I stood at the podium with three minutes to explain thirty days, nineteen years, and the question that has been living in my body for longer than I can name.
The 3 Minute Thesis competition at Thompson Rivers University, March 2, 2026. Secwépemc territory. One slide. One photograph I took beside the Sea of Cortez. One question on the screen behind me:
What happens when we stop running from silence and let it teach us how to heal?
I had three minutes. I had the whole project behind me: thirty days, eighty-one blog entries, thousands of kilometres of nervous system regulation, grief held and released, stones collected, pelicans watched, tears cried into salt water. I had a methodology grounded in the body. I had a word I invented, alonetude, and the conviction that it names something real.
Three minutes to say: precarious academic labour goes beyond economics. It lives in the body. It reshapes the nervous system. It forecloses the capacity for rest. And rest, genuine rest, embodied and unhurried, is a human right under international law, a matter of human dignity.
Three minutes to say: I went to Loreto, México, for thirty days alone. I brought my research questions, my sixty-year-old body, and one orange suitcase. I stayed until the sea taught me something a desk could never have offered.
I have no distance on how it went, exactly. I was inside it. I could feel the room listening. I could feel myself steady in a way I was unsteady a year ago, or six months ago, or even four months ago when I sat alone in the casita watching the sun set over the Sea of Cortez, wondering if any of this would ever be finished.
It is finished. And it is being heard.
Alonetude: The Healing Practice of Chosen Solitude.
Three minutes. Nineteen years. Thirty days by the sea. One breath before I spoke.
Thompson Rivers University | 3 Minute Thesis | March 2, 2026 | Kamloops, BC | Secwépemc Territory
