30 Days by the Sea – Page 2 – 30 Days by the Sea

Day 21: The End of Escape: I am Tired

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

I kept my discipline. I shed my need to escape.

Disruption as Data

Loreto has changed the way I read, though it would be more accurate to say that it has revealed the function reading has played in my life. For most of my adulthood, reading structured my days and anchored periods of transition. Books offered coherence during times of professional intensity and emotional uncertainty. Reading felt nourishing and intellectually generative, and it was. Yet its sudden absence created a rupture that demanded attention.

The absence of reading revealed a movement toward presence.

Since arriving in Loreto, I noticed that I had barely read at all. I continued to listen to podcasts, but the habitual reaching for books had quieted. When I eventually opened Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the disruption became analytically meaningful. In qualitative terms, this pause became data. It signalled a shift in how I was regulating attention, emotion, and solitude. The absence of reading revealed a movement toward presence rather than any loss of discipline.

The disruption became data.

Image: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Cover image sourced from Amazon for reference purposes.

Note. This image is a commercially available book cover sourced from Amazon and is included for contextual reference only. It is ancillary visual data, neither generated by the author nor analysed as part of the visual inquiry. The image is used to situate the reflective narrative in relation to Csikszentmihalyi’s work on attention, engagement, and presence.

Why Flow: Attention, Choice, and the Ethics of Engagement

I am no longer interested in productivity for its own sake.

I chose to read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience at this moment because I am no longer interested in productivity for its own sake. After years of equating movement with meaning and busyness with worth, I wanted to return to a text that speaks directly to the quality of attention rather than the quantity of output. Csikszentmihalyi’s work has long been associated with peak performance and optimal functioning, but what drew me back to it now was a quieter question: what does it mean to be fully engaged without being consumed?

My relationship to flow has shifted over time. Earlier in my career, I understood flow primarily through achievement, moments of intense focus that accompanied teaching, writing, training, or creative production. These states felt generative and affirming, particularly within institutional cultures that reward visible engagement and constant contribution. Yet, in hindsight, I can see how easily flow was absorbed into the broader machinery of busyness. What began as deep engagement sometimes became another way to justify overextension, another reason to remain in motion.

Reading Flow in the context of alonetude invites a different interpretation. Csikszentmihalyi emphasises that flow emerges when attention is voluntarily invested, when action is chosen rather than compelled, and when the self holds together rather than fragmenting under competing demands. This distinction matters. In Loreto, where external pressures have softened, I am learning to distinguish between immersive engagement and compulsive activity. Flow, in this sense, is no longer about intensity or output, but about alignment.

Flow, for me, is no longer about intensity or output, but alignment.

What I hope to learn from this book now is how to discern, rather than how to do more, and when engagement becomes avoidance. Csikszentmihalyi writes about cultivating inner order, the capacity to shape consciousness intentionally rather than reactively. This resonates deeply with my current inquiry. Alonetude has stripped away many of the external structures that once organised my time, leaving me face to face with my own patterns of attention. Flow offers a language for examining whether my engagement with work, creativity, and even rest arises from choice or from habit.

I am also drawn to the ethical implications of flow. In academic and professional cultures that normalise exhaustion, the language of optimal experience can easily be co-opted to sustain overwork. Reading Flow now, I am holding the text in tension with critiques of productivity and speed. I am less interested in flow as a performance enhancer and more interested in flow as a form of presence requiring no self-erasure.

Ultimately, I chose this book because it asks a question that aligns with the heart of alonetude: how do we live in ways that are attentive, meaningful, and self-directed, without needing to escape ourselves in the process? What I hope to learn is how to engage more sustainably rather than simply returning to my former pace, and how to engage deeply while staying grounded enough to stop.

Reading as Regulated Escape

Image: Travelling Library

Note. These books are no longer a task list. They sit here as companions rather than demands, reminding me that learning can be slow, embodied, and unfinished. Alonetude is teaching me that I need no compulsion to consume knowledge to remain in conversation with it.

These books arrived together through design. Each one has marked a different moment in my learning: how to think, how to feel, how to move, how to rest, how to heal, how to listen to the body, how to trust experience, how to let meaning emerge rather than be forced. For years, reading was another form of striving, a way to stay productive even in moments meant for rest. Now, this small library feels less like a syllabus and more like a permission structure. I read some of these texts slowly. Some I return to. Some I simply keep close, beyond answers, for companionship. Alonetude is teaching me that learning rarely moves forward in a straight line. Sometimes it gathers, waits, and rearranges itself quietly until the body is ready to receive what the mind once rushed past.

Reading is rarely problematised in academic or popular discourse. It is framed as restorative, virtuous, and intellectually productive. However, psychological research on coping and emotion regulation suggests that even adaptive behaviours can function as avoidance when used to manage prolonged stress or emotional overload (Gross, 2015; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). In my own life, reading had quietly joined a constellation of practices that allowed me to remain productive while avoiding stillness.

Over the past fifteen years, reading existed alongside other socially sanctioned escapes: work, achievement, training, travel, and service. I inhabited roles that were meaningful yet relentless: educator, writer, committee member, volunteer, athlete, artist, and caregiver. Beneath these visible performances were quieter coping strategies, including depression, stress-related illness, overconsumption, emotional numbing, and cycles of avoidance. Together, these practices formed a system of self-regulation oriented toward functioning rather than presence.

Image: Between Shelter and the Sky

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. This morning light is filtered, softened by the curtain that both protects and reveals. I hover between inside and outside, fully committed to neither. For much of my life, I lived at the extremes, either exposed through constant engagement or hidden behind busyness and distraction. Alonetude is teaching me to rest in this in-between space, where I can see the world without rushing toward it, and feel held without withdrawing. Presence, I am learning, asks something between full openness and full retreat. It asks only that I remain.

This image poses the question that Flow ultimately asks of me: where does my attention rest when nothing demands it? Csikszentmihalyi writes about optimal experience as a state of voluntary focus, yet alonetude has taught me that focus also requires restraint. The curtain reminds me that clarity rarely comes from constant exposure or relentless engagement. For years, busyness trained my attention outward, keeping me in motion, responsive, and productive. Here, attention settles instead. I am neither striving for immersion nor fleeing into distraction. I am simply present, allowing meaning to arise without forcing it. This, I am learning, is a different kind of flow: one rooted in choice rather than urgency, and in staying rather than escape.

Performance, Identity, and Misnaming Eccentricity

Image: Multiplicity Beyond Fracture

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. I have often described myself as eccentric, as though my many interests required explanation. This rock reminds me that complexity carries no implication of instability. It is composed of many elements held together over time, shaped by pressure rather than performance. What I once misnamed as excess was, in fact, accumulation. Each layer remains visible, yet none are required to justify their presence. Alonetude is teaching me that identity, like this stone, requires no constant shaping or display. It only needs time, contact, and the permission to remain whole.

For many years, I explained this pattern in terms of personality. I described myself as eccentric, curious, and driven to become many things at once. Yet scholarship on performativity and emotional labour suggests that sustained role performance can obscure the gradual erosion of the self beneath it (Butler, 1990; Hochschild, 2012). What Loreto revealed was that mediation, rather than multiplicity itself, was the issue.

I was aspiring to be something beyond the categories of scholar, philosopher, traveller, an artist, or a spiritual seeker. I already had those things. What I had avoided was inhabiting them without output, recognition, or distraction. Each role had become a buffer between me and my own interior life.

Alonetude as Ethical and Embodied Practice

Image: Setting Down What Once Carried Me

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. This image marks a pause rather than an ending. The boot, worn and emptied of the body that once depended on it, rests without urgency or direction. For years, movement, endurance, and productivity served as measures of worth. Alonetude invites a different ethic: the willingness to stop without apology and to remain without distraction. What is set down here is compulsion rather than capacity. What remains is presence, grounded and unperformed.

Alonetude, as I am coming to understand it, is neither isolation nor withdrawal. It is the ethical practice of staying. Philosophical and psychological literature draws a careful distinction between loneliness as imposed absence and solitude as chosen presence (Tillich, 1952; Storr, 1988). Alonetude resides within this distinction, yet it demands more than preference or temperament. It requires discipline, restraint, and an embodied willingness to remain without substitution.

In Loreto, alonetude has meant stepping out of familiar patterns of movement and productivity. It has meant sitting without a book in my hands and resisting the impulse to translate quiet into knowledge consumption. It has meant allowing boredom, restlessness, and sensory awareness to surface without resolution. This practice aligns with contemplative and trauma-informed scholarship that understands learning as embodied and regulatory, rather than exclusively cognitive (Kabat-Zinn, 1994; Porges, 2011). Insight, I am learning, arrives beyond analysis alone. Sometimes it arrives through waiting long enough for the body to register what the mind has learned to bypass.

Alonetude asks me to sit without filling the silence.

The discarded boot makes this visible. Once designed for movement, protection, and endurance, it now rests unused, emptied of the body that animated it. For years, I treated motion as virtue and endurance as evidence of worth. Stillness felt like failure. Alonetude asks something different. It invites me to set down the habits that carried me forward but also carried me away from myself. This is discernment, never abandonment. The body pauses, the role loosens, and what remains is presence, grounded and unperformed.

This is discernment. It is beyond burnout.

Lessons Learned: Reading as Presence Rather Than Escape

Image: Stillness, with a Pen in Hand

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. I came here with a notebook, assuming I would write my way into understanding. Instead, I found myself sitting quietly, the pen resting more often than moving. For years, travel and writing were part of my busyness, a way of staying productive even in beautiful places. This moment feels different. The notebook is no longer an instrument of urgency or output. It is simply a companion, waiting while I learn to be present without needing to capture, explain, or perform the experience.

The central lesson of this experience is less that reading is harmful than that its function matters. Alonetude has taught me to ask a different question of my practices: does this activity draw me toward myself, or does it allow me to disappear? This reframing reflects broader calls within qualitative inquiry to treat the researcher’s emotional and embodied presence as integral to knowledge production rather than as noise to be managed (Ellis et al., 2011; Nash, 2004).

By staying rather than escaping, I am learning to read myself with the same attentiveness I once reserved for texts. This deepens scholarship rather than diminishing it. Alonetude becomes both method and meaning, a way of inhabiting inquiry rather than performing it. The most demanding text I have avoided for years has been my own interior life. The lesson is relationship rather than abandonment. I am learning to meet books, roles, and ambition from a place of presence rather than flight.

What would it take to stay?

Title: Grounded Enough to Stay

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. There was a time when even standing still felt unproductive. I would have filled this moment with movement, planning, or interpretation. Here, I am learning something different. My feet in the water remind me that presence begins in the body before the mind. Alonetude is teaching me that staying requires no justification, and that learning can occur without busyness, without capture, and without escape. This is grounding, beyond any arrival.

The most challenging text I avoided for years was my own interior life.

References

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589

Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (30th anniversary ed.). University of California Press.

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

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.

Tillich, P. (1952). The courage to be. Yale University Press.

Day 20: The Weight of Always Almost

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

“Precarity lives in my body still.”

A Reflection on Precarity, Burnout, Mental Health, and Stress

I have been trying to write about precarity for three days now. Trying to find language for what it does to a body, to a nervous system, to a sense of self. But every time I sit down to write, my shoulders rise toward my ears. My jaw clenches. The ball in my stomach, that old childhood companion, tightens.

Mi cuerpo recuerda. My body remembers.

This tells me something important.

Precarity lives in my body still. Even here, even now, even after the contract ended months ago. The chronic stress of seven years shaped my nervous system in ways that persist, that compound the childhood trauma I have been exploring in this retreat.

I am writing this to remember. To document how my body still carries the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the impossibility of rest. Para no olvidar. (So I may always remember.) I write it down.

“The hypervigilance I learned as a child translated seamlessly into scanning for signs of danger in institutional politics.”

When Temporary Becomes Permanent

Seven years of contract renewals. Seven years of wondering, each spring, whether I would have employment in the fall. Seven years of performing gratitude for the opportunity to teach, for the chance to serve, for the privilege of another year.

Siempre agradecida. Always grateful.

Even now, sitting by the sea in Loreto, my body remembers what this felt like. The constant low-level activation. The shoulders that stayed tense for months. The jaw that ached from clenching. The stomach that churned with cortisol.

Never quite safe. Never quite secure.

Siempre casi. Always almost.

Almost permanent. Almost secure. Almost valued. The “almost” became the water I swam in, so constant I forgot there had ever been another way to breathe.

Gill (2010) writes about the psychological costs of academic precarity: anxiety, insecurity, and a persistent sense of disposability. But what she describes intellectually, I carried somatically. My body learned to live in a state of constant mobilization.

Stewart (2014) describes precarity as a mode of keeping people at the edge of their capacity, always managing, always coping, always one crisis away from collapse. This is the architecture of contemporary academic labour. Designed to keep us grateful. Compliant. Useful.

Designed to extract everything we have to give while offering nothing we can count on.

My body still knows this architecture. Still responds to it. Still carries the exhaustion of seven years spent always almost secure enough to rest.

When Old Trauma Meets New Precarity

Here is what I am only now beginning to understand: precarity does different things to different bodies.

For those of us who grew up in environments of chronic threat, where safety was provisional, where love was conditional, where our value was measured by our usefulness, academic precarity does more than create stress. It reactivates every old survival pattern.

Reactiva todo. It reactivates everything.

The hypervigilance I learned as a child, scanning for signs of danger in my father’s footsteps, translated seamlessly into scanning for signs of danger in institutional politics. The compulsive caretaking that kept my sisters safer became the compulsive service that kept me employed. The inability to rest, because rest meant someone might get hurt, became the inability to rest because rest might signal insufficient commitment.

Precarity became the professional equivalent of my childhood home. Uncertain. Threatening. Requiring constant vigilance to survive.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma survivors often find themselves in situations that unconsciously recreate the dynamics of their original trauma. Their nervous systems are calibrated to those conditions. They know how to function under threat. Safety feels foreign, suspicious, temporary.

La seguridad me asusta. Safety frightens me.

I excelled at precarity precisely because I had trained for it my entire childhood.

And this excellence made me exploitable.

Even now, my body remembers this pattern. Remembers how well it learned to function under chronic threat. Remembers the cost of that functioning.

When Exhaustion Becomes Architecture

My body still carries the exhaustion of those seven years. Carries it in ways I am only now beginning to recognise.

El cansancio vive en mis huesos. The tiredness lives in my bones.

Han (2010/2015) writes about burnout as the defining condition of achievement society, a society that exhausts us through internalised demands for optimization. We are tired because we have internalised the imperative to always be productive, always be useful, always be improving.

But for those of us in precarious employment, burnout operates differently.

We could never afford to burn out. Could never afford to slow down. Could never afford to admit exhaustion because exhaustion might mean we were insufficiently resilient, insufficiently committed, insufficiently grateful for the opportunity.

So we performed wellness. We performed work-life balance. We pursued sustainability while working 60-hour weeks on contracts that pretended we only worked 37.

Actuamos como si todo estuviera bien. We acted as if everything was fine.

Hochschild (1983) calls this emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable display. But in precarious academic labour, the emotional labour extends beyond managing student interactions or maintaining professionalism in meetings. It includes managing our own awareness of exhaustion, our own recognition of exploitation, our own rage at systems that treat us as disposable.

We learn to smile while drowning.

Aprendemos a sonreír mientras nos ahogamos. (We learn to smile while we drown.)

I became so skilled at this performance that I stopped recognising it as performance. The exhaustion became my baseline. The stress became my normal. The constant activation of my nervous system became just how bodies feel when you are working.

Except bodies are meant to rest. Bodies are meant to cycle between activation and recovery. Bodies are meant to feel safe sometimes.

Los cuerpos necesitan descansar. Bodies need to rest.

My body forgot this. Or perhaps it never knew.

Even now, even here in Loreto, where I am explicitly practicing rest, my body resists. Resists stillness. Resists the absence of productivity. Resists the possibility that rest might be permitted.

This is what seven years of precarity did. Trained my body to believe that rest equals danger. That stopping means being seen as disposable. That value comes only through constant output.

When Individual Therapy Meets Structural Violence

The institution offered an Employee Assistance Program. Six free counselling sessions per year, they said. As if the structural conditions producing our distress could be resolved through individual therapy. As if six sessions could address years of precarity, exploitation, and the constant message that we are valuable only insofar as we remain useful.

Como si la terapia pudiera arreglar el sistema. As if therapy could fix the system.

Ahmed (2017) writes about how institutions manage complaints by pathologising individuals. When we say the working conditions are harmful, they offer us therapy. When we say the system is broken, they suggest we work on our resilience. When we name exploitation, they recommend mindfulness.

This is malperformative care. It expresses concern while refusing to address the conditions producing harm.

My body remembers this, too. Remembers going to therapy, practicing mindfulness, and working on boundaries. And remembers that none of it changed the fact that I wondered, each spring, whether I would have employment in the fall. None of it changed the fact that my value was always provisional. None of it changed the structure, producing my distress.

Nada cambió la estructura. Nothing changed the structure.

Individual solutions cannot address structural problems.

But under precarity, we could never afford to acknowledge this publicly. Could never afford to appear ungrateful. Could never afford to bite the hand that feeds us, even when that hand feeds us only enough to keep us grateful for the next feeding.

So we suffered privately. We broke down quietly. We medicalised structural violence as individual pathology.

And the system continues unchanged.

My body still carries this particular exhaustion. The exhaustion of trying to heal individually from wounds produced collectively. The exhaustion of managing awareness that the problem is structural while pretending the solution is personal.

El agotamiento de fingir. The exhaustion of pretending.

When Your Body Keeps the Score

There is a particular kind of stress that comes from never knowing. The stress of constant uncertainty. Of always waiting. Of living perpetually in the conditional tense.

Si me renuevan… If they renew me… Si consigo otra posición… If I get another position… Si sobrevivo hasta la permanencia… If I survive until tenure…

My body still lives in this conditional tense. Still scans for threat. Still cannot quite believe that the immediate precarity has ended.

“Rest felt like vulnerability.”

Porges (2011) describes how chronic stress dysregulates the autonomic nervous system. When the threat is constant but never quite acute enough to fight or flee, the body gets stuck in a state of mobilization without resolution. The sympathetic nervous system stays activated. The social engagement system shuts down. We become hypervigilant, reactive, and unable to rest even when circumstances temporarily permit it.

Incluso cuando las circunstancias lo permiten. Even when circumstances permit it.

This is what seven years of contract renewals did to my nervous system.

Even when the contract was renewed, I could never relax. Because renewal meant only another year of uncertainty. Another year of proving my value. Another year of being grateful for the opportunity to prove my value again next year.

The stress accumulated. On my shoulders. In my jaw. In the ball in my stomach that never fully unclenched. In the insomnia that became chronic. In the way, I startled at sudden sounds. In the way, I could tolerate zero rest because rest felt like vulnerability.

El descanso se sentía como una vulnerabilidad. Rest felt like vulnerability.

My body was keeping score. And the score said: you are under threat.

Even now, even here, my body keeps this score. Keeps the tally of years spent in chronic activation. Keeps the memory of what it felt like to never be quite secure enough to let down my guard.

This is why I came to Loreto. To teach my body a different score. To practice, in small doses, what it feels like when rest might be permitted.

But the old score persists. Lives in my tissues. Activates when I sit too still for too long.

Todavía vive en mi cuerpo. It still lives in my body.

When Loss Creates Space for Feeling

On May 2nd, the logic of precarity arrived in my inbox. After seven years of contract renewals, the eighth year would be missing entirely.

I had been terminated.

Me despidieron. They fired me.

The ball in my stomach, that old childhood companion, returned with an intensity I had forgotten was possible. Every childhood fear was activated at once. The disposability. The message that my value was conditional. The understanding that I had been useful until I ceased being useful, and then I would be discarded.

I spent weeks in a fog of shame and grief.

Semanas en la niebla. Weeks in the fog.

But underneath the grief, something else was happening. Something I am only now, here in Loreto on Day 22 of my retreat, beginning to recognise.

The termination released something.

I could stop performing gratitude for conditions that were harming me. I could stop managing my awareness of exploitation. I could stop carrying the cognitive load of constant uncertainty, the emotional labour of appearing fine, the somatic burden of chronic activation.

The precarity had ended. Through loss, yes. Through termination, yes. But it had ended.

And I survived it.

Y sobreviví. And I survived.

This created space. Physical space, psychological space, somatic space. The space to finally stop performing and start feeling.

The space to come to Loreto and practice rest.

The space to write this reflection and acknowledge how my body still carries the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, the chronic stress of seven years spent always almost secure.

What My Body Needs Now

I could never have done this retreat while still precariously employed. My nervous system could never have tolerated it.

Rest requires safety. Real rest, the kind where your nervous system actually downregulates, where your body stops scanning for threats, where you can simply be, this requires the felt sense that you are currently free from immediate threat.

El descanso requiere seguridad. Rest requires safety.

Precarity makes rest impossible.

Even when we are actively working, we are planning, strategising, managing, and monitoring. Our nervous systems stay activated because the threat is real. We might be without employment next year. We might be unable to pay rent. We might be valued insufficiently to keep.

These are accurate assessments of structural conditions rather than irrational fears.

What I am learning here in Loreto is that healing from precarity requires first acknowledging what precarity does. In the body. In the nervous system. In the persistent sense that we are always almost but never quite secure.

Siempre casi, pero nunca completamente. Always almost but never completely.

I am learning that the hypervigilance I developed in childhood and refined through academic precarity does remain even after the precarious employment has ended. The patterns persist. The scanning continues. The inability to rest remains.

But I am also learning that these patterns can be worked with. Gently. Slowly. Through sustained exposure to actual safety, through practices that teach my nervous system that rest is permitted, through the radical act of simply being without having to prove my value through productivity.

Sin tener que demostrar mi valor. Without having to prove my value.

This is what alonetude offers. Capacity, as opposed to escape from precarity. The capacity to recognise when my nervous system is responding to past threat rather than present reality. The capacity to choose rest even when some old part of me insists that rest is dangerous.

The capacity to know my worth exists independent of my usefulness.

Mi valor existe independientemente de mi utilidad.

The Ongoing Practice of Recognition

My body still remembers the exhaustion of those seven years. Remembers it in the shoulders that rise when I sit at my laptop. Remembers it in the jaw that clenches when I think about job searching. Remembers it in the ball in my stomach that activates when I imagine another contract position.

Mi cuerpo todavía recuerda. My body still remembers.

And this remembering matters.

Because I will have to return to job searching. I will have to navigate an academic market that treats scholars as disposable. I will likely have to accept another precarious position because stable positions are rare, and I need to eat.

The structural conditions persist. The precarity continues. The threat remains real.

But what I am practicing here is recognition. The ability to recognise when my body is responding to a genuine present threat versus responding to past trauma. The ability to take the rest I can, when I can. The ability to know that my exhaustion is structural rather than a personal failing.

El agotamiento es estructural. The exhaustion is structural.

This matters. Because when I return to precarity, as I likely will, I want to remember that my stress response is accurate. That my hypervigilance is intelligent. That my exhaustion is a collective rather than an individual pathology.

I want to remember so I can fight for structural change while also surviving the present.

I want to remember that my body keeps the score because the score is real. Because precarity produces real harm. Because exhaustion is the appropriate response to conditions designed to extract everything while offering nothing secure in return.

Porque el cuerpo dice la verdad. Because the body tells the truth.

Beyond Individual Resilience

Let me be clear: individual healing is the wrong solution to structural exploitation.

What happened to me, seven years of precarious employment followed by termination, was a systemic issue requiring structural change, as opposed to an individual failing that therapy can fix.

Universities benefit from precarious labour. It is cheaper. It is more flexible. It is easier to manage and easier to discard. The precarity is the design, rather than an accident or an unfortunate side effect.

La precariedad es el diseño. Precarity is the design.

And as long as the design remains unchanged, more scholars will experience what I experienced. More bodies will carry the stress of chronic uncertainty. More nervous systems will be dysregulated by conditions that make safety impossible.

We need structural change. We need stable employment. We need labour protections. We need institutions to stop treating scholars as disposable resources to be exploited until they break.

But structural change is slow. And in the meantime, we survive.

This reflection is about naming what precarity does so we can recognise it, stop pathologising our responses to harmful conditions, and understand that our exhaustion is structural violence rather than personal failing.

Para que podamos entender. So we can understand.

And so we can fight for better while also learning to survive the present.

Why I Write This

I am writing this on Day 22 of my retreat because I need to remember.

Necesito recordar. I need to remember.

I need to remember what precarity felt like in my body so I avoid mistaking its absence for personal weakness. I need to remember that my nervous system was responding accurately to a genuine threat, so I refuse to shame myself for vigilance that kept me employed. I need to remember that the stress, the burnout, the mental health struggles were a collective response to collective conditions, as opposed to individual pathology.

I need to remember so I resist gaslighting myself when I return to job searching and hypervigilance returns.

Because it will return. Because precarity is real. The threat is structural. And my nervous system is responding intelligently, rather than irrationally, to recognising this.

Mi sistema nervioso responde inteligentemente. My nervous system responds intelligently.

What I hope to carry with me from these thirty days is recognition rather than elimination of stress response. The capacity to recognise it, to work with it, to know that I am responding to a genuine threat with appropriate vigilance, as opposed to being broken.

Como en lugar de estar rota. Rather than being broken.

I am responding intelligently to conditions designed to break me.

And I am slowly learning to practice rest in the spaces between threats. To recognise when safety is actually present, even if only temporarily. To allow my nervous system moments of genuine downregulation, even knowing that vigilance will be required again soon.

These small practices matter. They allow us to survive precarity with some part of ourselves intact, rather than solving it.

Nos permiten sobrevivir. They allow us to survive.

What My Body Wants You to Know

If you are reading this from inside precarious employment, if your contract renewal is uncertain, if you are managing chronic stress while performing wellness, if you are exhausted but cannot afford to admit it:

No estás fallando. You are failing at nothing.

Your stress is structural rather than personal weakness. Your exhaustion is collective rather than an individual lack of resilience. Your body is responding accurately to genuinely threatening conditions.

The hypervigilance makes sense. The inability to rest makes sense. The persistent sense of being always almost but never quite secure, this makes sense.

Todo tiene sentido. It all makes sense.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping you alert to genuine threat.

“The system is broken. You are whole.”

The system is broken. You are whole. What is broken is the structure that treats you as disposable while demanding you be grateful for the opportunity to prove your value again next year.

El sistema está roto. The system is broken.

I have zero solutions. I know neither how to dismantle precarity from within, nor how to survive it without cost.

But I know this: we survive better when we name what is happening. When we refuse to pathologise structural violence as individual pathology. When we recognise that our collective exhaustion indicates collective conditions that need changing.

And we survive better when we take the rest we can, when we can. Small moments. Brief windows. Ten minutes lying still before your body insists you get up and be productive.

These moments matter.

They solve nothing. But they allow us to survive.

Nos permiten seguir adelante. They allow us to continue forward.

My body still remembers the exhaustion. Still carries the stress. Still activates the hypervigilance.

And my body is telling the truth.

Y mi cuerpo dice la verdad. And my body tells the truth.

Note: This reflection draws from my lived experience of precarious academic employment and connects to theoretical frameworks from my doctoral work on institutional violence and my current thesis on alonetude as healing practice. The ideas here are in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional affects, Byung-Chul Han’s analysis of burnout society, Rosalind Gill’s research on academic precarity, and Bessel van der Kolk’s understanding of how bodies hold trauma and stress.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. In R. Ryan-Flood & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). Routledge.

Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Stewart, K. (2014). Road registers. Cultural Geographies, 21(4), 549–563.

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 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.

Day 19: The Artifact Archive

Finding the Language Before Words

Low Tide

The morning begins differently from the others. I leave my journal on the table. I reach 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.

Image: Low Tide: An Artifact Archive

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

Image: Low Tide Shoreline

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

Image: What the Sea Softens

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

Image: Held Spiral

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

Theoretical Framework: The Healing Architecture of Creative Flow

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, characterised 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 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.

Image: Where Things Gather

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 hypervigilant self-monitoring that characterises 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	Activity has clear immediate objectives	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 possibility 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 the researcher’s reflexive 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 characterised 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 exhibit higher levels of 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.

Title: Contact

Photo Contact: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 waves produces frequencies in the range of approximately 20 to 500 hertz, which align with brainwave patterns associated with deep relaxation. This auditory rhythm has a lulling effect that supports contentment and calm, offering predictable sensory patterns that the human nervous system often registers as safe.

For those carrying occupational trauma in their bodies, this neurological recalibration offers significant healing potential. The polyvagal 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 recognise 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.

Image: At the Edge

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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	Predictable rhythm synchronises with alpha brainwaves	Nervous system registers safety; hypervigilance decreases
Sea glass colours evoke tranquillity; anxiety reduction	Smooth objects stimulate interoceptive awareness	Grounding in body; emotional regulation support
The nervous system registers safety; hypervigilance decreases	Soft-focus attention reduces prefrontal activation	Inner critic quiets; default mode network activation
Repetitive motion	Walking rhythm activates parasympathetic response	Bilateral stimulation; somatic processing of stored tension
Discovery reward	Variable reinforcement triggers dopamine release	Sense of accomplishment; counters anhedonia
Colour exposure	Blues and greens associated with calm in colour psychology	Sea glass colours evoke tranquility; anxiety reduction

Note. Mechanisms synthesised 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.

Image: Sea Pottery

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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

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

Image: Borrowed Silence

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

Image: Childhood Dreams

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 individualised 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.

Image: Rock as Record

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

Embodied Practice: 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.

Image: Return

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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, hypervigilance, and disrupted interoception. 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 specialised 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.

Image: Nature’s Art

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Small white flowers bloom at the base of a tree, emerging from dry, compacted ground through persistence rather than abundance.

Evening Reflection: Finding the Language Before Words

Image: Evening Light

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 meaning-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.

Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 746–761. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2004.07.002

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.

Iles-Jonas, R. (2023, February 3). Beachcombing: Body, mind, soul. Beachcombing Magazine. https://www.beachcombingmagazine.com/blogs/news/beachcombing-body-mind-soul

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

Saito, Y. (1997). The Japanese aesthetics of imperfection and insufficiency. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55(4), 377–385. https://doi.org/10.2307/430925

Parkes, G., & Loughnane, A. (2023). Japanese aesthetics. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-aesthetics/

Rankanen, M., Leinikka, M., Groth, C., Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P., Mäkelä, M., & Huotilainen, M. (2022). Physiological measurements and emotional experiences of drawing and clay forming. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 79, Article 101899. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2022.101899

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.

Day 18: The Book That Taught Me to Listen to My Body

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

I brought one book with me to Loreto that I have already read three times.

The Body Keeps the Score sits on the nightstand, spine cracked, pages soft from handling. I rarely open it anymore. I have no need to. The words have moved from page to practice. But having it nearby feels important, the way certain objects become witnesses to our becoming.

How I Found This Book

I found van der Kolk’s book during a period when I was without words for what was wrong.

I was beyond crisis, technically. I was functioning. Teaching my classes, meeting my deadlines, and showing up where I was supposed to show up. But something had gone quiet inside me. Joy arrived less often and stayed for shorter periods. Sleep fractured into segments of vigilance. My shoulders had taken up permanent residence somewhere near my ears.

I thought this was just adulthood. Just the weight of a demanding career. Just what happens when you have been working contract to contract for twenty-five years, never quite sure if next semester will hold a place for you.

Then I read this sentence: “Traumatised people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 97).

I put the book down. I looked at my hands. I noticed, for the first time in years, how tightly I was holding my own fingers.

What I Learned About the Score

van der Kolk’s title comes from a simple observation: the body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

Every time we brace against difficulty, the body records it. Every moment of feeling unsafe, unvalued, and uncertain. Every adaptation we make to survive environments that ask too much and offer too little. The body keeps a running tally. A score.

I started noticing my own score.

The way my jaw clenched during work emails. The shallow breathing that never quite reached my belly. The startle response when my phone buzzed unexpectedly. The difficulty relaxing even when nothing was wrong, especially when nothing was wrong, because the absence of an obvious threat had become its own kind of suspicion.

These were quiet symptoms, far from dramatic. They were ordinary. That was the problem. I had normalised a state of chronic bracing, and my body had been keeping score the whole time.

The Part That Changed Everything

The part of van der Kolk’s book that changed everything for me was his distinction between knowing and feeling.

He explains that you can intellectually understand that you are safe. You can know that the difficult period is over, that the threat has passed, that you survived. But your body may hold a different story. The alarm system operates below the level of language. It remains beyond rational argument.

This explained so much.

I understood that precarious employment was just a system, never a personal failing. I understood that institutional instability had nothing to do with me personally. I understood all of this. But my body still braced every time I checked my email. My nervous system still treated uncertainty as danger, even when my mind knew better.

van der Kolk argues that insight alone falls short. You cannot think your way out of a body that has learned to be afraid. You have to give the body new experiences. You have to teach the nervous system, through repetition and patience, that safety is possible.

This is why I came to Loreto.

Learning the Body’s Language

One of the most useful things van der Kolk taught me is a word: interoception.

It means awareness of internal bodily sensations. The ability to notice what is happening inside you, to feel your own interior landscape.

I thought I had this. I was wrong.

When I first tried to check in with my body, I got nothing. Fine. Normal. Whatever. The channel was full of static. Decades of pushing through had taught me to override bodily signals rather than listen to them. I had become fluent in ignoring myself.

Here in Loreto, I have been practising. Every morning and evening, I sit quietly and ask simple questions. Where is there tension? What is my breath doing? What does my belly feel like today?

At first, the answers were vague. But slowly, the body has started to speak more clearly.

Tight behind the eyes today. Jaw softer than yesterday. A pulling sensation in my chest that might be grief, or might be longing, or might be something still awaiting a name.

This is what van der Kolk means when he says interoception is the foundation of agency. You cannot respond to what you cannot feel. You cannot change what you cannot notice. The first step in any different direction is simply knowing where you are.

Why the Sea of Cortez

van der Kolk writes about what actually calms a nervous system that has learned to be afraid: rhythm, breath, movement, and environmental cues of safety.

I had no full understanding of why I needed the sea until I read those words.

The waves arrive and recede with a regularity that teaches something below language. The body learns, through repetition, that things have beginnings and endings. That which rises also falls. That the next moment will come, and the one after that.

Swimming requires attention to breath in a way ordinary life rarely demands. I cannot swim and hold my breath due to anxiety. The water demands exhalation. It teaches my body what my mind has been trying to explain for years: you can let go, and the water will hold you.

Walking the shoreline is movement without a destination. No goal except the next step. No metric except presence. The body moves, and the mind follows, rather than the other way around.

And the wideness of the horizon, the warmth of the air, the predictability of light on water, these tell the ancient parts of my brain that right now, in this moment, I am safe.

This is what van der Kolk calls bottom-up healing. Beyond thinking my way to safety, feeling my way there. Giving my body experiences that contradict the score it has been keeping.

The Hardest Part

The hardest part of van der Kolk’s book, for me, was accepting that healing takes time.

I wanted a solution. A technique. Something I could implement and complete. But he describes recovery as a process of slowly, gently, teaching the body that the past is past. Beyond insight, through experience. Again and again, until the nervous system begins to trust.

This is why thirty days.

Thirty days will fix nothing entirely. But because thirty days of waking in the same safe room, of walking the same peaceful shore, of breathing the same salt air might begin to shift something. The body needs repetition. It needs evidence. It needs proof that safety can be sustained.

I am here to practice healing, beyond achieving it. I am here to practice it.

What My Body Is Saying Now

This morning, I noticed something new.

I woke without the usual surge of anxiety. No immediate reach for my phone. No mental inventory of what might have gone wrong overnight. Just the sound of waves and the pale light of early morning and my own body, breathing.

My shoulders were down. Beyond any deliberate memory to relax them, simply because they had relaxed on their own.

I lay there for a long time, feeling the strangeness of it. This is what van der Kolk means by the nervous system learning safety. Beyond thought. A state. Something the body does when it finally believes what the mind has been saying.

It held briefly. By afternoon, I had found new tensions to carry. But it happened. The body is learning.

Sea Glass

I have been collecting sea glass on my walks.

Each piece started as something broken. A bottle shattered against rocks. A jar that shattered on the journey. Sharp edges that could cut.

Time and salt transformed them. The tumbling softened what was dangerous. The constant motion wore away the sharpness until what remains is smooth, frosted, and safe to hold.

van der Kolk writes about neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to be reshaped by experience. The nervous system that learned fear can also learn safety. The braced body can also soften.

Sea glass carries its history of being broken. The frosted surface carries evidence of its history. But it is no longer dangerous. It has been changed by the environment in which it is held.

I think about this every time I pick up a piece of green or blue or amber glass from the sand. I think: this is what I am doing here. Being tumbled. Being smoothed. Beyond forgetting: transforming.

For Anyone Whose Body Is Keeping Score

If you are reading this, maybe your body is keeping score too.

Maybe you call it something else. Maybe it is just stress, difficulty, the ordinary accumulation of a hard life. But if your shoulders live near your ears and your sleep fractures into vigilance and your capacity for joy has narrowed into something you can barely remember, van der Kolk’s book might matter to you.

Here’s what I want you to know, from eighteen days into this experiment:

Your body’s responses are adaptations, never weakness. They are adaptations. They helped you survive something. The challenge lies in having developed them. The deeper challenge is that you may no longer need them, but they are still running.

Healing happens through the body. Understanding why you feel the way you feel is valuable. But the nervous system needs new experiences, beyond new insights alone. It needs to feel safe, to experience safety in the body rather than merely know it.

Time and salt transform things. Healing follows its own schedule, never ours. But the body that has been keeping a difficult score can learn to keep a different one.

This Evening

The sun is setting over the Sea of Cortez. The water has turned gold, then copper, then something darker, nameless.

I am sitting on the balcony with van der Kolk’s book beside me, unopened. Reading it feels unnecessary tonight. The words have become practice. The practice has become this: sitting here, watching light change, noticing that my breath is slow, my shoulders are down, and my body, for this moment, is open, released from bracing.

The score is changing.

Slowly. Imperfectly. But changing.

References

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Academic Lens

Van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score (2014) functions here as both a text and a mirror — the reader recognising their own nervous system's history in clinical language for perhaps the first time. This is an instance of what Fricker (2007) calls the restoration of hermeneutical justice: being given the conceptual resources to understand one's own experience, after a period in which those resources were absent. The learning described here is somatic as well as intellectual: the body responds to being correctly named.

Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista

What Arrives When You Are Ready

Can You See Me?

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Grief I Have Been Holding

This morning I cried.

Really cried. The kind of crying that starts somewhere below your ribs and moves through your whole body. The kind that makes you sit down because standing requires more structure than you have right now.

I was watching pelicans. Just watching pelicans fish. And suddenly I was weeping.

For seventeen days, I have been here, establishing safety and learning to sleep. Learning to play. Touching rocks. Watching whales. Allowing my nervous system to register that threat has passed, that I am here, that nothing is chasing me.

And this morning, my body decided it was safe enough. Safe enough to feel what I have been carrying. Safe enough to let the grief arrive.

Finalmente segura para sentir. Finally safe enough to feel.

What Greenspan Teaches About Dark Emotions

I brought Greenspan’s (2004) Healing Through the Dark Emotions with me to Mexico. Have been reading it in small pieces, letting it teach me what I am experiencing rather than rushing ahead to understand before feeling.

Greenspan argues that what we call “negative emotions” are badly felt energies, suppressed or misunderstood, rather than inherently problematic. She writes:

The dark emotions are purposeful. Their pain calls for attention, as does physical pain. (p. 88)

This stopped me in my tracks when I first read it weeks ago. Stopped me again this morning when the crying started.

The grief is purposeful. It is calling for attention. It has been calling for seventeen days, but I could hear it only once my nervous system registered enough safety to allow it.

El dolor tiene propósito. The pain has purpose.

Greenspan identifies grief as one of three “dark emotions” alongside fear and despair. She refuses to call them negative, insisting that “the energy of dark emotions is just energy” (p. 86). What makes emotions toxic is how we handle them: suppressing, denying, transcending prematurely, avenging, and escaping. The emotions themselves are neutral. Essential. Carrying information our bodies need us to know.

This reframes everything.

For five months before this retreat, I carried enormous grief. Witnessing someone I love disappear into addiction. Watching helplessly as the person I knew was displaced by someone whose behaviour felt profoundly other. Boss (1999) calls this ambiguous loss: grief without closure because the person remains physically present while psychologically transformed.

Turkey Vulture

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

But I could cry about nothing else. My nervous system was in constant threat response. Porges (2011) explains that the social engagement system (which supports emotional expression, connection, and facial expressiveness) goes offline during sympathetic activation or dorsal vagal shutdown. You cannot process grief when your body is preparing for fight or flight or freeze.

So I carried it. Held it. Waited.

And this morning, watching pelicans, my nervous system signalled: it is safe now. You can feel this now.

Ahora es seguro. Now it is safe.

The Three Skills of Emotional Alchemy

Greenspan offers what she calls “emotional alchemy,” transforming dark emotions from lead into gold through three core skills:

Skill 1: Attending. Learning to listen to the emotion. To notice it. To turn toward it rather than away. (p. 75)

Skill 2: Befriending. Feel it to heal it. Allowing the emotion to be present without trying to fix, change, or understand it. Just feeling it. (p. 76)

Skill 3: Surrendering. To let it go, you have to let it flow. Allowing the emotion to move through you, trusting that emotions are temporary, that they crest and subside like waves. (p. 78)

Sitting on the patio this morning, pelicans fishing below, I practiced these skills.

An Afternoon Scratch

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I attended. Noticed the tightness in my chest. The way my breath was catching. The pressure behind my eyes. The heat in my throat. I turned toward the grief rather than distracting myself with coffee, reading, or planning the day.

I befriended. Sat with the feeling. Did my best to allow it without needing to understand why pelicans triggered weeping. Without needing to make sense of timing. Without needing the emotion to be different from what it was. Just: this is grief. It is here. It is allowed to be here.

I surrendered. Let the crying happen. Let it move. Let it flow without trying to contain or control or finish it quickly. Greenspan writes that “the art of surrendering to fear is the art of living” (p. 195). The same is true for grief. Surrendering to grief is allowing life to move through you honestly.

Atender. Hacerse amigo. Rendirse. Attend. Befriend. Surrender.

Vulnerability as the Power of No Protection

Greenspan opens one chapter with this: “The open heart is the doorway, inviting angels in, revealing that the world, even in the pit of hell, is charged with the sacred” (p. 25).

This terrifies me and compels me at the same time.

For seventeen days, I have been building protection. Routine. Predictability. Environmental consistency. The conditions that allow the nervous system to regulate. And this has been necessary. Essential. I could do nothing else first.

But now protection is sufficient that I can afford brief moments without it. Can afford to open slightly. Can afford to let grief arrive.

Greenspan calls this “vulnerability as the power of no protection.” She writes:

But vulnerability is about openness, beyond hurting. Openness to pain, adversity, loss, and death, but also to the things we most desire and cherish: to love, intimacy, creativity, sex, birth, wonder; to being truly touched by another human being, being truly seen for who we are; to the sheer adventure of being alive; to the sacred spirit that imbues the world.

This is what alonetude is teaching me. That safety is the condition that allows vulnerability rather than its opposite. That I came here to establish enough protection that I could risk having no protection. The open heart requires the regulated nervous system first.

La vulnerabilidad requiere seguridad primero. Vulnerability requires safety first.

Brené Brown (2012) writes extensively about vulnerability requiring courage. But what I am learning here is that vulnerability also requires nervous system regulation. You cannot risk openness when your body is in chronic threat. Cannot allow grief to flow when every resource goes toward survival.

I See You

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Alonetude creates conditions where vulnerability becomes possible. Where dark emotions can arrive because the body finally trusts that it can handle them.

Emotions Live in the Body

One of Greenspan’s seven foundations is this: “Emotions live in the body, in the world” (p. 88).

This feels obvious once you pay attention, but for most of my life, I believed emotions lived in my head. Was that crying something you chose? That grief was a cognitive state you could think your way through.

But this morning taught me otherwise. The grief arrived somatically before I had conscious thought about it. My chest tightened. My breath caught. My eyes filled. Only then did my mind notice: oh. I am crying. Something is moving through me.

van der Kolk (2014) emphasises this: the body keeps the score. Emotions are stored in the nervous system, accessed through somatic pathways rather than through thought. This is why talk therapy alone often fails with trauma. The body holds what language cannot reach.

El cuerpo guarda lo que las palabras no pueden tocar. The body holds what words cannot touch.

Watching myself cry this morning, I understood something new. The grief was never absent. It was present all along, stored in my body, waiting for conditions where it could be processed safely. My nervous system was protecting me by keeping it stored until I had capacity to feel it. Now, seventeen days into alonetude, capacity has increased slightly. Enough for this morning’s grief. Probably insufficient for all the grief I carry. But enough for today.

This is what Porges (2011) describes: nervous system regulation as creating capacity for emotional experience. When we are dysregulated, we cannot access the full range of emotional life. Regulation restores access gradually, bit by bit, as the system learns safety.

Dark Emotions

Greenspan offers a process for working with dark emotions that feels remarkably similar to what I have been doing intuitively:

Step 1: Intention. Focusing your spiritual will. Deciding consciously to work with the emotion for healing and transformation. (p. 79)

Step 2: Affirmation. Developing an emotion-positive attitude. Believing that emotions are purposeful rather than problematic. (p. 80)

Step 3: Bodily Sensation. Sensing, soothing, naming emotions as they arise in the body. (p. 80)

Step 4: Contextualization. Telling a wider story. Understanding the emotion within its broader personal and social context. (p. 83)

Step 5: Non-Action. Befriending what hurts. Being simply present without trying to avoid, cling to, fix, or even understand. (p. 85)

Step 6: Action. Social action, spiritual service. Hearing what the emotion is asking of you and responding from the heart. (p. 85)

Step 7: Transformation. The way of surrender is allowing the emotion to flow and transform naturally. (p. 86)

This morning, I moved through these steps without consciously intending to:

I set an intention by recognising grief was present and choosing to sit with it rather than distract myself.

I affirmed that grief is purposeful by remembering Greenspan’s teaching that dark emotions carry essential information.

I attended to bodily sensation: tightness, heat, pressure, trembling, the specific texture of grief in my chest and throat.

I contextualised this grief by connecting it to five months of witnessing addiction, to ambiguous loss, to the accumulated weight of helplessness.

I practiced non-action by simply sitting. Without trying to make the crying stop. Without needing to understand it fully. Just being with it.

Action will come later. For now, the grief is teaching me what it needs to teach.

And transformation is happening whether I direct it or experience it passively. The crying eventually subsided. My breath evened. The pressure eased. Something shifted. Something moved. Something that was stored became something that flowed.

Algo que estaba almacenado se convirtió en algo que fluyó. Something that was stored became something that flowed.

Pelicans Flying Over the Sea

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

What This Means

Alonetude is proving more complex than I initially understood.

I came here thinking alonetude was about rest. About nervous system regulation. About recovering playfulness and establishing a routine. And it is all of those things.

But alonetude is also about creating conditions where difficult emotions can finally be processed. Where grief that has been held in the body for months can surface because the nervous system finally has capacity to feel it.

Greenspan writes that “without a listener, the healing process is aborted” (p. 14). In conventional therapeutic contexts, the listener is the therapist. But in alonetude, the listener is the self. Is the body attending to itself? Is the nervous system learning to hold what it previously could hold only in stored, frozen form?

En la alonetud, me escucho a mí misma. In alonetude, I listen to myself.

This feels important methodologically. Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) positions lived experience as legitimate data when properly contextualised. But what I am learning is that some lived experiences cannot be accessed until nervous system conditions allow it. The data exists in the body but remains inaccessible until safety permits processing.

Alonetude creates these conditions. Seventeen days of consistent safety. Seventeen days of routine. Seventeen days of play returning, of rocks teaching, of whales breathing, of stones offering patience. All of this accumulated into sufficient nervous system regulation that this morning my body decided: now. Now we can feel the grief about what happened before we came here.

Sands of Time

The Widsom of Grief

Greenspan calls this “the wisdom of grief” (2004). She argues that grief serves crucial functions:

It connects us to what we have loved and lost
It teaches us about attachment and impermanence
It opens our hearts to compassion
It reminds us we are vulnerable, alive, and capable of deep feeling
It transforms us from who we were before loss into who we become through integrating loss

Sitting here now, hours after this morning’s crying, I feel different. Lighter somehow. As though releasing some of the stored grief made space for something else. Made breathing easier. Made my chest less tight.

This is what Greenspan means by transformation. From grief to gratitude. Gratitude arrives through grief rather than replacing it, moving through grief makes gratitude accessible again. Makes joy possible. Makes life feel less heavy.

Del dolor a la gratitud. From pain to gratitude.

The pelicans are still fishing. The sea is still calm. The stones still sit patiently, teaching their lessons about deep time. Nothing external has changed.

But something internal has shifted. Some energy that was frozen is now flowing. Some stored emotion is now being partially processed.

And I am grateful. Grateful that my body knew to wait until safety was established. Grateful that alonetude created conditions where grief could arrive. Grateful for Greenspan’s framework that helps me understand what is happening. Grateful for the pelicans who somehow triggered the release I needed.

Figure: Safe Enough to Feel

Credit: NotebookLM, 2026

Can You See Me?

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Gracias por la seguridad que permite sentir. Thank you for the safety that permits feeling.

Gracias por el dolor que enseña. Thank you for the pain that teaches.

Gracias por las lágrimas que fluyen. Thank you for the tears that flow.

Gracias por el cuerpo que sabe cuándo es el momento. Thank you for the body that knows when it is time.

Frameworks and Concepts for Healing Dark Emotions

Concept or Framework Name	Author(s) or Source Cited	Key Definition or Description	Associated Stages or Skills	Somatic or Psychological Purpose	Source
Emotional Alchemy	Greenspan (2003)	Dark emotions are purposeful energies that carry essential information; their pain calls for attention, like physical pain, for healing and transformation.	3 Core Skills: 1. Attending, 2. Befriending, 3. Surrendering. 7 Foundations: 1. Intention, 2. Affirmation, 3. Bodily Sensation, 4. Contextualization, 5. Non-Action, 6. Action, 7. Transformation.	Dark emotions are purposeful energies that carry essential information; their pain calls for attention similar to physical pain for the purpose of healing and transformation.	[1]
Polyvagal Theory / Social Engagement System	Porges (2011)	A neurophysiological framework explaining how the nervous system regulates emotional expression and connection based on perceived safety or threat.	1. Sympathetic activation (fight/flight), 2. Dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze), 3. Social engagement system.	Creates the capacity for emotional experience; the body must register safety to move out of threat response and allow the social engagement system to process grief.	[1]
Alonetude	A state of intentional solitude is used to establish safety, routine, and nervous system regulation.	A state of intentional solitude used to establish safety, routine, and nervous system regulation.	Establishing safety, learning to sleep/play, touching rocks, watching nature, and establishing routine.	Creates conditions in which the body finally trusts it can handle and process stored, frozen emotions like grief.	A state of intentional solitude is used to establish safety, routine, and nervous system regulation.
The Body Keeps the Score / Somatic Storage	van der Kolk (2014)	The concept that emotions and trauma are stored in the nervous system and body rather than just as cognitive thoughts.	Accessing somatic pathways rather than just language or talk therapy.	The body protects the individual by storing emotions until the nervous system has the capacity to process them safely.	[1]
Vulnerability as the Power of No Protection	Greenspan (2003); Brown (2012)	An openness beyond pain and loss, extending to love, intimacy, and wonder; it is the state of having an open heart allowed by a regulated nervous system.	Requires nervous system regulation and courage.	Allows an individual to be truly touched or seen and to experience the “sheer adventure of being alive” once sufficient protection/safety is established.	[1]
Ambiguous Loss	Boss (1999)	A type of grief occurring without closure because a person remains physically present but is psychologically transformed or absent (e.g., through addiction).	Absent from source	Identifies the specific source of unresolved grief where typical closure is unavailable.	[1]
Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN)	Nash (2004)	A methodological approach that positions lived experience as legitimate data when properly contextualised.	Contextualising lived experience.	Validates the individual’s personal journey and bodily experiences as a source of knowledge and truth.	[1]

Note. Safe Enough to Feel: The Alchemy of Grief, Source Blog Post Day 17, 2026

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.

References

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Academic Lens

What arrives when you are ready — not forced, not scheduled — is the subject of intrinsic motivation theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000): genuine curiosity and creative impulse emerge when the conditions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met, and collapse under surveillance and external contingency. The readiness named here is also somatic: van der Kolk (2014) argues that the body must settle before the mind can receive. This entry documents what Lorde (1988) called the uses of the erotic — the knowledge that arrives through feeling rather than analysis.

Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)

I spent the last few days talking to rocks.

Mostly silently. But definitely talking. Asking questions. Wondering aloud. Sitting in front of volcanic rock faces on Coronado Island, trying to understand what I was seeing.

And here is the thing. They answered.

In the way they held their shapes. In how they carried their histories. In what form does patient transformation take over millions of years when you slow down enough to see it?

I am sixty years old, and I am learning to listen to stone.

Rock Chairs

The Rock That Looks Like It Is Melting

There is a rock face on the north side of the island that stopped me completely.

It looks like it is melting. Actually melting. You can see where lava poured down, where it pooled, where it started to cool, but had barely finished when the temperature dropped enough to freeze it in place.

The History of Time

Frozen mid-flow. Caught between liquid and solid. Holding that in-between state for millions of years.

I stood there for twenty minutes just staring.

Trying to imagine the heat that would make rock flow like water. Trying to comprehend the violence of that moment. Everything around it is burning or fleeing or already gone. And then the cooling. The gradual solidification. The transformation from a destroying force into a peaceful habitat where birds now nest and lichens grow.

And I thought this was what I was trying to do.

Hold the memory of heat without burning.

Carry what happened without being destroyed by it.

Be transformed by fire but remain myself through the transformation.

The rock face has been doing this for millions of years. I am on day fifteen. But we are doing the same work. Just at different speeds.

Esta piedra recuerda. This stone remembers.

And it is teaching me how to remember without burning.

The One That Is Broken But Still Standing

Crack in the Wall

There is another rock face with a vertical crack running through it. Maybe three meters tall. Maybe a centimetre wide at the widest point.

Something broke it. Thermal shock when cold water hit hot stone, maybe. Or an earthquake. Or just the accumulated stress of millions of temperature cycles. Expanding in heat. Contracting in cold. Until finally the rock could hold no more and split.

But here is what strikes me. It is still standing.

The two sides of the fracture have stayed together. Held by friction and weight. Stable despite the split. You can see light through the crack. You can see exactly where it broke. But it is still here. Still doing the work of being rock. Still holding the island together.

I looked at this fracture for a long time.

Thought about my own breaking points. The places where pressure exceeded what I could hold. The visible marks of moments when I could carry no more.

And I thought maybe breaking is just honest.

Maybe fractures are how we know something is real. Has limits. Can be stressed. Carries the history of what it has weathered.

There is a Japanese art form called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The philosophy is that breakage and repair are part of the object’s history and should be honoured, made visible rather than hidden. That something can be more beautiful for having been broken and carefully mended.

The fractured rock needs no gold. But it has the same quality.

Here is where I broke.

Here is where stress exceeded capacity.

Here is how I continue anyway. Fractured but standing. Marked but functional.

La fractura no es el final. The fracture is the end of nothing.

It is part of the story.

The Smooth One That Should Be Rough

Rock Face

Volcanic rock should be rough. Textured. Showing all the marks of how it cooled. Gas bubbles. Crystalline structures. The molten material is solidifying rapidly.

But there is a rock face on the eastern side that is impossibly smooth.

Worn smooth by thousands of years of wind carrying sand. By water moving across it twice daily with tides. The patient’s work of erosion removes everything that protrudes, leaving only the most resistant material.

I ran my hand across this surface and felt time differently than I usually feel it.

Hours and days and years dissolved. What remained was geological time. The kind of time where my entire life is too brief to register. Where everything I think matters is just noise in a system that has been running for billions of years.

This should feel crushing, right? Should make everything seem pointless?

But it feels the opposite.

It feels freeing.

The pressure to make my life matter in some permanent way dissolves when I realise nothing is permanent. Stone is temporary. Mountains are temporary. Even continents are temporary. Everything is wearing away. Everything is becoming something else so slowly we mistake it for stillness.

I need only be here. Touching this smooth stone. Learning from its patience. Understanding that wearing away is simply what everything does.

The question becomes, what shape do you hold while it is happening?

La piedra no resiste el desgaste. The stone receives erosion rather than resisting it.

Simplemente sucede. It simply happens.

And the stone continues being beautiful. Changing slowly. But beautiful.

Rock Tunnel

The One Covered in Barnacles

At the waterline, a rock is completely covered in barnacles. Thousands of them. Layer upon layer of small white shells so dense that the original stone beneath lies hidden from view.

I touched this carefully (barnacles are sharp) and felt the roughness, the complexity, the way they had created an entirely new surface.

The original rock is still there. Still solid. Still doing the work of being rock. But you would never know what it looked like before the barnacles arrived.

And I thought this is me at sixty.

All these layers of experience accumulated over decades. Jobs I have held. Places I have lived. People I have loved. Losses I have carried. Joys I have known. All of it is building up. Changing my surface. Making me something different than what I was beneath.

And this is okay.

I am trying to get back to the original, unbarnacled version of myself. Some pure state before life happened to me makes no sense.

I am the whole thing. Rock plus everything that has accumulated on it. All the layers together make up whatever I mean at this moment.

Las capas cuentan la historia. The layers tell the story.

The original stone plus everything else. All of it together.

The Fingers Reaching Toward Sky

Fingers Reaching for the Sky

On the western edge, a rock formation rises from the water like fingers reaching upward.

Five distinct pillars. Maybe two meters tall. Separated by erosion but still connected at the base. They look intentional. Looks like a sculpture. Looks like someone (or something) was trying to grasp the sky.

Of course, no one made them. Water and wind made them by removing everything else. Leaving only these harder pillars that resisted the longest.

But they look like reaching.

And standing in front of them, I felt the same impulse. To reach. To extend beyond my current boundaries. To stretch toward something beyond my current reach.

Here is what struck me. These pillars have been reaching for millions of years. They will never actually grasp the sky. The reaching is the point. The reaching is what they do.

And I thought maybe this is enough.

Maybe reaching without grasping is valid.

Maybe the attempt itself matters.

Maybe continuing to reach despite never quite arriving is what makes you worthy of standing there at all.

I have spent so much energy trying to secure things. Trying to arrive somewhere stable and permanent where I could finally stop reaching and just be.

But maybe the reaching is the point. Maybe the effort to grow, to stretch, to extend beyond my current limitations is what I am supposed to be doing. And arriving at ‘done,’ ‘secure,’ or ‘finished’ is impossible, because being alive means continuing to reach.

Alcanzar sin llegar. To reach without arriving.

This too is valid.

The effort itself matters.

Rock Face

What I Am Learning From Stone

Life in the Stone

I have been walking around this island touching rocks. Sitting with them. Trying to learn what they know.

And here is what they are teaching me.

Transformation is slow. Nothing happens suddenly in geological time. Fire becomes stone over timescales that exceed human comprehension. Erosion works grain by grain. Everything that looks stable is actually moving. Just so slowly, my brief human perception mistakes motion for stillness.

After five months of crisis, after twenty-five years of precarious employment, I forgot this. Forgot that healing takes time. Forgot that becoming someone different from you requires patience. The rocks are reminding me. Slow change is still change. Patient work over time moves mountains.

Breaking is honest. The fractured rock face still stands. Still functions. Fractures are part of the story rather than the conclusion. What broke me ended nothing. Just marked me. Made me different. Made my story more complex.

Accumulation creates complexity. The barnacle-covered rock is more interesting than smooth rock. More textured. More alive. What accumulates on you over time is the life you have lived, layered on the foundation you were given.

Reaching matters more than grasping. The stone fingers will never touch the sky. But they reach anyway. The reaching itself is beautiful. The effort itself matters.

Patience is active. The smooth rock achieved its smoothness through millions of encounters with water and wind. Each encounter removed something infinitesimal. But the accumulation of infinitesimal changes creates transformation. Patience is active participation in slow becoming rather than passive waiting.

The Small Stone I Carried Home

Special Rock

On my last day on the island, I picked up one small stone. Fits in my palm. Black basalt with rust-red oxidation patches. Smooth on one side where water wore it. Rough, on the other hand, is where a break exposed fresh surface.

I brought it back to the cottage.

It sits on the patio now. Every morning I touch it. Feel the contrast between smooth and rough. Notice how the sun warms it. Watch how rain darkens it temporarily, then how it dries back to its original colours.

The rock is still changing. Even here. Even in my care. Oxidation continues. Morning dew dissolves microscopic amounts of minerals. Daily temperature changes create stresses too small to see but real enough to eventually, inevitably, cause new fractures.

This rock is a teacher I brought home.

A reminder that transformation is slow. That breaking ends nothing. That accumulation creates beauty. That reaching without grasping is enough. That patience is how mountains move.

When I return to the life I left, when I re-enter the urgency and demands and constant pressure, this rock will sit on my desk.

Will be cool under my hand when I need cooling.

Will be solid when I need grounding.

Will be patient when I have forgotten how.

Esta piedra recuerda a mí. This rock remembers for me.

What I learned here. That change can be slow. That time is longer than I think. That patience is possible. That some stories take millions of years to tell.

Y está bien. And that is okay.

A Question For You

Standing Dreams

When was the last time you sat with something long enough to learn from it?

No analysing. No using. No thinking about it. Simply sitting with it. Letting it teach through its presence. It is patience. Its way of being in the world.

I am learning this at sixty. Learning to slow down enough to hear what the world has been saying all along. Learning to listen to teachers who speak in textures and colours, and the patient holding of shapes across deep time.

The rocks have been here for millions of years. They are in no hurry. They have time to teach.

And I am finally slow enough to learn.

If you are learning to slow down, to listen to unlikely teachers, to trust that transformation takes time, I would love to have you join the conversation.

The rocks and I will be here. Patient. Waiting.

Gracias, piedras. Por enseñarme paciencia. Por mostrarme que la transformación es lenta. Por recordarme que las fracturas cuentan historias. Por demostrar que alcanzar importa. Por estar aquí, de forma constante, mientras aprendo a estar presente.

Thank you, stones. For teaching me patience. For showing me that transformation is slow. For reminding me that fractures tell stories. For demonstrating that reaching matters. For being here, constant, while I learn to be present.

Rock Stories

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.

Day 15: La Edad y El Juego

Age and Play

Playing in the Sand

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Sea Lions Know Something I Forgot

I am sixty years old, and I am learning to play.

This morning, I caught myself humming. No song. Just sound making itself because it wanted to. I stopped mid-hum and thought: when did I stop doing this? When did humming become something I had to notice rather than something that just happened?

And then yesterday. The sea lions.

Lions Playing on the Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Hundreds of them off the coast of Loreto, leaping and spinning and riding waves with what looked like pure, uncomplicated joy. And here is what struck me: they were older. Many had grey muzzles. Scarred bodies. The marks of decades in the ocean. These were old sea lions. Experienced sea lions. Sea lions who had survived sharks and storms and whatever else the ocean throws at bodies over time.

And they were playing.

No different from young sea lions in their abandon. No careful moderation, no appropriate dignity. Just playing. Leaping. Spinning. Riding waves because riding waves feels good. Their age seemed irrelevant to the equation entirely.

I sat in the boat watching them, and something in my chest cracked open. Cracked, yes, but opened. Like a window that had been sealed shut for so long, I forgot windows could open, and suddenly there was air and light and the possibility of something beyond naming, but my body recognised immediately.

Star Sunshine

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Alegría. Joy.

Joy unattached to happiness, contentment, or satisfaction with accomplishments. Joy. The kind that bubbles up from somewhere that has nothing to do with achievement, productivity, or being a responsible adult who takes life seriously.
The kind the sea lions have. The kind I seem to have misplaced somewhere between twenty and sixty. The kind I am just now realising I want back.

What I Learned About Growing Up

Somewhere along the way, I learned that growing up means growing serious.
I cannot point to the exact moment this lesson took hold. There was no single conversation or event. It was more like osmosis. The gradual absorption of cultural messages about what mature adults do and avoid. Adults work. Adults are responsible. Adults plan, achieve, and contribute. Adults avoid wasting time. Adults avoid play.

Or if they play, it is scheduled, optimised, and turned into another form of productivity. Exercise that counts as play. Hobbies that produce results. Social games that serve networking functions. Play with purpose. Play with outcomes. Play that justifies itself.

But what the sea lions were doing yesterday required no justification. It served no purpose I could identify. Exercise was incidental (though movement was involved). Socialising was incidental (though they played near each other). Skill practice was incidental (though the skills were evident). They were just… playing. For its own sake. Because it felt good. Because they were alive and the ocean was there, and their bodies knew how to move through it joyfully.

I watched them and thought, “I used to know how to do this.” I did. I remember childhood summers when entire afternoons disappeared into invented games that had no point beyond playing them. I remember the absorption. The timelessness. The way my body knew what to do without my mind directing it.
And then I grew up. And growing up meant putting that away. Meant learning that time is currency, that activities should have purpose, that joy without justification is frivolous, immature, something you outgrow.

Except the sea lions seem to have skipped entirely. The grey-muzzled, scarred, elderly sea lions seem to have missed any memo about dignity, seriousness, and age-appropriate behaviour. They are still playing. Still joyful. Still leaping.
And I am sitting here at sixty, realising: I got it wrong. The sea lions were right all along.

What the Research Says (And Why It Matters That I Am Reading It)

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I am reading research on play and aging because that is what I do when I am trying to understand something. I read. I find frameworks. I look for explanations. This is probably part of why I lost play in the first place: I cannot just experience things. I have to understand them. Analyze them. Fit them into existing knowledge structures.

But the research is helping, so I am allowing it.

Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that play is a lifelong human need, no mere developmental stage we pass through. They studied adults across the lifespan and found that people who maintain a capacity for play show better physical health, stronger social bonds, greater creativity, and more resilience when life gets difficult. The absence of play in adulthood belongs to suppression rather than natural maturation. It is suppression.

This word stopped me: suppression.

Something different from absence. From outgrowing. Suppression. Which implies something was there and was pushed down. Which implies it might still be there. Which implies it could be recovered.

I sat with this for a long time yesterday evening after the boat returned. Suppression. What suppressed my play? And the answer came quickly, almost too quickly, as though it had been waiting to be asked:

Everything. Work suppressed it. Poverty suppressed it. Precarity suppressed it. Chronic stress suppressed it. Cultural messages about what serious academics do suppressed it. Twenty-five years of contract work, where every moment had to be productive because any moment could be your last, suppressed it.
My play was buried alive under layers of survival necessity, cultural expectation, and internalised messages about what maturity demands.

But suppression is different from death. Suppression means it is still there. Somewhere. Under all those layers. Waiting.

The sea lions confirmed this. They looked nothing like they were working to play. They looked like playing was the most natural thing in the world. Which suggests that play is natural. Which suggests that the unnatural thing is the absence of play. Which suggests I have been living unnaturally for a very long time.
Qué alivio. What relief. To know it endures. Just suppressed. Just waiting.

Sea Lions Playing

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Neuroscience of Joy (Or: Why Play Eluded Me Even When I Wanted It)
Here is something I learned from Porges (2011) that changed how I understand the last five months, the last five years, possibly the last twenty-five years:
Play requires safety.

Something beyond cognitive understanding of safety. Beyond intellectual knowledge that you are probably fine. Physiological safety. The kind that the nervous system detects below conscious awareness through what Porges calls neuroception. The body is constantly scanning the environment, asking: Am I safe? Can I rest? Can I play?

And if the answer is no, the social engagement system goes offline. This is the neural pathway that supports play, connection, and spontaneous joy. When the nervous system is in threat mode (preparing to fight, to flee, to freeze), the social engagement system shuts down. You cannot access Play. Cannot feel lightness. Cannot allow the vulnerability that playfulness requires.

This is autonomic regulation, beyond choice. The body makes decisions about resource allocation below the level where consciousness operates.
For five months before I came here, my nervous system never registered safety long enough for play to become possible. I was in constant crisis mode. Waiting for calls. Waiting for bad news. Waiting for the next emergency. My body had no resources for playfulness, for vulnerability, for the energy expenditure that play requires when every resource must go toward threat management.

My nervous system chose for me. The choice to avoid play was never mine.

And reading this, understanding this, I felt something unexpected: compassion. For myself. For my body. For the twenty-five years before that, when contract work meant my nervous system never fully relaxed because security was always provisional, always temporary, always one crisis away from disappearing.

Of course play was unavailable to me. Of course, joy became impossible. Because my body was doing something very right rather than anything wrong: keeping me alive under conditions that offered no support for flourishing.

But here is what the research also says: nervous systems remain plastic across the lifespan. The capacity for play can be restored at any age if conditions support it. If safety can be established. If the threat can be interrupted. If the social engagement system can come back online.

I am sixty years old, and my nervous system is learning safety. And as it learns safety, play is beginning to return. Quietly, incrementally. In small signals: humming. Swimming for pleasure. Watching pelicans without needing to make it productive.

Small. But real. And growing.

Pequeños milagros. Small miracles. Pero milagros de todos modos. But miracles nonetheless.

What Play Looks Like When It First Returns

This morning, I walked in the water along the seashore.

This is a small thing. Maybe it seems like nothing. But for someone who has spent decades organising every activity around productivity, purpose, and outcomes, swimming because the water looks inviting feels revolutionary.
I got in. The cold shocked me like it does every morning. But instead of swimming laps, instead of counting strokes, instead of trying to improve my form, I just… moved. Followed curiosity about underwater rocks. Let my body do what feels good. Floated when floating felt right. Dove when diving felt right.

No plan. No goal. No timer.

And I realised: this is play. Unlike what I remember from childhood. Unlike what the sea lions do. My version. Sixty-year-old-woman-in-the-Sea-of-Cortez version. Modified. Tentative. Still learning. But real.

Guitard et al. (2005) studied play in older adults and found that play often looks different from childhood play but serves similar functions: engagement with novelty, absorption in the process rather than the outcome, pleasure for its own sake, and temporary suspension of everyday concerns. Older adults play through gardening, cooking, music, crafts, and exploration.

I am playing through swimming. Through humming. Through letting myself be curious about things without turning curiosity into research questions. Through allowing time to be unstructured. Through following impulses that have no justification beyond: this sounds good right now.

Small things. But they add up. Each one teaches my nervous system: it is safe to be spontaneous. Safe to follow pleasure. Safe to let go of control slightly and see what happens.

Each one is a tiny rebellion against the internalised voice that says: You are sixty years old, what are you doing? You should be serious. You should be productive. You should be concerned about declining capacities, limited time, and making every moment count.

Each one is a tiny agreement with the sea lions who say: no. Play. Leap. Spin. Your age is beside the point. Your joy is the point.

Estoy aprendiendo. I am learning.

Lentamente. Slowly.

Lero aprendiendo. But learning.

The Paradox That Makes Me Laugh

Here is something that makes me laugh now that I can laugh about it:
I am conducting research on rest and recovery and nervous system regulation. I am documenting how environmental conditions affect play capacity. I am reading literature on playfulness, aging, and successful life transitions.

I am turning the recovery of play into academic work.

This is very me. Very on-brand. Cannot just play. Have to study play. Have to document play. Have to theorise play. Have to turn play into scholarship because scholarship is how I make meaning, and scholarship carries legitimacy that pure experience often lacks in my mind.

But here is what I noticed yesterday watching the sea lions: they were documenting nothing. Reading no literature on play theory. Conducting no comparative analysis of their play behaviours across developmental stages. They were just playing.

And I thought: yes. That is the point. The point is to do it, first and foremost, with understanding secondary.

But I also thought: maybe both are okay. Maybe I can study, play, and also play.

Maybe the studying helps me trust that play is legitimate enough to allow.

Maybe the research gives me permission that my body needs before it can relax into playfulness.

Maybe there is no single right way to recover and play at sixty. Maybe scholarly-personal-narrative-researcher-trying-to-learn-to-be-playful-again is a valid way to do it.

The sea lions need no research to justify their play. But I might. At least for now. At least until my nervous system trusts playfulness enough to allow it without justification.

And maybe that is okay. Maybe that is my version. Nerdy. Academic. Needing frameworks before I can allow experience. But still moving toward the same place the sea lions are already inhabiting: joy. Lightness. Permission to leap.

Me río de mí misma. I laugh at myself.

What Sixty Knows That Twenty Could Barely Imagine

There is something sixty understands that twenty lacked the ground to know:

Nothing is permanent. Nothing is as high-stakes as it seems. Most of what feels catastrophic becomes a foundation. Failures leave you standing. Mistakes are survivable. The things you think will last forever dissolve. The things you think will destroy you become stories you tell.

At twenty, play was impossible because everything felt too important. Every choice felt permanent. Every failure felt existential. The stakes were always maximum.

At sixty I know better. I know that very little is as important as it seems. That most catastrophes become footnotes. That reputation is less fragile than fear suggests. That dignity survives embarrassment. That making mistakes carries no verdict on your worth.

This knowledge could support play. Could create psychological space where experimentation feels safe, where outcomes matter less than process, where I can be silly without it threatening my sense of self.
But knowledge alone falls short. The nervous system has to believe it. Has to feel safe enough to trust that playfulness leads somewhere other than catastrophe.

This is the work I am doing. Teaching my sixty-year-old body what my sixty-year-old mind already knows: it is safe enough to play.
And here is what is helping: the sea lions.

When I skip for three steps, I am completely here. Future thoughts quiet. Past replays absent. Just: body moving, sun warm, this feels good.
That presence is what I lost. What chronic stress took from me. What I am reclaiming now, three steps at a time.

Volcanic Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026

And here is what surprises me: it feels good. Beyond the skipping. The reclaiming. The gradual return of lightness. The sense that my body is becoming a place where joy is possible again.

For years, my body was a site of vigilance. Of tension. Of preparing for a threat. Now it is becoming something else. Something softer. Something more playful.
Mi cuerpo se está curando. My body is healing.

No sólo descansando. More than resting.

Curando. Healing.

Y parte de la curación es recordar cómo jugar. And part of healing is remembering how to play.

What the Sea Lions Teach About Successful Aging

Traditional models of successful aging emphasise maintaining function. Physical health. Cognitive capacity. Productivity. Contribution. (Rowe & Kahn, 1997).

But the sea lions suggest a different model.

Successful aging might be: maintaining the capacity for joy. For curiosity. For absorption in the present moment. For play.

Their bodies are older. Scarred. Slower now, less agile than young bodies. But they play anyway, through aging rather than despite it. Their play is a present-moment engagement, no effort to recapture youth. It is present-moment engagement with being alive in the body they have now.

This feels important.

Twenty again holds no appeal for me. No idealised version of youth calls to me. I want to be sixty and playful. Sixty and joyful. Sixty and capable of skipping for three steps when skipping feels right.

I want what the sea lions have: age that leaves joy intact. Experience that carries lightness alongside wisdom. Wisdom that includes lightness.

Henricks (2015) argues that play in later life serves a generative function: modelling joyful engagement for younger generations, resisting cultural narratives that equate aging with decline, and demonstrating that vitality persists across the lifespan.

If this is true, then learning to play at sixty is a contribution, no form of regression. It is resistance. It is saying: this is what aging can look like. Alive. Present. Joyful. Still learning. Still curious. Still capable of surprise. No grimness, no resignation, no decline toward inevitable loss.

The sea lions model this every day. I am trying to learn from them.
Slowly. With academic footnotes and self-consciousness they never carry. But learning.

And occasionally, when I forget to monitor myself, when I am absorbed in water or surprised by pelicans or simply here, I play.
Just for a moment. Just for three steps. Just for one spontaneous laugh.
But it is there. Real. Growing.

New Directions

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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.

References

Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Guitard, P., Ferland, F., & Dutil, É. (2005). Toward a better understanding of playfulness in adults. OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, 25(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/153944920502500103

Henricks, T. S. (2015). Play and the human condition. University of Illinois Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Rowe, J. W., & Kahn, R. L. (1997). Successful aging. The Gerontologist, 37(4), 433–440. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/37.4.433

Academic Lens

Age and play in the same frame raises the question of what Brown (2010) calls the permission to be imperfect: the cultural prohibition on adult play is internalised most deeply in those whose worth has been contingent on productivity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) identifies play as the purest form of autotelic experience — activity valuable in itself, not for any outcome. The bodily joy described in this entry is also a somatic signal of the nervous system's continued decompression: Porges (2011) notes that playfulness is a marker of ventral vagal engagement, a physiological state unavailable under chronic threat.

Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra

Ballenas y Piedra / Whales and Stone

The Sea of Cortez

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I had no plan to see whales.

The boat tour was about the island, about Coronado with its ancient volcanic stone rising from the sea like something too dramatic to be real. I wanted to see the geology. Wanted to understand how fire becomes stone, how destruction becomes foundation, how violence cooled into something that now holds life.

The whales were absent from the itinerary. They were passing through. We were lucky, the captain said. Muy afortunados.

Grey Whale

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I felt anything but lucky at first. I felt unprepared. As though I should have known this was possible, should have researched grey whale migration patterns, should have brought a better camera, should have been ready for this moment rather than sitting in a small boat with no idea where to look or what I was about to see.

Then the water broke, and there was a back. Grey. Massive. Longer than our boat. The whale surfaced, breathed (a sound I cannot describe except to say it sounded like the ocean exhaling), and disappeared again into water that closed over it as though nothing that large had just been there.

I forgot about being prepared. Forgot about cameras. Just watched the space where the whale had been, waiting, holding my breath, aware suddenly of my own breathing in a way I had forgotten since the panic attacks that brought me here began to ease. The whale breathes air like I breathe air. We are both mammals. Both carry our ancestors’ decision to leave the ocean and then (in the whale’s case) the decision to return. Both are shaped by evolutionary pressures I can name but struggle to fully comprehend.

The whale surfaced again. Fifty metres ahead this time. I could see barnacles clustered on its head, the mottled grey of skin that looked like stone worn smooth by water. Another breath. Another dive. And I realised I was crying. Quietly, undramatically. Just tears on my face that I left alone because they felt like the right response to whatever was happening.

van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma resolution occurs less through understanding than through the body’s learning to feel safe again. I have been here two weeks learning that lesson: letting my body remember what safety feels like. But something about the whale’s presence intensified it. The whale’s breath synchronised my own breathing in ways beyond my control. My nervous system responded to the whale’s presence before my mind registered what I was seeing. This is what Porges (2011) calls neuroception, the body’s capacity to detect safety or danger below conscious awareness through environmental cues, including, apparently, the respiratory patterns of other mammals.

Learning Scale Through Bodies

I have been thinking about scale.

Egypt Gods

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

For two weeks, I have been learning to feel small in ways that leave me whole. Small against the stars. Small against the sea. Small against geologic time. But the whale is different. The whale is something other than cosmic distance or abstract deep time. The whale is right here, breathing the same air I am breathing, made of the same carbon and oxygen and complexity. And it is so much larger than me that my body cannot quite process it.

Fifteen metres long, the guide said. Up to forty tonnes. These are numbers. They mean nothing until you are in a six-metre boat and a whale surfaces close enough that you understand: I am the size of the whale’s eye. Maybe smaller. The whale could overturn this boat without meaning to, just by surfacing in the wrong place. We are here because the whale allows it. Because the whale, in its vast mammalian intelligence, has chosen to regard us as harmless.

This is different from the stars’ indifference. The stars choose nothing. They simply are, and my presence or absence makes no difference to them. But the whale is aware. The whale has agency. The whale sees me (I watched its eye track our boat as it passed) and makes decisions about whether I am worth noticing, worth avoiding, or worth approaching. I am in a relationship with the whale, whether I intended it or otherwise. And the whale, by refraining from destroying us, by passing peacefully, by allowing us to witness, is teaching me something about coexistence I had no idea I needed to learn.

Sea Lions on the Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Buber (1923/1970) writes about I-Thou relationships, encounters where the other is met as subject rather than object, where genuine relation becomes possible even across vast differences. The whale encounter fell short of I-Thou in Buber’s full sense (the whale was silent toward me, was entering no reciprocal relation), and yet it resisted the category of I-It (the whale as object, as thing to be observed). It was something in between. Something more like: we share this moment. We share this water. We share the fact of being alive at the same time in the same place, and that sharing, however brief, however one-sided, matters.

Boss (1999) writes about ambiguous loss, about relationships that defy clear categories. I am thinking about this now in a different context. What is my relationship with the whale? Beyond connection in the usual sense (the whale carries no knowledge of me). Beyond threat (I pose none). Beyond kinship (though we share mammalian ancestry, that seems too distant a claim to make). Something else. Something more like a witness. I witnessed the whale. The whale, perhaps, witnessed me. And that mutual witnessing, even without recognition or acknowledgment, creates a kind of relation that matters.

The whale needs nothing from my witnessing. But I seem to need to witness the whale. Need to know that something this large, this ancient (grey whales as a species evolved approximately 2.5 million years ago; Swartz, 2018), this indifferent to human concern still exists. Still migrates. Still breathes air, nurses its young, and navigates thousands of kilometres using senses I cannot imagine. The whale’s existence, independent of my need for it, feels like permission. Permission to exist independently of others’ needs for me. Permission to migrate toward what I need without justifying the journey. Permission to be large in my own right, even when that largeness is invisible to those who look at me and see only the surface.

Fire Becoming Stone: On Transformation and Time

We continued toward Coronado Island, and I was quiet.

The others in the boat were talking about the whales, about luck, about whether we might see more on the return trip. I had no words. No way to translate what I was feeling into words that would make sense to people who had seen the same thing I had seen, but seemed to have experienced it differently. They saw whales. I saw something I still lack language for.

The island rose ahead of us. Red and black stone. Sharp angles softened by millennia of erosion, but are still clearly volcanic. The guide explained the geology: an ancient volcano, now extinct, part of the volcanic chain formed when tectonic plates pulled apart millions of years ago, and magma rose to fill the gaps. The red is iron oxide. The black is basalt. The textures tell stories about how quickly lava cooled, how gas bubbles were trapped and never escaped.

I listened, but I was thinking about something else. About fire becoming stone. About destruction becoming a foundation. About the fact that everything solid was once liquid, once too hot to touch, once actively destroying everything it encountered. And now it sits peacefully in the sun. Now it is a habitat. Now birds nest on it, sea lions bask on it, and fish hide in its underwater crevices.

What does it take for violence to cool into peace? How long? Under what conditions? Can a human lifetime be long enough for that transformation or do we need geologic time, millions of years, the patient work of water and wind wearing down sharp edges until they are smooth?

Herman (1992) writes that trauma recovery unfolds in stages: establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma narrative, and restoring connections with others. But she acknowledges that recovery follows no straight line, that setbacks occur, that some trauma leaves permanent marks even as healing proceeds. The volcanic stone teaches something similar. The violence of eruption is permanent in some sense, the stone will always be volcanic stone, will always carry the signature of fire in its composition and structure. But it is also transformed. Cooled. Made into something that can be touched, that can hold life, that is no longer actively destructive even as it remembers destruction.

I am carrying violence inside me. None of it my own. Violence witnessed. Violence absorbed through trying to protect someone beyond my reach to protect. The past five months have been volcanic: sudden eruptions, molten rage, heat that destroyed everything it touched. And I came here hoping that distance, time, and consistency might cool it. Might turn it from something actively harmful into something that can be lived with. Maybe even something that becomes a foundation.

Two weeks may or may be enough. If thirty days will be enough. If any amount of time in any location will be enough. But watching volcanic stone hold seabirds and sea lions, I felt something like hope. If fire can become this, maybe anything can transform. Maybe cooling is less about erasing what happened but about integration. About the violence becoming part of your structure without remaining your defining characteristic. About carrying fire’s memory without burning.

Touching Ground: Embodied Knowledge

We anchored in a small bay, and the captain said we could swim if we wanted.

I lowered myself into the water, and the cold shocked every thought out of my head. My body contracted. My breath stopped. Then started again, harsh and fast. Then slowed. Then the cold became bearable. Then it became exactly right.

I swam toward the island’s edge where stone met water. Underwater, volcanic rock was even more dramatic: sharp ridges, smooth faces, crevices dark with shadow and possibility. I reached out and touched it. Ran my hand along the surface. Rough. Solid. Still holding some memory of heat, though that heat is millions of years old, cooled now to ocean temperature.

My body knows stone differently than my mind knows it. My body reads texture, temperature, and solidity. My body has no use for tectonic plates or million-year timescales. My body just knows: this is real. This is here. This can be touched. And touching it changes something. The stone remains indifferent. But me. I have been changed by touching the stone that was once fire.

Volcano Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) writes about embodied perception, about how we know the world primarily through our bodies before we know it through concepts. The body’s knowledge is immediate, pre-reflective, and cannot be fully translated into language. This is what Sheets-Johnstone (2011) calls kinesthetic knowing, knowledge that emerges through movement and touch, through the body’s direct engagement with the material world. This knowing precedes and often exceeds what language can capture.

This is what I was experiencing in the water. Feeling the volcanic stone rather than thinking about it. Learning it through skin, through the resistance it offered when I pushed against it, through the way it scraped my palm when I held on too tightly. My body was gathering information my mind struggled to process: the stone’s texture, its temperature gradients, its stability, its indifference to my presence. All of this registered somatically before I had words for any of it.

Damasio (1994) argues that emotion and feeling are fundamentally embodied, that what we call consciousness emerges from the body’s ongoing process of self-regulation and environmental response. The body knows before the mind knows. The body responds before conscious thought directs it. And often the body knows things the mind never fully grasps because those things exist at the level of sensation, of immediate experience, of contact with the world that exceeds conceptual capture.

I stayed in the water longer than I intended. Kept swimming around the island’s edge, kept touching stone, kept trying to understand through my hands what my mind had yet to grasp. Eventually, I climbed back into the boat. Wrapped a towel around myself. Sat in the sun, which felt impossibly good after the cold. And thought: I came here to touch ground. That is what this month is. Touching ground after years of free-fall. Learning what is solid. Learning what holds.

Finding Pattern in Movement

The whales we saw this morning migrate up to twenty thousand kilometres annually. Arctic feeding grounds to Baja breeding lagoons and back. They navigate using what scientists believe is a combination of magnetic field detection, sun position, memory of coastline features, and possibly echolocation. Grey whales are baleen whales rather than toothed whales, so their sonar works differently from that of other sea mammals (Swartz, 2018).

What strikes me is the fact itself, more than the mechanism. Twenty thousand kilometres. Every year. For their entire lives. They stay in no one place. They are built for movement. Their survival requires migration, requires leaving feeding grounds when food runs out, requires travelling to warm water to give birth, and requires trusting that the journey is possible even when you cannot see the destination.

I have been thinking about this in relation to my own life. The constant movement. The inability to stay. Twenty-five years of contract work meant never knowing whether I would be in the same place next semester or next year. Always preparing to leave. Always holding relationships lightly because attachment to place or people or routine felt dangerous when any of it could be taken away with two weeks’ notice.

Standing (2011) writes about the precariat, the growing class of workers whose employment is temporary, insecure, and without benefits or stability. Precarious workers live in perpetual uncertainty, unable to plan for the future, unable to establish roots, always one crisis away from catastrophe. This precarity creates what Standing calls “status frustration” and chronic stress that accumulates over time, wearing away at health, relationships, and sense of self.

But the whale’s migration is different from my precarity. The whale chooses to leave. The whale knows where it is going. The whale has done this journey before and will do it again. There is certainty in the pattern, even though each journey is unique, even though conditions change, even though some years are harder than others. The whale’s movement carries no precarity. It is rhythm. It is a pattern. It is a kind of stability that emerges through movement, even because of it.

What I am attempting here is something like that. No true migration (I will return to the same city, the same life), but the development of a pattern. The trust that this rhythm I am establishing can be carried forward. That I can know where I am going even when I cannot yet see it. That leaving may carry no loss in it. Sometimes, leaving is how you find your way home.

Witness of Joy

On the trip, we also saw hundreds of sea lions.

Sea Lions Playing

I watched them and cried again. No particular sadness in it. No pure happiness either. Just the body’s response to witnessing something it recognises but cannot name. What we call joy in humans belongs to a wider mammalian inheritance.

But watching them, my mind moved away from neuroscience. I was thinking about the five months before I came here. The heaviness. The way joy became impossible, through no choice for sadness but because the capacity for lightness had been worn away by constant vigilance, constant crisis, constant weight. I forgot that joy was possible. Forgot that bodies can move just for the pleasure of movement. Forgot that play is a real thing animals do, a fundamental expression of being alive.

Porges (2011) describes the social engagement system, the neural pathways that support play, connection, facial expression, and vocalization. This system only functions when the nervous system registers safety. When we are in threat states (sympathetic activation or dorsal vagal shutdown), the social engagement system goes offline. We cannot play. Cannot connect easily. Cannot access the lighter states that make joy possible. Play requires a nervous system at rest, a body that trusts its environment enough to lower its defences.

The Lioness

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Play has been absent from my life for months. Maybe years. Have been too vigilant, too responsible, too aware of everything that could go wrong to allow the kind of unselfconscious absorption that play requires. But watching the sea lions, I felt something shift. Recognition rather than permission. Recognition that the capacity for play still exists in me somewhere. That it has been temporarily inaccessible, dormant but alive. The nervous system can move from a chronic threat response back to states where play becomes possible.

The sea lions do it. That whales do it (I read later that grey whales are known to approach boats, allowing humans to touch them, seeming curious about us in ways that look like play). That maybe, given enough time, safety, and consistency, I can do it too.

Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that play is essential rather than frivolous, serving crucial functions in mammalian development and adult well-being: reducing stress, building social bonds, enhancing creativity, and maintaining cognitive flexibility. The absence of play, they suggest, is a marker of systems under stress, of lives organised around survival rather than flourishing.

I understood: I have been in survival mode. The return to play will signal that something fundamental has shifted. That I am safe enough to be playful again.

Making Meaning

Back at the dock, stepping from boat to land, I felt unsteady.

Physically, I was fine. But something about spending hours on water had changed my relationship with solid ground. The architectural structures of human settlement: buildings, walls, boundaries water lacks.

Afternoon Seista

That evening, I lay in a hammock and thought about the day. About whales’ breathing. About volcanic stone, teaching me that fire can be cooled. About sea lions playing. About my body’s response to all of it: unplanned tears, unexpected joy, a steadiness that came from witnessing things beyond my control continuing to exist in their full complexity.

Nash (2004) writes that scholarly personal narrative requires staying with experience long enough to understand what it means, resisting the rush to conclusions and allowing meaning to emerge through sustained reflection. This is the work of meaning-making, as Park (2010) describes the process by which individuals integrate difficult experiences into their life narratives, restoring a sense of coherence and purpose. Meaning-making bypasses silver linings and forced positive interpretations. It is about the harder work of acknowledging what happened, sitting with its difficulty, and gradually discovering how it connects to the larger story of who you are and what matters to you.

I am doing that now. Making no claim to understand what today meant, only acknowledging that it did. That seeing whales changed something in me I cannot yet name. That touching volcanic stone mattered. That witnessing sea lions mattered. That my body knows things my mind has yet to find language for.

Sea Lions

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Tomorrow I will wake, and the whales will be farther north. The sea lions will be somewhere else in the sea. The volcanic stone will still be there, still cooling, still becoming whatever it is becoming over timescales I cannot comprehend. And I will still be here, still learning what it means to be small and temporary and witness to things larger and older and more indifferent than I am.

But I will carry today. The sound of whale breath. The texture of volcanic stone under my hand. The sight of the sea lions. The recognition that my body still remembers how to cry in response to beauty, still registers awe even after months of numbness, still has capacity for the kind of witness that feels like prayer even when belief in anything to pray to has left you.

Rock Formations

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Gracias, ballenas. Thank you, whales.

Por respirar donde yo podía oírte. For breathing where I could hear you.

Gracias, piedra volcánica. Thank you, volcanic stone.

Por recordarme el juego. To remind me about play.

Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you, body.

Por saber cómo llorar cuando las palabras no bastan. For knowing how to cry when words fall short.

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.

References

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011). The primacy of movement.

Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

Swartz, S. L. (2018). Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus). In B. Würsig, J. G. M. Thewissen, & K. M. Kovacs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of marine mammals (3rd ed., pp. 422–428). Academic Press.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Academic Lens

Whales and stone: two orders of time meeting the human body. The whale's presence — a creature of vast scale, indifferent to the observer — is a profound instance of what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call extent: an environment large enough to contain and exceed the self, producing the felt sense of being part of something beyond individual concern. This encounter also instantiates alonetude (Tucker, 2026) at its most expansive: alone in the presence of something vast, the self becomes appropriately small, and the experience is not frightening but freeing.

Day Thirteen: La Tierra Bajo Mis Pies

The Earth Beneath My Feet

The Sea Etched in the Earth

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I woke this morning thinking about roots.

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 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.

The Colonial Village

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Entering the Landscape

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, through 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.

The Faces in the Rock

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 recognises 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 recognise stone. The calcium, the minerals, and the slow patient being that both rock and bone share.

The History of Time

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Shared Heat

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.

The Breath of the Sea

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Land as Relation

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 with place produces change. Knowledge emerges through relationship, through being shaped by landscape over time (Basso, 1996).

Thirteen days mark the beginning of this instruction. Teaching arrives through the body rather than language. Bones recognise 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.

Sea Bone

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Held, Temporarily

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. Desert stretching 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.

Shoreline

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 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, recognising 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.

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

Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032004003

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 somatic metaphors for stability. In Levine's (2010) somatic 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 — is not neutral ground; 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.

La Continuación / The Continuation

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.

Crack of Dawn

Photo Credit: January 13, 2026

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 characterised my mornings for months before arriving here. This is co-regulation 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 embodied knowledge. From something I observe to something I am.

The light is beginning now.

A View From My Deck

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 twenty-five 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 pathologise exhaustion or anxiety as personal flaws. I see them as natural responses to abnormal conditions, conditions I am now beginning to unlearn.

What is Normal?

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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 theorising 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.

Rock Art

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2o26

La luz me sostiene. The light holds me.

El mar me enseña. The sea teaches me.

Y mi cuerpo recuerda. And my body remembers.

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

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.