Category: 30 Days by the Sea

Crossing Back, Carrying Forward

On Leaving the Liminal, Returning to the World, and What the Third Shore Teaches About Thresholds

The sweetness is gone, yet the form persists.

Title: Weathered Sweetness

Artist Statement

I came across this fragment while walking slowly along a stony stretch of shoreline, a place where very little seemed to belong and yet everything had arrived there for a reason. The dried citrus peel rested among the rocks, its colour still vivid despite the evident passage of time. It had once held moisture, brightness, and nourishment. Now it remained as structure, fibre, and trace.

I was drawn to the contrast. The surrounding stones felt ancient, dense, and immovable, while the peel carried the delicate architecture of something that had been alive in a different way. Placed together, they formed a quiet study in endurance. One shaped by geological time. The other by the brief, sensory life of fruit.

In my reflective practice, I often find meaning in what has been left behind. Objects that might be overlooked begin to feel like records of transition. This fragment speaks to me about what remains after usefulness has passed. The sweetness is gone, yet the form persists. There is dignity in that persistence, a reminder that value persists even as function changes.

I photographed it as I found it, without rearrangement. The moment felt complete. A small offering of colour held within an otherwise muted landscape. It invited me to consider how traces of vitality remain visible long after the season that produced them has ended.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Last Morning

How does one leave a threshold?

I woke before dawn on the final day. The casita was still dark, the Sea of Cortez invisible beyond the window, present only as sound: the soft rhythmic collapse of waves against sand, that constant whisper I have been falling asleep to for thirty nights. Tomorrow I will wake to silence, or to the different silence of a Canadian winter, and this sound will exist only in memory.

Se acaba. It ends.

I have been preparing for this moment without knowing how. How does one leave a threshold? How does one step back into ordinary time after thirty days suspended between who one was and who one is becoming? The literature on liminality describes the passage into threshold spaces with precision, yet remains quieter about the passage out. Perhaps because leaving the liminal zone is harder to theorize. Perhaps because each crossing back is as particular as the person making it.

Title: Before the Sun

Artist Statement

I took this photograph in the last hour of darkness, when the sea and sky were still indistinguishable. This is the threshold hour, the liminal moment when categories dissolve and everything exists in a state of becoming. For thirty days, I have inhabited a similar dissolution: neither fully the person I was when I arrived nor yet the person I will be when I leave. This image holds that ambiguity without resolving it. The horizon line is visible but barely, a suggestion rather than a declaration. I am learning that thresholds are places of power precisely because they refuse clarity. They ask us to tolerate uncertainty, to exist in the between, to trust that what emerges on the other side will be worth the crossing. 

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

What the Anthropologists Knew

Title: What Remains After Tide

Artist Statement

I found this shell far from the water’s edge, resting in dry earth rather than along the shoreline where one might expect it. Its placement caught my attention first. It felt displaced, carried beyond its original context and left to settle somewhere quieter, somewhere less obvious.

The shell itself bears the marks of time. Its surface is worn, its edges softened, its spiral intact but weathered. I was struck by how it still held its form despite everything it had moved through. Once a living structure, it now exists as residue. A trace. A record of what once housed life and sound and movement beneath the sea.

In my reflective work, I am often drawn to objects that signal transition rather than completion. This shell feels like evidence of passage. It has travelled, endured pressure, and arrived altered but recognizable. Its presence on the ground invites contemplation about displacement, survival, and the quiet dignity of what remains after the tide has receded.

I left it as I found it. I photographed it as I encountered it, partially embedded in the soil, surrounded by small stones and fragments of organic debris. The setting matters. It speaks to the way beauty and meaning surface in unexpected locations, outside the environments where they were first formed.

This image becomes a meditation on endurance. On the structures we carry within us even after the conditions that shaped them have changed. On how remnants continue to hold story long after their original function has passed.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I came to this shoreline already in the threshold, already betwixt and between.

Arnold van Gennep, writing in 1909, gave us the vocabulary we still use for understanding transitions. In Les Rites de Passage, he identified three phases that characterize all major life transitions: separation, in which individuals are removed from their ordinary social position; liminality, the threshold period of ambiguity and transformation; and incorporation, the return to society in a new status or condition.

Victor Turner (1969/1977) built on van Gennep’s ideas by placing greater emphasis on the transitional, in-between stage of a rite of passage. He described this “liminal” phase as a state of deep uncertainty and ambiguity, in which individuals no longer hold their previous identities and have yet to assume new ones. Turner noted that during this period, people exist outside of the normal social order, beyond the roles and structures defined by tradition or authority. Although this stage can be unsettling and even risky, it also holds the potential for meaningful transformation, precisely because conventional boundaries and expectations are temporarily removed.

I arrived in Loreto in separation. I had been removed from my institutional position, stripped of the identity that “contract academic” had provided for nineteen years. I came to this shoreline already in the threshold, already betwixt and between. The thirty days here have been an extended liminality, a sustained dwelling in the in-between space that most rituals compress into hours or days.

Now I face incorporation. The return. The crossing back.

Turner (1969/1977) suggests that what makes liminal experiences distinctive is their combination of seeming opposites: humility alongside sacred significance, and sameness alongside a sense of deep connection. In these ritual moments, individuals step temporarily outside ordinary time and everyday social structures. Although brief, this suspension allows for shared recognition of a broader social bond that transcends normal roles and hierarchies.

Title: The Doorway I Will Leave Through

Artist Statement

Van Gennep understood that thresholds are physical as well as symbolic. The Latin word limen means doorway, the literal space between inside and outside, the strip of ground one crosses when entering or leaving. This doorway has held me for thirty days. I have passed through it each morning to walk the shoreline; I have returned through it each evening to rest. 

It has been my crossing point between solitude and the world, between the interior work of healing and the exterior fact of place. Tomorrow I will pass through it one last time, carrying my bags, closing it behind me. The door will remain. I will be gone. This is what thresholds teach: we pass through them, but they stay behind. We carry only what we can hold in our hands and in our memory. 

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Third Shore as Liminal Space

I named this blog “The Third Shore” because the phrase captured something I could feel but could barely articulate when I began. There is the shore of loneliness, where aloneness is suffered, where the absence of others aches like a wound. There is the shore of solitude, where aloneness is chosen, where being with oneself becomes nourishing rather than depleting. And there is a third shore, the liminal space between them, where the practice of alonetude unfolds.

Long and Averill (2003), in their foundational study of solitude, observed that beneficial aloneness requires certain conditions: freedom from social demands, permission to express emotions, and the capacity for self-reflection. Loneliness, by contrast, is characterized by the painful perception that one’s social connections are insufficient (Perlman & Peplau, 1981). These are distinct states, yet they share a border. One can slip from solitude into loneliness without noticing the crossing. One can transform loneliness into solitude through attention and intention.

The third shore is where that transformation occurs. It is a liminal space: neither fully one thing nor the other, holding both possibilities, requiring constant navigation. Walking has been the central practice of these thirty days.

Estoy aprendiendo a caminar entre dos mundos. I am learning to walk between two worlds.

Table 1

Van Gennep’s Three Phases Applied to the Alonetude Retreat

Note. Van Gennep’s (1909) tripartite structure provides a framework for understanding the retreat as a ritual process. The separation phase involved physical departure from Canada and symbolic departure from institutional identity. The liminal phase comprised the thirty days of alonetude practice. The incorporation phase, now beginning, involves returning to ordinary life while carrying forward what was learned in the threshold.

We pass through thresholds, but the thresholds stay behind.

What I Carry Forward

Title: Sky Practice

Artist Statement (Scholarly Personal Narrative Reflection)

I took this photograph while standing still long enough for my breathing to slow. The sky was wide and uninterrupted, the kind of expanse that asks nothing but attention. Two birds crossed the frame at different distances from where I stood, one closer, wings extended in full glide, the other smaller, further out, moving along its own invisible current. Their spacing held my gaze.

What stayed with me was the quiet relationship between proximity and independence. Each flew independently, in no formation together, yet neither was alone. Each moved within the same field of air, carried by the same conditions, responding to the same thermals, but at their own pace, along their own trajectory. Watching them, I felt something settle inside me about how companionship can exist without entanglement.

I have been thinking about how presence works in this way. How we share sky with others, share time, share movement through particular seasons of life, yet still remain responsible for our own lift and direction. There was no urgency in their flight, no need to arrive quickly. The moment felt unhurried, held open by light and distance.

In my own practice, images like this become reminders of scale. Of how small the human body is against open sky, and how relieving that recognition can be. The photograph holds a brief alignment between body, breath, and horizon. A pause long enough to notice that movement sometimes requires trust far more than effort. Sometimes it requires trust in the air that holds you.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Turner (1969/1977) observed that people who emerge from liminal experiences often carry with them a different relationship to social structure. Having existed outside the usual categories, they see those categories more clearly. Having been stripped of status markers, they understand how arbitrary such markers can be. This is liminal knowledge: wisdom gained through the suspension of ordinary ways of being.

I carry forward the knowledge that my value was never contingent on institutional recognition. This sounds simple. It has taken me twenty-five years to learn it in my body rather than merely understand it in my mind. The precarious academic learns to measure worth through external validation: contracts renewed, courses assigned, the provisional belonging that must be constantly re-earned. Alonetude has taught me a different arithmetic. I am valuable because I am. Full stop. No contract required.

I carry forward the practice of slow attention. The discipline of walking without a destination. The permission to notice colour, texture, and light. The fragments of tile and glass I gathered from the empty field sit in my bag, waiting to become something I cannot yet name. They are evidence that treasure exists in overlooked places, that beauty persists despite neglect, that brokenness can be the beginning of a new form.

I carry forward the understanding that rest is resistance. Hersey (2022) is right: in a culture that extracts value from bodies until they break, choosing to rest is a political act. Choosing to heal rather than merely survive. Choosing to attend to my own restoration rather than performing wellness for those who profit from my depletion. This is knowledge I will need in the world I am returning to, which remains structured by the same extractive logics I fled.

Title: What Fits in a Bag

Artist Statement

I photographed what I am carrying home because objects hold memory differently than words. These fragments of tile, glass, and stone have no market value. They would carry their full meaning only for someone who had walked the fields where I found them, had bent down to pick them up, had felt their weight in the palm while the afternoon light slanted across the desert floor. They are worthless and priceless at once. They are evidence of attention, material proof that I was here, that I looked, that I gathered what the world had discarded and held it precious. The amber stone catches light even now. The blue tiles will become mosaic, eventually, when I am ready to arrange them into new form. What fits in a bag is never everything. What fits in a bag is only what we can carry. The rest, the sea sound, the quality of morning light, the feeling of being held by a landscape that asked nothing of me, this I carry in my body. This I carry forward into whatever comes next. 

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Danger of Re-Entry

The third shore is where that transformation occurs.

Transition theorist William Bridges (2004) warns that the incorporation phase is often the most difficult. We emerge from liminal experience transformed, yet the world we return to remains largely unchanged. The people who knew us before may expect the person we used to be. The structures that shaped our earlier suffering remain in place. There is a profound dissonance between inner transformation and outer continuity.

I am aware of this danger. Canada waits for me: the same country, the same academic culture, the same precarious conditions that burnt me out in the first place. The institutions have learned nothing from my departure. They will continue extracting value from contingent workers until those workers, too, collapse. I cannot return to the same relationship with those structures and expect different outcomes.

Yet I am returning differently. This is the gift of liminality: the threshold changes us even when the world on the other side remains the same. I know now what my face looks like when it belongs only to me. I know what my body feels like when it sleeps without the weight of performance. I know that invisibility can be medicine, that rest is resistance, that alonetude is a practice I can continue even in places where solitude must be carved from crowded hours.

Volveré diferente. I will return differently. That has to be enough.

Title: Footprints Filling

Artist Statement

These are my footprints, walking away. By the time I took this photo, the tide was already beginning to blur them, softening the edges, starting the quiet work of erasure. By nightfall, the sand would be smooth again.

I have walked this shoreline every day for thirty days. Thousands of steps, each one erased. This is what the ocean teaches: presence endures, even when evidence disappears. I was here. The marks are gone.

What remains is the rhythm: the act of walking, one foot and then the other, the commitment to return each morning regardless of whether anything remains.

Tomorrow someone else will walk this same shore. The sand will hold their steps just as it held mine: fully, briefly, without keeping score.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Alonetude as Ongoing Practice

The retreat ends, but alonetude continues. This is the insight I want to carry most carefully across the threshold: the practice was never about the place. Loreto held me while I learned, but what I learned is portable. Alonetude, the intentional, embodied, chosen practice of solitude as healing, can be practised anywhere there is space for attention, permission for presence, and willingness to be with oneself.

Kabat-Zinn (1994) writes that mindfulness is available in any moment we choose to be present. The difficulty lies in remembering to choose it, in carving out space for attention within lives structured by distraction and demand. This will be my work in the months ahead: protecting the practice, maintaining the discipline, refusing to let ordinary life erode what extraordinary solitude built.

I will walk in Canada the way I walked here: slowly, without a destination, attending to what appears. I will paint stones even without the Sea of Cortez to wash them clean. I will practise the quiet permission of invisibility even in places where people expect my performance. I will rest, and I will call that rest resistance, and I will refuse the shame that productivity culture attaches to stillness.

These are promises I am making to myself. They are also political commitments. Every hour I give to alonetude is an hour withdrawn from the extraction economy. Every moment of presence is a refusal of the scattered attention that capitalism demands. This is a small resistance. It is also the only resistance available to a body recovering from exploitation: the insistence on caring for myself even when systems would prefer I be available, productive, and perpetually giving.

Title: The Sea Will Still Be Here

Artist Statement 

I took this photograph as a form of gratitude. The sea received me for thirty days. It held my walks, witnessed my tears, caught the light I photographed each morning. It will continue doing all of this after I leave. The tides will rise and fall. The pelicans will skim the surface. The waves will collapse against sand with the same rhythm they have kept for millennia. 

My presence here has changed nothing about this place. And yet this place has changed everything about me. This is the paradox of alonetude: we are held by something larger than ourselves, something that remains indifferent to our particular struggles, and in that indifference we find permission. Permission to be small. Permission to be temporary. Permission to rest within the vast continuity of water and light and time. Gracias, mar. Gracias por todo. Thank you, sea. Thank you for everything. 

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Crossing the Threshold

Title: Where the Boundary Gives Way

Artist Statement

I took this photograph while walking a familiar path, one I had come to rely on for steadiness. What drew my attention was the fence. It was meant to mark a boundary, to hold a line between walkway and hillside, between what was permitted and what was left to grow undisturbed. Yet the fence had given way. The metal mesh bent inward, pulled down by time, weather, and gravity. It no longer stood as a firm divider. It sagged, softened, and followed the shape of the land it once tried to contain.

I paused there longer than I expected. I found myself thinking about how many of the boundaries in my own life had begun this way, strong at first, clearly defined, built for protection. Over time, some held. Others shifted. Some were worn down by repeated pressure, by responsibility, by care extended outward without equal care extended inward. The image became less about infrastructure and more about the quiet labour of maintenance, both external and internal.

The hillside beyond the fence was alive in its own way. Dry brush, small blooms, cactus, and stone coexisted without straight lines or imposed order. There was a different kind of structure there, one shaped by adaptation rather than enforcement. Standing between the path and the slope, I felt the tension between containment and release, between holding form and allowing movement.

This photograph sits within my inquiry into thresholds and limits. It reminds me that boundaries shift and change. They require tending. They bend when neglected. They also teach. The softened fence signals information, never failure, to me. It signals information. It asks where reinforcement is needed and where flexibility might be wiser.

I left the scene thinking about the balance between protection and permeability. About how living well requires both. About how even a boundary that has given way can still mark a place of learning.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Van Gennep understood that thresholds require ritual acknowledgment. We cannot simply drift from one state to another; we must mark the crossing, honour the passage, name what is ending and what is beginning. Without ritual, transitions remain incomplete. We carry unfinished business into our new lives, and it weighs us down.

This blog post is my ritual. These words mark the crossing. I name what is ending: thirty days of formal retreat, the sustained liminality of this particular place and time, the intense attention that structured solitude made possible. I name what is beginning: return, incorporation, the carrying forward of what I learned into ordinary life.

I acknowledge the threshold by standing on it one last time. Here, at the edge, I can still feel both shores. The loneliness I feared before I came. The solitude I cultivated while I was here. And the third shore between them, the liminal space where alonetude unfolds, where the practice of intentional presence transforms suffering into wisdom.

I cross now. I carry what I can carry. I leave the rest at the water’s edge, trusting that the sea will tend it, that the tide will smooth it, that some future walker may find treasure in what I leave behind.

Title: After

Artist Statement

This image documents a threshold moment, taken as I prepared to leave a place that had quietly shaped my inner world. The disorder of the bed is evidence of transition rather than chaos, of embodied movement between states of being. I was struck by how the act of leaving is plural; it unfolds in gestures, hesitations, and rituals of gathering.

The photograph is part of a broader inquiry into what it means to depart, physically, yes, and emotionally too. As I packed, I realized that objects carry more than function: they hold memory, narrative, and proof of transformation. The image reflects the tension between mobility and attachment, between material departure and affective residue.

In reflecting on this moment, I am reminded of Victor Turner’s notion of liminality: a suspended state in which the old identity is no longer fully intact and the new one has yet to crystallize. This photo stands as evidence of that space: hovering, neither quite here nor quite there, rich with meaning throughout.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The third shore will be here when I need it. The practice continues, even without the sea.

Cruzo ahora. Sigo adelante. Llevo todo conmigo.

I cross now. I go forward. I carry everything with me.

References

Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.

Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204

Perlman, D., & Peplau, L. A. (1981). Toward a social psychology of loneliness. In S. Duck & R. Gilmour (Eds.), Personal relationships 3: Personal relationships in disorder (pp. 31–56). Academic Press.

Turner, V. W. (1969/1977). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Cornell University Press.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage(M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)

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.

I am valuable because I am. Full stop.