive understanding alone. The stone teaches this lesson through its material presence. My body responds to the touch of the stone that was once fire. My nervous system registers: this heat has cooled. This violence has integrated. This danger has passed. The teaching is somatic, pre-reflective, accessed through touch rather than through thought.
El cuerpo aprende lo que la mente no puede enseñar. The body learns what the mind cannot teach.
Alonetude as a Necessary Condition:
This learning requires the specific conditions alonetude provides. Alonetude differs from loneliness (involuntary, depleting) and from simple solitude (neutral absence of others). Aloneness is intentional, embodied, chosen solitude undertaken with a specific purpose: to create conditions where nervous system regulation becomes possible, where body knowledge can emerge, where integration can occur at the pace trauma requires rather than the pace productivity demands.
What the Tide Leaves
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
In alonetude, I have time to sit with this stone. To touch it repeatedly over days. To allow my body to learn from it without hurry, without interpretation, without needing to translate the experience into productivity or outcome. The stone’s patience meets my need for slow learning. Alonetude creates the temporal and spatial conditions where this encounter becomes transformative rather than merely observational.
La soledad intencional crea espacio para sanar. Intentional solitude creates space for healing.
The Story of Survival: Fracture as Record
A tall rock split by a narrow vertical fracture stands nearby. Light passes through the opening. The break records a moment when pressure exceeded capacity. Thermal shock. Accumulated stress. A single event or many.
The defining part of this story lives in what followed. The stone remains upright. Gravity and friction hold its halves together. Endurance continues.
La fractura no es el final. Es parte de la historia. The fracture is not the end. It is part of the story.
Embodied Epistemology:
Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) argues that we know the world primarily through our bodies before we know it through concepts. Looking at this fractured stone, I understand fracture differently than I would through reading about structural failure. My body reads the crack as a text. My hands want to touch it. My eyes trace the line from bottom to top. My breathing synchronizes with the stone’s stillness. This is what Sheets-Johnstone (2011) calls kinesthetic knowing, knowledge that emerges through movement and sensory engagement rather than through abstract reasoning.
The fractured stone teaches through its material presence. The crack is visible. Light passes through. Yet the stone stands. Has stood for millennia. Will stand for millennia more. My body learns from this: fracture and standing can coexist. Breaking and continuing can be simultaneous rather than sequential.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Roto pero de pie. Broken but standing.
Linking to Personal Trauma Context:
For five months before this retreat, I witnessed an addiction crisis in someone I love. The vigilance fractured something in me, fractured my capacity for rest, for trust, for allowing things to unfold without constant monitoring. Figley (1995) calls this secondary traumatic stress or compassion fatigue: the emotional and psychological impact of sustained exposure to another’s trauma. Boss (1999) terms it an ambiguous loss: grief without closure, living loss, frozen grief because the person remains physically present while psychologically transformed.
El dolor sin cierre. The pain without closure.
The fractured stone offers a different narrative than clinical diagnoses provide. It says: you broke under pressure that exceeded your capacity. This is honest. This is a record of what happened. And you remain standing. The fracture is now part of your structure. Part of your story. It has made you different, but has brought nothing to an end.
In alonetude, I can sit with this teaching. Can allow the stone’s fracture to normalize my own. Can stop pathologizing what happened to me and start recognizing it as a truthful response to impossible conditions.
La verdad sobre lo que rompió. The truth of what broke.
The Story of Accumulation: Becoming Through Layers
At the waterline, a stone is fully covered in barnacles. Its original surface no longer shows. Time here works through attachment rather than loss.
Las capas cuentan la historia. The layers tell the story.
Feminist Epistemology and Situated Knowledge:
Haraway (2013) argues against the “god trick” of seeing from nowhere, from no body, with no particular situated perspective. She insists that all knowledge is situated, embodied, and particular. The barnacle-covered stone embodies this epistemology. The stone’s “original” state is no more real or valuable than its current state. Both are legitimate. Both are true. Both constitute the stone’s being at different moments in its becoming.
This challenges the therapeutic narrative that positions healing as a return to some pre-trauma state. Alcoff and Gray (1993) critique this in survivor discourse: the assumption that there exists some “authentic self” that trauma covered over and that must be excavated, recovered, and restored. But what if, as the barnacle-covered stone suggests, we are always the sum of what has accumulated? What if there is no pure original state to return to because identity forms through layering rather than through preservation of the untouched core?
No hay yo original que recuperar. Soy la suma de lo acumulado. There is no original self to recover. I am the sum of what has accumulated.
Alonetude as Epistemological Practice:
In alonetude, I stop seeking to return to some earlier version of myself. The thirty days by the sea are creating a different epistemological stance: acceptance of accumulation. Recognition that sixty years of lived experience—jobs held, places inhabited, people loved, losses carried, joys known—have created the person I currently am. The barnacles are the story, alongside the stone. I am both stone and barnacles. Both foundation and accumulation.
This represents what Code (1991) calls epistemic authority: the right to be heard as a credible knower. For twenty-five years of precarious academic employment, my epistemic authority was constantly questioned. My knowledge claims required defending. My lived experience needed validating through external frameworks. The barnacle-covered stone teaches a different epistemology: accumulated experience creates rather than corrupts knowledge. The layers tell the story. All of it together constitutes what can be known from this particular situated location.
Mi experiencia es conocimiento legítimo. My experience is legitimate knowledge.
The Story of Longing: Reaching as Meaning
Five stone pillars rise from the sea, shaped by erosion that removed everything around them. They look like fingers reaching skyward. For millions of years, they have extended upward without touching what they reach toward.
Alcanzar sin llegar. To reach without arriving.
Linking to Meaning-Making Research:
Park (2010) defines meaning-making as the process through which individuals integrate difficult experiences into their life narratives in ways that restore coherence and purpose. Traditional meaning-making research often implies that meaning is found through resolution, through making sense of what happened in ways that allow closure.
But the reaching stone pillars suggest a different model. They have been reaching for millions of years. They will never grasp the sky. Yet the reaching itself constitutes their meaning, their purpose, their way of being in the world. Resolution is neither necessary nor possible. What matters is orientation, direction, and the sustained effort toward something beyond current grasp.
Frankl (1959/2006) argues that meaning comes from orientation toward what matters rather than from the achievement of specific outcomes. The stone pillars embody this. Their reach creates their significance. Their effort defines their being. Arrival is irrelevant because the reaching itself is the point.
El esfuerzo mismo importa. The effort itself matters.
Alonetude and Reconceptualizing Success:
Standing (2011) describes the precariat as a class of workers in chronic insecurity, always preparing to leave, unable to establish roots, and constantly vulnerable. Twenty-five years of contract work taught me the lesson of precarity: reaching equals grasping, or it equals failure. If you are reaching toward something (security, stability, permanence) and fail to grasp it, you have failed.
Veinticinco años de inseguridad. Twenty-five years of insecurity.
The stone pillars teach otherwise. In alonetude, I can allow this different model. Can recognize that much of what I have been reaching toward (permanent employment, financial security, recognition within academic hierarchies) may never be grasped. But the reaching itself—the effort toward meaningful work, toward contributing to knowledge, toward supporting students, toward living with integrity—that reaching has value independent of whether it culminates in traditional markers of success.
This is what alonetude allows: space to reconceptualize what success might mean when conventional metrics remain inaccessible. Space to let reaching be enough.
Rock Pillars
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
El alcance basta. The reaching is enough.
The Story of Erasure: What Endures Through Wearing Away
A smooth rock face bears the mark of wind, sand, and tide. Everything that once protruded has been worn down through repetition. What remains resists.
Lo que queda resiste. What remains resists.
Deep Time as Therapeutic Frame:
Bjornerud (2018) calls this timefulness, the capacity to recognize that everything exists in time, that what looks solid and permanent is actually fluid and changing when viewed at an appropriate scale. The smooth stone is being worn away grain by grain. In a million years, it will be noticeably smaller. In ten million years, it might be gone entirely, returned to sand, redistributed across the seafloor.
This scale reframes trauma recovery. Porges (2011) emphasizes that nervous system regulation happens gradually through repeated experiences of safety rather than through single interventions. Each safe encounter removes some infinitesimal amount of hypervigilance. Each moment of rest slightly reduces chronic activation. Over time, over much more time than our urgency wants, the system transforms.
Grano por grano. Momento por momento. Grain by grain. Moment by moment.
The smooth stone teaches patience with this process. A transformation that takes millions of years still qualifies as a transformation. Slow change is still change. Patient work over time moves mountains, literally, through the process of erosion that the stone embodies.
Smooth Rocks
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Alonetude’s Temporal Gift:
Alonetude provides temporal conditions that contradict productivity culture’s demand for immediate, measurable, documented progress. Thirty days is insufficient to fully restore nervous system regulation after decades of chronic threat. But thirty days allows beginning. Allows first movements toward calm. Allows the body to experience sustained safety long enough to register that safety exists, that rest is possible, and that hypervigilance can soften slightly without catastrophe.
The smooth stone reminds me: this is enough. This beginning. This first slight softening. Mountains move through repetition of infinitesimal change. I need only participate in the process. Trust the slow work.
Confío en el trabajo lento. I trust the slow work.
Dragon Face
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Ongoing Story: Stillness That Moves
A small basalt stone now rests on my desk. One side feels smooth from the water. The other remains rough where a break once exposed its interior. Oxidation continues. Temperature shifts create microscopic changes.
Even in stillness, transformation continues.
Incluso en la quietud, el cambio continúa. Even in stillness, change continues.
Body as Archive:
Derrida (1996) theorizes the archive as dynamic rather than static, constantly being produced and reproduced rather than simply stored. Foucault (1969/1972) adds that archives are selective, shaped by power, reflecting what is deemed worth preserving while silencing what is excluded.
The stone on my desk functions as what I am calling a material archive, an archive that exists in matter rather than in text, in physical form rather than in language. It archives the heat that formed it, the cooling that transformed it, the water that smoothed it, the break that roughed it, and the ongoing oxidation that reddens it. All of this remains accessible through touch, through observation, through sustained attention to its material presence.
Archivo material. Archivo viviente. Material archive. Living archive.
My body similarly functions as an archive. Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes this: the body keeps the score. Trauma is stored somatically. The nervous system holds memories conscious mind may never access. Recovery requires helping the body learn safety again through somatic practices that update the archive, that add new experiences of calm to counterbalance stored experiences of threat.
El cuerpo recuerda lo que la mente olvida. The body remembers what the mind forgets.
The stone on my desk reminds me that I am archive. Those sixty years of experience live in this body. That recovery means adding new material to the archive rather than erasing old material. That healing is an accumulation of safety experiences sufficient to counterbalance threat experiences. That transformation continues even when it appears to be stillness.
Alonetude as Archival Practice:
This thirty-day retreat is archival work. Each morning of waking without crisis adds to the body’s archive of safe wakings. Each swim adds to the archive of joyful movement. Each stone touched adds to the archive of curiosity satisfied. Each sunset watched adds to the archive of beauty witnessed. The body is learning through repetition. The archive is being updated. New material is accumulating.
Día por día, construyo un nuevo archivo. Day by day, I build a new archive.
The stone teaches patience with this archival process. Its archive spans millions of years. Mine spans weeks. Both are real. Both constitute legitimate forms of knowing and becoming.
Synthesis: Alonetude as Pedagogy of Deep Time
These stones form what I theorize as the pedagogy of deep time, a land-based learning that operates at a geological scale and offers a perspective on trauma recovery unavailable through conventional therapeutic timelines.
La pedagogía del tiempo profundo. The pedagogy of deep time.
Methodological Contributions:
This work contributes to several scholarly conversations simultaneously:
- Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004): Demonstrating how lived experience, when properly theorized and critically examined, generates legitimate scholarly knowledge
- Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Showing how land-based learning can support nervous system regulation in ways that complement but differ from clinical interventions
- Alonetude as Concept: Developing intentional, embodied, chosen solitude as distinct from loneliness and as a necessary condition for certain forms of healing and learning
- Embodied Epistemology: Illustrating how somatic knowing through sustained attention to the material world produces knowledge inaccessible through abstract reasoning alone
- Feminist Methodology: Centring lived experience, situated knowledge, and body wisdom as legitimate sources of scholarly authority
The Rock Face
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
What Stones Teach About Alonetude:
The stones clarify what alonetude makes possible:
- Time to learn at body speed rather than mind speed
- Space to sit with difficult knowledge without needing immediate resolution
- Permission to accumulate rather than excavate
- Freedom to reach without grasping
- Patience with the transformation that unfolds slowly
- Trust in processes that operate below conscious awareness
La alonetud permite lo que la urgencia niega. Alonetude permits what urgency denies.
Continuing Questions:
This research generates new questions:
- How might trauma recovery models incorporate geological time as a framework?
- What would therapy look like if it assumed healing takes decades rather than months?
- How can educational institutions support forms of knowing that require sustained solitude?
- What gets lost when we privilege verbal processing over somatic learning?
- How might alonetude be made accessible to those without the resources to retreat?
Preguntas que las piedras despiertan. Questions the stones awaken.
The stones continue their stories. I continue learning to read them slowly, with humility and trust in time.
Las piedras continúan. Yo continúo aprendiendo. The stones continue. I continue learning.
Con paciencia. Con tiempo. Con gratitud. With patience. With time. With gratitude.
The Pedagogy of Deep Time
Credit: NotebookLM, 2026
References
Alcoff, L., & Gray, L. (1993). Survivor discourse: Transgression or recuperation? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18(2), 260–290.
Bjornerud, M. (2018). Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world. Princeton University Press.
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Code, L. (1991). What can she know? Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Cornell University Press.
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Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1969)
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1959)
Haraway, D. (2013). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1. In Women, science, and technology (pp. 455-472). Routledge.
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence–from domestic abuse to political terror. Hachette uK.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011). The primacy of movement (Expanded 2nd ed.). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
