To understand why last night matters so much, why one night of unbroken sleep marks such an important moment in this healing process, I need to explain how sleep actually works. I came to grasp this fully only after reading the research. Sleep is layered, active work. It is far more than “being unconscious” for seven or eight hours. Sleep is a process, a carefully organized progression through distinct stages that unfolds in a specific order throughout the night. Researchers refer to this pattern as sleep architecture (Walker, 2017).
Here is how it works. When we sleep, we move through stages. There are stages of light sleep, which researchers call Stage 1 and Stage 2 non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep for short. Then there is deep sleep, the third stage of non-REM sleep. Scientists also call this slow-wave sleep because, when they measure brain activity during this stage with an electroencephalogram, they see large, slow waves. Finally, there is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, named for the rapid eye movements that occur during this stage, even though the body is asleep (Walker, 2017).
We cycle through all stages all night. Instead, we repeatedly cycle through all of these stages. One complete cycle, from light sleep through deep sleep to REM sleep and back, takes about ninety minutes. A good night’s sleep involves completing four to six of these cycles, which is why we need seven to nine hours of sleep (Walker, 2017).
What I am learning is that each stage does something different and important for the body and mind. Light sleep is a transitional state. It eases us from being awake into deeper states. During this stage, our heart rate slows, our breathing steadies, and we begin to disconnect from what is happening around us. Deep slow-wave sleep is when the body undergoes physical repair. This is when tissues heal, the immune system strengthens, growth hormones are released, and our brains store the factual information we learned during the day, the kind of memory we can consciously recall later (Walker, 2017). REM sleep does different work. This is when we process emotions, when our brains integrate new learning with what we already know, when creative problem-solving happens, and when our psychological equilibrium gets maintained (Germain, 2013; Walker, 2017).
When sleep gets fragmented, when we wake up frequently or leave cycles incomplete, we miss essential processes. The body is unable to finish its maintenance work. This is what had been happening to me for months.
What the research taught me, and what my own body confirmed over these nine days, is that this architecture requires a specific function of the nervous system. Progression through these stages occurs only when the nervous system is in a particular state. Stephen Porges (2011, 2022), who developed a model of how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, calls this the state of genuine safety and connection. I will explain what this means because it is central to understanding what changed last night.
The genuine safety complex is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is associated with rest and restoration. Porges describes it as the most recent evolutionary branch of this system, unique to mammals. When we are in this state of genuine safety and connection, we feel safe. Our bodies can engage socially with others. Porges calls this “mammalian calm,” the state that allows for rest, restoration, intimacy, and even play. You can recognize this state in the body: the heart rate steadies with healthy variability, breathing is calm, the facial muscles relax, and we can make comfortable eye contact with others. And critically for sleep, in this state, we can surrender to unconsciousness without our nervous system remaining vigilant, constantly scanning for threats (Porges, 2011, 2022).
The problem is that when the nervous system remains in a defensive state, sleep deteriorates. There are two main defensive states. One is the body’s alert state, commonly known as the fight-or-flight response. When this system activates, heart rate increases, cortisol rises, muscles tense, and alertness heightens. The body is preparing to fight or run. The other defensive state is dorsal vagal shutdown, also known as the freeze or collapse response. This is when the body immobilizes, when we dissociate, when we metaphorically “play dead” because the threat feels overwhelming (Porges, 2011, 2022). When the nervous system stays in either of these defensive states, sleep becomes fragmented, shallow, and non-restorative (Germain, 2013; Mellman et al., 2002). The state of constant alertness, always scanning for potential threats, prevents the deep relaxation that complete sleep cycles require. The nervous system resists fully surrendering to sleep because, below conscious awareness, it assesses that doing so would leave us vulnerable to harm.
The research on trauma makes this relationship very clear. People diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, show severely disrupted sleep across multiple measures. Their sleep architecture looks broken. They obtain significantly less slow-wave sleep, resulting in less physical restoration. Their REM sleep is highly fragmented, compromising emotional processing. They wake frequently during the night, driven by what researchers call autonomic the body stuck in high alert, the nervous system’s persistent scanning for threat operating even during sleep (Germain, 2013; Mellman et al., 2002; van der Kolk, 2014).
But here is what matters for understanding my own experience: diagnosable PTSD is unnecessary to experience these patterns. Chronic occupational stress, particularly the sustained and unpredictable stress of precarious employment, produces remarkably similar patterns through the same underlying mechanism (Åkerstedt, 2006; Lallukka et al., 2010). Economic precarity, the sustained threat to livelihood and financial security, generates the same kind of autonomic the body stuck in high alert that traumatic events produce. The nervous system cannot distinguish between different types of threats to survival. It responds to the pattern of threat rather than to the specific content.
When I say I slept through the night, I mean that my autonomic nervous system maintained a state of genuine safety and connection, that state of felt safety, across multiple ninety-minute sleep cycles for seven consecutive hours. My body held the physiological state associated with safety long enough to complete the full restorative architecture of sleep. This is something my system has been unable to accomplish for longer than I want to admit.
Nine days. Nine complete cycles of consistent environmental cues, predictable daily rhythms, and the systematic absence of things my nervous system reads as threats. That is what it took for my nervous system to shift its baseline assessment from “unsafe, must remain vigilant” to “safe enough to rest completely.”
Table 1
Sleep Architecture and Autonomic States: Physiological Functions, Indicators, and Impacts of Disruption
Sleep Stage or Physiological State
Category
Description and Biological Function
Physical Indicators
Impact of Disruption or Stress
Key Research Citations
Source
Stage 1 & 2 Non-REM
Non-REM Sleep (Light Sleep)
Transitional states that ease the body from wakefulness into deeper sleep and progressive disconnection from the environment, supporting essential maintenance processes and preparation for restorative sleep.
Fragmentation disrupts maintenance processes and prevents progression into deeper restorative sleep cycles.
Walker (2017)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
Stage 3 Slow-wave Sleep
Non-REM Sleep (Deep Sleep)
Primary stage for physical repair, tissue healing, immune strengthening, and growth hormone release; supports consolidation of factual and recallable memories.
Large, slow brain waves measured by EEG (delta waves).
Loss of physical restoration; markedly reduced in individuals experiencing chronic stress or PTSD.
Walker (2017); Germain (2013); Mellman et al. (2002); van der Kolk (2014)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
REM Sleep
Rapid Eye Movement Sleep
Processes emotions, integrates new learning with prior knowledge, supports creativity, and maintains psychological balance.
Rapid eye movements with muscle atonia; variable heart rate and breathing.
Fragmentation impairs emotional processing and memory integration; commonly interrupted by autonomic the body stuck in high alert in PTSD.
Walker (2017); Germain (2013); Mellman et al. (2002)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
a state of genuine safety and connection
Parasympathetic State (Rest and Restoration)
State of felt safety that enables rest, social engagement, and the capacity to surrender to unconsciousness without vigilance.
Steady heart rate with healthy variability; calm breathing; relaxed facial muscles; ease in eye contact.
Inability to sustain this state interrupts restorative sleep cycles and shifts the system into defensive states.
Porges (2011, 2022)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
the body’s alert state
Defensive State (Fight-or-Flight)
Mobilization response to perceived threat, maintaining alertness and readiness for action.
Produces fragmented, non-restorative sleep and prevents the deep relaxation required for full sleep architecture.
Porges (2011, 2022); Germain (2013); Mellman et al. (2002)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
Note: This table integrates sleep-stage physiology with autonomic nervous system states to illustrate how safety, threat, and stress shape sleep quality. It emphasizes the interdependence between sleep architecture and autonomic regulation in restorative sleep and in trauma-related disruption.
Title: The Science of Resorative Sleep
Created by Notebook LM, 2026
This moment has clarified that restorative sleep is neither accidental nor simply a matter of time spent in bed. It is an embodied outcome of safety. Sleep architecture unfolds fully when the nervous system assesses the environment and the broader conditions of life as safe enough to release vigilance. One uninterrupted night mattered because it marked a physiological shift rather than a behavioural one. My body sustained a state of genuine safety and connection long enough to complete multiple cycles of repair, integration, and emotional processing. Healing, in this sense, emerged through conditions rather than effort. It arose as the threat receded, rhythms stabilized, and my nervous system received permission to rest. This understanding reframes sleep as a diagnostic signal of safety and a quiet indicator of recovery already underway.
References
Åkerstedt, T. (2006). Psychosocial stress and impaired sleep. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 32(6), 493–501. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.1054
Germain, A. (2013). Sleep disturbances as the hallmark of PTSD: Where are we now? American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(4), 372–382. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12040432
Lallukka, T., Rahkonen, O., Lahelma, E., & Arber, S. (2010). Sleep complaints in middle-aged women and men: The contribution of working conditions and work-family conflicts. Journal of Sleep Research, 19(3), 466–477. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2010.00821.x
Mellman, T. A., Bustamante, V., Fins, A. I., Pigeon, W. R., & Nolan, B. (2002). REM sleep and the early development of posttraumatic stress disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(10), 1696–1701. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.10.1696
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
Google. (2026). The science of restorative sleep [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Academic Lens
Finding a morning rhythm in a new place is a form of what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls the early conditions for flow: a structure that is self-chosen, repeatable, and calibrated to one's own pace. The body's uptake of a different daily rhythm also reflects Porges's (2011) nervous system model: the nervous system steadying one another with the environment rather than with institutional time. Rhythm, here, is a body-based baseline from which genuine inquiry becomes possible.
What does it mean to let the body lead? This morning I find out. I leave my journal on the table. I reach instead for the small cloth bag hanging by the door, the one I bought at the mercado for carrying treasure and now carry for carrying what the sea leaves behind.
Notation: A visual record of low tide as threshold, documenting how attention, touch, and found objects become a form of embodied knowing and creative recovery.
Low tide has pulled back the waterline like a curtain rising on a stage scattered with props. I walk slowly, head bent, eyes soft-focused, the way Iles-Jonas (2023) describes in her writing on beachcombing meditation, receiving rather than scanning urgently, open to what the shore offers. The repetitive motions of walking, bending, and standing begin to affect my nervous system. My breath slows. My shoulders drop. Something in my chest unclenches.
Notation: The shoreline at low tide reveals what is usually hidden. Exposed sand, scattered fragments, and a widened horizon mark a brief interval of openness before the sea returns.
A piece of sea glass catches the early light. Green, the colour of old wine bottles. Once sharp and dangerous, now softened by endless tumbling. I hold it to the sun and watch light move through it like water through memory. The edges are frosted, rounded, and safe to hold. I think about what time does to things. What salt and sand and constant motion do to the jagged parts of us.
This is wabi-sabi made visible. The Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness (Juniper, 2003; Koren, 1994). This sea glass, weathered and clouded, is more beautiful than the bottle it once was. The transformation requires time; I cannot rush. Patience, I am learning.
Note. Weathered sea glass gathered at low tide, softened by time, salt, and motion into fragments safe to hold.
I find a spiral shell, small enough to sit in my palm. Growth that moves outward while turning inward is a natural representation of how personal development requires both expansion and introspection. I find a piece of driftwood, silver-grey and salt-cured, dead wood given new life through salt and sun. Greenspan’s (2003) alchemy made visible the transformation of what appears finished into something with renewed purpose and beauty.
Note. A small spiral shell rests in the palm, holding outward growth and inward turning in a single form.
My cloth bag grows heavy with treasures. Each object becomes a small sermon on impermanence and resilience.
Recojo tesoros que el mar regala. I collect treasures that the sea gives back.
Back at the cottage, I spread my finds across the wooden table. The sea glass sits on my table. The shells are arranged by size. The smooth stones lined up like a quiet congregation. The driftwood pieces lay out like bones waiting to be assembled into meaning.
Image: The Artifact Archive Table
Note. Collected objects are sorted and arranged without a plan. Sea glass, shells, stones, and driftwood become a quiet archive of attention, presence, and embodied memory.
I begin to arrange the objects. With intuition rather than a plan, moving pieces like words in a sentence, I am still learning to speak. This is bricolage, creating with whatever is at hand. Lévi-Strauss (1966) described the bricoleur as one who makes do with available materials, creating meaning from found objects rather than purpose-made tools. Today, I am the bricoleur of the beach. The sea has provided my vocabulary. Now I am learning its grammar.
What I will make remains ahead of me. That feels important. For so long, productivity demanded knowing the end before beginning. Art asks something different. Art asks for presence without a predetermined outcome.
The morning passes without my noticing. When I finally look up, three hours have disappeared into flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) optimal experience made real in my own hands. I feel the particular satisfaction of having made something from nothing, of having spoken in a language older than words.
The Ideas That Help Me Think
Flow States and the Alonetude of Making
What happened at my table this morning has a name in positive psychology: flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), the Hungarian-American psychologist widely regarded as the father of flow research, described this state as complete immersion in an activity in which nothing else seems to matter, where the experience itself becomes so enjoyable that people pursue it for its own sake, regardless of cost. During flow, individuals report feeling strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and operating at peak capacity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
The term flow state refers to a psychological condition of complete immersion in an activity, characterized by deep concentration, diminished self-consciousness, and an altered sense of time. Unlike passive relaxation, flow emerges from active engagement in which skill level is well-matched to the challenge level. Tasks that are too easy tend to lead to boredom, while those that are too difficult often lead to anxiety. The balance between these extremes creates what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) describes as optimal experience.
Note. Shells, stones, coral, and driftwood settle together at the base of dry branches, held in place by gravity, wind, and time.Maybe someone put them there, or maybe the wind did?
From a neurological perspective, flow is associated with decreased prefrontal cortex activity, a phenomenon known as transient hypofrontality (Dietrich, 2004). This temporary reduction in executive functioning may help explain the loss of self-consciousness and altered time perception commonly reported during flow states. The inner critic quiets. The ruminating mind stills. What remains is presence.
For those healing from occupational trauma, this temporary relief from the always-on-guard, scanning for the next threat, self-monitoring that characterizes chronic stress, offers profound neurological rest. My morning spent arranging sea glass was far beyond a pleasant distraction; it was an active form of neurological recovery.
Table 1
Conditions for Flow and Their Manifestation in Beachcombing Art Practice
Accessible entry; endless possibilities for complexity
Definition
Beachcombing Art Manifestation
Clear goals
Accessible entry; endless possibilities for complexity
Finding treasures; creating aesthetic arrangement
Immediate feedback
Progress is visible and continuous
Each find is instant reward; arrangement evolves visually
Challenge-skill balance
Task difficulty matches ability level
Accessible entry; endless possibilities for complexity
Merged action-awareness
Complete absorption in activity
The ego temporarily suspends
Loss of self-consciousness
Ego temporarily suspends
No inner critic judging; simply making
Transformed time perception
Hours feel like minutes
The ego temporarily suspends
Note. Conditions adapted from Csikszentmihalyi (1990). Flow manifestations are documented through my own reflective journaling.
Blue Mind: The Neuroscience of Water Proximity
The therapeutic benefits of beachcombing extend beyond flow into what marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols (2014) describes as Blue Mind, a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peace, unity, and a sense of immediate satisfaction with life. In contrast to the frenetic Red Mind associated with constant digital stimulation, blue spaces activate a neurochemical cascade that supports relaxation, eases anxiety, and enhances creative thinking.
The term Blue Mind refers to the cognitive and emotional benefits derived from proximity to water environments. Research demonstrates that coastal residents experience greater positive psychological effects, including reduced stress and increased physical activity, compared to inland residents (White et al., 2021). Regular exposure to ocean environments can alter brain wave frequencies, putting individuals into meditative states while improving cognitive functions such as learning and memory.
Note. A hand rests on a smooth volcanic stone, registering weight, temperature, and presence through touch.
Negative ions in sea air have been shown to increase oxygen uptake in the human body, with potential benefits for mood and reductions in depressive symptoms (Perez et al., 2013). The rhythmic sound of ocean waves produces a steady, predictable auditory pattern that the nervous system tends to register as safe, supporting relaxation and reducing the vigilance associated with chronic stress (Nichols, 2014). This quality of constancy offers neurological reassurance, easing the body into a calmer baseline state.
For those carrying occupational trauma in their bodies, this neurological recalibration offers significant healing potential. The nervous system, attuned to environmental cues of safety and danger, reads the rhythmic constancy of waves as evidence of a stable, predictable environment. The nervous system can release its vigilant grip.
Beachcombing as Contemplative Practice
Beachcombing operates as what might be termed embodied mindfulness, a form of meditation that requires no instruction, no cushion, and no prescribed posture. The activity naturally anchors practitioners in present-moment awareness through sustained sensory engagement. The focused search for small treasures helps clear the mind, drawing the beachcomber into immediate connection with the earth, a state that meditation practitioners recognize as mindfulness (Iles-Jonas, 2023).
The term mindfulness refers to the psychological practice of being fully present and engaged in the current moment, aware of thoughts and feelings without judgment. Unlike formal meditation practices that can feel inaccessible or intimidating, beachcombing provides a low-pressure entry point into mindful awareness. The activity requires no prior training, carries no expectations of achievement, and offers immediate sensory rewards.
Note. Feet stand in moving water as the tide passes around them, marking a moment of arrival and release.
The repetitive nature of walking and bending creates a meditative flow state, as researchers describe it (Neurolaunch, 2025). The body moves rhythmically while the eyes scan softly. The mind quiets. Intrusive thoughts about past failures or future anxieties lose their grip when attention is occupied with the immediate question: Is that a piece of glass? The urgency of ordinary worries dissolves in the face of such simple, present-tense curiosity.
Table 2
Therapeutic Elements of Beachcombing Practice
Element
Mechanism
Healing Function
Wave sounds
Nervous system registers safety; a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, decreases
Walking rhythm activates the parasympathetic response
Note. Mechanisms synthesized from Nichols (2014), Neurolaunch (2025), and Iles-Jonas (2023).
Wabi-Sabi: The Aesthetic Philosophy of Transformed Imperfection
The sea glass I hold teaches what the Japanese have known for centuries. Wabi-sabi, a philosophical and aesthetic concept that emerged from fifteenth-century tea ceremony practice, centres on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. Koren (1994) describes wabi-sabi as an aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. This worldview stands in direct opposition to Western ideals that privilege newness, symmetry, and permanence.
Note. Blue pottery gathered together, holding depth, clarity, and the memory of water.
The term wabi originally carried connotations of solitude and life lived close to nature, away from society, but gradually evolved to suggest rustic simplicity, freshness, and quiet contentment. Sabi refers to the beauty that emerges with age, the patina of time and the visible wear that signals use and history (Juniper, 2003). Together, these concepts name an aesthetic sensibility that honours what Western culture often discards.
Sea glass embodies wabi-sabi with remarkable clarity. Once a manufactured object, sharp-edged, uniform, and purpose-made, it has been transformed by time and environment into something more beautiful than its original design. The frosted surface, rounded edges, and softened colours emerging from industrial origins mark a long journey through salt, sand, and continual tumbling. Here, imperfection becomes the source of beauty.
For those healing from trauma, wabi-sabi offers a radical reframe. Emergence from difficult experiences requires no polish, no perfection. Our rough edges, softened by time and held to the light, might reveal their own particular beauty. The cracks and weathering are evidence of survival, of passage through difficult conditions, of transformation that only occurs through endurance.
The Artifact Archive: Objects as Embodied Knowing
The term wabi originally carried connotations of solitude and life lived close to nature, away from society, but gradually evolved to suggest rustic simplicity, freshness, and quiet contentment. Sabi refers to the beauty that emerges with age, the patina of time and the visible wear that signals use and history (Juniper, 2003). Together, these concepts name an aesthetic sensibility that honours what Western culture often discards.
Sea glass embodies wabi-sabi with remarkable clarity. Once a manufactured object, sharp-edged, uniform, and purpose-made, it has been transformed by time and environment into something more beautiful than its original design. The frosted surface, rounded edges, and softened colours emerging from industrial origins mark a long journey through salt, sand, and continual tumbling. Here, imperfection becomes the source of beauty.
Rose and Bingley (as cited in Trauma-Informed Arts research) demonstrate how found objects in creative practice operate as gestural records of place-anchored identity shaped by migration and rupture. The sea glass I collect is far beyond decorative; it is data. Each piece carries information about where I have been, what caught my attention, and what resonated with my internal state on a particular day. Together, the collection maps a healing trajectory that words alone might miss.
Table 3
Artifact Archive: Collected Objects and Their Symbolic Resonance
Artifact
Physical Transformation
Metaphorical Teaching
Sea glass
Once sharp and dangerous, now softened by endless tumbling
Time and environment transform rough edges into beauty, safe to hold
Driftwood
Dead wood given new life through salt and sun
Greenspan’s (2003) alchemy: what appears finished can find renewed purpose
Spiral shell
Growth that moves outward while turning inward
Personal development requires both expansion and introspection
Smooth stones
Once jagged rock, worn smooth by constant motion
Persistent forces reshape even the hardest materials
Weathered logs
Trees that once stood tall, now horizontal, silver-grey
Rest after striving has its own dignity and beauty
Note. Artifact interpretations drawn from the researcher’s reflexive practice and the wabi-sabi aesthetic framework (Juniper, 2003; Koren, 1994).
Critical Analysis: The Privilege of Creative Solitude
Note. Wind-bent palms stand between desert and sea at dusk, holding a moment of calm made possible by time, place, and circumstance.
Before this reflection settles into unexamined celebration, critical analysis demands acknowledgment of the structural conditions enabling this practice. The ability to spend mornings beachcombing and afternoons making art requires particular material circumstances: freedom from wage labour during healing, financial resources for retreat accommodation, geographic access to the coastline, and physical mobility to walk and bend. These conditions are available only to some.
Inversion thinking, the practice of examining what an opposite perspective might reveal, asks a necessary question: What does this healing practice look like for those without such privilege? A single parent working multiple jobs cannot take time off in the mornings for beachcombing. A person with mobility limitations may find sandy shorelines difficult to navigate. An inland resident lacks access to the Blue Mind effects along the coast. The practice of creative solitude documented here exists within structures of class, geography, and ability that warrant careful scrutiny.
Note. A hand-crafted blanket reminds us that care, warmth, and repair have long been created collectively, often under conditions of constraint. Unlike coastal solitude, such forms of making emerge in shared spaces, through necessity as much as choice, offering a counterpoint to individualized narratives of healing shaped by access, time, and privilege. Made by a local artisan.
This acknowledgement leaves the healing potential of art-making and nature engagement fully intact. Rather, it situates individual practice within broader contexts of access and equity. The question then becomes how the principles of flow, tactile engagement, and creative expression might be made available across different life circumstances. Urban community gardens, accessible art spaces, and therapeutic programs designed for shift workers represent efforts to extend what I experience as individual privilege into more collective and inclusive forms of care.
Note. Paint layered onto stone becomes a portable site of flow and tactile engagement, suggesting how creative expression can travel beyond coastlines and retreats into shared, accessible spaces of care.
The risk of documenting healing through art and beachcombing is that it becomes another form of lifestyle prescription, another obligation for stressed workers to feel guilty about skipping. My intention is different: to understand what makes this practice healing, then to question how those elements might be adapted, modified, and extended to those whose circumstances differ from my own.
Art as Language Before Words
There are things I cannot say in sentences that my hands seem to know how to express. This is the territory of embodied cognition, the understanding that knowledge resides in the body as well as in the mind. When I arrange sea glass by colour, I am sorting more than objects. When I position pieces of driftwood to create negative space, I am composing something my conscious mind has yet to articulate.
Trauma-informed arts research supports this phenomenon. Embodied expression can enable release when verbal recounting feels inaccessible or unsafe (Rose and Bingley, as cited in Sunderland et al., 2022). The body functions as an archive, holding experiences that may resist verbal articulation yet emerge with clarity through creative processes. Movement, texture, colour, and arrangement become languages when words feel insufficient.
The term embodied cognition refers to the theory that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the physical world. Rather than operating solely through abstract mental activity, knowing emerges through sensory engagement, motor action, and bodily awareness. When I hold sea glass to the light, information passes between hand and eye, and something deeper than thought is activated.
Note. Waves break and recede across dark sand, leaving a thin lace of foam that marks the sea’s ongoing rhythm of arrival and release.
This matters for healing from occupational trauma, which often settles in the body as tension, a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, and disrupted inner body awareness. Talk therapy, while valuable, sometimes falls short of what the body holds. Creative practice offers an alternative pathway, one that supports processing through action and sensation rather than language alone.
Bricolage: Creating Meaning from What Is Available
The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) introduced the concept of bricolage to describe a mode of thinking and creating that works with whatever is at hand rather than seeking specialized materials or tools. The bricoleur, in contrast to the engineer who designs from first principles using purpose-made components, creates a heterogeneous repertoire of odds and ends from available fragments.
The term bricolage (from the French bricoler, to tinker) refers to the construction or creation of something from a diverse range of available things. In the context of healing practice, bricolage becomes a metaphor for working with what life has provided rather than lamenting what is absent. The sea glass was once waste. The driftwood was once a living tree. The shells housed creatures now gone. From these remnants, something new emerges.
This philosophy extends beyond physical art-making to the reconstruction of self after trauma. Healing asks us to become something new rather than who we were before. We heal by gathering the fragments of experience, the lessons learned, the strengths discovered, the perspectives shifted, and assembling them into something new. The bricoleur grieves no absence of ideal materials; she works with what the tide has brought in.
Notable observations: The combination of outdoor movement followed by indoor creative activity created a natural rhythm that felt restorative. Beachcombing functioned as a transition, leaving the casita’s contained space for the expansive shore and then returning with gathered materials to work with the hands. This ritual of going out and coming back mirrors an essential aspect of the psyche’s need for both exploration and return.
Note. As light shifts toward evening, the same objects appear transformed. Illumination changes perception, offering a final teaching on how meaning emerges through context rather than alteration.
As the light shifts over the water, I sit with my arrangement of found objects. The meaning remains open, and that feels right. For much of my life, meaning was something I produced on demand: reports, analyses, frameworks, recommendations. The occupational world trained me to know what I was making before I made it, to articulate purpose before taking action.
Art asks something different. It asks me to begin without knowing the end. To trust that sense will emerge through the doing. To believe that my hands might hold knowledge, my mind has yet to find its words.
The sea glass catches the evening light differently now, more amber, more gold. The objects remain the same, yet they appear transformed by a change in illumination. This, too, is a teaching. What reveals itself one way in the clarity of morning may disclose other dimensions in the softness of evening. The object holds steady; the light changes, and with it, perception.
El arte habla cuando las palabras fallan. Art speaks when words fail.
This is what Day 19 offered: a different language for knowing, one that works alongside words rather than replacing them, as this written reflection exists alongside the created arrangement, but an addition. A parallel stream of sense-making. A reminder that healing unfolds through multiple channels, and that the body and its creative capacities hold wisdom the mind may take years to articulate.
What I will make from these gathered objects remains open. Perhaps that unknowing is itself the gift.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.
Juniper, A. (2003). Wabi sabi: The Japanese art of impermanence. Tuttle Publishing.
Koren, L. (1994). Wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers. Stone Bridge Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. University of Chicago Press.
Nichols, W. J. (2014). Blue mind: The surprising science that shows how being near, in, on, or under water can make you happier, healthier, more connected, and better at what you do. Little, Brown and Company.
Perez, V., Alexander, D. D., & Bailey, W. H. (2013). Air ions and mood outcomes: A review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychiatry, 13, Article 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-13-29
White, M. P., Elliott, L. R., Grellier, J., Economou, T., Bell, S., Bratman, G. N., Cirach, M., Gascon, M., Lima, M. L., Lõhmus, M., Nieuwenhuijsen, M., Ojala, A., Roiko, A., Schultz, P. W., van den Bosch, M., & Fleming, L. E. (2021). Associations between green/blue spaces and mental health across 18 countries. Scientific Reports, 11(1), Article 8903. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87675-0
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
The “artifact archive” practice described here, collecting what the sea leaves behind and attending to it as a form of knowing, engages Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry methodology: the sustained, patient engagement with phenomena as they present themselves, without a predetermined framework for what they mean. The decision to leave the journal behind and reach instead for the collecting bag represents a shift from linguistic to material inquiry, what Bachelard (1969) calls phenomenological attention to substance: the way physical objects carry and release imaginative knowledge that precedes words. The phrase “the language before words” names exactly what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) argue arts-based research can access: dimensions of experience that conventional academic prose cannot reach. Van der Kolk (2014) notes that traumatic experience is stored in precisely this pre-linguistic register, which is why art-making and sensory engagement can address what talking alone cannot. The archive of objects also speaks to what Tuan (1977) calls the deepening of place attachment through material interaction: the shoreline becomes home through the accumulated relationship with its particular objects, textures, and offerings.
I am learning that treasure is what the world overlooks rather than what it values. Treasure is what the world has overlooked, discarded, and left behind for someone patient enough to notice.
Title: Blue Enough to Stop
Artist Statement
I noticed this because the blue refused to disappear.
At first glance, it was just dust and gravel, the kind of ground you walk over without registering it. Then the colour began to surface. Small shards scattered unevenly, catching light in brief, insistent flashes. They were beyond arrangement. Beyond intention. Simply there, insisting on being seen.
This moment reminded me how attention changes the world. What appears monochrome at a distance reveals complexity when approached slowly. The blue fragments felt like remnants of care, traces of something once whole that still carried beauty despite being broken. I thought about how easily colour is erased by speed, by habit, by the assumption that nothing important lies underfoot.
There is something tender in stopping for what is small and sharp-edged. These fragments asked for no fixing and no story beyond their presence. They held their colour against dust and time. That felt instructive. It suggested that value requires no coherence, no completion. It can exist in scattered form, waiting for someone willing to look closely enough to notice.
This image stays with me because it affirms a practice I am learning to trust. To walk slowly. To look down. To allow myself to be interrupted by what glints quietly at the margins. The blue was enough to stop me. That feels like a lesson worth keeping.
There is an empty field just beyond the edge of town, where the paved road gives way to dust and the last buildings surrender to open land. I have been walking past it for weeks without stopping. It looked like nothing. Scrub brush. Rubble. The kind of place you glance at and dismiss.
Yesterday, I stopped.
Something beyond naming made me turn off the path and walk into that emptiness. Perhaps I was tired of the routes I already knew. Perhaps my body was leading me somewhere my mind had yet to consent to go. I have been learning, throughout this time by the sea, to follow impulses that resist explanation. This is part of what Scholarly Personal Narrative makes possible: trusting that the body knows things the conscious mind has yet to articulate.
The field was full of treasure.
Title:One Person’s Treasure
Artist Statement
This work began when I stopped walking past what I had assumed was empty. Turning into the field felt intuitive, guided by the body rather than the mind. What appeared as absence revealed fragments of glass and tile, small residues of domestic life and quiet abandonment.
I approach these materials as witnesses, holding traces of memory, use, and erasure. Through Scholarly Personal Narrative and land-based inquiry, this field becomes both site and method, a place where brokenness speaks and presence persists. This work is an act of ethical noticing, listening to what remains.
What I was doing in that field has a name. It is called gleaning.
Gleaning is an ancient practice. In agricultural societies, gleaners were people who followed behind the harvesters, collecting the grain that had been left behind in the fields. Gleaning was how the poor survived. It was sanctioned in biblical law: landowners were instructed to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that widows, orphans, and strangers could gather what they needed.
Filmmaker Agnès Varda (2000), in her documentary The Gleaners and I, explored how gleaning persists in contemporary life. Varda filmed people who collect discarded food from markets, artists who work with found materials, and herself, gathering images and stories that others have overlooked. Varda understood gleaning as both a practical survival practice and a creative practice. She called herself a gleaner of images.
I am a gleaner too. I walk through empty fields and collect what has been left behind. Tiles that once covered floors. Pottery that once held food. Glass that once contained something someone needed. These objects have been discarded, but they retain their beauty. Weathered, but intact.
There is something in this practice that speaks to my own experience. I, too, have felt discarded. I, too, have been treated as though my value ended when my utility to an institution was no longer convenient. Walking through that field, picking up fragments that others have dismissed, I am practising a different way of understanding worth.
Title: What Can I Make With These?
Artist Statement
I picked these up without a plan in mind. I noticed them because they had opened themselves. Split husks resting on concrete, their inner fibres exposed, their protective work already done. They were no longer attached to the tree, no longer enclosing anything, and yet they remained present. That mattered to me.
What drew me in was their honesty. These forms show what happens after holding, after covering, after protection has reached its limit. They make no pretence of wholeness. They try nothing like returning to what they were. They rest exactly as they are, shaped by weather, pressure, and time. I recognized something of myself in that posture.
My practice at this stage is grounded in attention rather than transformation. I am interested in what materials teach when they are allowed to remain close to how they were found. These husks speak about shedding, about release, about the quiet dignity of structures that step aside once their purpose has been fulfilled. They carry evidence of labour without demanding recognition for it.
Placing them together is a way of listening. I let them go beyond resolving into a single form. I let them sit in relation, curved toward and away from one another, holding space without enclosure. They become companions rather than components. The work lives in that relational field.
This piece belongs to my broader inquiry into value, endurance, and recovery. I am learning to recognize worth in what has been cast aside and to trust forms that have no need to seek completion. These husks remind me that protection can be temporary, that opening can be a form of wisdom, and that what remains after release still carries meaning.
Gleaning is how the discarded find their way back to meaning.
Objects as Co-Researchers
In arts-based research, found objects can serve as co-researchers. This means they move beyond the merely decorative or illustrative. They participate in the inquiry. They carry knowledge. They teach.
Material culture theorist Jane Bennett (2010), in her book Vibrant Matter, argues for what she calls “thing-power”-the capacity of objects to act, to affect, to make things happen. Bennett challenges the assumption that only humans have agency. Objects, she suggests, are active agents. They exert influence. They shape what becomes possible.
I have felt this thing-power in the field. A flash of colour catches my eye. I bend down. My hand reaches before my mind decides. The object has called me. It has exercised a kind of agency, drawing my attention, inviting me to pick it up, to carry it home, to consider what it means.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013) writes about making as a process of correspondence between maker and material. The maker imposes no form on passive matter. Instead, maker and material enter into dialogue. Each responds to the other. Each shapes what emerges.
My relationship with these found objects is a form of correspondence. I decided nothing in advance about what I was looking for. I let the field show me what was there. I let the objects announce themselves. I followed their lead.
Title: Washing the Findings
Artist Statement
I photographed the washing because it is part of the practice. These objects came from the earth, carrying dust, salt, and the residue of years of exposure to weather. Washing them is an act of attention. It is slow, deliberate work. I handle each piece individually, feeling its weight, noticing its texture, watching colours emerge as the dirt lifts away.
This is a contemplative practice in material form. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994) describes mindfulness as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgment. Washing these fragments becomes mindfulness with my hands. It grounds me in the present and connects me to something beyond my circling thoughts.
Each fragment has a history I will never fully know. But I can read what is written on their surfaces.
I believe the coloured tiles came from buildings that once stood in this area. Loreto is an old town, founded in 1697 as the first Spanish colonial settlement on the Baja California Peninsula. These tiles may have covered floors in homes, churches, or municipal buildings. They may be decades old. They may be older. The colours, reds and blues, yellows and whites, were chosen by someone. They were arranged in patterns. They were walked upon, cleaned, and lived with. Now they are fragments in a field, and I am holding them in my palm.
The pottery shards tell similar stories. I found a piece with a blue floral pattern, clearly part of a decorated plate or bowl. Someone painted those flowers. Someone purchased that dish. It held food that nourished someone. Now it is broken, but the pattern remains visible, still beautiful, still evidence of care.
The glass pieces, amber, brown, and translucent, have been tumbled smooth by time. They have the quality of sea glass, though I found them in a dry field. Perhaps they were once bottles that held medicine, wine, or oil. Perhaps they were broken and their fragments scattered, and the wind and sand did the work that waves do on beaches.
I almost missed it. It was the colour of the dust around it, a warm honey-brown that blended with the earth. But something about the way it caught the light made me pause. I bent down. I brushed away the dirt. And there it was: a piece of what I believe is carnelian, or perhaps a form of agate, translucent and glowing like something alive.
I have been carrying it in my pocket ever since. I take it out and hold it to the light. I feel its smooth weight in my palm. It has become a kind of talisman, a physical reminder that beauty exists in overlooked places, that value requires no certification by recognition.
“Beauty exists in overlooked places. Value requires no certification by recognition.”
Amy Tucker, Day 24: Finding Treasure in Empty Fields (January 24, 2026)
A Counter-Archive of the Overlooked
I have written about the concept of a counter-archive in earlier posts. This term describes a collection of evidence that documents what official records refuse to acknowledge. Institutions keep archives of what they consider important: contracts, budgets, meeting minutes, and performance metrics. They keep no archives of exhaustion, of grief, of the slow accumulation of harm that precarious labour produces.
My collection of found objects is becoming a counter-archive of a different kind. It is an archive of the overlooked. It gathers what has been discarded, dismissed, or left behind. It insists that these fragments have value, that they are worth preserving, that they carry knowledge.
Cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2003) argues in her book An Archive of Feelings that trauma leaves traces that official archives cannot capture. Cvetkovich proposes alternative archives: collections of ephemera, personal objects, and creative works that document emotional and bodily experiences excluded from institutional memory.
My cup of tiles, stones, and glass is such an archive. It holds evidence of presence, of care, of the persistence of beauty in conditions of neglect. It documents my own practice of attention during this time by the sea. It will travel home with me, a material record of what I learned in this empty field.
Title:The Full Collection
Artist Statement
I arranged these objects on the table to see them all at once, to understand what I had gathered. The arrangement was intuitive, beyond any plan. I simply placed each piece and let the composition emerge. What I see now is a kind of mosaic, a tessellation of fragments that fit together imperfectly yet create something whole nonetheless.
This feels like a metaphor for my life right now. I am made of fragments: the teacher, the mother, the athlete, the advocate, the person who was discarded by an institution she served for nineteen years. These pieces resist fitting together neatly. They have rough edges. They come from different sources. But here they are, arranged on a surface, making a pattern beyond prediction. Artist and writer Anne Truitt (1982) believed that art is inseparable from the artist as a whole person, a product of everything rather than skill alone, one is. This collection is the product of who I was during these thirty days. It is art made through attention rather than intention.
Looking at these fragments spread across the table, I think about mosaics.
A mosaic is an art form made from broken pieces. Tiles, glass, stone, pottery: all are shattered or cut into fragments, and then those fragments are arranged into patterns and images. The beauty of a mosaic depends on brokenness. Without the breaking, there would be no small pieces to arrange. Without the fragments, there would be no whole.
Art historian Bissera Pentcheva (2010) writes about Byzantine mosaics and their capacity to transform light. The irregular surfaces of mosaic tiles catch and scatter light in ways that flat surfaces cannot replicate. Mosaics shimmer. They seem alive. Their beauty lies precisely in their fragmentation.
I am thinking about this in relation to my own experience. I have been broken by precarious labour. My sense of professional identity has shattered. My body has carried the weight of chronic stress until it could carry no more. I arrived at this time by the sea in fragments.
But fragments can be arranged. Fragments can become mosaics. The breaking may be the beginning of a different kind of wholeness, one that acknowledges rupture rather than pretending it never happened.
The breaking may be the beginning of a different kind of wholeness.
The Human Right to Beauty
Title: What Was Bound
Artist Statement:
I noticed this because something had already been tied.
A length of frayed fibre lay on the ground, knotted at its centre, holding itself together even as its edges unraveled. It looked used, weathered, and finished with its original task. Nearby, a small ring rested in the dust, separate yet clearly related, as if it had once played a role in keeping something contained.
What this image brings forward for me is the quiet after function. The moment when binding has done its work and is no longer required. I have been thinking a great deal about what it means to hold things together for long periods of time. Roles, responsibilities, expectations. The fibres here show the cost of that work. They are worn thin at the ends, softened by exposure, altered by effort.
There is care embedded in this object. Someone tied it for a reason. Someone relied on it to secure, to fasten, to keep order. And yet it now rests on the ground, released from usefulness, still intact, still present. That feels important. It mirrors an experience I know well. Being valued for what I could hold together, and then set aside once that labour was no longer needed.
I am drawn to the knot at the centre. It is firm, deliberate, almost tender. It suggests intention rather than accident. Around it, the fibres loosen and spread, no longer contained by the same demands. The object has shifted from function to witness. It carries memory in its structure.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of noticing what remains after systems of use move on. I am interested in materials that show wear honestly, that hold evidence of service without apology. What was bound here has been released. What remains still carries meaning.
I want to connect this practice to the human rights framework that grounds this entire project.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This right includes the right to make art, to appreciate beauty, and to engage in creative practice.
But there is something more fundamental here, something about the right to perceive value in what has been devalued.
Philosopher Elaine Scarry (1999) argues in her book On Beauty and Being Just that the experience of beauty is bound up with justice. When we perceive something as beautiful, Scarry suggests, we recognize its right to exist, its claim on our attention, and its worthiness. Beauty, in this sense, is far from frivolous. It is ethical. It trains us to see the value in things and, by extension, in people.
Walking through that empty field, bending down to pick up discarded tiles, I was practising a form of justice. I was recognizing the value in what had been thrown away. I was refusing the logic that says broken things are worthless.
This matters because I, too, have been treated as though my value ended when I was no longer useful to an institution. I, too, have been discarded. Finding beauty in these fragments is a way of insisting that discarded carries no implication of worthlessness. It is a way of practising, in material form, the belief that every being has inherent dignity regardless of what systems of power decide.
What Remains
Title: What the Sea Returned
Artist Statement
I gathered these pieces slowly, without a plan, letting my hands decide before my mind intervened. Shells smoothed thin by water. Glass softened into quiet colour. Wood hollowed and shaped by time rather than tools. Each object arrived through patience rather than searching, offered up by tide, weather, and repetition.
What this collection reminds me of is how the sea practices care. It breaks things down, yes, but it also rounds edges, tempers sharpness, and leaves behind what can endure touch. The glass no longer cuts. The shells carry the echo of shelter. The wood holds openings where something once moved through it, leaving pathways rather than damage. These materials speak of transformation through persistence rather than force.
As I arranged them together, I became aware of how little I needed to decide. Balance emerged on its own. Colour found companionship. Texture created conversation. This feels aligned with how I am learning to live right now. Less directing. More listening. Allowing relationships to form without insisting on outcome.
There is a quiet ethics in keeping what has been weathered rather than perfected. These objects have lived alongside loss, erosion, and change. They remain beautiful because of that history rather than despite it. Holding them, I am reminded that what survives carries knowledge. What returns has something to teach.
This collection functions as a personal archive of attention. Each piece marks a moment when I slowed down enough to receive rather than pass by. Together they form a record of time spent listening to what the sea was willing to share.
I will carry these fragments home with me. They will sit on a shelf or a windowsill, catching light, reminding me of this field, this practice, this moment in my recovery.
They will remind me that the world overlooks treasure rather than what it values. Treasure is what the world has overlooked. Treasure is what remains beautiful despite being broken. Treasure lies in empty fields, waiting for someone patient enough to notice.
I am learning to be that patient person. I am learning to walk slowly, to look carefully, to bend down and pick up what catches my eye. I am learning that this practice of attention is itself a form of healing.
van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma recovery requires the restoration of the capacity for pleasure, for play, for engagement with beauty. Feeling less bad falls short of what we need. We must learn again to feel good, to be moved by what is beautiful, to experience joy without guilt.
These fragments bring me joy. Holding the amber stone up to the light brings me joy. Arranging the tiles on the table and seeing the pattern emerge brings me joy. This joy is medicine, far from frivolous. It is evidence that I am healing.
I am learning that the practice of attention is itself a form of healing.
Estoy encontrando tesoros. Estoy aprendiendo a ver.
I am finding treasure. I am learning to see.
Title: Carried, Then Set Down
Artist Statement
I placed these objects together because they felt as though they had already found one another.
A seed pod, opened and emptied of what it once carried. A feather, shed without injury, its work in the air complete. Two small stones, held briefly in the hand and then released. None of these were taken by force. Each was encountered at a moment when it was ready to be found.
What this arrangement reminds me of is how much of life is held temporarily. Protection, lift, nourishment, weight. These materials speak quietly about function that has ended without failure. The seed pod has released. The feather has fallen. The stones remain exactly as they are. There is no urgency here, no demand to return to usefulness.
I have spent many years believing that value was tied to carrying, to lifting, to producing. This grouping asks something different of me. It invites attention to what happens after effort, after release, after the body no longer needs to hold everything together. There is dignity in that moment. There is relief.
The space between these objects matters as much as the objects themselves. They are arranged with care, yet allowed distance. They share a surface without being bound to one another. That feels instructive. It mirrors a way of being I am learning to trust, one where connection requires no containment.
This work belongs to my inquiry into attention, recovery, and the ethics of noticing. These materials teach me that carrying is only one phase of existence. Setting down is another. Both are necessary. Both leave traces.
Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Orion Press. (Original work published 1958)
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Duke University Press.
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.
Pentcheva, B. V. (2010). The sensual icon: Space, ritual, and the senses in Byzantium. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Scarry, E. (1999). On beauty and being just. Princeton University Press.
Truitt, A. (1982). Daybook: The journal of an artist. Pantheon Books.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Varda, A. (Director). (2000). Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [The gleaners and I] [Film]. Ciné Tamaris.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
The epistemology of discarded treasure articulated in this post resonates with what Moustakas (1961) calls the phenomenological turn: attending to what is present rather than what is supposed to be there, which often means recovering what has been overlooked or devalued by dominant frameworks. The insight that “treasure is what the world overlooks” carries a political dimension that Nixon (2011) would recognize: slow violence renders certain things, and certain people, invisible precisely by failing to register them as valuable. For the precarious academic who has spent nineteen years on the margins of institutional belonging, the practice of finding beauty in what has been discarded is autobiographical as much as aesthetic: it is the application of a new valuing logic to the self. Tuan’s (1977) concept of topophilia extends to include small objects: attachment to place includes attachment to the particular material gifts that place offers, and the shoreline’s discards become intimate through the attention paid to them. The “Blue Enough to Stop” artwork described here enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call creative analytic practice: making meaning through form rather than argument, letting the image do the epistemic work.
Ten evenings. I am starting to understand why I came here.
Blue dissolving into gold, gold bleeding into rose, rose deepening into violet. Del azul al oro, al rosa y al violeta. I have watched this transformation from this balcony for ten evenings now, and it has never been the same twice. The colour shifts with cloud cover, humidity, and the presence or absence of wind. Each sunset is singular. Unrepeatable. A gift offered once and then gone.
I am learning to receive it without trying to hold it.
This is harder than it sounds. My instinct, honed by decades of academic work, is to document, analyze, and pin down. To turn experience into data that can be preserved, referenced, and cited. But sunsets resist this treatment entirely. They happen, they transform, they vanish. All you can do is be present while they occur.
It feels both longer and shorter than that. Longer because so much has shifted, the sleep that consolidates, the thoughts that clarify, the nervous system that learns to trust. Shorter because time here moves differently from time in my old life. The days unfold rather than accumulate into weeks that must be gotten through. They simply unfold, each one complete in itself.
This morning I wrote about being ready for deeper work.
This afternoon, I discovered whether that was true.
Three hours reading Kaplan and Kaplan’s The Experience of Nature. Dense academic writing. Multiple theoretical frameworks were synthesized. Complex arguments are built across chapters. The kind of scholarship that, a month ago, would have required multiple passes, extensive notes, and constant backtracking to passages still just beyond my grasp.
Some concepts will need return visits to sit with and let marinate. But the basic structure of their argument, the way they build their case for nature experience as psychologically restorative, the relationship they trace between environmental qualities and cognitive restoration, is clear. Accessible. My mind is following along without forcing it.
This is what full cognitive capacity feels like. The ability to think deeply, with them. To follow sustained arguments. To hold multiple ideas in relationship. To synthesize.
The relief of this is enormous.
I had begun to wonder whether the cognitive impairment was permanent. Whether months of sleep fragmentation and chronic stress had done lasting damage. Whether I would ever again be able to engage with complex theory the way I once had.
The answer, apparently, is yes. Given sufficient rest, given release from chronic threat, given time for the nervous system to recalibrate, the capacity returns.
Arnsten’s research on stress and prefrontal function helps me understand why. When the nervous system operates in a defensive state for extended periods, blood flow and glucose are redirected away from the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive centre, toward more primitive structures involved in survival. This is adaptive in the short term. Nuanced analysis is useless when facing immediate danger. You need fast, automatic responses.
But when the threat becomes chronic, when the nervous system never gets the signal that it is safe to stand down, those executive functions simply go offline. Offline. Temporarily unavailable. The biological infrastructure that supports complex thought is taken out of commission to conserve resources for survival.
These ten days have convinced my nervous system that the emergency is over. Those resources can be redirected back toward thinking, toward curiosity, toward engagement with ideas.
This is remarkable, though it may sound otherwise.
For years, I have operated with a productivity logic that says: if you can still function, you should keep working. Rest is what you do when you literally cannot continue. Until then, push.
This afternoon I was tired. Just tired in that natural way that comes after sustained intellectual engagement. My body said enough for now. And I listened.
I made lunch. Sat on the patio. Ate without reading, without working, without multitasking. Simply ate. Tasted the food. Felt the sun.
Resting in a hammock in the afternoon with the sound of waves, the movement of air, and the warmth of the sun filtered through palm fronds.
This is what Nash means when he writes about Scholarly Personal Narrative as a practice of presence. Being fully in the experience, beyond just documenting it. Allowing yourself to notice what is actually happening rather than constantly narrating it, analyzing it, and turning it into something useful.
Beyond fitness goals or counted steps. Without a destination in mind. Just walking because my body wanted to move, and the beach was there, and the light was beginning to change.
I walked north until I reached the tide pools. Sat on a rock. Watched small crabs scuttle between crevices, tiny fish dart through shallow water, sea anemones open and close their delicate tentacles.
An entire world in a depression carved into stone by centuries of waves.
Time felt different there. Expansive. Unhurried. As though the afternoon had all the space it needed, and there was no rush to get to the evening. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) writes about lived time, time as experienced rather than measured. Time expands when you are fully present and contracts when you are anxious about what comes next.
When I finally stood to walk back, my legs were stiff from sitting, but my mind was quiet in a way months had taken from it. The constant low-level hum of anxiety, the voice that is always calculating, planning, worrying about what needs doing next, had simply stopped.
This is what Kaplan calls “the gentle pull of the natural world.” The quality of engagement that holds your attention gently, without effort, without demanding anything. Natural environments provide this. The movement of water. The scuttling of crabs. The opening and closing of anemones. Your attention is engaged and unhurried. And in that gentle engagement, something in the nervous system settles.
The quiet way nature restores us. Theory argues that modern life depletes what they call “directed attention,” the capacity to focus on tasks that require effort, to inhibit distraction, and to sustain concentration. We exhaust this capacity constantly: driving in traffic, responding to emails, sitting through meetings, forcing ourselves to concentrate on work that holds little natural interest.
Nature restores directed attention by allowing rest rather than stimulating further. By providing what Kaplan calls “being away,” a break from the demands that deplete us. By offering the gentle pull of the natural world, engagement without effort. By creating compatibility between what the environment offers and what we need in that moment.
Sitting on that rock watching tide pools, I was away. I was softly fascinated. The environment was perfectly suited to what I needed.
And something that had been tightly wound for months finally loosened.
I made dinner as the light began its transformation. Simple food: canned fish with lime, rice, and vegetables. Ate on the patio. Watched the birds complete their final fishing runs before settling for the night.
Title: Dinner Time
The pattern is so familiar now that I could set a clock by it. Morning fishing. The midday rest. The late afternoon fishing. The evening returns to roosting sites. Day after day, the same rhythm.
Rich in variation, each day holds its own. Weather. Wind. The presence or absence of baitfish near the surface. Sometimes the pelicans fish alone. Sometimes in groups. Sometimes they dive from great heights. Sometimes they simply skim the surface, plucking small fish without submerging.
The rhythm allows for variation. The variation occurs within rhythm. Neither negates the other.
I am learning this. Estoy aprendiendo esto.
Slowly.
What has ten days built?
I have been asking myself this as the light fades and the first stars appear. What is different now from ten days ago when I arrived at this cottage, suitcase still packed, uncertain whether I knew how to stay?
Sleep: Three nights of sleeping through. The pattern is consolidating. My nervous system, learning that night, means rest: that darkness is safe, that vigilance can be released for seven hours without catastrophe.
Cognition: Prefrontal cortex restored. Can read complex theory. Follow sustained arguments. Synthesize across frameworks. Think without forcing each thought into existence through sheer will.
Embodiment: Being in my body rather than trying to manage it from outside. Can feel sensations without them being threatening. Can notice needs before they escalate into emergencies.
Rhythm: Evening sequence established. Morning patterns are consolidating. The body learns to read time through environmental cues, light quality, temperature, and the pelicans’ flight patterns, rather than the external demands that structured my old life.
Trust: the foundation beneath everything else. My nervous system is beginning to trust. Trust that this environment is safe. Trust that rest will come. Trust that the next crisis can find me unhurried, the next email that changes everything, the next announcement that requires scrambling, repositioning, and proof of worth.
The foundation holds.
Tomorrow I will build on it. More reading. More theoretical engagement. Days eleven through twenty move toward integration, bringing embodied experience into conversation with scholarly frameworks. Seeing how research illuminates what the body already knows. Contributing, eventually, to conversations about solitude and healing and the conditions that support nervous system regulation.
But tonight I simply rest in what ten days have created. In the capacity that has been restored. In the trust built brick by brick, through consistent rhythms and environmental cues, my conscious mind barely registered, but my nervous system tracked with precision.
In an hour, I will begin the evening sequence. The rituals my nervous system has learned to recognize as the approach of rest.
Dinner already eaten. Dishes washed. Cottage tidy. All the small acts of care that signal: evening is here, night is coming, you can begin to let go.
Will I sleep through tonight? Fourth night in a row would confirm the pattern even more strongly. It would give my system even more evidence that this is real, sustainable, and trustworthy.
But even if I wake, even if tonight fragments again, I know more now than I did ten days ago. I know what supports sleep. I know what environmental cues signal safety. I know how to maintain conditions even when the immediate results fall short of my hopes.
Healing releases control of outcomes. It is about maintaining conditions and trusting the system to respond.
I cannot force my nervous system to trust. But I can keep creating the circumstances that make trust possible. Keep following rhythms. Keep honouring the body’s signals. Keep providing the environmental conditions required for safety.
The actual sleeping, the actual healing, the actual transformation. These happen in their own time. Beyond conscious control. According to processes more ancient and wiser than anything my conscious mind can manage.
All I can do is maintain the conditions and step aside.
El umbral. The threshold.
I stand on it tonight. Looking back at the ten days that built a foundation. Looking forward to twenty more that will build on it.
Here. On this threshold. Leaving what was behind, arriving toward what comes next. Noticing what is.
The foundation holds. My body knows this. My nervous system has learned, through accumulated evidence, that conscious thought played almost no role in gathering. Tomorrow I build upward from here.
But tonight, esta noche, I rest.
The pelicans have settled for the evening, wherever it is they go when light fails, and the sea turns dark. The stars are beginning to appear, one by one, then a handful, then too many to count. The waves continue their patient rhythm, the same rhythm they have maintained for millions of years, the same rhythm they will maintain long after I have left this place and returned to whatever life awaits me back home.
And I sit on the balcony on the tenth evening, holding the question that all thresholds hold:
What becomes possible when the foundation is sound?
Tomorrow I begin finding out.
La fundación sostiene. The foundation holds.
Mañana construimos hacia arriba. Tomorrow we build upward.
Pero esta noche, solo esto. But tonight, just this.
El mar. Las estrellas. El ritmo constante. The sea. The stars. The constant rhythm.
Y un cuerpo que finalmente descansa. And a body that finally rests.
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
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
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.
ACADEMIC LENS
The concept of foundation, la fundación, names the epistemic shift that occurs when the body has rested sufficiently to become a reliable ground of knowing. Levine (2010) describes this as the “somatic floor”: the felt sense of bodily stability from which genuine movement and exploration become possible. Before the nervous system can restore, it requires what Porges (2011) calls cues of safety, consistently repeated signals that the environment is no longer hostile. Ten days of such signalling represents, neurologically, the beginning of what van der Kolk (2014) calls the revision of implicit memory: the gradual updating of the body’s baseline predictions about what the world holds. The bilingual form of this entry also enacts a kind of foundation: Anzaldúa’s (1987) argument that the borderlands between languages constitute an epistemological ground from which new thought becomes possible, precisely because neither language’s existing categories can fully contain the experience being named. The foundation built here is thus simultaneously somatic, linguistic, and methodological.
Actually thinking about roots. About how they reach downward into darkness. About how they find water through the soil. About how they hold plants steady against wind while also drawing nutrients upward into the stem, leaf, and flower. Roots as anchor and conduit. Roots as holding and feeding at once.
My attention has been held by the sea. Twelve days of walking in it, watching it, letting it move through my body. Yet this morning, my awareness shifted downward rather than outward. Toward earth. Toward the land that holds this place, this village, this precise curve of coast where the Sea of Cortez meets the Baja desert.
The land has always been here. I have walked across it daily. Still, my attention treated it as surface, as passage, as the space between cottage and shoreline. Water received my devotion. Land remained in the background.
This morning, I attended differently.
Turning from Water to Land
Today I leave my current space and move to a small village called Nopoló, also settled along the sea’s edge. The change feels subtle yet consequential. A relocation measured in minutes yet weighted with meaning. A shift in orientation rather than distance.
In the afternoon, I explore Loreto Bay at Nopoló. The sea, the rock formations, the cliffs. I move slowly, allowing the landscape to lead rather than plans or expectations.
The earth here carries a different texture than the earth I know. Rocky. Sparse. The colour of sand, yet compacted and dense, shaped by centuries of sun, wind, and a climate where rain arrives rarely and leaves quickly. Growth here reflects careful strategy. Cacti store water patiently. Shrubs hold small leaves that conserve moisture. Palms appear only where underground water rises close enough for roots to reach.
This kind of understanding emerges through long attention to place. Anthropologist Keith Basso describes how knowledge forms through sustained presence, through learning how the landscape holds memory, instruction, and meaning over time (Basso, 1996). The Cochimí people lived on this land for thousands of years before the arrival of Spanish missions. They knew which plants carried water in their roots. Which animals moved through during particular seasons? Where springs surfaced after rare rains. How weather revealed itself through birds, air, and light.
I lack this knowledge. Thirteen days cannot produce it. Still, attention can begin. I can notice that the land teaches differently from the sea. Each carries wisdom shaped by its own rhythms.
Learning What the Land Knows
Place-based learning grows from exactly this kind of attention. Knowledge is formed through bodily presence and by noticing patterns, textures, and temporal rhythms associated with a specific location. Gruenewald describes this learning as emerging from a relationship rather than abstraction, from inhabiting a place rather than observing it from a distance (Gruenewald, 2003). Ingold similarly writes that understanding arises through movement, through walking landscapes and learning their contours over time (Ingold, 2021).
Here, the land teaches patience. Economy. Endurance.
I climb higher. The street becomes a dirt road. The dirt road becomes a path. The path leads to a small rise where I can see the village below me, the sea beyond it, and the islands visible in morning light across the channel.
I sit on a rock, a rock embedded in the earth, part of the hillside’s bone structure. Warm already from the sun, though the morning is still early. Rough texture. Solid.
My body recognizes this differently from water. Water yields. Shapes itself around you. Holds you through buoyancy, through displacement, through the physics of floating. Rock is what yields to. Rock holds its form. Rock is a limit, a boundary, a fact that stops you.
And yet that framing needs adjusting. Rock does yield. Just slowly. On timescales beyond human body perception. Wind erodes rock grain by grain. Water wears channels through stone. The mountain I am sitting on was once seafloor, thrust up by tectonic forces that continue to reshape this landscape, imperceptibly, constantly.
Geologic time: the scale at which mountains rise and fall, continents drift, oceans open and close. The scale at which everything solid reveals itself as fluid, moving at speeds that make our lifetimes appear like single breaths (McPhee, 1981).
Sitting on this rock, I am sitting on an ancient seafloor. The calcium in my bones came from the same ocean that deposited the limestone this rock is made of. I am made of the same elements as the mountain. Different arrangement. Different timescale. But the same stuff.
My body knows this. My bones recognize stone. The calcium, the minerals, and the slow patient being that both rock and bone share.
A lizard appears beside me. Small. Brown. Entirely still except for the pulse in its throat and the movement of eyes tracking something unseen.
We sit together for several minutes. Two beings warming ourselves on the same sunlit rock. The lizard remains. I remain. No negotiation. No interaction. Shared occupation.
This differs from encounters with village dogs, which involve social cues and mutual recognition. The lizard and I coexist. The rock holds us both.
When the lizard disappears into a narrow crack, I stay. Feeling warmth against my legs and palms. Feeling how my body prefers stone to sand or grass. Perhaps an ancestral memory. Mammals draping themselves across sun-warmed rock for temperature regulation.
Thermoregulation describes the capacity to maintain internal temperature. Humans rely on metabolism, shivering, sweating, and also behaviour. Seeking the sun. Seeking shade. Using the material world to support cellular life.
The lizard depends on this more actively. Still, I participate as well. Sitting. Warming. Settling.
The land teaches this, too. I am material. I require what stone requires. Stability. Mineral composition. Time. Stone holds what I require. Warmth. Solidity. Memory.
Walking back down the hill, I think about Indigenous land relationships. The Cochimí and, later, the Kiliwa and Paipai peoples understood themselves as continuous with the land, responsible to it, and shaped by it (Shipek, 1988). Land existed as a relation rather than a possession.
This understanding largely disappeared within settler cultures. Land became property. Resource. Commodity. Something external to the body rather than continuous with it.
Basso writes that Western Apache people understand places as teachers. Places carry stories. Places remember. Time spent in a place produces change. Knowledge emerges through relationships, shaped by the landscape over time (Basso, 1996).
Thirteen days mark the beginning of this instruction. Teaching arrives through the body rather than language. Bones recognize stone. Lungs adapt to this particular air. Skin acquires a balance among sun, wind, and dryness.
What Place Teaches
This reflects place-based learning. Knowledge formed through sustained physical presence. Through walking contours. Through noticing what grows where and why. Through feeling the weather on the skin. Through reading time through light and seasonal rhythm (Gruenewald, 2003; Ingold, 2021).
The land teaches groundedness. Literal grounding. A reminder that I am terrestrial. That my legs belong to earth. That water offers refuge while land offers belonging.
The day warms. Pelicans follow their mid-morning patterns. The sea continues its rhythms.
Something has shifted. Attention expands. Land joins water. Earth beneath the cottage. Mountains rising westward. The desert stretches along the peninsula. All alive. All teaching.
Tomorrow I will walk again. Perhaps up the arroyo that cuts through the village, dry now, shaped by rare floods. Perhaps south along the beach where buildings end, and desert meets sea without mediation.
The land has been here long before me. It will remain long after the cottage crumbles and the village becomes another layer in the geologic record. The rock that held me this morning has existed for millions of years. It will continue for millions more.
I am here briefly. The land holds me the way it holds everything. Temporarily. Lightly. Aware that all presence passes, all bodies return borrowed elements.
Gracias, tierra. Thank you, Earth.
Por sostenerme. For holding me.
Por enseñarme la paciencia. For teaching me patience.
Por recordarme que soy hecha de ti. For reminding me that I am made of you.
Y que volveré a ti. And that I will return to you.
Walking back down the hill, I think about Indigenous land relationships. How the Cochimí and later the Kiliwa and Paipai peoples understood themselves as part of the land rather than separate from it, continuous with it, responsible to it and for it (Shipek, 1988).
This is what settler cultures have largely lost: the understanding that we are of the land rather than on it. That land is relation, kin, the material basis of existence that cannot be owned any more than you can own your own body (though capitalism tries to convince us we can and should).
Basso (1996) writes about how Western Apache people understand places as teachers. Actually, beyond metaphor. Places hold stories. Places remember. Places shape those who spend time with them. To know a place deeply is to be taught by it, changed by it, made into someone slightly different from who you were before you arrived.
I have been here for thirteen days. The place has begun to teach me. Through presence rather than language, and the land’s own language may always exceed my fluency, but through my body. Through my bones, recognizing stone. Through my lungs, adjusting to this particular quality of air. Through my skin, learning this specific combination of sun, wind, and dryness.
Place-based learning: knowledge that emerges from sustained physical presence in a location rather than from books or lectures, on. From walking its contours. From noting what grows where and why. From feeling the weather on your skin and reading time through light, to learning the daily and seasonal rhythms that make this place what it is.
The land is teaching me something the sea cannot teach: groundedness. Literal grounding. The reminder that I am a terrestrial animal, that I walk on legs designed for earth rather than fins designed for water, that my primary relationship is with solid ground, even when I love the water.
Title: The Tide
Back in my space now. The morning has warmed considerably. The pelicans are fishing their mid-morning pattern. The sea continues its rhythms.
But something has shifted in how I hold my attention. Less focused solely on water. More aware of the land: the earth under the cottage, the mountains rising to the west, the desert stretching north and south along the peninsula. All of it is alive. All of it is teaching.
Tomorrow I will walk again. Different direction perhaps. Up the arroyo that cuts through the village, dry now but carved by occasional floods when rare rains come. Or south along the beach to where buildings end, and desert meets sea directly, no human settlement mediating the meeting.
The land is here. Has been here. Will be here long after I leave, long after the cottage crumbles, long after the village itself becomes another layer in the geologic record. The rocks I sat on this morning have been sitting there for millions of years. They will sit there for millions more.
I am here for thirty days. The land holds me the way it holds everything: temporarily, lightly, knowing that all occupation is provisional, all presence fleeting, all bodies eventually returning to the elements they borrowed.
Gracias, tierra. Thank you, Earth.
Por sostenerme. For holding me.
Por enseñarme la paciencia. For teaching me patience.
Por recordarme que soy hecha de ti. To remind me, I am made of you.
Y que volveré a ti. And that I will return to you.
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
Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Ingold, T. (2021). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge.
McPhee, J. (1981). Basin and range. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Shipek, F. C. (1988). Pushed into the rocks: Southern California indian land tenure, 1769-1986. University of Nebraska Press.
Academic Lens
Ground beneath the feet, earth, sand, rock, is one of the oldest body-based metaphors for stability. In Levine's (2010) body-based experiencing framework, grounding is a literal therapeutic practice: contact with the earth as a nervous system intervention, activating the sense of being held. The land of Baja California, Cochimí territory, carries no neutrality; this entry is implicitly engaged with what Wilson (2008) calls relational accountability in Indigenous research methodologies: the land has its own knowledge, its own history, and its own rights as a witness.
I woke this morning without an alarm, and for several minutes I lay still, noticing.
My shoulders rested flat against the mattress. My jaw hung loose. My breath moved in long, unhurried waves, rising and falling like the sea I could hear through the open window. These details might seem unremarkable to someone who has always slept peacefully, but for me, they marked a shift I had almost forgotten was possible.
For years, I have woken braced. Shoulders already climbing toward my ears. Jaw clenched against the night. Breath shallow and quick, as though the day’s demands had already begun pressing against my chest before I opened my eyes. I had normalized this state to the point that I no longer recognized it as anything other than how mornings felt.
This morning was different. The body had begun to remember something older than vigilance. It had started to remember safety. And with that, remembering came something I had tried to avoid. The grief.
The Science of Felt Safety
Stephen Porges (2011, 2022), the neuroscientist who developed the Polyvagal Theory, helps me understand what happened this morning. Safety is a physiological state rather than a thought, regulated by the autonomic nervous system below the level of conscious awareness. We arrive there through the body first. Porges calls this the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the body reading the environment and deciding, before the mind catches up, whether we are safe.
The body’s instinct to scan for safety refers to the nervous system’s continuous, unconscious scanning of the environment and internal bodily signals for cues of safety, danger, or life threat (Porges, 2003, 2004). Unlike perception, which involves conscious awareness and interpretation, the body’s instinct to scan for safety operates below the threshold of awareness, triggering reflexive shifts in autonomic state without requiring conscious evaluation of the environment. This process evolved to enable our ancestors to respond rapidly to threats, but it can become miscalibrated by chronic stress, trauma, or prolonged exposure to demanding environments.
Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory proposes that mammals possess three primary autonomic states, each associated with distinct neural circuits that emerged at different points in evolutionary history (Porges, 2011). These states form a hierarchy, with the newest and most sophisticated circuit supporting social connection and calm, and the oldest supporting immobilization and shutdown.
What I Am Learning in the Body
Understanding the theory helps me name what I have been experiencing. For much of the past several years, and perhaps much longer, my nervous system has operated in a state of chronic alert. The demands of academic work, the precarity of contract positions, the emotional labour of supporting students through their own struggles, the vigilance required to navigate institutional politics: all of these kept my body in a low-grade state of mobilization, ready to respond to the next challenge, the next deadline, the next crisis.
I became so accustomed to this state that I mistook it for normal. The tight shoulders, the clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the difficulty sleeping through the night: these seemed features of adult life rather than symptoms of a nervous system stuck in defence mode. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. The body becomes a place of tension rather than rest, alert rather than ease.
Here, by the Sea of Cortez, something is shifting. The cues my nervous system receives have changed. The rhythm of the waves provides what Porges might call prosodic cues of safety: low-frequency sounds that signal the absence of threat. The warmth of the sun, the slow pace of the days, the absence of urgent demands, and the faces of people moving without hurry all communicate safety to a body that has been listening for danger.
Deb Dana (2018, 2020), whose work translates how the nervous system responds to safety and threat into practical application, describes the process of befriending one’s nervous system. She writes about learning to notice the micro-moments of genuine safety connection, what she calls glimmers: small sparks of safety and calm that can be cultivated and expanded over time. I am learning to notice these glimmers here. The warmth of coffee in my hands. The sound of pelicans diving. The way my breath deepens when I sit by the water.
But here is what arrived unbidden: as the body begins to soften, grief rises to meet it.
This morning, after noticing my loose jaw and flat shoulders, I lay in the early light and felt the tears come. They were tears of relief, certainly, but they were also tears of mourning. Mourning for all the years I spent braced against a world that demanded constant vigilance. Mourning for the woman who took on contract after contract because she was terrified that if she said no, there would be nothing. Mourning for the version of myself who believed she had to be everything for everyone, and who quietly disappeared in the effort.
Miriam Greenspan (2003), in her essential work Healing Through the Dark Emotions, argues that grief, fear, and despair are transformative rather than pathological when we allow ourselves to experience them fully. She calls this process emotional alchemy: the transmutation of difficult emotions into wisdom and connection. But the alchemy only works if we are willing to feel what we have been avoiding.
Emotional alchemy refers to the transformational process through which emotions culturally labelled as negative, such as grief, fear, and despair, can become pathways to gratitude, joy, and faith when they are authentically and mindfully felt rather than suppressed or bypassed (Greenspan, 2003). This framework challenges the dominant cultural emphasis on emotional control and positivity, suggesting instead that what we call healing requires moving through rather than around rugged emotional terrain.
I have been avoiding this grief for a very long time. There was no space for it in a life organized around survival. When you are juggling three contracts across two institutions, preparing courses in whatever hours remain after committee meetings and student advising, there is no time to sit with the question of what you might be losing in the process. The hamster wheel of precarious academic labour does what it is designed to do: it keeps you running too fast to notice that you are running in place.
An Accounting of What Was Lost
What did I lose in those years of overwork and fear-driven striving? The list is long, and I am only beginning to acknowledge it.
Time with people I love. The dinners declined because I had marking. The phone calls were cut short because I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class. The visits went untaken because there was no time, no money, no energy left over after the institution had taken its share.
My own creative work. The writing projects set aside, year after year, while I wrote endless course outlines, assessment rubrics and committee reports. The ideas flickered and faded for lack of sustained time to develop them.
My health. The chronic tension I normalized. The sleep I sacrificed. The stress that accumulated in my body while I told myself I was fine, I could handle it, this was just what working hard looked like.
Presence. The capacity to be fully present where I was, rather than mentally composing tomorrow’s lecture or worrying about next semester’s contract while sitting at my own dinner table. The ability to rest without feeling guilty, to play without calculating what I should be accomplishing instead.
Myself. Somewhere along the way, in trying to be everything for everyone, I lost track of who I was outside of producing, performing, and proving my worth through labour. The woman who existed before she became a human productivity machine.
Why did I accept so many contracts? Why did I work through weekends, through holidays, through the body’s increasingly urgent signals that something was wrong?
The answer is simple and painful: fear.
Fear that if I said no to one contract, there might never be another. Fear that I would be forgotten, passed over, rendered invisible in a system that treats contract employees as interchangeable parts. Fear that my value depended entirely on my usefulness, and that the moment I stopped being maximally useful, I would cease to matter
This fear was entirely rational. The conditions of precarious academic employment are designed to produce exactly this kind of anxiety. As I explored in my earlier research on contract faculty experiences, the structure of term-by-term appointments creates what scholars have called artificial scarcity: a manufactured sense that opportunities are scarce, competition is fierce. One must constantly prove one’s worth to secure even temporary belonging.
Artificial scarcity is the institutional production of resource scarcity that serves extractive logics rather than reflecting genuine constraints. In academic contexts, this manifests as deliberately limited contract renewals, competition for positions that could be made permanent, and funding models that pit workers against one another for resources that institutions choose to withhold. The effect is to transfer risk from institution to worker while intensifying individual self-exploitation to maintain employability.
Greenspan (2003) writes that suppressed fear often converts into anxiety, a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, or what she calls “toxic rage” that finds no appropriate outlet. For me, the fear transmuted into overwork: a constant striving that kept the terror at bay by keeping me too busy to feel it. The hamster wheel spun fast enough that I could pretend I was going somewhere.
Greenspan (2003) insists that we cannot heal by bypassing the dark emotions. We can only heal by moving through them. This morning, lying in the grey light with tears running into my hair, I began to let myself grieve what was lost.
I grieved for the years of contracted time, sold in increments to institutions that refused to commit. I grieved for the version of myself who believed she had to earn her right to exist through constant productivity. I grieved for the students I taught while running on empty, giving them less than they deserved because I had nothing left to give. I grieved for the relationships I neglected, the boundaries I failed to uphold, and the needs I refused to acknowledge, because acknowledging them would have required slowing down.
And I grieved for the woman I might have become if I had been able to trust that I was enough. The woman who wrote her own work, who rested without guilt, who knew her value, stood apart from her usefulness to others. The woman who could be, without having to justify her existence through labour constantly.
That woman is still possible. She is emerging slowly, her shoulders learning to drop and her jaw to soften. However, her emergence requires mourning the years during which she had been unable to exist fully. Grief is part of becoming.
Following the methodology I developed for this project, I have been tracking my body-based state each morning and evening. The patterns are beginning to reveal themselves. What I notice now is that the emergence of grief marks a new phase in the body’s work. The nervous system begins to settle, and the emotions held at bay by chronic activation begin to surface.
Table 1 body journal: Days 1–6
Day
Morning Observation
Evening Observation
Primary State
1
Tight chest, shallow breathing, jaw clenched
Restless, difficulty settling
SA
2
Woke with a loose jaw
Some softening after water time
SA → VV
3
Breath deeper, still some tension
Easier sleep, fewer interruptions
SA/VV
4
Woke with a loose jaw
Calm, present, grounded
VV
5
Woke with a looser jaw
Emotional release, then peace
SA → VV
6
Shoulders flat, jaw loose; grief arose
Tears for lost years; then gentle calm
VV + grief
Note. States are classified according to Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011). VV = genuine safety; SA = the body’s alert state. The trajectory across Days 1–6 reflects a gradual shift from the body’s alert state toward genuine safety regulation, with grief emerging as a regulated and tolerable affective state.
Day six marks the continuation of physical settling alongside the emergence of emotional content that demands its own kind of attention. The body softens enough to feel what it has been protecting me from feeling. This is precisely what Greenspan describes: the dark emotions arise when we finally create conditions safe enough to hold them.
It would be tempting to treat this grief as purely personal, a private mourning for private losses. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the structural dimensions of my experience.My nervous system became thrown off balance through specific, structural conditions. The conditions of precarious academic labour, the expectations of constant productivity, and the erosion of secure employment are systemic features of contemporary work that affect millions.
Byung-Chul Han (2010/2015), in The Burnout Society, describes how neoliberal economies produce subjects who exploit themselves more thoroughly than any external master could. We become subjects of achievement, experiencing our self-exploitation as freedom, as choice, as personal ambition. The violence is hidden because it comes from within. The exhaustion feels like personal failure rather than structural extraction.
Healing my own nervous system, while valuable, leaves untouched the conditions that initially caused the nervous system to be thrown off balance. I hold both truths: personal healing matters, and structural change remains necessary. The grief I feel this morning is mine, but it is also collective. It belongs to every contract worker who said yes when they wanted to say no. It applies to anyone who has tried to be everything for everyone and lost themselves in the effort.
One of the most generative ideas I have encountered in my research is the body as archive. The body stores experience in ways that resist verbal articulation but emerge vividly through attention to body-based sensation. Muscle tension, posture, breath patterns, sensory associations: these hold histories that may never have been consciously processed or integrated into narrative memory.
When I notice my shoulders dropping, I am reading the archive. The body is releasing its record of vigilance, one slight relaxation at a time. When my jaw softens in sleep, the body is revising its story, replacing the narrative of threat with emerging evidence of safety. When tears come, the body finally allows what was stored to flow outward. The grief I feel is archived, years of unshed tears for years of unlived moments.
van der Kolk (2014) describes trauma as an experience that becomes stuck in the body, unable to complete its natural cycle of activation and discharge. The inverse may also be true: healing becomes possible when the body finds conditions that allow it to complete cycles interrupted by chronic stress. The sea, the warmth, the solitude, the absence of demand: these may be creating the conditions my body needs to process what it has been carrying. The grief is part of that processing.
Later this morning, after the tears had passed and I had dressed and walked to the water, I watched the pelicans again. They rest on the water between dives, floating with apparent ease, their bodies loose and buoyant. They seem to know something about the alternation between effort and rest, between activation and recovery, that I am only now beginning to learn.
The pelicans show no sign of grief. But perhaps that is because they have never lost access to their own rhythm. They have never been asked to produce constantly, to prove their worth through labour, to fear that rest makes them dispensable. They dive when hungry, float when satisfied, and fly when they choose. The simplicity of it undoes something in me.
Porges (2022) argues that safety is a biological imperative, suggesting that social connectedness and the experience of felt safety are fundamental human needs wired into our physiology. Perhaps the grief I feel is the recognition of how long I lived without this safety, how long I ran on vigilance and fear, how much I sacrificed to a system that asked everything and offered no guarantee in return.
Day six. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw is learning to soften. The breath is learning to deepen. And the tears are learning to fall. All of it is necessary. All of it is the body doing its quiet work of remembering what it means to be safe, and mourning the years when safety had been beyond reach.
Greenspan (2003) promises that, when fully felt, grief transmutes into gratitude. I am still on the way. But I trust the process. I trust the tears. I trust the sea and the pelicans and this slow, patient body, finally allowed to feel what it has been carrying.
Safety, it turns out, is something the body both recognizes and grieves. It is something the body grieves when it finally arrives.
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton.
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton.
Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.
Porges, S. W. (2003). Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1008(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1301.004
Porges, S. W. (2004). The body’s instinct to scan for safety: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.
Porges, S. W. (2022). how the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
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.
ACADEMIC LENS
This post documents what Porges (2011) terms a shift from sympathetic to ventral vagal activation: the nervous system’s gradual movement from sustained threat-readiness toward the physiological state associated with safety, social engagement, and rest. The specific somatic markers described, loose jaw, resting shoulders, unhurried breath, are precisely what Levine (2010) identifies as indicators of successful nervous system discharge following chronic mobilisation. Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that trauma treatment cannot proceed through cognitive reframing alone; the body must be given new physical experiences of safety that gradually revise its baseline predictions. The brown pelican observed in this entry functions as what Ulrich (1983) called a restorative natural element: organisms with purposeful, unhurried movement that invite matching attentional rhythms in the observer. The bilingual Spanish-English structure of this post also enacts the methodological argument: that meaning-making happens in the space between languages, and that bilingual expression can access emotional registers unavailable in a single tongue, an insight developed in Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands theory of code-switching as an epistemological practice.
Caminando el Malecón on the fourth day: a bilingual reflection on walking the seafront promenade in Loreto, and what the body learns when it is given permission to move slowly, without destination.
Reading Time: 14minutes
Title: The Bench That Waits
Artist Statement
It was empty when I arrived.
Empty, waiting. The kind of waiting that holds space for whoever might need it, without straining toward arrival. Positioned between palms and water, the bench faced outward, offering its view without instruction. Sit or continue. Stay or keep walking. The invitation was gentle enough to refuse.
I noticed how naturally my body moved toward it.
As if rest recognizes itself. The slats still cool from morning air, the sea stretching steady beyond the shoreline, mountains holding their distance across the water. Nothing demanded attention. The bench offered comfort directly. It simply provided it.
I stayed just long enough.
But long enough to feel the pause it offered. Long enough to understand that some forms of support ask nothing in return. They exist so that, when needed, we can set our weight down for a moment and remember what it feels like to be held without expectation.
It sounds unremarkable, and perhaps it is. People walk every day for transportation, exercise, and the simple need to move from one place to another. But this walking was different. This walking was deliberate, unhurried, without destination. I walked the malecón, the seaside promenade that curves along Loreto’s waterfront, and somewhere between my first step and my last, something shifted. I began to find myself in the rhythm of my own feet.
Rebecca Solnit (2001), in her meditation on the history and meaning of walking, observes that the physical rhythm of walking and the movement of thought are deeply intertwined, each step through a landscape corresponding to a movement through ideas. Walking, she argues, is locomotion and so much more. It is a mode of being in the world, a way of thinking with the body, a practice that has shaped philosophers, poets, and pilgrims for millennia. I set out this morning simply to move. I set out to move. But movement, I am learning, has its own intelligence.
El Malecón / The Promenade
The malecón stretches along the edge of the Sea of Cortez, a paved path bordered by palm trees on one side and water on the other. In the early morning, before the heat becomes oppressive, it fills with walkers: elderly couples moving slowly arm in arm, young mothers pushing strollers, fishermen heading to their boats, tourists like me trying to find our place in this unfamiliar landscape.
I joined the flow without speaking to anyone. I was alone in a crowd, solitary yet surrounded, occupying what the sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) called civil inattention: a delicate social contract in which strangers acknowledge each other’s presence through brief eye contact or a nod, then politely look away, granting each other the privacy of public space. There is a particular freedom in being unknown. No one on this malecón knows my name, my history, my roles, my failures. I am simply a woman walking, indistinguishable from any other woman walking, anonymous in the best possible way.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer whose work explores the relationship between people and place, distinguishes between space and place. Space, he suggests, is abstract, undifferentiated, open. Place is space that has been given meaning through experience, through movement, through the accumulation of memory and feeling. I am in the process of transforming this malecón from space into place, step by step, morning by morning, until it becomes somewhere I belong rather than somewhere I am visiting.
Title: Looking Up
Artist Statement
I noticed the sky because the trees asked me to.
Their trunks moved upward and outward, drawing my gaze away from the ground I had been watching all morning. Palms reaching, bending slightly, as if shaped by years of wind and salt air. I stood beneath them, small in comparison, aware of how rarely I stop long enough to look up without purpose. What held me there was the layering.
Fronds crossing one another. Dark silhouettes against a pale, clouded sky. Movement without urgency. Even the stillness felt alive, suspended between breeze and pause. It reminded me that perspective shifts quietly, sometimes offered by nothing more than changing the direction of your gaze. I stayed a moment longer than expected.
Simply allowing the upward view to hold me. A reminder that rest arrives in many forms beyond lying down. Sometimes it arrives in the simple act of lifting your eyes and letting the world open above you.
There is something about the pace of walking that matches the pace of thought. Frédéric Gros (2014), the French philosopher who wrote a book-length exploration of walking as a philosophical practice, observes that walking is human. When we walk, we move at approximately five kilometres per hour, the pace at which humans have moved for most of our evolutionary history. This is the speed at which the world makes sense, at which details can be noticed, at which the mind can wander without becoming lost.
I noticed things this morning that I would have missed from a car or a bus. A pelican perched on a piling, utterly still, watching the water. An old man mending a fishing net, his fingers moving with the ease of decades of practice. A child chasing pigeons, her laughter bright against the morning quiet. Bougainvillea spilling over a white wall in shades of magenta and coral. A dog sleeping in a patch of sun, so profoundly at peace that I envied him.
These small observations accumulated as I walked, asking nothing, just offering themselves to my attention. This is what the Kaplans (1989) meant by “the gentle pull of the natural world”: the gentle engagement with the environment that allows the mind to rest while remaining alert. Walking provides a constant stream of such fascination: the changing view, the shifting light, the small dramas of ordinary life unfolding at the edges of the path. My attention was held without being captured. I was present without being vigilant.
Una Mujer Caminando Sola / A Woman Walking Alone
There is a particular experience of being a woman walking alone in a public space. Lauren Elkin (2017), in her exploration of female flânerie, the art of wandering through city streets, notes that the figure of the flâneur, the leisurely male stroller who observes urban life, has historically had no female equivalent. Women in public spaces have been subject to scrutiny, harassment, and assumptions about their availability or their morality. The freedom to wander, to be seen without being accosted, to occupy space without justification, has been a privilege unevenly distributed.
Here on the malecón, I felt safe. The morning light, the presence of families, and the openness of the waterfront all contributed to a sense of ease. However, I am aware that this ease is neither universal nor guaranteed. I carry decades of conditioning about where women can go, when, and with whom. I have the vigilance that women learn early, the constant low-level assessment of threat that becomes so habitual it feels like instinct. Walking alone, as a woman, at 60, in a foreign country, is an act of quiet defiance. It is a claiming of space, a declaration that I have as much right to this malecón as anyone.
Sara Maitland (2009), writing about her own experiments with solitude, describes how aloneness for women has historically been framed as socially suspect, as something pathological, dangerous, or a sign of having failed at the relational obligations expected of women. A woman alone must be waiting for someone. A woman alone must be lonely. A woman alone must require rescue, company, or protection. These assumptions persist even when we have consciously rejected them. Walking the malecón alone, I am practising a different narrative: that solitude can be chosen, that a woman can be complete unto herself, that walking alone is pure presence.
I am finding myself, precisely here.
Caminar Como Pensar / Walking as Thinking
Title: Standing with Myself
Artist Statement
I saw the shadow before I saw the photograph. Cast long across the sand, shaped by a sun beyond my direct view, my body appeared as outline rather than detail. No expression. No colour. Just form held briefly on the surface of the earth. I stood still for a moment, noticing how unfamiliar it felt to look at myself without the usual identifiers. No face. No eyes. Only presence. What stayed with me was the clarity of the silhouette.
There is honesty in shadow. It removes performance. Removes the small adjustments we make when we know we are being seen. What remains is posture. Weight distribution. The simple fact of occupying space. I realized I was looking at evidence of being there rather than proof of who I am. A quieter form of documentation. The sand held me without resistance.
Wind-shaped ridges moving outward in soft repetition, my shadow resting across them without altering their pattern. Temporary. Already shifting as the sun moved. I stood there aware that this is what much of life feels like, moments of presence held briefly on landscapes that existed long before us and will continue long after. I let the shadow remain a while.
I let the shadow remain intact a little longer, recognizing it as companion rather than absence. Beyond loneliness. Beyond solitude. Just the simple act of standing with myself, visible in outline, grounded in light.
The philosophers understood what neuroscience is only beginning to confirm: that walking changes how we think. Aristotle taught while walking, his students strolling beside him through the Lyceum’s colonnades. Rousseau claimed that he could compose only while walking. Nietzsche held that genuine philosophical thought could only arise in motion (as cited in Gros, 2014). Wordsworth walked an estimated 180,000 miles in his lifetime, composing poems with each step.
Contemporary research supports these intuitions. Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014), in a series of experiments at Stanford University, found that walking significantly increases creative divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple solutions to open-ended problems. Participants who walked, whether on a treadmill or outdoors, produced more creative responses than those who sat. The effect persisted even after walking ended, suggesting that movement primes the mind for creative thought in ways that outlast the activity itself.
This morning, as I walked, thoughts arose that had been inaccessible during the first three days of sitting and settling. Ideas for writing. Insights about patterns in my life. Connections between things I had read and things I had experienced. It was as if the movement of my body had loosened something in my mind, allowing thoughts that had been stuck, dammed up behind the exhaustion, vigilance, and accumulated tension of years to flow. Walking, I began to think again. Walking, I began to find the thoughts that had been waiting for space to emerge.
Title: A Small Signal
Artist Statement
The self-portrait arrived without intention. I was watching the shoreline, the way the stones gathered where the tide had last reached, when my shadow entered the frame. Familiar now, this outline of myself appearing unannounced. My hand lifted without planning, two fingers raised in a quiet gesture. For no audience at all. Just a small signal that I was here, standing between water and land, present in the light of that moment.
What stayed with me was how brief it was. The sea kept moving. The sand kept holding its patterns. My shadow shifted as the sun moved, the gesture dissolving almost as soon as it formed. And yet it felt enough. A soft reassurance offered inward rather than outward. I am here. I am steady. Still arriving, even now.
El Cuerpo Recuerda Cómo Moverse / The Body Remembers How to Move
I have been a swimmer, a triathlete, a woman who pushed her body through marathons and triathlons. Movement has always been part of who I am. But somewhere in the last few months, I stopped. The demands of work, the weight of caregiving, the creeping exhaustion that made even small exertions feel impossible: these accumulated until I no longer recognized myself as someone who moved. I became sedentary. I became still in all the wrong ways.
Walking the malecón this morning, I felt my body remember. The swing of arms, the push of feet against pavement, the rhythm of breath deepening with exertion. It was gentle, nothing like the intensity of training, but it was movement. It was my body doing what bodies are designed to do: carrying us through the world, encountering terrain, responding to the demands of gravity, distance, and time.
Researchers in embodied cognition argue that thinking extends beyond the brain, distributed throughout the body and its interactions with the environment (Shapiro, 2019). We think through the world rather than about it from a position of detachment; we think through our bodies, with our bodies, as our bodies. Walking is a form of thinking. Movement is a form of knowing. When I walk, I am doing something beyond transporting my mind from place to place. I am engaging in a fundamentally different mode of cognition, one that integrates body and world in ways that sitting cannot replicate.
Encuentros / Encounters
Near the end of the malecón, where the pavement gives way to sand, and the tourist hotels yield to fishing shacks, I stopped to rest on a bench. An elderly woman sat at the other end, her face weathered by sun and time, her hands folded in her lap. We nodded at each other, the universal greeting of strangers sharing space.
“Bonita mañana,” she said after a moment. Beautiful morning.
“Sí,” I agreed. “Muy bonita.”
We sat in companionable silence, watching the water. I knew nothing of her name, her story, nothing about the life that had brought her to this bench on this morning. She knew nothing of mine. And yet there was a connection, brief and wordless, the kind of connection that can only happen between strangers who have no agenda, no history, no expectation of each other. Just two women, sharing a bench, watching the sea.
The sociologist Georg Simmel (1908/1971), writing about urban life, described the paradox of proximity and distance that characterizes encounters with strangers. We are physically close, often closer than we would be with intimates, yet socially distant, protected by conventions of anonymity. This distance, Simmel argued, can be liberating. It allows us to be seen without being known, to exist in public without the weight of personal history.
The woman rose to leave, gathering a small bag I had missed until that moment. “Que le vaya bien,” she said. May it go well for you. “Igualmente,” I replied. Same to you. She walked away, and I stayed on the bench, holding the small gift of that encounter, that moment of human connection that asked nothing and gave everything.
Encontrándome / Finding Myself
Title: Where the Water Waits
Artist Statement
I found it tucked into the wall as though it had always been there, water gathering quietly beneath the carved lion’s face. The stream was gentle, almost ceremonial, falling into the basin without urgency. I stood there longer than I expected, listening to the soft repetition of water meeting stone. There was something grounding in its rhythm, a steadiness that asked nothing of me and yet held the space all the same.
What struck me most was the feeling of offering. The fountain asked nothing of thirst. It simply waited, holding water for whoever might arrive needing pause, reflection, or refreshment. I felt that invitation without having to drink. Just standing near it was enough, reminded that restoration often lives in small, quiet places, flowing patiently until we are ready to receive it.
What does it mean to find yourself? The phrase is so common that it has become cliché, the stuff of self-help books, wellness retreats and midlife crisis narratives. And yet, walking back along the malecón this morning, I understood something about what it might actually mean.
Finding yourself is encountering something in motion, beyond any unchanging core that has been there all along, hidden beneath roles and responsibilities. The self is no buried treasure. Instead, as the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) argues, the self is something we construct through our choices, our relationships, our engagements with the world. Taylor (1989) suggests that selfhood is constituted by the things that genuinely matter to us; identity is formed through what w rather than simply discovered,e care about and choose to orient ourselves toward. We find ourselves by discovering what matters, by choosing what to attend to, by moving toward what calls us.
Walking matters to me. I had forgotten, but this morning I remembered. Movement matters. The body in space, encountering the world at the speed of feet, matters. Solitude in public, the freedom to be alone among others, matters. The malecón is teaching me what matters. Each step is a small declaration: this is who I am. This is who I am becoming.
Dan McAdams (2001), the narrative psychologist, suggests that identity is fundamentally a story we tell about ourselves, a personal myth that integrates past, present, and anticipated future into a coherent sense of who we are. Finding yourself in this framework means revising the story. It means writing new chapters. It means recognizing that the self is fluid, authored, made.
I am making myself on this malecón. Step by step, I am writing a new chapter in which I am a woman who walks alone, who claims space, who moves through the world at the speed of thought, who finds herself through solitude, because of it.
Paso a paso, me estoy convirtiendo en quien siempre fui.
Step by step, I am becoming who I always was.
Reflexión de la tarde / Evening Reflection
Title: Daybreak Crossing
Artist Statement
I arrived before the sun cleared the mountains, when the sea was still holding night in its depths. The horizon glowed slowly, a thin line of gold widening by the minute, as though the day were being poured carefully into the world. Birds crossed the sky in loose formation, their wings catching the first light. I stood still, aware of how quietly morning begins when no one is rushing it forward.
What I felt most was permission. The water moved without urgency. The light unfolded at its own pace. Nothing demanded that I be anything other than present to the crossing from dark to day. In that moment, I understood arrival differently, as something ongoing, something that happens gradually, like sunrise, asking only that I remain long enough to witness it.
I walked again this evening, as the sun dropped toward the mountains and the light turned golden. The malecón was different at this hour: more crowded, more festive, families out for their evening paseo, that lovely Latin custom of strolling together as the day cools. I was alone among the couples and the families, and I felt held by that rhythm. I felt held by the rhythm of the walk, the beauty of the light, the simple pleasure of a body in motion.
Tomorrow I will walk again. And the day after that. Walking has become my practice here, my daily discipline, my way of being in this place and in this body. Each walk is different: different light, other encounters, different thoughts arising from the rhythm of feet. And each walk is the same: the same path, the same sea, the same self, meeting the world one step at a time.
Solnit (2001) remarks that the pace of genuine thought roughly matches the pace of walking, and that contemporary life, moving far faster than either, routinely outruns the capacity for real reflection. Here in Loreto, I am slowing down to the speed of thought. I am letting my mind keep pace with my feet. I am finding myself in the ordinary miracle of movement, of breath, of a body carrying me through a world that reveals itself slowly, step by step, along a malecón I am learning to call my own.
Elkin, L. (2017). Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Goffman, E. (1963). Behaviour in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press.
Gros, F. (2014). A philosophy of walking (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Maitland, S. (2009). A book of silence. Granta.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577
Shapiro, L. (2019). Embodied cognition (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Simmel, G. (1971). The stranger. In D. N. Levine (Ed.), Georg Simmel: On individuality and social forms (pp. 143–149). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908)
Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
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.
Academic Lens
Walking the malecon as daily ritual embodies what Pink (2013) calls sensory ethnography: knowledge gathered through the moving, attentive body in a specific place. The body adapting to a new rhythm, new smells, sounds, temperatures, signals the early stages of body-based regulation that Levine (2010) describes as the nervous system's capacity to "track" safety. The bilingual form of this entry reflects the way the Spanish-speaking environment was generating a different kind of cognitive and embodied presence.
ACADEMIC LENS
Walking as a research method has a long tradition in what O’Rourke (2013) calls “walking methodologies”: the mobile body as instrument of inquiry, the act of moving through space as a form of thinking. This day-four entry on the malecón traces what Tuan (1977) calls the phenomenology of place attachment: how a landscape becomes meaningful through repeated bodily encounter, through the accumulation of sensory memory that gradually transforms space into place. The proximity of the sea is methodologically central rather than incidental,ral: Blue Mind research (Nichols, 2014) documents the measurable calming effect of blue spaces on the human nervous system, partially explaining the restorative quality of this daily practice. The bilingual notation, moving between Spanish place names and English reflection, performs what Anzaldúa (1987) describes as the writing of the borderlands: language that belongs fully to neither territory and thus opens a third epistemological space. The early-project quality of this walk, still tentative, still scanning, still learning what it means to move without agenda, also documents the initial stages of what Levine (2010) calls somatic re-orientation: teaching the nervous system, through repeated safe experience, that purposeless movement is permitted.
I woke this morning with a tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with the night before.
The sleep had been deep, the room cool, the sea audible through the open window. Everything about this place says rest. And yet my body woke braced, as though preparing for something that never arrived.
I lay still for a long time, watching the ceiling lighten. Trying to name what I was feeling.
It took a while to find the word. When it came, it surprised me.
Fear.
The Shape of It
The fear lives elsewhere. I have settled into Loreto more easily than I expected. Solitude has become companionable. Silence I am learning to inhabit.
The fear is of what happens if I truly let go.
For years, decades, I have held myself together through effort. Through vigilance. Through the constant, quiet work of monitoring, anticipating, and performing competence. I have been the one who could be counted on. The one who showed up prepared. The one who held more than her share because holding felt safer than asking for help.
That holding has become so familiar that I cannot quite imagine who I would be without it.
And so the fear: if I release the grip, if I stop the vigilance, if I truly rest, will I ever want to return to life as it was? Will I lose the capacity for striving that kept me employed, that kept me useful, that kept me worthy of belonging?
Will I, in some fundamental way, stop being the person I have always been?
The Paradox of Letting Go
There is a strange paradox here. I came to this retreat because I was exhausted by the holding. Because the vigilance had worn grooves in my nervous system that no longer served me. Because I wanted, desperately, to rest.
And now that rest is possible, I am afraid of it.
Afraid that rest will undo me. That I will sink into it and never surface. The woman who emerges from this month will be unrecognizable to herself and to others. That she will have lost her edge, her drive, her usefulness.
The fear reveals how deeply I have tied my worth to my capacity for effort. How thoroughly I have believed that I am only as valuable as what I produce.
Brené Brown (2010) calls this the use of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as a measure of self-worth. She identifies it as one of the things we must consciously release if we want to live what she calls a wholehearted life. Reading those words years ago, I nodded in recognition. Living them is harder.
Title: Halfway There
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creating Safety for the Self
In my academic work, I have written about psychological safety: the conditions that allow people to take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, shame, or punishment (Edmondson, 1999). In classrooms and workplaces, psychological safety means being able to ask questions, admit mistakes, and offer ideas that might fail. It means knowing that vulnerability will be met with support rather than judgment.
I have spent years trying to create psychological safety for students. I have rarely thought about creating it for myself.
What would it mean to approach my own interior with the same care I offer others? To make it safe for myself to rest without proving I deserve it? To let go without requiring a plan for what comes next?
Psychological safety, I am learning, begins within. It begins with the quiet assurance that I will stay with myself, whatever surfaces. That I will meet my need for rest with gentleness. That I will carry this retreat forward as what it is: a return to myself.
The body knows when it is safe. Stephen Porges (2022) has shown that feelings of safety arise from internal physiological states and from cues that signal the nervous system can stand down from vigilance. Those cues can come from the environment, from the relationship, from the breath, from the stillness.
They can also come from the stories we tell ourselves about what we are allowed to need.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
There is another fear beneath this one, harder to name.
I am afraid that if I let go completely, I will lose the capacity to love the life I have built. That the stillness will reveal how much of my striving was compensation rather than calling. That I will look back at my career, my choices, my years of effortful contribution, and feel only exhaustion rather than meaning.
I am afraid of becoming someone who no longer wants to return.
And beneath even that: I am afraid that letting go will reveal an emptiness I have been running from. That, without the structure of obligation, without the identity of educator, without the constant motion, I will find nothing but blank space where a self should be.
This is the fear that woke me this morning. This is what tightened my chest before dawn.
Staying With It
I left my phone untouched. I resisted the pull toward plans or tasks or the small urgencies that usually rescue me from discomfort.
I stayed.
I let the fear be present without trying to fix it. I breathed into the tightness in my chest. I asked, with as much curiosity as I could muster: What are you trying to protect?
The answer came slowly. The fear is trying to protect me from loss. Loss of identity. Loss of purpose. Loss of the scaffolding that has held my life in place for so long.
I thanked it. I mean that genuinely. The fear has kept me functional through years that might otherwise have broken me. It has helped me show up when showing up was required. It has been a kind of armour, and armour serves a purpose.
But armour is heavy. And I am in a place now where I can set it down, even briefly. Even experimentally.
An Experiment in Trust
What if letting go means finding? What if the woman who emerges from stillness is clarified rather than diminished? What if rest reveals presence rather than emptiness?
I cannot know without trying. I cannot know from the outside. I can only know by going in.
Brown (2010) writes about cultivating intuition and trusting faith, which requires letting go of the need for certainty. Certainty is what I have always sought. Plans, structures, contingencies. The illusion that if I prepare enough, I can prevent loss. The illusion that control keeps me safe.
Here in Loreto, the illusion is harder to maintain. The sea holds itself apart from my plans. The mountains hold their shape with or without my watching. The pelicans fish without consulting my schedule. Life here unfolds without my management, and it unfolds beautifully.
Perhaps I, too, can unfold without so much management.
Perhaps the self that emerges from stillness will be someone I recognize after all. Perhaps she will be someone I have been waiting to meet.
Morning, After
I made coffee. I carried it to the small balcony. I sat in the chair that had become familiar over these eight days and watched the light strengthen over the water.
The fear remained. It sat beside me like a companion, still present but no longer gripping. I had acknowledged it. I had listened. I had refused to let it drive me back into motion.
This, I think, is what the discipline of staying means. It means feeling the fear fully. It means feeling the fear and remaining anyway. It means creating enough safety within myself to be present with uncertainty, with open-handedness, with the vulnerability of letting go.
The morning was quiet. A boat moved slowly across the bay. Somewhere, someone was beginning their day with purpose and direction. I was beginning mine with a question still ahead of me.
That felt honest. That felt like enough.
¿Y si me suelto? What if I let go?
I hold the question open. But I am willing to find out.
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
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Porges, S. W. (2022). nervous system safety: Attachment, communication, finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
ACADEMIC LENS
The question at the heart of this post, ¿y si me suelto?, “what if I let go?”, names the central therapeutic and existential challenge that van der Kolk (2014) identifies in trauma recovery: learning to release the chronic muscular and psychic bracing that survival required, even when survival is no longer at stake. Menakem (2017) describes this as “settling the body”: the slow, somatic process of convincing the nervous system that it may relax its vigilance. The bilingual framing is significant: posing the question first in Spanish allows it to arrive before the analytical English mind can intercept and evaluate it. Anzaldúa (1987) argued that bilingual expression can bypass habitual cognitive filters, accessing emotional knowing that monolingual discourse forecloses. The arts-based imagery accompanying this reflection functions within what Levine (2010) calls the “felt sense”: the pre-linguistic bodily awareness that must be engaged for deep somatic change to occur. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou ontology also resonates: letting go may be understood as releasing the I-It relationship with one’s own body, the instrumental management of the self, in favour of a more receptive, present, and mutual encounter with one’s own experience.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body abandonment, trauma, and the nervous system’s response to harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity.
Title: Please Honour This Boundary
Artist Statement
I stopped because the request was gentle.
The sign carries no threat. It carries no scolding. It asks. Please. It marks a boundary in soft language, inviting care rather than compliance. Behind it, the dunes rise slowly, grasses holding sand in place, doing the quiet work of restoration. Beyond that, the water moves, and the mountains remain steady, indifferent to whether I step forward or hold still.
This image brought my relationship with boundaries to the forefront. For a long time, I understood boundaries as exclusion or denial, something imposed from outside. Here, the boundary exists in service of recovery. It protects what is fragile and still becoming. It honours a process that cannot be rushed.
I stood there longer than necessary, noticing how restraint can be an act of respect. Remaining outside is a form of presence. It is participation through care. The land is witnessed without requiring my footsteps. It needs space. It needs time. It needs people willing to stop at the edge and let healing happen without interruption.
This sign speaks to a lesson I am learning in my own life. Restored spaces require protection. Emerging strength requires limits. There is dignity in stepping back when something is growing.
I took this photograph as a reminder that care often looks like a pause. That listening sometimes means remaining at the threshold. That asking permission of land, of body, of self, is a way of staying in right relationship.
The running shoes sat in the corner of my room for three weeks before I touched them. I had packed them with intention, tucked between journals and watercolours, believing that here, in this place of alonetude beside the Sea of Cortez, I might find my way back to my body. This morning, I finally laced them on.
Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity. In this sense, solitude becomes a micro-practice of justice, reclaiming time, body, and attention from institutional regimes that normalize depletion.
The soles felt strange against my feet. Foreign. As if they belonged to someone I used to know.
Where universities track contracts, outputs, and enrolments, these artifacts track fatigue, healing, consent, and refusal.
Image: Waiting to Move
Artist Statement
These running shoes exist for return, never speed.
They have carried me through early mornings and late afternoons, through streets that asked nothing of me and paths that asked me to pay attention. They hold the imprint of repetition, of breath finding rhythm, of the body remembering that it knows how to move without explanation.
What these shoes remind me of is how care can be practical. They absorb impact quietly. They meet the ground again and again without complaint. They do the work they were made to do, and in doing so, they allow me to keep going. There is something deeply grounding in that kind of reliability.
Running, for me, has become a practice of listening rather than pushing. I notice how my feet land. I notice when my stride shortens, when my body asks for gentleness rather than distance. These shoes have learned my pace. They hold evidence of effort and rest equally.
I have spent many years moving through systems that rewarded endurance without regard for wear. These shoes offer a different lesson. Support matters. Cushioning matters. Fit matters. Progress happens when the body feels held rather than driven.
This image belongs to my inquiry into recovery, embodiment, and the ethics of care. Forward motion asks for presence over urgency. Sometimes it simply requires something steady beneath you and the willingness to take the next step.
My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a body-based assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold the right to safe and secure work. Precarious academic labour extends far beyond an employment condition; it is a human rights issue. International frameworks recognize the right to decent work, rest, and health, yet contingent academic systems routinely undermine these rights through chronic insecurity, unpaid labour, and performance surveillance.
For years, running functioned as infrastructure, a way to metabolize contract uncertainty, wildfire seasons, pandemic isolation, and the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. My body was both coping and complying. The shoes, therefore, archive institutional extraction, marking how academic capitalism extends into muscle, breath, and gait.
Title: Move
Artist Statement
I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.
What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.
As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.
I stopped running last August. The word stopped implies a decision, a deliberate cessation. That framing feels too clean. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue. I attempted to start running in October, then in November, and, well, today.
For years, running had been my anchor. Through the relentless cycles of precarious academic labour (contract after contract, never knowing if the next semester would bring employment), my morning runs held the chaos at bay. I ran through smoke seasons when Kamloops air turned orange with wildfire haze. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and uncertainty. I ran through the accumulating weight of what Han (2010/2015) calls the burnout society: that particular form of exhaustion that emerges when self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-improvement.
Until I could run no more.
Title: Discarded Shelter: A Small Artifact of Passage
Artist Statement
This photograph captures a worn cap resting on dry soil and creeping groundcover, an object displaced yet held by the landscape. As a personal artifact, the cap signals exposure and release, something once worn for protection, now relinquished to the elements. It functions as a micro archive of movement and passage, marking a moment where containment gives way to vulnerability.
The surrounding textures of dust, stone, and persistent vegetation speak to resilience within aridity. These materials carry their own histories of endurance and adaptation. Placed together, they form a quiet record of how presence fades without disappearing entirely.
Positioned at the threshold between human trace and ecological continuity, the cap holds tension between what is left behind and what endures. As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents departure, rest, and the ethics of letting go through material evidence rather than narrative explanation.
The language of “stopping” is too orderly for what actually happened. It suggests a managerial decision, a tidy life choice, a rational pivot. Bodies rarely follow rational life plans, and exhaustion rarely arrives that way. What happened was more like surrender: the moment when a body simply refuses to continue performing a capacity it no longer possesses.
For fifteen years, running was far more than a hobby. It was infrastructure. It was how I metabolized stress, uncertainty, grief, ambition, and institutional precarity. I ran through contract cycles, through wildfire smoke, through pandemic isolation, through the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. Running functioned as a regulator, a refuge, and an identity. It was both a coping mechanism and a performance of resilience.
That framing feels too clean, almost managerial. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue.
Running has been a huge part of my life. It structured my mornings and offered a sense of coherence in a life shaped by academic precarity, seasonal contracts, and the constant uncertainty of whether the next semester would bring work. I ran through wildfire seasons when Kamloops air turned orange and thick with ash. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and anxiety. I ran through the accumulation of what Han (2010/2015) describes as the burnout society, where self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-care, and productivity masquerades as virtue.
My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a body-based assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold it.
Title: Vulnerability: A Body Returns to Motion
Artist Statement
This photograph depicts a single running shoe resting on volcanic sand, functioning as a quiet ethnographic artifact. It holds the quiet rather than staging crisis or spectacle. Instead, it holds the ordinary materiality of stopping.
The shoe operates as an extension of the body, a prosthetic of movement shaped by repetition, impact, and endurance. Set down on the ground, it marks a pause rather than a failure. It bears witness to exhaustion as an embodied state and to the moment when motion, once necessary for survival, is interrupted.
What emerges here is a material trace of rupture in an identity long organized around forward movement. The shoe records effort without explanation. It carries the imprint of kilometres travelled and the weight of what it has absorbed. In resting, it shifts function from propulsion to evidence.
As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents the ethics of stopping, the legitimacy of rest, and the quiet knowledge held by materials once devoted to endurance.
In qualitative terms, this image functions as data. It documents a threshold moment in which the body asserted its limits against institutional, psychological, and cultural demands. The shoe, half-buried, speaks to sedimentation, the layering of fatigue, trauma, ambition, and discipline that eventually accumulates into refusal. In this sense, stopping is a form of information rather than failure.
There is vulnerability in this artifact, but also a possibility. The shoe holds both cessation and return. It sits on the edge of movement, implying that motion may re-emerge on different terms. Returning to running now feels less like reclaiming a former self and more like negotiating a new relationship with embodiment, one that privileges consent, slowness, and care over endurance and performance.
If loneliness is the pain of being alone, solitude is its glory. Similarly, if exhaustion is the pain of productivity, rest may be its quiet counterpart. The body’s refusal becomes a form of wisdom, a boundary that resists the neoliberal logic of infinite capacity.
Title: Shadow at the Threshold
Artist Statement
This image records my shadow elongated across water and shore, a body doubled by reflection and light. I am present twice here and fully in neither place. The shadow stretches into the lake while my feet remain on land, marking a quiet division between where the body stands and where the self extends.
What this moment holds for me is a sense of suspension. The water is still enough to reflect sky and mountain, yet shallow enough to reveal the ground beneath. The shadow moves across both states at once. It belongs to surface and depth simultaneously. I held still. I resisted pulling back. I stayed exactly where I was and let the image form around that decision.
The length of the shadow speaks to timing rather than identity. It records the angle of the sun, the hour of the day, the season of light. My form is stretched thin by circumstance, shaped by forces beyond my control. This feels honest. It mirrors a period in my life where identity is extended, reworked, and softened by context rather than fixed by definition.
As visual data, the photograph captures an embodied moment of orientation. The shoreline becomes a site where body, environment, and time co-produce meaning. The self appears as trace rather than subject, relational and temporary. The shadow is evidence of presence. It is evidence of standing still long enough to be shaped by what surrounds me.
The shadow also gestures toward institutional surveillance, in which the academic self is often experienced as an object observed and measured rather than as a sovereign subject. Such surveillance practices implicate academic freedom and the right to dignity at work, where bodies become sites of audit and governance rather than care.
This section demonstrates vulnerability as knowledge-based data, revealing how institutional precarity inscribes itself on the nervous system and how embodied refusal constitutes knowledge.
Scholarly Engagement: The Archive of Exhaustion
Understanding what happens when a body collapses from prolonged occupational stress requires theoretical frameworks that honour what the body knows. The polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges (2011), offers essential language for what I experienced. Porges describes three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal state (social engagement, safety, connection), the sympathetic state (fight-or-flight, mobilization), and the dorsal vagal state (shutdown, collapse, conservation).
Title: Learning to Shuffle: Safety as Relational Practice
Artist Statement
This photo centres on a warning sign for manta rays that instructs walkers to shuffle their feet as they enter the sea. The directive is practical, grounded in ecological care and mutual vulnerability. Shuffling helps alert manta rays to human presence, reducing the risk of harm to both. Yet the instruction also operates symbolically, asking the human body to slow down, to signal itself, and to move with awareness rather than entitlement.
What interests me here is how movement becomes ethical practice. The body is asked to alter its habitual patterns in recognition of another being’s habitat and dignity. Shuffling becomes a pedagogy of relational care, a way of learning through the feet that the shoreline is shared space. This is an ecosystem beyond empty leisure where human and more-than-human lives intersect continuously.
The manta ray remains unseen beneath the surface, yet it is central to the instruction. Its invisibility matters. Ethical movement depends on attention to what cannot always be perceived directly. The sign makes visible an obligation to those who are present without being immediately legible, reminding the walker that care often begins before encounter.
As visual data, this artifact extends my inquiry into alonetude and embodied ethics. Movement here is framed neither as conquest nor extraction, but as negotiated presence. The directive to shuffle offers a quiet counterpoint to productivity culture. Slow down. Sense the ground. Acknowledge others. Move in ways that minimize harm. In this sense, the sign functions as both ecological instruction and philosophical metaphor for ethical being-in-place.
The sign offers a counter-ways of knowing to academic capitalism: a movement guided by relational accountability rather than speed, competition, and extraction.
For years, my nervous system oscillated between the body’s alert state and desperate attempts to reach genuine safety safety. The constant a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger of precarious employment (Will there be a contract next term? Am I performing well enough to be renewed? What happens if I speak too honestly about institutional failures?) kept my body in a state of chronic threat, what Porges (2011) calls neuroception: the nervous system’s unconscious scanning for danger. My nervous system read danger everywhere, even when my conscious mind insisted everything was fine.
By August, my body had shifted into dorsal vagal shutdown. This is the state of last resort: what happens when fight-or-flight fails, when mobilization depletes beyond recovery. The system conserves by collapsing. Energy withdraws. Movement becomes effortful. The world flattens into grey.
Running became impossible because running requires mobilization energy. When the tank is truly empty, even self-care becomes another demand the body simply cannot meet.
Table 1
nervous system States and Physical Activity: A Personal Cartography
nervous system State
Physical Activity Capacity
Workplace Conditions
Body-based Markers
Ventral Vagal (Safety/Connection)
Full capacity; movement feels enjoyable and restorative
Note. This table integrates Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory with personal experience during the transition from occupational burnout to healing retreat. The nervous system states are mapped to physical activity capacity, workplace conditions, and body-based markers, as documented over the research period. Adapted for SPN methodology where lived experience constitutes primary data.
Perspective: This Morning’s Run
I walked to the waterfront before dawn. The air held that particular softness that exists only in the hours before the desert sun asserts its dominance. My body felt tentative, as if asking permission to inhabit space differently than it has for months.
Image Before the Sun
Artist Statement
The pre-dawn hour offers what Porges (2011) describes as environmental safety cues: low stimulation, softened light, and the absence of social demand. This temporal threshold between night and day mirrors a physiological transition, as the body begins to move from dorsal vagal shutdown toward genuine safety engagement.
In this moment, the environment participates actively in regulation. Still water reflects rather than interrupts. Sound is muted. Movement is minimal. Nothing asks for response. The scene supports a gradual return to relational capacity without forcing alertness or productivity. Safety is communicated through quiet continuity rather than reassurance.
What draws my attention here is how regulation emerges through context rather than effort. The body requires no instruction to calm itself. It responds to cues offered by light, temperature, and space. The landscape becomes co-regulator, holding the nervous system in a state of readiness without demand.
As visual data, this image documents a condition of becoming. The water gestures toward possibility rather than outcome. Regulation is present as potential rather than performance. This pre-dawn interval holds the ethics of alonetude, a chosen presence that allows the body to re-enter connection on its own terms.
I began slowly. Pace itself became a form of care. My feet found rhythm on the packed sand near the water’s edge, where the surface offered just enough cushion to absorb impact.
For the first few minutes, my body resisted. Muscles complained. The lungs protested the unfamiliar demand for deeper oxygen exchange. This is what Levine (1997) describes in Waking the Tiger: the body’s natural protective response to resuming activities associated with periods of distress. My nervous system remembered that running used to accompany exhaustion, anxiety, and the desperate attempt to outpace institutional harm.
I kept moving anyway. I let the complaints arise without trying to silence them. I noticed the tightness in my shoulders, the guarding in my jaw, the way my breath wanted to stay shallow.
Title: Sands of Time
Artist Statement
Faint footprints along the shoreline mark movement, presence, and impermanence. They are body-based traces of a body in motion, briefly impressed into wet sand and already in the process of being taken back by the tide. The marks exist within a narrow window of visibility, held only until water returns.
What this image holds for me is the relationship between embodiment and erasure. Presence here is real, yet provisional. The body leaves evidence, but it releases any insistence on permanence. The shoreline registers contact and then releases it, responding through its own rhythm rather than human intention.
The tide functions as collaborator rather than force. It participates in making and unmaking the trace, reminding me that movement always occurs within relational systems. No step exists in isolation. Each imprint is shaped by timing, pressure, moisture, and return.
As visual data, the photograph documents how presence is enacted and dissolved through the shared rhythms of body and sea. The footprints carry no intention of enduring. They mark a moment of passage, offering a quiet lesson in how to move through the world while allowing what follows to take its course.
Porges (2011) describes this shift as the nervous system receiving cues of safety from the environment. The rhythm of waves. The cool air on my skin. The absence of screens, notifications, and institutional surveillance. The steadiness of my own footfalls established a new relationship with this body, this moment, this place.
My shoulders dropped. My jaw softened. My breath deepened of its own accord, without instruction or force. A state of genuine safety and connection emerged. For the first time in months, I felt my body organizing itself around presence rather than threat.
Here I am.
That moment asked for a theory: to understand how, rather than to explain it away, something so structural could feel so intimate.
Theory: Bodies as Archives of Structural Harm
The exhaustion that brought my running practice to a halt was never merely personal. Academic capitalism, the systematic transformation of higher education into a market-driven enterprise prioritising revenue generation, productivity metrics, and competitive positioning (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), creates bodies like mine with systematic precision. The precarious labour conditions that define contemporary university employment produce specific physiological consequences: chronic stress activation, disrupted sleep architecture, inflammatory cascades, and metabolic the nervous system thrown off balance.
Al Serhan and Houjeir (2020) found significant correlations between the intensification of academic capitalism and faculty burnout, documenting how market-driven educational environments create unsustainable demands that erode well-being and professional capacity. Their research validates what my body already knew: this exhaustion is structural, produced by systems designed to extract maximum labour from minimally compensated workers.
Precarious academic labour extends beyond a labour-market condition; it is also a human rights concern. These rights are articulated in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966), which affirms the right to just and favourable conditions of work, including rest and reasonable limitation of working hours.
The right to decent work, security of employment, and safe working conditions is recognized in international human rights frameworks, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. My body’s collapse thus reflects more than personal vulnerability; it indexes institutional arrangements that systematically violate the right to dignified, secure, and health-sustaining work.
My body’s collapse is thus beyond the simply anecdotal; it is indicative of systemic rights erosion in contemporary higher education.
Title: Strata of the Third Shore: Sea as Memory, Land as Archive
Artist Statement
This painted stone renders the sea as layered strata, with bands of blue, rust, green, and sand-toned pigment evoking shoreline, sediment, and water in dialogue. The rock functions as both canvas and collaborator, carrying its own geological history while receiving contemporary marks of experience. In this sense, the piece becomes a micro archive where land and memory meet.
The horizontal bands suggest temporal and emotional layers. Surface calm gives way to deeper currents, sedimented grief, and emergent healing. The luminous blue at the base gestures toward movement and continuity, while warmer earth tones recall land-based memory and embodied history. The stone resists smoothness, insisting on texture and unevenness. This resistance mirrors the non linear nature of recovery and becoming.
As an arts-based research artifact, this work operates as multimodal data within Scholarly Personal Narrative and humanities inquiry. Painting the sea onto land material enacts a relational methodology in which body, pigment, stone, and place co-produce knowledge. The object becomes a tactile record of alonetude, presence, and the ethics of witnessing landscape as teacher.
Hochschild (1983) named this phenomenon emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. For contingent academics, emotional labour extends beyond classroom performance to include the constant performance of enthusiasm, the manufactured gratitude for unstable employment, and the suppression of legitimate grievances. This labour is invisible, uncompensated, and ultimately depleting.
My body stopped running because it had nothing left. The collapse was honest. The collapse was necessary.
Title: Bleached Architecture: Coral as Witness and Afterlife
Artist Statement
A bleached coral fragment rests on volcanic sand, marking presence, loss, and ecological time. Its porous structure carries traces of former life, openings where relation once flowed. The surface records exposure. What remains is delicate, weight-bearing, and altered by conditions beyond its control.
This fragment brings my attention to fragility as a shared condition. Coral lives through interdependence, relying on temperature, chemistry, and rhythm held in balance. When that balance shifts, the body changes. What appears inert is, in fact, a record of relation strained beyond capacity.
Encountering this piece, I felt my own exhaustion placed within a wider field of precarity. The fragment situates bodily depletion alongside ecological harm, linking labour extraction and environmental degradation as intersecting justice concerns. Both operate through systems that normalize overuse, accelerate demand, and treat depletion as acceptable cost.
Here, coral functions as ecological witness and material archive. It indexes how patterns of strain reverberate across bodies, institutions, and environments, leaving evidence that is quiet yet enduring. The fragment holds no accusation. It remains. In doing so, it asks for attention, care, and a recalibration of how value, labour, and life are held.
Healing requires completing interrupted defensive responses; movement releases trapped survival energy
Body-led pacing allows completion of protective responses; running becomes discharge rather than demand
Note. This table synthesises trauma theory, organizational psychology, and embodiment scholarship to contextualize the cessation and resumption of physical activity following occupational burnout. Sources verified through institutional databases. Framework aligned with Nash’s (2004) SPN requirement that personal narrative engage substantively with scholarly literature.
Action: Movement as Reclamation
I ran for perhaps fifteen minutes this morning. By any previous standard of mine (when I could cover ten kilometres before breakfast, when running was discipline and distance and doing), fifteen minutes would have felt inadequate. A failure.
This morning, those fifteen minutes felt like a revolution.
Title: Daybreak at the Cliff
Artist Statement
Pelicans rest on volcanic rock as dawn light opens the horizon, holding stillness, tide, and geological time in quiet relation. The birds are present without urgency, bodies folded into rest as the ocean continues its steady rhythm. The rock beneath them carries a deeper temporality, shaped by forces that long predate both tide and wing.
What this scene brings into focus is co-presence across scales. Avian life, ocean movement, and volcanic strata occupy the same frame without hierarchy. Dawn holds each rhythm without favouring one over another. It simply reveals them together. The pelicans remain part of the landscape rather than interrupting it. They belong to it, momentarily aligned with processes that exceed any single lifespan.
The image situates time as layered rather than linear. The immediate softness of morning light sits alongside the slow pulse of the sea and the vast duration held in stone. This convergence invites attention to continuity rather than event, to relationship rather than action.
As visual data, the photograph documents a moment where species, elements, and temporalities meet without demand. It foregrounds an ethics of shared presence, reminding me that rest, movement, and endurance can coexist within the same horizon, each holding space for the others.
The difference lies in how I returned. Previously, my running was extraction, demanding performance from a body that had already given everything. The running that happened this morning was related. I moved with my body rather than at it.
Sunderland et al. (2022) describe how trauma-informed movement practices differ fundamentally from conventional exercise frameworks. Rather than imposing external goals on the body, trauma-informed movement invites the body to lead, to set pace, to determine duration, to signal completion. The practitioner’s role shifts from taskmaster to listener.
This morning, I listened. When my body asked to slow down, I slowed down. When it wanted to stop and watch pelicans dive for fish, I stopped. When it asked to walk the final stretch, I walked. Each choice was a conversation rather than a command.
Title: The Pause That Teaches
Artist Statement
The pelicans offered an unplanned lesson in embodied presence. Their hunting unfolds through complete attentiveness to the moment. Hovering. Assessing. Committing fully to the dive. There is no excess movement, no rehearsal. Each action arises from readiness rather than force.
Watching them, I felt my own body slow. The run paused without ending. Breath settled. Attention sharpened. The act of observing became a parallel practice, one that allowed stillness to exist inside motion rather than in opposition to it. The pelicans approached the water without rushing. They waited until the moment was right, and then they moved without hesitation.
This experience reframed how I understand interruption. Within trauma-informed movement, pauses are often misread as failure or loss of discipline. Here, the pause functioned as information. It carried data about safety, timing, and deep listening. The body knew when to stop watching and when to move again.
As visual and body-based data, this moment documents a shift in relationship to movement. Attention becomes a form of care. Stillness becomes part of momentum. The pelicans model a way of being that honours precision over speed and presence over persistence, offering permission to pause without abandoning forward motion.
Alonetude made this possible. In solitude, there is no audience for performance. No fitness tracker is demanding improvement. No institutional gaze measuring productivity. There is only the body, the breath, the sea, the slowly brightening sky.
Without witnesses, the body can tell the truth.
Title: Step into the Tide
Artist Statement
A bare foot meets the shoreline, marking contact, return, and the body’s quiet consent to re-enter the sea. The gesture is small, almost unremarkable, yet it carries weight. Skin touches water without armour or urgency. The body chooses proximity rather than distance.
What this moment holds for me is the ethics of consent in movement. The foot pauses before fully entering, allowing sensation to arrive first. Temperature, texture, resistance. The sea is met slowly, on equal terms. This is a return that requires no immersion. It honours readiness.
The shoreline becomes a threshold where the body negotiates trust. Years of holding tension and bracing against impact have taught my body to hesitate. Here, hesitation is attentiveness. It is listening. The foot lowers when the nervous system agrees. Contact becomes collaboration rather than conquest.
As visual data, this image documents an embodied decision point. Re-entry is framed as relational, shaped by timing, sensation, and choice. The body resists rushing to belong. It waits until belonging feels possible.
van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body keeps the score, that our tissues, organs, and nervous systems hold the memory of what we have survived. If this is true, then my body has been keeping meticulous records of nineteen years of precarious labour. The chronic tension. The interrupted sleep. The constant calibration of self-presentation to meet institutional expectations. The grief of contracts that ended, relationships that frayed under unsustainable demands, and dreams deferred and deferred again.
Yet if the body keeps the score of harm, perhaps it can also keep the score of healing. Perhaps these fifteen minutes by the sea, this small, trembling, imperfect return to movement, registers in my tissues as evidence that safety is possible. That rest can be trusted. That the body, given sufficient care and time and solitude, remembers how to feel alive.
Little by Little
This is what alonetude offers: the space to let the body lead. To stop performing wellness and actually experience it. To run slowly along a shoreline at dawn, asking nothing of the moment except presence, and to feel something inside slowly, tentatively, begin to heal.
Little by little, the body finds its way back.
Image: Shadow Self
Artist Statement
This image captures my self-shadow at the water’s edge, marking a liminal encounter between body and sea, presence and erasure. Rendered only as a silhouette, the figure allows for self-observation without the self-consciousness of direct gaze. The body appears indirectly, shaped by light rather than asserted through form.
The advancing foam operates as both boundary and invitation. It traces a shifting line where land, body, and ocean negotiate contact. In this moment, the tide functions as a temporal and relational force, advancing and retreating without urgency. I stand at the threshold, neither immersed nor withdrawn, embodying what I understand as alonetude, a chosen presence within a larger ecological field.
The shadow stretches and softens across wet sand, signalling a body in transition. It reflects a state that has moved beyond contraction and exhaustion, yet is still reassembling itself into certainty. The image holds that in-between condition with care.
As visual data, this photograph documents an what the body knows-based moment. The shoreline becomes a research site where identity, nervous system state, and environment co-produce experience. The self emerges here as relational rather than fixed, a silhouette shaped by water, light, and ground rather than by narrative or performance.
I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.
What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.
As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.
Tonight, as the sun sets over the Sierra de la Giganta, I feel the pleasant ache of muscles reawakening. It is a different ache than the chronic tension I carried for months. This one speaks of use rather than depletion, of a body asked to participate in its own life rather than merely endure.
Tomorrow I may run again or walk. Or I may simply sit by the water and breathe. The point is no longer the activity itself but the relationship, the ongoing conversation between intention and capacity, between what the mind desires and what the body can sustain.
The body knows. And finally, I am learning to listen.
Title: Day’s End
Artist Statement
Carmen emerges as a dark silhouette across the Sea of Cortez, anchoring the horizon and holding the quiet of distance, water, and sky. The landmass withholds assertion through detail or texture. It remains intact through outline alone, a steady presence shaped by light rather than proximity.
What this image offers me is a sense of orientation without demand. Carmen holds the horizon gently, giving the eye a place to rest while allowing the surrounding space to remain open. Water and sky expand around it, and time seems to slow in response. The distance matters. It preserves separation while sustaining relationship.
As visual data, the silhouette functions as a stabilising reference point within a wide field of stillness. It reflects how grounding can occur without closeness, how connection can be maintained through recognition rather than arrival. Carmen remains where it is, and that is enough to hold the scene together.
Methodological Reflection: SPN as Healing Practice
I understand Scholarly Personal Narrative as both a method and a practice. Nash and Bradley (2011) describe SPN as a way of transforming lived experience into scholarly knowledge through theory-informed reflection and an honest engagement with vulnerability. In writing this entry, This entry reaches beyond reporting on experience; it inhabits the methodology. My morning run becomes data. The subtle shift in my nervous system becomes evident. My body’s responses become a legitimate site of knowledge production.
The VPAS framework helps me organize this inquiry. Vulnerability appears in my account of collapse, in the moment my body withdrew consent to continue running. Perspective emerges as I trace the movement from depletion toward tentative return, noticing how hope arrives quietly, almost imperceptibly. Action is present in the fifteen minutes of running, but also in the choices to slow down, to stop, to breathe, and to listen. Scholarly engagement threads through this narrative as I situate my embodied experience within Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory, trauma scholarship, and critiques of academic capitalism.
I extend Scholarly Personal Narrative through multimodal, artifact-based inquiry. The shoes, stones, shadows, and watercolours serve as more than decoration. They are co-researchers. They hold memory, affect, and institutional inscription. By treating these objects as data, I am expanding what counts as evidence in organizational, educational, and human rights research. Framing embodied exhaustion as a human rights issue allows me to move beyond personal narrative and into structural critique, linking my body to policy, labour conditions, and institutional design.
I no longer understand chronic dorsal vagal shutdown as a personal pathology. I understand it as an institutional outcome. My nervous system collapsed beyond isolationtion. It was shaped by contingent contracts, constant performance evaluation, and the quiet pressure to be endlessly available. In this sense, my body becomes diagnostic. It registers what policy documents and strategic plans cannot: the physiological cost of precarious academic labour.
This shift in framing, from personal pathology to institutional outcome, is the move that institutional gaslighting forecloses. The inversion that locates harm inside the worker is precisely the inversion this thesis refuses. My body is not the problem. The body is the evidence.
Alonetude has become a methodological condition for this work. In solitude, I hear my body more clearly. Without students, emails, metrics, or surveillance, my body speaks in sensation, breath, and fatigue. Here, data emerges in the body rather than performatively. I am practising scholarship from the inside out, allowing embodiment to guide analysis rather than treating it as an object to be analyzed.
Learning to listen to my body feels both intimate and political. It is a healing practice and also a refusal. It interrupts the logic of extraction that shaped my academic life. It challenges the primacy of productivity as a measure of worth. It insists that limits are forms of knowledge, but forms of knowledge and ethical boundaries.
I believe that if higher education institutions are serious about equity, inclusion, and well-being, they must confront the embodied consequences of precarious labour. Secure employment, reasonable workloads, and psychological safety are human rights obligations rather than luxuriesgations. Without structural change, universities will continue to produce bodies calibrated for collapse and then misrecognize that collapse as individual weakness rather than as a failure of institutional design.
Writing this section is therefore both research and resistance. It is an act of counter-archiving, inserting the body back into institutional memory and insisting that embodied experience counts as knowledge.
References
Al Serhan, O., & Houjeir, R. (2020). Academic capitalism and faculty burnout: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 15(5), 1368–1393. https://doi.org/10.18844/cjes.v15i5.5350
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
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Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sunderland, N., Graham, P., & Lorenz, D. (2022). Trauma-informed dance/movement therapy: Considerations for practice. In S. L. Brooke & C. E. Myers (Eds.), The use of creative arts therapies in trauma and recovery (pp. 15–32). Charles C Thomas Publisher.
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van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Translation note. Spanish language passages in this post were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning and are intended as guides to meaning rather than certified linguistic interpretations.
ACADEMIC LENS
The concept of bodily abandonment named in this title engages van der Kolk’s (2014) clinical argument that the most pervasive injury of chronic trauma is what the body carries from inside out, rather than what happened from outside but what the person learned to do to the body from inside: to leave it, to override its signals, to treat it as a vehicle for performance rather than a subject of care. Menakem (2017) calls this “self-abandonment,” distinguishing it from the harm inflicted by others: it is the secondary layer of injury, the person’s own learned disconnection from somatic experience, that must be addressed for healing to be sustained. The photographic journal format of Day 22, with its many images and artist statements, enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call arts-based inquiry: using visual documentation to explore rather than illustrate pre-formed conclusions, to surface knowledge that verbal reflection alone cannot reach. Levine’s (2010) concept of the “somatic narrative,” the story the body tells through sensation, posture, and movement, is what these artworks attempt to read. The body that remembers its own abandonment also, in remembering, begins to undo it: the act of witnessing, even through art, constitutes what Levine calls a “corrective somatic experience.”
I woke before the light this morning. I woke free of anxiety. My thoughts moved gently rather than racing toward demands. I was simply awake in the way an animal wakes: aware, present, responsive to some internal signal that sleep was complete and consciousness could return. I slept solidly last night.
The darkness held a particular quality at this hour. It was dense and gentle. The Sea of Cortez whispered rather than spoke, its sound intimate and close, as though sharing secrets only pre-dawn can hear. I lay there listening, tracking the gradual shift from deep black to grey to that moment just before sunrise, when the world begins to remember colour.
Fifth morning of unbroken sleep. Cinco mañanas.
I notice how differently I hold this information now than on Day Nine, when the pattern first established itself. Then it felt miraculous, fragile, something that might shatter if examined too closely. Now it feels ordinary. It is natural-ordinary, the way breathing is ordinary: essential, life-sustaining, but no longer requiring constant amazement.
My system no longer scans for threats upon waking. It simply wakes, assesses the environment as safe through accumulated data points (consistent sounds, familiar light patterns, the absence of disruption), and allows consciousness to emerge without the defensive mobilization that characterized my mornings for months before arriving here. This is how we steady one another with place. The sea, the light, and the flight patterns of pelicans are my companions in restoration. My nervous system orients to their constancy.
This is re-inhabitation. A return to the deeper rhythms that survived beneath who I had to become. Learning has shifted from conscious recognition to what the body knows. From something I observe to something I am.
I can see it even with my eyes closed: the gradual brightening that comes before sunrise, the world remembering itself. I get up, pull on clothes, and walk to the balcony. The pelicans are already fishing, their morning routine as established as my own has become.
I watch one pelican dive. The complete commitment of it: wings folding, body dropping, the compact missile of intention entering water with barely a splash. Surfaces. Waits. The fish is visible in the throat pouch, and the backward tilt of the head sends it down. Then stillness. Complete stillness. The body rests on water while the system processes what it has caught. No hurry. The pelican rests with what it has before seeking the next fish. Digests. Allows the body to complete one cycle before beginning another.
Esto también es una enseñanza. This, too, is a teaching.
The pelican dives because its body signals hunger, beyond any schedule that dictates it should fish at this hour. This is intrinsic motivation in its purest form: action arising from internal states rather than external pressures or rewards.
For nineteen years, I lived according to externally imposed rhythms. What I was experiencing, I now understand, was chronic autonomy frustration, one of the three basic psychological needs Self-Determination Theory identifies as essential for well-being.
This kind of exhaustion is disproportionately borne by women. Especially those navigating midlife in systems that reward endless availability and punish embodied limits. What I am naming here extends beyond personal recovery. It is a reclamation of rhythm in a world that teaches women to ignore their own. What Gabor Maté (2022) calls “the myth of normal” is unravelling. I no longer pathologize exhaustion or anxiety as personal flaws. I see them as natural responses to abnormal conditions, conditions I am now beginning to unlearn.
Twelve days ago, I arrived here holding the question of whether I could stay. I am here. The days unfold. The routine continues. And somewhere in the last twelve days, I stopped asking for permission and simply started living.
This is what Haraway (1988) means by situated knowledge: beyond abstract theorizing about what knowledge might be, grounded in the concrete recognition that I am in this body, in this place, at this moment, noticing what I notice. That observation matters.
Coming here, choosing this documentation, claiming this experience as scholarship: these are acts of resistance against that denial. I am saying my knowing matters. My observation counts. My embodied experience constitutes valid data.
The sunrise is happening now. The pattern provides structure. The variation provides life.
How do I document my own experience with enough rigour to make it a scholarship while remaining present enough to actually experience what I am documenting?
The theoretical scaffolding continues to build. But this morning, before the reading begins, I simply sit with what is here. Water. Birds. Light. Breath. The embodied reality that theory helps me understand but cannot replace.
And you, reading this: what has your morning taught you? What rhythms in your life have asked to be trusted, held without cross-examination?
Coffee now. The smell of it. The warmth of the cup. The first sip that signals morning has arrived, you are awake, and the day is beginning.
I think about routine again. It has stopped feeling like a constraint and has become a container. The predictability allows spontaneity because the calculating has quieted.
My body is learning to read time by sunrise, by the pelicans’ fishing patterns, by the quality of light at different hours. These serve as zeitgebers, helping my disrupted circadian system recalibrate to a more natural rhythm.
Now I know the difference. Freedom is a structure you choose that holds you safely and that you can trust to continue even when you stop monitoring it.
Soon I will swim. What I am learning through swimming is what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls flow, though the flow I experience is quieter than what he typically describes.
Perhaps this is what alonetude looks like in motion. Beyond performance or accomplishment. Just being fully present with yourself in an activity that asks nothing beyond presence itself.
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
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.
ACADEMIC LENS
The quality of waking described here, “aware, present, responsive to the world and unbraced against it,” represents what Porges (2011) calls ventral vagal activation: the biological state that underlies genuine curiosity, openness, and engagement. Van der Kolk (2014) distinguishes this from the forced calmness of emotional suppression: true regulation is characterized by ease rather than management. The image of “waking the way an animal wakes” deliberately bypasses the self-monitoring of the institutionalised academic subject, invoking instead Menakem’s (2017) concept of embodied animal wisdom: the somatic knowing that precedes and grounds conceptual thought. The word “continuation” also carries methodological weight: this entry records the continuation rather than any breakthrough or arrival, ongoing quality of a process, the steady accumulation of new somatic experience that Levine (2010) identifies as the mechanism of healing. It is the persistence of the changed nervous system state across days, rather than a single dramatic shift, that constitutes genuine recovery. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) would recognize this daily writing practice itself as part of the inquiry: the journal entry as data, the noticing as method.
