30 Days by the Sea Archives - Page 2 of 5

Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Brown (2010) describes a kind of revolution: the daily choice rather than the grand gesture, to stop performing adequacy, to resist the cultural demand that we suppress joy, suppress struggle, and keep pretending that everything is manageable. She positions the embrace of authenticity and inherent worth as acts of genuine resistance in a world that profits from our insecurity.

I have spent nineteen years in precarious academic employment, learning to be visible in very particular ways. Visible enough to be valued. Invisible enough to avoid threat. Always performing the precise calibration of presence that contingent labour demands. I learned to smile when I was exhausted. I learned to express gratitude for crumbs. I learned to appear endlessly available, endlessly capable, endlessly willing. The performance became so habitual that I forgot it was a performance at all.

Title: Tidal Margins

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 1.

Artist Statement

This shadow self-portrait speaks to the liminal space between visibility and hiddenness. I was drawn to this image because it captures me at the precise moment when I became aware of my own shadow, both literal and metaphorical.

This represents a methodological turn toward honest self-reflection, where the researcher becomes visible through absence. The tidal margins represent what Audre Lorde calls the 'erotic' as a source of power, the knowledge that exists in the spaces beyond performance. Standing at this threshold, I understood that the most profound relief comes from the permission to be unremarkable.

I live, I realize, in perpetual audition.

I am thinking this morning about what Brené Brown (2010) describes as the liberation that becomes possible when we release the need to perform wellness and adequacy. I read those words years ago and thought I understood them. I had no real grasp of them then. I understood them in my thinking, the way one understands a theorem or a map of a place one has never visited. Understanding them in my body, in the unclenching of my jaw and the descent of my shoulders from their permanent station near my ears, this is something else entirely.

Here, on this shoreline where nobody knows my institutional history, where nobody requires my competence or my compliance, I am discovering what it feels like to simply be present without performing the act of being present. The difference registers first in my body. I notice my breath moving freely, unguarded by the vigilance that institutional survival demanded. I notice my face doing whatever it wants, unmanaged for external consumption.

I am learning what my face actually looks like when it has stopped arranging itself for others.

Title: Unnoticed Gathering

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 2.

Artist Statement

The sky in this moment holds the experience of being present without audience. What moved me about capturing this image was the simultaneity of presence and invisibility the birds were there, I was there, and nothing required us to announce ourselves. Returning to Brown's work on the vulnerability paradox, I realized that my assumption that visibility equals value was false.

This moment articulates the ethical turn toward witnessing one's own life without need for external validation. The gathering without performance became a model for how institutional structures might be reimagined to honour presence itself rather than the appearance of productivity.

The Frontstage Life

I am learning what my face actually looks like when it has stopped arranging itself for others.

Erving Goffman, writing in 1959, gave me language I had been missing. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he describes social existence as a theatrical performance. We maintain a “frontstage” self designed for public consumption while preserving a “backstage” self hidden from view. The frontstage involves what Goffman calls “impression management”: the careful curation of behaviours, expressions, and appearances designed to elicit desired responses from our audience.

Reading Goffman here in Loreto, I understand something I could only grasp now, at a distance from institutional life. For workers in precarious positions, and I was precarious for nineteen years, always contingent, always renewable, always provisional, there may be no backstage at all. The performance must be maintained at all times because the audience is always watching, always evaluating, always deciding whether one deserves continued employment.

I live, I realize, in perpetual audition.

Title: The Unburdened Shore

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 3.

Artist Statement

This direct photograph of my experience walking an unobserved shoreline struck me as perhaps the most honest moment of the project. I wrote my name in the sand, for me.

Nobody needed my performed joy, my calibrated warmth, my endless availability. This represents what Sara Ahmed calls the 'willfulness' of creating space for one's own experience outside institutional frameworks.

What stood out was the bodily recognition, the unclenching of my jaw, the descent of my shoulders from their permanent station near my ears. This embodies what Brown identifies as the revolutionary act of choosing authenticity over performed compliance, a concept that becomes material and embodied in this single moment of unobserved presence.

I am practising invisibility as medicine.

Arlie Russell Hochschild extended this analysis in ways that name precisely what I experienced. In The Managed Heart, she introduced the concept of “emotional labour”: the work of managing one’s feelings to create a publicly observable display that meets occupational requirements.

I think about the thousands of times I smiled when I felt rage. The meetings where I projected calm while my stomach churned with anxiety. The performance reviews where I expressed gratitude for feedback that felt like erasure. Hochschild names this labour “invisible” because employers and institutions see nothing of it, compensate nothing, and acknowledge nothing of its occurrence. Yet it extracts a profound toll.

The toll is what I am healing from now, here, where nobody requires my managed heart.

Title: Dispersed Presence

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 4.

Artist Statement

In this image, the beach holds multiple presences, myself, the rocks, the sand patterns - none requiring central observation. What captured my attention was the recognition that existence requires no concentration in the gaze of others.

This moment became crucial for articulating how institutions demand centrality: the central thesis, the central argument, the central self. Yet this beach scene demonstrates that sense-making occurs in dispersal, in the scatter of experience. This connects directly to Brown's assertion that imperfection is a fuller expression of humanity rather than a flaw - distributed, complex, and valid precisely in its refusal of singular visibility.

Table 1

Key Theoretical Concepts: The Architecture of Performed Selfhood

Definition and Application to Alonetude	Definition and Application to Alonetude Goffman’s (1959) theory that social interaction operates like a theatrical performance. Individuals manage impressions on the “frontstage” while reserving authentic expression for “backstage” spaces. In alonetude, the 30-day retreat creates an extended backstage where the performance can finally cease.
Dramaturgical Framework	Goffman’s (1959) theory that social interaction operates like a theatrical performance. Individuals manage impressions on the “frontstage” while reserving authentic expression for “backstage” spaces. In alonetude, the 30-day retreat creates an extended backstage where the performance can finally cease.
Emotional Labour	Hochschild’s (1983) concept describes the work of managing one’s emotions to fulfil occupational requirements. For precarious academic workers, this includes performing gratitude, suppressing exhaustion, and projecting perpetual availability. Alonetude involves the cessation of this labour.
The Precariat	Standing’s (2011) term for the growing class of workers characterized by chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, and truncated rights. The precariat lives in permanent audition, unable to relax vigilance because employment is always provisional.
Auto-Exploitation	Standing’s (2011) term for the growing class of workers characterized by chronic insecurity, lack of occupational identity, and truncated rights. The precariat lives in permanent audition, unable to relax vigilance because employment is always provisional.

Note. These theoretical concepts provide language for understanding how institutional demands shape embodied experience. Each framework illuminates a different dimension of what alonetude is healing: the exhaustion of performance, the depletion of emotional labour, a state of constant alertness, always scanning for the dangers of precarity, and the internalization of extractive demands.

The Mask Becomes the Face

La máscara se convierte en la cara. The mask becomes the face.

Byung-Chul Han (2010/2015) argues in The Burnout Society that contemporary exhaustion differs from earlier forms of exploitation because the master has been internalized. We no longer need external overseers to drive us toward breakdown. We drive ourselves.

I recognize myself in these words with a clarity that feels like grief. For how many years did I mistake self-exploitation for dedication? How many evenings did I work past exhaustion, believing this was what commitment looked like? How deeply had I internalized the demand for constant availability until I could no longer distinguish institutional requirement from personal identity?

La máscara se convierte en la cara. The mask becomes the face.

What I am learning here in Loreto, in this practice of alonetude, is that the mask can be removed. The face beneath it still exists. It has been waiting, all these years, for permission to emerge.

Title: Weathered Acceptance

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 5.

Artist Statement

This image resonated because it offered a visual metaphor for what Brené Brown terms 'normal wear and tear' the evidence of a life fully lived. This becomes an argument for the validity of weathering, of showing marks of growth rather than performing unmarked perfection. What struck me most powerfully was understanding that my own weathering the visible evidence of institutional survival, of negotiating precarity requires no hiding. The rocks offer no apology for their transformation; they simply exist in evidence of it.

The Practice of Being Unseen

I am practising invisibility as medicine.

This is what it looks like: I walk through town without performing approachability. I sit at cafés without arranging my face into pleasant neutrality. I allow my body to hold whatever expression it naturally holds without editing for external consumption. Sometimes that expression is weariness. Sometimes grief. Sometimes, a blankness that might read as unfriendly to those trained to expect women to project warmth at all times.

I notice, with something like wonder, how much energy this releases. Energy that was going toward performance is now available for other purposes. For feeling. For noticing. For simply being present in this body, on this shoreline, under this particular quality of winter light.

Title: Peripheral Vision

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 6.

Artist Statement

This photograph captures the moment when I realized that being present required no centrality. In the periphery, I found a kind of peace that visibility could never offer. Connecting this to scholarly personal narrative, the margins have long been the location of intellectual and artistic work by those excluded from centres of power. What moved me about this image was the recognition that my position on the periphery could become a methodological stance, a choice rather than a limitation imposed from without, to see differently. Brown's work on vulnerability intersects here with marginality theory: the margin transforms from a place of diminishment into a site of distinct about what and how we know power.

The relief that flooded my body felt almost shameful in its intensity.

Stephen Porges’s work on how the nervous system responds to safety and threat helps me understand what is happening in mine. Porges describes three states of autonomic function: genuine safety (social engagement and felt safety), sympathetic (mobilization for fight-or-flight), and dorsal vagal (immobilization and shutdown). The state of genuine safety and connection, the state of genuine ease and relaxed presence, requires what Porges calls “the body’s sense of being safe.” The nervous system must detect, below conscious awareness, that the environment is safe enough to lower defences.

I understand now why rest felt dangerous for so many years. My nervous system was correctly detecting that the institutional environment was unsafe. Precarious employment is, in fact, a threat. The vigilance was appropriate to the conditions. What I am experiencing in Loreto, removed from that context, is the gradual return of genuine safety capacity. My nervous system is slowly registering that the threat has passed.

The jaw unclenches. The shoulders descend. The breath deepens. The face softens into whatever expression emerges naturally, rather than the expression that survival required.

This is what healing looks like. It looks quiet. It looks unremarkable. It looks like a woman sitting at a café without smiling.

Title: The Quiet Horizon

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 7.

Artist Statement

Looking toward the horizon in this image, I see no audience waiting for arrival, no applause from the sky or judgment from the water. This moment struck me as crystallizing Brown's central insight about the performance paradox: the freedom that comes when we stop performing.The horizon represents the necessary distance from institutional frameworks that demand constant self-presentation. What resonated most was the embodied sense of the sky's indifference, genuinely uninterested in my performed competence. This indifference, paradoxically, becomes liberatory, allowing for existence without the burden of constant visibility.

Visual Witness

Image: A Face Released from Performance

Title: Shallow Waters

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 8.

Artist Statement

Where water is shallow and clear, everything is visible to those who look closely, yet some things go unlooked at. This distinction became crucial to my understanding. This image articulates the difference between transparency and surveillance between voluntary self-disclosure and mandated visibility. What struck me most powerfully was the recognition that Brené Brown's call to 'show up and be seen' has been weaponised in institutional contexts, transformed from an invitation into a demand. This shallow water photograph reclaims the right to exist in visibility without being watched, to be knowable without being known.

The Wisdom of Withdrawal

Audre Lorde (1988) argues that caring for oneself, especially in environments that systematically exploit and deplete individuals, is, beyond selfishness, a vital form of self-preservation that holds political significance. Building on this perspective, Hersey (2022) positions rest as an intentional disruption of extractive systems rooted in capitalism and white supremacy. She emphasizes that in a world that treats people as instruments of productivity, the decision to rest is a radical rejection of dehumanization.

Through this lens, my retreat from visibility in Loreto becomes both a political and a personal gesture. By stepping back from performative roles and refusing the expectation of constant emotional availability, I challenge the norms that prioritize compliance and positivity over authenticity. This withdrawal is a reassertion of my interior life, beyond avoidance of institutional demands. In reclaiming the right to be unseen, I recover a space that precarious labour conditions had taken away.

In this way, I am beginning to understand alonetude as resistance and self-reclamation, a deliberate, grounded return to the self.

This is how I am coming to understand alonetude, as resistance, as reclamation, as the slow and quiet work of returning to myself.

Title: Windswept Freedom

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 9.

Artist Statement

The wind in this moment disturbs and reveals without judgment. What moved me about capturing this image was the recognition that forces beyond my control could touch and change me without requiring my consent or performance. Returning to Brown's concept of vulnerability, I understood that true vulnerability might mean allowing oneself to be moved, revealed, and transformed without controlling how that transformation is perceived. In scholarly personal narrative, this becomes the ethical stance of allowing one's own becoming to be visible without explanatory framing. The wind's indifference models a kind of presence that can be authentic precisely because it is unmonitored.

Table 2

Contrasting Performance and Presence: An Embodied Mapping

Outward, managing others’ perceptions	Institutional Performance	Alonetude Presence
Visibility	Strategic; managed for evaluation	Released; being seen without being watched
Emotional State	Managed; performing prescribed feelings	Authentic; allowing whatever emerges
Nervous System	the body’s alert state; a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger	genuine safety engagement; felt safety
Face	Arranged; the mask maintained	Released; the face beneath the mask
Arranged, the mask maintained	Outward; managing others’ perceptions	Inward; attending to actual experience
Outward, managing others’ perceptions	Alienated; self as instrument	Integrated; self as presence

Note. This table maps the embodied shifts I am experiencing between institutional performance demands and the presence cultivated through alonetude. The contrast illuminates how withdrawal from performance constitutes healing rather than avoidance. Each dimension represents territory being reclaimed.

What Becomes Possible

Title: Solitary Witness

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 10.

Artist Statement

Walking alone along the shore, I discovered that I could be complete in my own witnessing. This image resonated because it represented the culmination of my understanding that validation can arise entirely from within.

This solitary stance connects to what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the 'Coatlicue state' - the necessary period of withdrawal and self-confrontation. What struck me was that Brown's concept of wholehearted living requires no audience; it requires only one's own presence to oneself. This photograph documents the moment when I understood that the simple act of witnessing my own life, exactly as it was unfolding, constituted sufficient permission.

Brown (2010) describes authenticity as an ongoing practice rather than a fixed state, the continual work of releasing the performance of who we believe we ought to be in order to make room for who we actually are. I am beginning to understand what this might actually feel like. It feels quiet. It feels unremarkable. It feels like walking along a seawall with whatever face my face wants to make, without editing, without management, without performance.

The invisibility I am practising here is a temporary gift. I will return to contexts that require some degree of impression management; that is the nature of social life. What I am learning, however, is the difference between the performances that genuine connection requires and the performances that exploitative systems demand. There is a difference between adjusting one’s presence to foster mutual understanding and warping one’s entire being to ensure institutional survival.

Estoy aprendiendo la diferencia. I am learning the difference.

The sea cares nothing about my smile. The pelicans require no enthusiasm from me. The afternoon light falls on my shoulders, whether I am projecting competence or simply existing in my actual state. Here, in this chosen solitude, in this practice of alonetude, I am remembering what my face looks like when it is my own.

That remembering is itself evidence. Evidence that the body can recover from extraction. Evidence that the self remains beneath the mask. Evidence that withdrawal can be protective, that stopping can be ethical, and that invisibility can be medicine.

I will rest here a while longer, unseen.

The quiet is enough.

Title: The Relief of Being Unseen

Photograph from “Day 28: The Quiet Permission of Invisibility”, image 11.

Artist Statement

As I turned from the beach, I carried the profound relief of having been unwatched and unneeded. What moved me about this concluding image was the bodily recognition of release the relief was deeply embodied, beyond the merely intellectual. This moment articulates what it means to step outside the panopticon of institutional visibility. Connecting this to Brown's work on shame and worthiness, I understood that my fear of invisibility had been shaped by systems that equate visibility with value. This image documents the revolutionary recognition that invisibility born from freedom differs entirely from invisibility born from erasure. The permission I found was beyond being seen: the profound gift of being allowed to simply exist.

References

Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.

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

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

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

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.

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

Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

ACADEMIC LENS

Brené Brown’s (2010) framing of authenticity as a daily practice of resisting the cultural demand for performed adequacy provides the theoretical ground for the “quiet permission” described here. The concept of invisibility as permission draws on what Hochschild (2012) documented as the exhaustion of constant emotional performance: the body’s relief when it is no longer required to manage others’ perceptions of it. For the precarious academic who has spent nineteen years making herself legible, competent, and non-threatening to those who hold power over her employment, the experience of being genuinely unseen in a Mexican town represents a radical physiological reprieve. Menakem (2017) describes this as the release of what he calls “body armor”: the chronic muscular and postural holding that the surveilled body maintains. The quietness of this permission also resonates with Moustakas’s (1961) concept of alonetude as he describes in passing: the state in which one is fully present without requiring an audience for one’s existence. Van der Kolk’s (2014) research confirms that genuine psychological safety includes the freedom from evaluation, and that many trauma survivors have never fully experienced it.

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

Reading Time: 7 minutes

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.

Photograph from “Day 18: The Book That Taught Me to Listen to My Body”, image 1.

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 nineteen years, never quite sure if the next semester will hold a place for you.

Then I came across van der Kolk’s (2014) description of how traumatized people carry a persistent sense of unsafety in their own bodies, words that named exactly what I had been living.

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.

Photograph from “Day 18: The Book That Taught Me to Listen to My Body”, image 2.

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 normalized 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, in my thinking, 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: inner body awareness.

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 inner body awareness 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 read that passage three times. The research was naming something my body already knew it needed.

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

Photograph from “Day 18: The Book That Taught Me to Listen to My Body”, image 3.

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 recognizing 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 body-based as well as intellectual: the body responds to being correctly named.

Day 20: The Weight of Always Almost

Reading Time: 14 minutes

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 sympathetic state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, the impossibility of rest. Para no olvidar. (So I may always remember.) I write it down.

“The state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger 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 in my thinking, I carried in the body. 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 state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger 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 recognize.

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 internalized demands for optimization. We are tired because we have internalized 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 recognizing 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 practising 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, practising 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 always on guard, scanning for the next threat, 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 20 of my retreat, beginning to recognize.

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 body-based 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, body-based 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 sympathetic state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, 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 sympathetic state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger 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 recognize 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 practising here is recognition. The ability to recognize 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 a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger 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 thrown off balance 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 recognize 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 20 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 a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger returns.

What I was experiencing, what I am still learning to name, was institutional gaslighting: the structural inversion that reframes collective harm as individual pathology, and asks the harmed person to bear the proof, the labour, and the cure. The vigilance was real because the precarity was real. The body knew what the institution refused to say.

Because it will return. Because precarity is real. The threat is structural. And my nervous system is responding intelligently, rather than irrationally, to recognizing 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 recognize 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 recognize 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 state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger 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 pathologize structural violence as individual pathology. When we recognize 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 sympathetic state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger.

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 finding our own calm. 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.

ACADEMIC LENS

“Precarity lives in my body still” names what Nixon (2011) calls the somatic dimension of slow violence: the accumulated bodily cost of nineteen years of conditional belonging, of being almost-hired, almost-secure, almost-enough. Van der Kolk (2014) documents how the body encodes the history of threat and uncertainty in its baseline physiological patterns, so that even when the external circumstances change, the body continues to produce the hormonal and muscular signatures of threat-readiness. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour extends this analysis: the constant management of anxiety, performance of competence, and suppression of need that precarious employment requires constitutes an invisible labour cost that accumulates as somatic exhaustion. The “weight of always almost” also resonates with what Menakem (2017) calls “dirty pain”: the suffering generated by the original harm alongside the secondary layers of shame, doubt, and self-monitoring that institutional structures add to structural injury. The day-twenty positioning of this reflection is also significant: sufficient temporal distance from the departure to begin processing what was being carried, still too close to have fully set it down.

Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Evening Reflection: When the Shoulders Finally Drop

Video Credit: Gemini, 2026

The sky over the Sea of Cortez turns amber and rose as I write this, the eighth sunset of this retreat. Eight days. One complete week plus one day of threshold-crossing. Long enough for the body to begin believing what the mind decided: that this time is mine, that rest is permitted, that I can stop performing vigilance.

This evening, I sat on the small balcony with nothing but cooling coffee and the sound of waves returning to shore. No task. No plan. No productive purpose. Just sitting as the light changed, watching pelicans settle onto pilings for the night, their bodies perfectly still after a day of diving. They looked the way I feel tonight, arrived, finally, into stillness.

Title: Evening Tide, Sea of Cortez. Rhythm Without Demand.

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 1.

La quietud. The quietness. The settling. The quality of being that emerges when striving pauses long enough for presence to surface.

Blue Background Water Colour

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 2.

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2025

What Happens When the Body Exhales

For eight days now, I have been tracking my body-based state with the methodological rigour this research requires, but also with growing tenderness toward what the body reveals. This evening’s observation differs from previous entries in a manner best described as qualitative rather than quantitative. Something has shifted. Something has softened. The shoulders that have lived near my ears for years, decades, perhaps, have finally dropped.

Stephen Porges (2011, 2022) writes that the autonomic nervous system functions as a surveillance mechanism, continuously scanning for cues of safety or threat through what he terms the body’s instinct to scan for safety. This scanning occurs below conscious awareness, shaping our physiological state before we have language to describe our feelings. For years, my body’s instinct to scan for safety detected threat everywhere: in the precarity of contract work, in institutional politics, in the endless demands that arrived faster than I could meet them, in the quiet terror of never being enough.

Here, by the sea, the cues have changed. Predictable rhythm. Consistent warmth. The constancy of waves. The absence of urgent demands. No emails requiring immediate response. No meetings to navigate. No performances to sustain. Day by day, hour by hour, my nervous system has been gathering evidence: this place is safe. This time is protected. You can rest.

Tonight, the shoulders finally believed it. They dropped. And with that, the tears came.

Title: Circulation Without Effort

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 3.

The Grief That Hides in Muscle

It is a strange thing to discover that your body has been holding grief in places you had never thought to look. The shoulders, apparently, have been carrying years of it. The jaw, too, clenched through countless nights of fitful sleep, grinding away anxiety that had nowhere else to go. The chest, held tight against the vulnerability of being seen as struggling, as uncertain, as anything less than fully competent.

Bessel van der Kolk (2014) documents how trauma, and I would add chronic stress, chronic precarity, and chronic performance of adequacy, gets stored in the body’s tissues, in patterns of tension and bracing that become so familiar we forget they were learned. The body keeps the score, he writes, when the mind refuses to. My body has been keeping score for a very long time.

As my shoulders dropped tonight, something released. Tears came, quiet and steady, undramatic, arriving like rain after a long drought. I wept for the woman who carried so much for so long. I wept for the years of vigilance that never brought the security they promised. I wept for all the moments I had held rigid because softening felt dangerous, because survival required staying braced.

Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is a kind of alchemy, transforming pain into wisdom when we allow ourselves to feel it fully rather than bypassing it in favour of premature healing. Tonight’s tears were recognition. They were recognized. They were the body finally releasing what it no longer needed to carry.

When we give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
Adapted from Shakespeare, as cited in Greenspan (2004)

But sometimes grief needs no words. Sometimes the shoulders drop, and the body speaks its own truth.

Title: Stone Angel

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 4.

Evening Body-based Record

Table 1
Day 8 Body-based Tracking: Evening Entry

Time	Autonomic State	Physical Sensations	Emotional Quality	Notes
6:00 PM	genuine safety	Shoulders noticeably lower, jaw loose, deep breath available without effort	Peaceful, tender, slightly tearful	First evening where settling feels complete rather than effortful
7:30 PM	genuine safety	Warmth in chest, softness in belly, feet grounded	Grateful, present, emotionally open	Tears came and passed gently; no activation followed
9:00 PM	genuine safety	The first evening in years where sleep feels like an arrival rather than a collapse	Quiet contentment, readiness for rest	The first evening in years where sleep feels like an arrival rather than a collapse

Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection, characterized by parasympathetic activation, social engagement capacity, and felt safety (Porges, 2011). Tonight marks the first sustained evening-long state of genuine safety and connection without the body’s alert state spikes.

What Eight Days Has Taught

If someone had told me on Day 1 that eight days would be enough to feel this different, I would have dismissed the possibility entirely. Eight days against decades of patterning? Impossible. And yet here I am, shoulders lower, breath deeper, tears falling freely because safety has become believable enough for grief to surface.

the quiet way nature restores us Theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995) proposes that natural environments restore depleted cognitive and attentional resources through four key qualities: being away (psychological distance from demands), extent (environmental richness), the gentle pull of the natural world (gentle engagement), and compatibility (alignment between environment and purpose). This retreat has offered all four. But what the theory leaves unnamed, what no theory fully reaches, is the embodied dimension of restoration.

Restoration is body-based first. It is body-based. It is muscular. It is nervous-system-deep. The mind can decide to rest, but the body must be convinced. That convincing takes time, takes consistency, takes environmental cues repeated until the ancient mammalian brain that governs survival finally accepts: we are safe here.

Eight days. That is how long it took for my shoulders to believe it.

Deepening Inner Body Awareness

Another shift tonight: the clarity of internal signals. I knew I was hungry before hunger became uncomfortable. I felt thirsty early enough to address it gently. I noticed fatigue creeping in and sat down rather than pushing through. These micro-adjustments represent inner body-sensing awareness, the capacity to perceive and interpret internal bodily states (Craig, 2002; Mehling et al., 2012), and represent a significant development from Week 1.

When the nervous system operates in chronic defence, inner body awareness dims. The body’s quieter signals get overridden by louder demands: deadlines, obligations, others’ needs. We learn to ignore hunger until it becomes urgent, to override fatigue with caffeine and willpower, to silence the body’s requests for rest because rest feels dangerous when survival depends on constant output.

Here, eight days into chosen stillness, inner body awareness has returned. I am learning again to hear what my body communicates. I am remembering that these signals are information, data rather than weakness; that responding to them is wisdom, deep listening rather than indulgence.

Table 2
inner body-sensing Awareness Development: Days 1–8

Struggled to sustain attention to the body; mind wandered constantly	Day 1	Day 8
Noticing	Difficult to detect subtle bodily cues; awareness fragmented	Clear, early detection of hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature changes
Struggled to sustain attention to body; mind wandered constantly	Attention to body was fragmented; mind wandered constantly	Can maintain gentle attention to internal states without forcing
Emotional Awareness	Disconnection between physical sensation and emotional state	Growing recognition of how emotions manifest in the body
finding our own calm	Limited capacity to use bodily awareness for regulation	Beginning to use breath, posture, movement responsively
Body Listening	Tendency to override or ignore bodily signals	Increasing trust in body’s communications
Trusting	Body felt unreliable, unpredictable	Emerging sense that body’s signals are trustworthy data

Note. Framework adapted from Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA; Mehling et al., 2012). inner body-sensing capacity improves with reduced cognitive load and increased felt safety.

Title: Sea Treasure

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 5.

Visual Documentation: Artifacts of Settling

Tonight’s artifact collection includes the grey-blue pebble I found this morning on the beach walk, smooth, palm-sized, temperature-neutral. I have carried it all day, a tangible reminder of what settling feels like. The stone has been tumbled by tides for who knows how long, its roughness worn away by countless returns to shore. It is complete without being perfect. It is whole because the sea has shaped it, held whole by that very shaping.

I also photographed my hands this evening, palms open and resting on my thighs, fingers slightly curled. The image captures something about receptivity, about the body’s capacity to be open without gripping. These hands have held so much: students’ struggles, institutional politics, my own relentless standards. Tonight they are empty. Tonight they rest.

Tomorrow I will try charcoal drawing. I want to capture the quality of light at sunset, the way amber and rose bleed into each other across the water. Charcoal feels right for this: the smudging, the imprecision, the way it cannot be controlled entirely. A medium that requires surrender.

Theoretical Integration: When Safety Permits Grief

Tonight’s experience illuminates a vital relationship between nervous-system regulation and emotional processing. Porges (2022) emphasizes that the social engagement system, which involves a state of genuine safety and connection, must be activated before deeper emotional work becomes possible. When we are in the body’s alert state (fight-or-flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze), we lack the physiological capacity for the kind of emotional experience that supports integration and healing.

This explains why my grief waited eight days to arrive. The tears had to wait until my body released its defence mode. Safety had to stabilize first. The state of genuine safety and connection had to become reliable, consistent, and trustworthy. Only then could the grief surface without overwhelming me, without triggering a return to vigilance.

Title: The Whale Sculpture

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 6.

Deb Dana (2018, 2020), translating how the nervous system responds to safety and threat into therapeutic practice, describes this as “building the genuine safety muscle,” strengthening the nervous system’s capacity to remain regulated even when difficult emotions arise. Eight days of consistent safety cues have built enough genuine safety capacity that I could cry tonight without dysregulating. The tears came and passed like weather, leaving me softer rather than depleted.

This has implications for our understanding of healing from burnout. We cannot think our way out of the nervous system, which is thrown off balance. We cannot use willpower to override autonomic states shaped by years of chronic stress. We need environments that consistently communicate safety. We need time, more than we think, less than we fear. We need conditions that allow the body to gather evidence slowly, patiently, until it finally believes: we are allowed to rest.

Spanish Lessons the Sea Teaches

Title: Memories of the Sea

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 7.

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Spanish phrase I learned today from a local fisher: déjate llevar, let yourself be carried. He was describing how to swim in the Sea of Cortez, how to work with the current rather than against it. But the phrase resonated beyond its literal meaning.

Title: Let Yourself Be Carried

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 8.

Déjate llevar. Let yourself be carried. Stop resisting. Stop bracing. Allow the existing support.

I have spent decades swimming against currents that were stronger than I could overcome: institutional precarity, economic insecurity, and cultural narratives that equate worth with productivity. I exhausted myself with that swimming. Here, eight evenings into learning a different way, I am beginning to understand the expression “dejar de llevar.” I am beginning to let the sea, this place, this time, this intentional solitude, carry me.

The shoulders dropped tonight because I finally trusted what was holding me. The grief came because safety made space for it. The healing is happening because I stopped swimming long enough to float.

End of Day Eight

Day 8 marks the threshold: the body has settled enough that analysis can be sophisticated without overwhelming. The artifacts I have been collecting, pebbles, photographs, and journal entries documenting sensory experience, can now begin to speak to one another, to reveal patterns, and to illuminate the mechanisms by which solitude supports healing.

But tonight, analysis waits. Tonight, there is only the amber sky fading to violet, the pelicans motionless on their pilings, the sound of water returning to shore. There is only this body, finally soft, finally believing in its own safety. There is only gratitude for eight days that changed everything by teaching one simple thing:

The shoulders can drop. The grief can come. The healing can happen. All we need is time, permission, and a place that holds us gently while we remember who we are when we stop performing strength.

Title: The Settling

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 9.

La quietud. The settling. The arrival. Finally being here.

Gracias, Mar. Thank you, seaa

Por enseñarme a descansar. For teaching me to rest.

Title: Figure X. The Body-based Arrival: How the Body Learns to Let Go

Photograph from “Day Eight: La Quietud: Vespers”, image 10.

Image Credit: NotebookLM 2026

Note: The Body-based Arrival: A conceptual synthesis of nervous system settling, inner body-sensing return, and grief release observed across Days 1–8 of the retreat.

Listen to the podcast here by NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/5a728afe-1ad0-4fea-93aa-d87f483fe24f?artifactId=b2f3b31c-ebc2-4fc2-bcdc-c4b2891ff5fe

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

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? inner body awareness: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894

Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.

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

Google. (2026). La Quietud [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com

Google. (2026). Evening Reflection: When the Shoulders Finally Drop [AI-generated video]. Gemini. https://gemini.google.com

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

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

Mehling, W. E., Price, C., Daubenmier, J. J., Acree, M., Bartmess, E., & Stewart, A. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA). PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.

Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227

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

ACADEMIC LENS

Vespers, the evening prayer office, provides the spiritual frame for what Porges (2011) describes as the physiological shift into parasympathetic rest: the moment the nervous system registers that the day’s demands have concluded and safety can be inhabited. The observation that “the shoulders finally drop” documents this transition somatically, naming what Levine (2010) calls the completion of a defensive response and the return to a regulated baseline. The eighth day as a symbolic threshold also resonates with Turner’s (1969) analysis of ritual structure: sufficient duration to begin genuine transformation, the liminal space no longer new and still finding its resolution. The amber and rose sky of the Sea of Cortez functions as what Ulrich (1983) identified as a restorative environment: natural settings with soft fascination that hold attention without requiring effortful processing, allowing the nervous system to discharge accumulated tension. The evening practice of intentional rest described here aligns with Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) argument that the researcher’s own body is a legitimate site of inquiry, and that attending to it carefully, without agenda, constitutes a form of data collection.

Day 23: Remembering How to Play

Reading Time: 15 minutes

Black and White Experiments and the Serious Work of Being Silly

What surprised me was how natural all of this felt. None of it required effort, productivity, or justification. It simply required remembering that curiosity, play, and wonder were never meant to be outgrown.

What I Did Today

Today, I tried to remember what it felt like to be a child. I tried to do, without explanation or permission, the things I once imagined adulthood would allow.

When I was young, I thought being a grown-up meant freedom. I thought it meant staying up as late as I wanted, eating what I wanted, and going where I wanted. I thought adulthood was permission. I had yet to understand that adulthood, particularly adulthood shaped by precarious labour and chronic responsibility, would become its own kind of cage. I had no way of knowing that the freedoms I imagined would be traded for obligations I never explicitly agreed to.

Today, I took some of those freedoms back.

Here is what I did:

I danced with my shadow, curious about how it moved when I moved.

I ordered dessert for dinner, because pleasure requires no earning first.

I painted seashells slowly, letting colour decide where it wanted to land.

I hunted for treasure simply to practise looking.

I drew in the sand, knowing the tide would erase it and trusting that was part of the point.

My room went uncleaned, and nothing terrible happened.

I made funny poses for photographs, laughing at myself instead of correcting myself.

I experimented with black-and-white photography, noticing how light and absence speak to one another.

I snuck onto the golf course after dark to walk across the elegant bridges, feeling both brave and gentle at the same time.

And I talked to dogs, which, if I am honest, has always felt like the most sensible thing to do.

Title: Shadow Dance

Photograph from “Day 23: Remembering How to Play”, image 1.

Artist Statement

I photographed my shadow because shadows are honest. They perform nothing. They simply follow, stretching and shrinking with the angle of the light, revealing the body's position in space. Dancing with my shadow felt ridiculous at first. I am sixty years old. I am a scholar.

What am I doing, waving my arms at the ground? But that voice, the one that says act your age, the one that says someone might see, is the voice of a culture that has forgotten what play is for. Play researcher Stuart Brown (2009) argues that play stands opposite depression, never work. It is the opposite of depression. Play is how mammals learn, bond, and regulate their nervous systems. My shadow cares nothing about my credentials. It just wants to dance.

The Science of Play

I want to take play seriously, which is perhaps a contradiction, but stay with me.

Play is far from frivolous. Far from a waste of time. Far from something we are supposed to outgrow as adults. Play is a biological necessity. It is wired into our nervous systems. It is how we learn, how we connect, how we heal.

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown (2009), founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades studying play across species. Brown argues that play is essential for brain development, emotional regulation, and social bonding. In his research with everyone from Nobel laureates to murderers, Brown found a consistent pattern: those who had been deprived of play in childhood showed significant deficits in empathy, problem-solving, and emotional resilience. Play, Brown concludes, is necessary for healthy human development and remains so throughout life.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (1998), who studied the neuroscience of emotion, identified play as one of the seven primary emotional systems in the mammalian brain. Panksepp discovered that rats laugh when they play, emitting ultrasonic chirps that function like human giggles. Play, Panksepp argued, is hardwired from the start, beyond learned behaviour. It emerges spontaneously when safety conditions are met.

This connects to Stephen Porges’s (2011) how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, which I have been sitting with for weeks now. Porges emphasizes that play requires a sense of felt safety. The social engagement system, which enables play and connection, only comes online when the nervous system perceives safety. When we are in survival mode, when we are anxious or always on guard, scanning for the next threat or exhausted, play becomes impossible. The body shuts down the play circuits and redirects resources toward defence.

For years, my nervous system has been in survival mode. Play has been inaccessible to me. I have been too tired, too worried, too busy bracing for the next threat. Today, doing these small, silly things, I felt something shift. My body remembered what play feels like. My nervous system, sensing the absence of threat, allowed the play circuits to come back online.

Brown (2009) challenges the assumption that play is a trivial or childish activity by arguing that its true opposite is depression rather than work, positioning play as a fundamental condition of psychological vitality rather than a reward for productivity.

Black and White Experiments

Among today’s plays, the black-and-white photography stood out.

I have been photographing in colour throughout this time by the sea, drawn to the vivid blues of the sea, the warm ochres of the desert, and the bright tiles I found in the empty field. Colour has felt like medicine, like my eyes were starved for saturation after years of grey institutional spaces.

But today I wanted to see differently. I wanted to strip away colour and notice what remained. I wanted to understand how light and shadow speak to one another when hue is removed from the conversation.

Black-and-white photography has a long history as a medium for seeing the essential. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952), who helped establish photography as an art form, worked almost exclusively in black and white. He spoke of the decisive moment, the instant when form, gesture, and meaning align. Black and white, Cartier-Bresson believed, revealed the bones of an image, the underlying structure that colour sometimes obscured.

Photographer Minor White (1969) wrote about photography as a contemplative practice. White encouraged photographers to approach their subjects with what he called camera vision, a state of heightened awareness in which the photographer becomes fully present to what is before them. White’s black-and-white images have a meditative quality, inviting slow looking rather than quick consumption.

Today, I tried to approach my playful subjects with a camera’s eye. I photographed my shadow, my sandy drawings, and the bridges on the golf course. I photographed without worrying about whether the images were good. I was experimenting, which is another word for playing.

Title: Witnessing

Photograph from “Day 23: Remembering How to Play”, image 2.

Artist Statement

I took this photograph while walking on the shore, attentive to how the ground carries memory. The pattern in the sand felt like a living diagram, a temporary archive of movement, water, and touch. The central circle drew my attention as a small void, a receptive space where something had been and where something else could form. The branching lines reminded me of roots, veins, and pathways, evoking how land and body mirror one another in their capacity to hold experience.

Including my shoes in the frame was a deliberate choice. My presence is partial, grounded, and relational rather than dominant. I stand with the land rather than over it. This image becomes a record of encounter, where my body meets the earth in a moment of pause. In trauma-informed and arts-based research, such moments matter. They mark when attention shifts from analysis to embodied witnessing.

This photograph extends my inquiry into how land teaches through traces. The sand speaks beyond words, yet offers patterns, marks, and impressions that invite interpretation. In Photovoice and Scholarly Personal Narrative, images function as prompts for reflection, memory, and relational sense-making. Here, the land becomes both collaborator and teacher, offering a visual metaphor for connection, healing, and continuity.

I understand this image as a quiet mapping of relationality. The centre suggests a gathering place, while the lines reaching outward suggest connection across time, body, and place. Standing there, I felt both held and called outward. The photograph is an invitation to notice what remains after movement, after presence, after touch. It is a small practice of ethical witnessing, where attention becomes a form of care.

What Play Requires

Play requires specific conditions. It cannot be forced. It cannot be scheduled. It cannot be made productive. The moment we try to instrumentalize play, to make it serve some other purpose, it stops being play.

Philosopher Johan Huizinga (1971), in his foundational work Homo Ludens (which translates to “playing human”), argued that play is a primary category of life, as fundamental as reasoning or making. Huizinga defined play as a voluntary activity that takes place within certain limits of time and space, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding. Play, Huizinga insisted, is a stepping outside of ordinary life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own.

This helps me understand why play has been so difficult during my years of precarious labour. Precarity erodes the conditions that play requires. When you are constantly uncertain about your employment, when you are always on guard, scanning for the next threat about institutional politics, when your nervous system is stuck in chronic activation, you cannot step outside ordinary life. Ordinary life is too threatening. The temporary sphere of play cannot form.

Today, I had what play requires: safety, time, and permission.

Safety: no one was watching, no one was judging, no one needed anything from me.

Time: the day stretched out with nothing scheduled, nothing required, nothing pressing against its edges.

Permission: I gave myself permission to be silly, to be unproductive, to do things that served no purpose except the pleasure of doing them.

These conditions are necessities, never luxuries. And they have been systematically denied to me by the conditions of precarious academic labour.

Precarity erodes the conditions play requires. When your nervous system is stuck in chronic activation, the temporary sphere of play cannot form.

Dessert for Dinner

I want to say something about dessert for dinner, because it was such a small thing yet felt so large.

For years, I have eaten responsibly. I have eaten in ways that fuelled productivity, that supported training, that kept my body functioning as a machine that could work and work and work. I have thought of food as fuel, as an obligation, as something to manage rather than enjoy.

Today, I went to a small restaurant by the water and ordered only dessert. Flan. A cup of coffee. Nothing else.

The waiter looked at me with mild confusion. I smiled and said, Solo postre, por favour. Just dessert, please.

It arrived: creamy, caramel-topped, beautiful. I ate it slowly, savouring each bite. The sweetness was almost overwhelming. Allowing myself sweetness without first earning it.

This is what food researcher and therapist Ellyn Satter (2007) calls eating competence: the ability to eat with joy, flexibility, and deep listening to one’s own body. Eating competence is the opposite of rigid dietary rules. It involves trusting the body to know what it needs, allowing pleasure without guilt, and approaching food with curiosity rather than control.

Dessert for dinner was a small act of eating competence. It was me saying to my body: your pleasure matters. What you want matters. Sweetness requires no earning through suffering first.

Title: Dessert for Dinner

Photograph from “Day 23: Remembering How to Play”, image 3.

Artist Statement

I photographed my dessert to document this small rebellion. The black-and-white treatment makes it feel timeless, like a memory, like something that could have happened yesterday or decades ago. Pleasure is often the first thing we sacrifice when we are in survival mode. We tell ourselves we will enjoy things later, after the work is done and we have earned them. But later keeps receding. The work is never done. Pleasure deferred indefinitely becomes pleasure denied. This photograph says: today I held nothing back. Today I allowed myself sweetness in the middle of everything, as a statement of worth rather than reward.

The Golf Course Bridges

After dark, I walked to the golf course at the edge of town. The gates were closed, but a gap in the fence remained. I slipped through.

This is the kind of thing I used to do as a teenager. Sneaking into places I was told were off-limits. The thrill of mild transgression. The feeling of getting away with something.

The golf course was beautiful in the dark. The grass was soft under my feet. The stars were bright overhead. And there were bridges, elegant wooden bridges crossing over water features and sand traps. During the day, these bridges are for golfers. At night, they were for me.

I walked across each bridge slowly, feeling the wood beneath my feet, looking up at the sky. I was trespassing, technically. But the trespass felt gentle, victimless. I damaged nothing. I was just walking across beautiful bridges because I wanted to.

Philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984), in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, writes about the ways ordinary people subvert the structures of power through small acts of resistance. De Certeau calls these acts tactics, as opposed to the strategies employed by those in power. Walking across the golf course bridges at night is a tactic. It is a small refusal of the rules that say certain beautiful spaces are only for certain people at certain times.

Title: Night Bridge

Photograph from “Day 23: Remembering How to Play”, image 4.

Artist Statement

I nearly let this photograph pass untaken, nervous about being caught. But that nervousness was part of the play. Risk, within safe limits, is part of what makes play exhilarating. Brian Sutton-Smith (1997), a leading play theorist, argues that play always involves some element of uncertainty and a negotiation between order and chaos. Walking across this bridge in the dark, I was negotiating. I was playing with boundaries. I was remembering what it felt like to be young and bold and willing to break small rules for the sake of beauty.

The Right to Play

I want to connect today’s activities to the human rights framework that grounds this project.

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. Article 27 affirms the right to participate in cultural life and to enjoy the arts. These rights extend beyond children. They belong to adults, too. They are part of a group of 60-year-old women recovering from burnout. They are precarious workers denied the conditions the play requires.

Play researcher René Proyer (2017) has studied playfulness in adults and found that it correlates with psychological well-being, creativity, and life satisfaction. Playful adults, Proyer found, are flexible, curious, and resilient, free of immaturity or irresponsibility. Playfulness is something to cultivate throughout life rather than simply outgrow.

But the conditions of contemporary work make adult play difficult. The expectation of constant availability, the erosion of boundaries between work and leisure, the chronic stress of economic precarity: all of these work against the conditions that play requires. Play becomes something we schedule, optimize, and do for its health benefits rather than for its own sake. And when play becomes instrumental, it stops being play.

Today, I played without instrumentalizing it. I danced with my shadow because of joy, never because it would reduce my cortisol levels. I ordered dessert for dinner purely because I wanted it. I snuck onto the golf course purely for the thrill, never because trespassing builds character. I did these things because I wanted to. Because they were fun. Because my body, finally sensing safety, remembered what it felt like to play.

Playfulness is something to cultivate throughout life, beyond outgrowing.

Talking to Dogs

I should say something about talking to dogs.

This behaviour is entirely familiar to me. I have always talked to dogs. I greet them on the street. I ask them about their days. I tell them they are beautiful and good. Their owners can think what they like.

Dogs understand something that adult humans often forget. They live in the present moment. They experience joy without complication. They defer no pleasure. They earn no treats through suffering first. When a dog sees someone it loves, it refuses to pretend to be cool. It wags its entire body.

I aspire to be more like a dog.

Today, I met a small brown dog on the beach. It was digging in the sand with complete focus, searching for something only it could smell. I sat down nearby and watched. The dog glanced at me, decided I was acceptable, and returned to its digging.

“Hola, perrito,” I said. “¿Qué buscas?” Hello, little dog. What are you looking for?

The dog offered a wagging tail as an answer. That was answer enough.

Animal studies scholar Donna Haraway (2008) writes in her book When Species Meet about the relationships between humans and companion animals. Haraway argues that we become who we are through our interactions with other species. Dogs are far more than pets. They are companion species, beings with whom we share our lives and who shape us as much as we shape them.

My conversation with the beach dog was a moment of interspecies play. Neither of us needed anything from the other. We were just sharing space, sharing curiosity, sharing the pleasure of being alive on a warm evening by the sea.

Title: Playmate

Photograph from “Day 23: Remembering How to Play”, image 5.

Artist Statement

Dogs remain entirely unaware they are being photographed. They perform nothing. They simply are. This is what I am trying to learn from them: how to be without performing, how to experience joy without complicating it, how to greet each moment with full-body enthusiasm. The black-and-white treatment of this image strips away distractions and lets me focus on the dog's essential dog-ness: the alert ears, the curious eyes, the readiness for whatever comes next. If I could bottle what dogs have and sell it, I would be rich. But it cannot be bottled. It can only be practised, moment by moment, in the company of beings who have never forgotten how to play.

What Play Teaches

Today taught me several things.

First: play is still available to me. I thought precarity and burnout had broken something essential, had severed my connection to joy, silliness, and spontaneity. But that connection was buried, never broken. Under exhaustion. Under obligation. Under the weight of nineteen years of chronic stress. Today, with safety, time, and permission, it emerged.

Second: play requires no expensive equipment or exotic locations. It requires only willingness. A shadow to dance with. A piece of flan. A dog to talk to. A golf course bridge to walk across in the dark. Play is available everywhere, all the time, to anyone willing to receive it.

Third: play requires no earning. This was the hardest lesson. I have been trained to believe that pleasure must be earned, that rest must be earned, that fun is a reward for productivity rather than a right of existence. Today I practised a different logic: play first, simply because I am alive, and play is part of being alive.

Fourth: black-and-white photography is its own kind of play. Removing colour changes how I see. It invites experimentation, curiosity, willingness to fail. The images I made today are experiments, far from masterpieces. Some are blurry. Some are badly composed. All of them are evidence that I was playing, trying something new, and willing to look silly in the name of learning.

Curiosity, play, and wonder were never meant to be outgrown. They were meant to be carried forward, quietly, into a life that knows when to loosen its grip.

What Remains

The day is ending. My room remains a glorious mess. I have sand in my shoes, caramel on my shirt, and images of shadows and bridges stored on my camera.

I feel lighter than I have felt in a very long time.

Tomorrow I will likely do something responsible. I will write, or walk, or continue the quieter practices of this time by the sea. But today I played. Today I remembered what my body knew before precarity taught it to forget. Today I was a child in a sixty-year-old body, and it was exactly right.

van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma recovery requires the restoration of play and imagination. Processing difficult experiences through talk alone falls short. We must also rebuild our capacity for joy, for spontaneity, for uncomplicated pleasure. Play is medicine. It is as necessary for healing as rest and reflection.

Today I took my medicine. I danced, ate dessert, talked to dogs, and snuck across bridges in the dark. I experimented with my camera, laughed at my own shadow, and refused to clean my room because someone once told me that adults have to keep things tidy.

No one is grading this. No one is watching. No one needs me to justify how I spent my day.

I played. That is enough.

An Invitation

If you have forgotten how to play, I would like to extend a small invitation.

Think of something you wanted to do when you were a child, something that seemed like it would be possible when you were finally a grown-up.

Now do it.

Dance with your shadow. Order dessert for dinner. Talk to a dog. Walk across something beautiful in the dark. Make funny faces. Draw something that will be erased. Experiment with something unfamiliar.

Permission is yours already. No earning required. No justification needed.

You just need to remember that you were once a child who knew how to play, and that child is still in there, waiting for you to remember.

Hoy jugué. Hoy recordé.

Today I played. Today I remembered.

References

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

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The decisive moment. Simon & Schuster.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press.

Huizinga, J. (1971). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Beacon Press.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.

Proyer, R. T. (2017). A new structural model for the study of adult playfulness: Assessment and exploration of an understudied individual differences variable. Personality and Individual Differences, 108, 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.011

Satter, E. (2007). Eating competence: Nutrition education with the Satter eating competence model. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour, 39(5), S142–S153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneb.2007.01.006

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press.

United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

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

White, M. (1969). Mirrors messages manifestations. Aperture.

Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

ACADEMIC LENS

Play as recovery is what Winnicott (1971) names as far more than recreation, identified as the primary developmental context of authentic selfhood: the space where the true self, rather than the compliant or performed self, discovers what it actually wants and enjoys. The observation that play “required remembering” rather than learning frames it as a recovery of existing capacity rather than the acquisition of a new skill, precisely what Brown (2009) found in his research on play deprivation: the playful self is never fully extinguished, only suppressed. The black-and-white photography experiment as a vehicle for play engages what Bachelard (1969) calls the imagination of matter: approaching the visual world through a different tonal grammar, one that strips colour’s emotional shorthand and asks the eye to find new relationships. Van der Kolk (2014) argues that creative engagement activates the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for exploration and novelty, directly countering the narrowing of attention that chronic stress and trauma produce. Curiosity, wonder, and silliness are experiential signatures rather than trivial: they are the signatures of a nervous system that has moved out of survival mode and into what Porges (2011) calls the ventral vagal state of safe engagement.

Day 26: Scattered Blue

Day 26: Scattered Blue, a photographic meditation on the colour blue and what it means to find your whole palette scattered across the floor of a life. On creativity, alonetude, and the wonder of the Sea of Cortez.

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Title: When I am Feeling Blue

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 1.

Artist Statement

I looked down and laughed. My blue sandals, my blue toenails, and scattered across the concrete before me, droplets of blue paint that someone had spilled and never cleaned. The coincidence was too precise to ignore. This arrived without planning. I had simply stopped walking and noticed that the ground was echoing me back.

This is one of the photographs I have kept in colour. The blue demanded it. Against the grey and beige of the weathered concrete, the paint droplets appeared like a constellation, random yet patterned, evidence of movement and accident. My sandals anchored the frame at the bottom, situating my body within the encounter. I was fully within the encounter rather than observing from a distance. I was standing in the middle of what I found.

I am drawn to moments of unexpected correspondence. The times when what I carry meets what the world offers without intention or design. The blue paint was left for no one. It was residue from labour I had no way to witness, a task completed and moved on from, the spillage deemed too minor to address. Yet standing there, I became part of its composition. My feet completed a pattern that had been waiting, perhaps, for someone to notice.

In my broader practice, I think often about trace and residue. What remains after work is finished. What gets left behind when attention moves elsewhere. The paint droplets will fade eventually, worn away by foot traffic and weather. But for this moment, they held their blue against the grey, bright and unashamed, and I stood among them wearing the same colour, as if the ground and I had agreed on something without speaking.

The photograph holds play and presence in equal measure. It reaches beyond profundity. It simply records a moment when I looked down, saw myself reflected in what had been discarded, and smiled at the small magic of correspondence. Sometimes the land teaches through means other than solemnity. Sometimes it teaches through delight.

I have always been drawn to blue.

Beyond the way people speak of favourite colours, a casual preference is carried from childhood without much thought. This is something else. Something that lives in my body before my mind has time to name it. When I see a particular shade of blue, the soft turquoise of shallow water, the deep indigo of twilight, the bright cerulean of a painted door, something in me settles. My shoulders drop. My breath slows. The world becomes manageable for a moment.

“I have always been attracted to this colour. It reminds me of calm. Peace. Seas.”

Blue is my nervous system’s signal for safety.

Porges (2011) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, what he calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the body’s unconscious detection of safety or threat. Certain stimuli signal danger: loud noises, aggressive faces, signs of chaos. Others signal safety: soft voices, gentle rhythms, open spaces. I have come to understand that, for me, blue functions as a neuroceptive cue. It tells my body that the threat has passed. It tells my genuine safety system that it is safe to engage, to play, to rest.

Stopping to notice revealed this to me. Until I stood on grey concrete with blue scattered at my feet and laughed at the unexpected correspondence.

The day I took this photograph, I was walking without a destination.

This has become a practice during my retreat, caminar sin rumbo, walking without direction, letting my feet decide where to go. Kabat-Zinn (1994), in his foundational work on mindfulness, describes this quality of attention as “non-striving,” the willingness to let experience unfold without forcing it toward a predetermined goal. Walking without a destination is non-striving, made ambulatory. The body moves. The mind follows. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes everything does.

I had painted my toenails blue before I left Canada. A small aesthetic choice, barely conscious. I had packed the blue sandals because they were comfortable, suited the climate, and something in me wanted to carry that colour into this journey. Its significance had stayed quiet.

And then the ground answered.

Title: Constellation of Accident

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 2.

Artist Statement

I crouched down to see them closer.

The paint droplets varied in weight and pattern. Some had fallen heavily, pooling into thick spots of saturated blue. Others were mere specks, barely visible, almost lost to the texture of the concrete. The pattern was random, no design, no intention, just the physics of liquid falling and landing where gravity placed it.

But randomness can look like pattern when you attend to it long enough. The droplets clustered in some areas, scattered in others, creating rhythms I could almost hear. This is what attention does: it finds meaning in what was never meant to mean anything. It makes constellations from scattered stars.

Someone painted something here. A wall, a sign, a piece of furniture they were refinishing. The work is finished now, moved elsewhere, forgotten. Only this residue remains, evidence of labour, trace of presence, blue marks on grey ground that no one thought to clean.

I am interested in residue. In what remains after the task is complete. In the unintended traces we leave behind.

I have been collecting broken blue things.

It started with the tiles I found in the empty field on Day 24, fragments of old Mexican ceramics in that particular turquoise-teal that appears on church domes and courtyard fountains throughout Baja California Sur. I picked them up without knowing why, only that their colour called to me, only that my hand reached for them before my mind could explain.

Since then, I have gathered more. Blue glass tumbled smooth by time. Blue pottery shards with half-erased patterns. Blue sea-worn fragments from the beach, their origins unidentifiable, their colour persistent. Each one caught my eye, and I bent down, and I carried it home, and now I have a small collection of blue facts waiting to be assembled.

The broken pieces are gathering. They will show me what they want to become.

This gathering is its own kind of practice. Leavy (2015), in her work on arts-based research, argues that creative processes generate knowledge that other methods cannot access. The hands learn differently from the mind. The act of selecting, collecting, and arranging is a knowledge-based activity, a way of knowing through doing. What the blue pieces will become stays open. I only know that gathering them feels important, feels like research, feels like my body telling me something my conscious mind has held rather than articulated.

Title: What I Have Gathered

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 3.

Artist Statement

Becoming a collector of broken blue things arrived without a plan.

But here they are. Pieces of tile from the empty field. Sea glass from the beach. Pottery shards whose patterns are half-erased by time. Each one came to me separately, in its own moment, asking to be noticed. I said yes. I picked them up. I carried them back to this temporary home where they now rest together, learning each other’s company.

The blues vary. Some lean toward turquoise, some toward indigo, some toward the grey-blue of storm clouds over water. But they belong together. My body knew this before my mind understood. The hand reached; the eye approved; the collection grew.

What will I make with them? A mosaic, perhaps. An assemblage. A frame for something still forming. For now, I am letting them sit together. Letting them tell me what they need.

Mosaic, as an art form, is made from broken things.

The word derives from the Greek mouseion, a place sacred to the Muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences who bestow creative inspiration on humans. Mosaics were holy before they were decorative. They covered temple floors and church walls, transforming shattered stone and glass into images of the divine. The Byzantine masters of Ravenna understood this alchemy: that brokenness, properly arranged, becomes more luminous than wholeness ever was.

Pentcheva (2010), in her study of Byzantine aesthetics, describes how mosaic tiles catch light unevenly because each is set at a slightly different angle. The surface shimmers. The image breathes. What looks fixed is actually in constant subtle motion, alive with the unpredictability of its fragmented construction.

I think about my own fragments this way. The blue pieces I have gathered stay in motion. They carry light differently depending on how I hold them, how the sun enters the window, and how my attention moves across their surfaces. They are waiting to become something, but that something will shimmer. It will shift. It will be alive, the way broken things, reassembled, become alive.

There is another dimension to blue I must acknowledge.

Blue is also the colour of sadness. To “feel blue” is to feel low, melancholic, and touched by grief. The blues, as a musical tradition, emerged from the specific sorrows of Black American experience: oppression, loss, the particular ache of being human in a world that often makes no sense. When Robert Johnson sang “Hellhound on My Trail,” when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” they were singing the blues. They were giving voice to what lives in the blue frequency of emotion.

I carry this blue, too. The depression I have been writing about throughout this retreat. The sadness that followed me from Canada persists despite the warm light and the sound of waves. The grief of losing a career I loved. The fear of an uncertain future. The despair, Greenspan’s (2003) word for it, that arrives sometimes in the early morning and sits on my chest like weather.

Greenspan teaches that grief, fear, and despair are pathways through healing rather than obstacles. Greenspan (2003) insists that dark emotions are appropriate responses to a world that, rather than illness, hat genuinely contains sorrow, fear, and loss. We are trained to bypass difficult feelings, to positive-think our way past them, to medicate them into silence. But Greenspan insists that befriending the dark emotions, sitting with them, listening to what they carry, transforms them into wisdom.

Blue holds both. The calm of the sea and the sadness of the spirit. The peace of shallow water and the grief of deep. I am learning that these are neighbours rather than opposites, sharing a colour, sharing a frequency, sharing space in my body as I walk through this month of alonetude.

Title: Blue at Rest

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 4.

Artist Statement

The blue is resting.

I came to the pool in the late afternoon, when the light had softened and the other guests had gone inside. The water held still, that particular turquoise that exists only in certain latitudes, certain qualities of light. The palapa framed the scene like a theatre curtain, dried palm fronds hanging heavy overhead, creating a threshold between shade and brightness, between shelter and exposure.

A blue towel lies abandoned on the deck. Someone was here. Someone swam or sat or simply rested near the water, then moved on, leaving this soft evidence behind. The towel and the pool speak to each other in the same colour, different textures, different purposes, but belonging to the same family of blue.

I have been thinking about what it means to let things rest. The water simply rests. The towel simply rests. The palm trees sway slightly, at ease. Everything in this frame exists in a state of pause, of waiting, of being without becoming. This is what I came here to learn, how to be still without feeling that stillness is failure.
The turquoise door of the casita echoes the water. Blue answering blue across the space. The world arranged it without my intervention. The world arranged it, and I was present enough to notice.

The art project will take shape when I return to Canada.

I imagine a mosaic, perhaps. Something that holds the blue pieces together while honouring the breaks between them. Something that catches light the way Pentcheva describes shimmering, shifting, alive. Something that carries both the calm of these seas and the sadness of these months. Something that transforms what was discarded into something beautiful, the way gleaning transforms forgotten abundance into sustenance.

But I hold it open rather than force it. I am practising what Chödrön (2000) calls “groundlessness,” the willingness to exist without knowing what comes next, to tolerate the uncertainty of being between. The fragments will tell me what they need. The blue will speak when it is ready.

For now, I gather. I notice. I let the colour find me where it will.

Title: Held in Blue

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 5.

Artist Statement

This image emerged unintentionally. I had set out without abstraction as a goal. I had been walking, attentive to land, horizon, and form, when the frame filled instead with colour alone. No shoreline. No sky line. No identifiable object to anchor perception. Only blue, deep and immersive, layered in tonal variation.

At first, I considered discarding it. It held a different kind of witness than my other photographs. It resisted narrative. Yet the longer I sat with it, the more it began to speak in a different register. It moved beyond landscape into interiority.

The field of blue feels oceanic without depicting the ocean. It holds the same sense of suspension I experienced while floating in open water, where orientation dissolves and the body rests in something vast, buoyant, and indifferent to personal history. There is no horizon to measure against. No visual boundary to define scale. Only immersion.

In my reflective practice, this image becomes a study in containment without confinement. Blue often carries associations of depth, quiet, and emotional spaciousness. Here, those qualities feel intensified by the absence of distraction. Nothing interrupts the field. Nothing asks for interpretation. The photograph offers stillness rather than information.

I have come to understand it as a visual analogue for the psychological state cultivated through alonetude. A state in which identity softens, performance recedes, and the self is held rather than displayed. It mirrors the experience of resting within one’s own interior expanse without the need to articulate or explain.

The subtle shifts in tone across the frame suggest movement beneath apparent uniformity. Even in stillness, there is variation. Even in quiet, there is life. The image reminds me that healing rarely appears dramatic. Sometimes it looks like this: immersion in a colour that asks nothing and gives space in return.

I kept the photograph because it holds what cannot be easily represented. The feeling of being suspended between exhaustion and restoration. Between who I was and who I am becoming. Between surface and depth.

I stood on grey concrete with blue scattered at my feet, and I laughed.

This is what I want to remember from this retreat. More than the hard work of facing depression and grief. More than the theoretical frameworks and the scholarly engagement. More than the counter-archive of institutional harm. But also this: the laughter. The delight. The unexpected joy of finding myself echoed in a scattered patch of paint that someone had spilled and never cleaned.

Alonetude reaches beyond processing suffering. It is also about allowing pleasure. About noticing when the world offers a gift, a visual rhyme, a moment of correspondence, blue meeting blue on grey ground, and receiving it without demanding that it mean something profound.

Sometimes it just means: here is beauty. Here is a play. Here is a moment of delight in a month that has also held heaviness.

I am learning to receive both.

Sometimes the land teaches through means other than solemnity. Sometimes it teaches through delight.

Title: Blue Correspondence

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 6.

Artist Statement

I return to this image because it holds something I need.

The correspondence arrived without planning. I painted my toenails blue with no knowledge of what I would find on the ground. I wore blue sandals simply as a choice. The meeting was accident, coincidence, grace, whatever word we use for moments when the world seems to be paying attention to us.

But I was paying attention too. That is the key. The paint had been there for weeks, maybe months. Others had walked over it without noticing. I noticed because I was looking down. I was practising the slow attention of alonetude, the willingness to let experience arrive without rushing past it.

The photograph records this meeting of attentions, mine and the world’s. It holds play and presence in equal measure. It resolves nothing outright. It simply says: here, for this moment, the ground and I agreed on something without speaking.

That agreement feels like the beginning of healing.

Azul. El colour de la calma. El colour de la paz. El colour del mar. El colour de la tristeza también. El colour de todo lo que siento.

Blue. The colour of calm. The colour of peace. The colour of the sea. The colour of sadness, too. The colour of everything I feel.

I am carrying it forward.

Title: The Quiet Field

Photograph from “Day 26: Scattered Blue”, image 7.

Artist Statement

This image holds very little in the conventional sense of representation, yet it carries a surprising emotional density. In fact, it is a photo of my pocket.

The frame is filled by a single tonal field, dark blue shifting almost imperceptibly toward charcoal and indigo. There is texture, but it is subtle. There is gradation, but it refuses spectacle. The photograph holds its silence. It waits.

I have come to see this photograph as a meditation on interior quiet. It evokes the psychological state that emerges after prolonged solitude, when the nervous system begins to settle and stimulation no longer feels necessary. The darkness signals containment to me rather than heaviness. It signals containment. A held space where thought can soften.

The faint textural variations across the surface remind me that stillness is never empty. Beneath apparent uniformity, there is movement, grain, and subtle differentiation. Much like emotional healing, the changes are gradual and often invisible to others. Yet they are present, shaping experience from within.

There is also a relational quality to the image. It holds space rather than imposing meaning. It invites projection. Viewers bring their own associations to the field, their own histories with darkness, rest, and quiet. In this way, the photograph functions less as documentation and more as atmosphere.

Within my broader body of work on alonetude and liminal retreat, this image represents the deep interior phase of threshold experience. The stage where identity loosens, where language recedes, where one learns to remain present without needing clarity or resolution.

It is the visual equivalent of closing one’s eyes while awake. Of standing in a room before dawn. Of inhabiting the pause before re-entry into the world of roles and expectations.

The photograph holds that pause without interrupting it.

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

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

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

Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Pentcheva, B. V. (2010). The sensual icon: Space, ritual, and the senses in Byzantium. The Art Bulletin, 92(4), 631–655.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.

ACADEMIC LENS

The pursuit of blue described in this post engages what Nichols (2014) documents as the neurological specificity of blue-space attention: the sea’s particular spectral quality generates measurable changes in brain activity, reducing stress hormones and increasing serotonin in ways that are distinct from other natural environments. Ulrich’s (1983) restorative environment research contextualizes this: blue water environments offer the soft fascination and complexity that allow the directed attention system to rest while the nervous system settles. The “scatteredness” named in this title is also methodologically significant: after weeks of sustained inquiry, the attention naturally disperses, which Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) identify as a sign that attentional fatigue is being healed rather than a failure of concentration. Bachelard (1969) wrote about the phenomenology of blue as the colour that most readily dissolves the boundary between self and world, and this post’s experience of losing oneself in blue resonates with that: the therapeutic dissolution of the vigilant, bounded self that precarious life has required. The scattered blue is a form of release rather than disorder, the nervous system’s version of Menakem’s (2017) “settling.”

Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Silence as a Place

I have been here one week now, and something has changed in my relationship with silence.

For the first several days, silence felt like an absence: the absence of traffic, of notifications, of the constant hum of obligation that had become the background noise of my life. I noticed silence the way one notices a missing tooth, by the shape of what was gone. The quiet felt strange, almost suspicious, as though it were hiding something.

This morning, sitting on the small balcony with coffee cooling in my hands, I realized that silence had become something else entirely. It had become a place. A place I could enter. A place I could inhabit. A place that held me rather than something I had to hold at bay.

Title: The Pause Before the Storm

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 1.

Silence as Autonomous Presence

The Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1948/1988), in his remarkable book The World of Silence, offers language for what I am experiencing. Picard argues that silence is neither void nor absence but rather an autonomous phenomenon: a presence that exists independently of speech and sound, a reality that begins beyond the falling away of noise.

Title: Silence as Substance

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 2.

Charcoal Sketch: Amy Tucker, 2026

When language ceases, silence begins. But it begins for reasons beyond the ceasing of language. The absence of language simply makes the presence of silence more apparent.

Picard, 1948/1988, p. 15

This distinction matters. If silence were merely the cessation of sound, it would be defined entirely by what it lacks. It would be a negative space, an emptiness awaiting filling. But Picard insists that silence has substance, has being, has its own formative power. Silence, in his account, shapes human beings just as language shapes us, though in different ways.

Silence as Autonomous Phenomenon

When Picard describes silence as autonomous, he means that silence exists independently of human will or action. We uncover silence already present beneath the words. Silence, in this framework, is primary. Language emerges from silence and returns to it. The words we speak are like waves rising from and falling back into a vast sea of quiet that preceded them and will outlast them.

Title: Bench, Waiting…

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 3.

Learning to Enter

I have spent much of my adult life in noisy environments: classrooms full of voices, offices humming with machines, homes filled with the sounds of family and obligation. Silence, when it appeared, felt like an interruption rather than a foundation. I filled it quickly, almost reflexively, with music, with podcasts, with the radio playing in the background while I worked. The thought of sustained quiet made me uneasy in ways I left unexamined.

Now I understand that unease differently. What I was avoiding in silence was an encounter. Silence waits. It listens. Picard writes that where silence is, we are observed by silence. Silence looks at us more than we look at it. This is precisely what felt threatening: the sense that in silence, I would have to meet myself without distraction, without the buffer of activity and noise that kept me safely busy.

Here in Loreto, I am learning to enter silence rather than escape it. The learning has been gradual. In the first days, I noticed how quickly my mind rushed to fill the quiet. Thoughts formed into lists. Conversations from months ago replayed themselves. The body responded with tension, as though silence required vigilance, as though something might be hiding in the stillness.

Staying silent requires patience. Rather than filling it, I began to notice its texture. Silence, I discovered, carries layers. There are distant sounds within it: the far-off call of a bird, the whisper of wind, the rhythmic breathing of the sea. Silence holds space rather than collapsing inward. Over time, it revealed rhythm.

Silence Has a Rhythm

Title: Breath of the Canopy

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 4.

This has been the week’s revelation: silence is alive.

The sea rises and falls. Wind moves through the palm fronds in waves that sound like breathing. My own breath creates a gentle cadence if I stay still enough to notice. Even the light shifts in patterns that feel rhythmic, the slow arc of morning into afternoon into evening. Silence contains all of this motion. It lives. It moves. It pulses with a life I had been too busy to perceive.

Picard understood this. He wrote of the forest as a great reservoir of silence from which quiet trickles in a thin, slow stream, filling the air with its brightness. The image is precise: silence as source, as reservoir, as something that flows rather than simply exists. Here by the Sea of Cortez, the silence flows from the water, from the mountains, from the vast expanse of sky that has no interest in human schedules or human noise.

Table 1

Qualities of Inhabited Silence

Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction	What It Means	How It Manifests
Autonomous	Silence exists independently of human will or speech	Silence is uncovered rather than created; it precedes and outlasts words
Layered	Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows	Wind, breath, distant birds, the sea: silence holds rather than excludes
Rhythmic	Silence has patterns, cycles, flows	Morning quiet differs from evening quiet; silence moves with time
Companionable	Silence accompanies without demanding; it witnesses without judging	A sense of being held, of belonging without performance
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows	Silence allows internal signals to surface; it reduces interpretive load	Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction

Note. The framework synthesizes the work of Picard (1948/1988), contemplative traditions, and personal observation. These qualities emerged through sustained attention rather than analysis.

Title: Inhabited Silence

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 5.

After years shaped by disruption, urgency, and collective strain, silence offers what I had needed without knowing it: relief from constant interpretation.

In my working life, I was perpetually reading: reading student papers, reading institutional policies, reading the room in meetings, reading the unspoken tensions in corridors and committee gatherings. Every moment required assessment, response, and performance of understanding. Even leisure hummed with demand; podcasts, news, and social media all called me to process, evaluate, and react.

Silence asks for none of this. There is no need to respond. There is no performance required. Experience can simply exist without commentary. This permission feels revolutionary after decades of cognitive labour.

In silence, listening shifts from sound to sensation. From external cues to internal signals. Hunger is evident when no distraction overrides it. Fatigue makes itself known without shame. Contentment arises unannounced, without having to justify itself against productivity metrics.

Silence clarifies.

Silence and the Settling Body

The connection between silence and nervous system regulation is becoming clearer to me now. Yesterday, I wrote about the body beginning to remember safety. Today, I understand that silence is part of how that remembering happens.

Stephen Porges (2022) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, constantly scanning for signals of safety or threat. Chronic noise, whether literal sound or the metaphorical noise of constant demand, keeps the system in a state of vigilance. The body cannot fully settle when it must remain alert to incoming information that might require a response.

Silence provides what Deb Dana (2020) might call a cue of safety. In the absence of demands, the nervous system can begin to downregulate. Muscles soften. Breath deepens. The state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, that felt like normal alertness manifests as chronic tension, and that tension begins to subside.

I have noticed this in my own body over the past week. Each quiet morning reinforces the message that stillness can be supportive. Each evening without urgent input confirms that the world holds steady even when I am unreachable. The body learns through repetition, and silence provides the conditions for that learning.

When Silence Becomes Companionable

Perhaps the most unexpected discovery of this week is that silence can be companionable.

Title: Held Without Asking

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 6.

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I arrived here expecting solitude to feel lonely, at least sometimes. I expected to miss conversation, to feel the absence of other voices. And there have been moments of longing, particularly in the evenings when the day’s warmth fades, and the darkness feels vast. But alongside that longing, something else has emerged: a sense of being accompanied by silence itself.

This is difficult to articulate without sounding more mystical than I mean. I mean something quite practical: that silence holds without judgment. It asks nothing of me in terms of interest, productivity, or usefulness. It holds my worth independent of output. Silence simply is, and in its presence, I am permitted to simply be.

Picard writes that when two people are conversing, a third is always present: silence is listening. I have begun to feel this even when alone. Silence listens to my thoughts without needing me to speak them. It witnesses my morning rituals, my wanderings to the water, and my afternoon rest. It accompanies without intruding.

Belonging within silence feels different than belonging through interaction. It carries steadiness rather than affirmation. It arises from alignment rather than exchange.

The Noise We Carry

Title: One Missed Call

Photograph from “Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar”, image 7.

Picard wrote his meditation on silence in 1948, and even then, he worried about what he called the world of noise encroaching on human consciousness. He wrote of radio noise as something that surrounds us, accompanies us, and creates a false sense of continuity that substitutes for genuine presence. If he found the mid-twentieth century noisy, I can only imagine what he would make of our current moment.

We carry noise with us now. It lives in our pockets, vibrates against our bodies, follows us into bedrooms and bathrooms and the last quiet corners of our lives. The smartphone has colonized silence more thoroughly than any technology before it. There is no longer any space, Picard wrote presciently, in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.

Coming here required a deliberate choice to leave that noise behind. I brought my phone but set it to silent. I check email once a day, if that. I have no television, no radio, no podcasts playing while I walk. The withdrawal was initially uncomfortable, as with any withdrawal. The hand reached for the device reflexively. The mind generated reasons to check, to see, to know what was happening elsewhere.

Now, a week in, the reaching has slowed. The mind has settled into the rhythm of this place rather than the rhythm of the feed. Silence has expanded to fill the space that noise once occupied. And I am beginning to understand that this space was never empty. It was always full of silence, waiting for me to notice.

A Body-based Record

The body journal continues to reveal patterns. Day seven marks the emergence of what I can only call ease with silence, a comfort in quiet that was absent at the beginning of the retreat.

Table 2

body journal: Day 7

Time	Observation
Morning	Woke without alarm. Silence felt welcoming rather than empty. Sat with coffee in quiet for forty minutes without restlessness. Breath deep and steady. VV state.
Midday	Walked to water in silence. No impulse to fill quiet with podcast or music. Noticed layers within silence: wind, birds, waves. Felt companioned rather than alone.
Evening	Watched sunset in complete quiet. Silence felt like a place I could inhabit rather than endure. Body soft, jaw relaxed, shoulders down. Gratitude present.
	VV sustained throughout the day. Silence is experienced as a supportive presence rather than an absence.

Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection. The emergence of silence as a companionable practice marks a qualitative shift from earlier periods.

Silence and Alonetude

I am beginning to understand that silence is one of the essential conditions for alonetude: the intentional, contemplative solitude I came here to practise. Without silence, solitude risks becoming merely physical isolation, a removal from others that leaves the inner noise intact. With silence, solitude opens into something spacious enough to hold reflection, restoration, and the slow work of becoming present to oneself.

Silence creates the conditions for attention to turn inward. It reduces the load of constant input that normally occupies cognitive and emotional resources. It allows the nervous system to settle, the body to soften, the mind to stop its endless scanning for threat or opportunity. In silence, energy conserves itself. Presence becomes possible.

This is why retreat centres and monasteries have always understood silence as discipline rather than deprivation. Silence asks to be inhabited rather than endured. Silence is itself the somewhere, the place where transformation becomes possible because we are finally still enough to receive it.

Evening, Day Seven

The sun is setting as I write this. The sky over the Sea of Cortez has turned the colour of ripe peaches, fading to lavender at the edges. The mountains across the water are silhouettes now, their details absorbed into the growing dark.

It is very quiet.

Quiet, mostly. I can hear the water lapping against the shore. A bird calls somewhere in the distance. My own breath moves in and out, marking time. But beneath and around these sounds, silence holds. Silence is the medium through which everything else moves, the space in which sound becomes possible.

Picard writes that silence contains everything within itself. It is always wholly present and completely fills the space in which it appears. I feel this now, sitting in the fading light. Silence asks nothing of me. It holds no anticipation of my next word or my next action. It simply holds, vast and patient and present.

One week ago, I arrived here full of noise: the noise of years of overwork, of worry, of the constant chatter of a mind that had forgotten how to be still. The noise is quieter now. It remains, and perhaps it always will. But silence has made room for itself within me, as it does this evening, surrounding and holding the small sounds of life without being diminished by them.

Silence is a place. I am learning to live here.

References

Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.

Picard, M. (1988). The world of silence (S. Godman, Trans.). Gateway Editions. (Original work published 1948)

Porges, S. W. (2022). How the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227

Academic Lens

Silence as place rather than absence is the lived-experience core of this entry, resonating with Bachelard's (1964) concept of inhabited space: silence becomes a room one can enter and dwell in. This is alonetude at its most concentrated, the capacity to be, in Winnicott's (1958) phrase, alone in the presence of the world without anxiety. The sea as acoustic environment contributes what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call fascination: the quality of an environment that holds attention without effort and allows the mind to rest.

Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible

Reading Time: 11 minutes

What Makes Restoration Possible

Title: When the Sky Speaks

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 1.

The sky is doing that thing again. Blue becomes gold, becomes rose, becomes violet, and if you blink, you miss the exact moment one colour surrenders to the next. Del azul al oro, al rosa y al violeta. (For the record, I have to look up every word in Spanish in my translator.) I have been sitting here on the balcony watching it happen, trying to find words for what today felt like, and I keep circling back to the same inadequate word: different.

Different. And yes, better.

Title: Coffee by the Sea

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 2.

Different in a way that makes me realize how long I have been living in that other place. The one where everything costs. Where even simple things, getting out of bed, making coffee, being present in my own life, require negotiation and force and that particular grinding willpower that is really just exhausted determination wearing a productivity costume.

Today arrived without force. No tuve que forzar nada.

I woke without the usual calculation of whether I had enough in the tank to make it through. No caffeine required, no stubbornness invoked to override my body. No careful rationing of attention, like it might run out before sunset.

Things just… happened. Todo fluyó. Thoughts connected. Words came. My body moved through space without requiring constant management. Natural. Like breathing. Like the way I imagine other people, rested people, move through their days without even noticing how easy it is.

Three hours

This morning I wrote for three hours. Tres horas. The kind of writing where you look up and realize time passed, and you were simply in it, beyond counting, beyond the forcing of each sentence into existence through sheer will.

I wrote about what happened last night. About sleep architecture and nervous system states, and why my body finally trusted enough to sleep through. I wove together material from Walker (2017) on sleep cycles and Porges (2011) on the nervous system, along with what actually happened in my own body between 11 PM and 6 AM. Complex theoretical frameworks are talking to each other through my experience. All of it makes sense. All of it flowing.

Title: Sleep Cycle

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 3.

Created: Gemini AI, 2o26

Three months ago, this would have been impossible.

Beyond hard. Impossible.

And I need to be precise about that distinction because it matters.

There is this thing that happens when you have been stressed and sleep-deprived for long enough. People talk about it like you are just a little foggy, a little slower, like turning down the volume on a radio. That description misses what it feels like from inside. From inside, it feels like parts of your brain just… stop. Go dark. Offline (Arnsten, 2009).

The prefrontal cortex, the part that does complex thinking, holds multiple ideas at once, synthesizes and integrates, and makes connections, needs massive resources to run. Blood flow. Glucose. Energy. And when your body thinks it is in danger, when your nervous system has been reading the environment as threatening for weeks or months, those resources get redirected. Away from thinking, toward surviving. The amygdala scans for threats. The brainstem is ready to react. Ancient survival systems running the show while the thinking parts go quiet (Arnsten, 2009; Goldstein & Walker, 2014).

Which makes perfect evolutionary sense if you are running from a predator. Nuance is useless when you need to run. You need fast, automatic, proven responses.

The problem is that economic precarity (precariedad económica) is no predator. Contract uncertainty cannot be outrun. But try telling that to a nervous system running million-year-old software that says: sustained threat equals redirect all resources to survival.

So the thinking parts go offline. Executive functions dim. And you tell yourself you are just tired, that you need to try harder, that you need more coffee.

Title: Untitled

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 4.

Except that trying harder proves ineffective when the biological structures that underpin complex thinking have been taken offline to conserve resources for mere survival.

This morning, those structures were back. I could feel it, bodily, somáticamente, in my actual body. I read something from Walker’s work, and I could hold the concept while simultaneously connecting it to Porges and to what happened in my own sleep last night. Three frameworks, held together, talking to each other in my mind.

A month ago, reading that same passage, I would have had to stop. Reread. Make notes. Force comprehension through sheer determination. Today it just… made sense. La comprensión fluyó. Understanding flowed.

The Files

After lunch, I did something I have been avoiding. I opened my files. The pages I wrote months ago when sleep was breaking every night, when my nervous system was in constant alert, when exhaustion had become so normal I had stopped recognizing it as a state separate from just being me.

I was bracing for it to be bad. Full of gaps. Incoherent in places. The kind of work you produce when your prefrontal cortex is running on fumes, and you are just trying to get through.

It was good. Actually, genuinely good. The arguments held. The theory was solid. The thinking was clear.

And I sat there staring at these pages I wrote while barely functional and felt this complicated tangle of relief and grief. Una especie de duelo. Because if I could do that work while exhausted, produce something sound while my body was in survival mode, while parts of my brain were literally offline, what might I have been capable of if I had been rested?

What did I lose to those months of pushing through?

I watched the pelican outside my window for a long time. Dive. Rest. Zambullirse y descansar. Dive. Rest. Over and over. That simple rhythm. And something shifted in how I was thinking about the question.

The assumption underneath my grief was that exhausted-me and rested-me are the same person in different states. But that framing misses something. The work I produced while exhausted was shaped by that exhaustion. The questions I asked, the frameworks I reached for, the way I approached the material: all of it came from living inside chronic activation and precarity.

That work has value because it was written from within the very thing it seeks to understand. Nash (2004) argues that lived experience (experiencia vivida) is legitimate scholarly data when you examine it rigorously. My exhaustion was enriching the work. It was part of the data.

What restoration gives me goes beyond redoing that work “properly.” It is the chance to add another layer. To examine chronic activation from the perspective of someone who has lived both states and can now see the relationship between them.

Both matter. Both are real. Both contribute.

I have been writing down what I notice in my body at different points throughout the day. For no formal reason. Just because the consistency seemed worth documenting.

Morning: Waking without an alarm. The body knows what time it is from some internal clock that fragmented sleep had disrupted. That feeling of being actually rested sinks all the way into my bones. Quiet joy mixing with disbelief, mixing with gratitude. High energy but organic, unforced, free of chemical aid, just available. First conscious thought: I slept through.

Mid-morning: Three hours of writing behind me. Shoulders loose. Jaw soft. Hands steady. That focused clarity without the edge of strain I am so used to. Still high energy, sustained without effort. No fatigue. Apparently, complex intellectual work thrives beyond defensive states of the nervous system. Who knew.

Afternoon: After lunch. Gentle hunger satisfied. Digestion easy. Muscles relaxed. Just… contentment. Being in my body instead of trying to manage it from somewhere outside. Energy is moderate now, appropriate to midday. Body speaking up clearly about needs: thirst, hunger, time to move, instead of waiting until an emergency before getting my attention.

Later afternoon: Reading dissertation. Sitting comfortably without conscious effort. No tension accumulating in the neck and shoulders. Emotions are complex, that relief-grief tangle, present but manageable. Holding contradictory feelings without my nervous system reading emotional complexity as a threat. Energy is holding steady.

Evening: Sunset. Cooling air. Breath synchronized with waves. Body at ease. Deep peace. That gentle anticipation of evening unfolding. Energy naturally declines as the day winds down. Unwound rather than crashed. Present rather than depleted. Responsive to circadian rhythms, to what is actually needed now.

Night: Preparing for sleep. The body is already beginning the transition. Muscles releasing. Calm. Trust that sleep will come, that my body knows how to do this. Very low energy, sleep-ready. And here is what strikes me: no anxiety about whether tonight will repeat last night. Just readiness.

Looking at this pattern, the way energy moved across the day, I can see how it is supposed to work. La naturalidad. The naturalness of it. High when needed for writing. Moderate for reading. Naturally declining toward rest. Responsive. Appropriate. Organic.

For months, my energy looked nothing like this. Low despite caffeine. Forced into function through will. Brief spikes when adrenaline kicked in. Complete crashes. Forced back up. Anxious and activated at night when I needed sleep.

That is the nervous system thrown off balance, impairing its function. That is the nervous system thrown off balance. That is what happens when the nervous system cannot access the state that allows for appropriate energy modulation.

Today, my energy followed the pattern research says is healthy (Kaplan, 1995; Ryan & Deci, 2000). And I know that sounds abstract, mere “research says” abstraction, but from inside it feels like my body finally remembering how to be a body. How to respond to actual needs instead of just surviving threat after threat after threat.

Title: The Pelican’s Teaching

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 5.

My hands wanted charcoal this afternoon. For no reason except that they wanted it. So I drew the pelican. El pelícano. The one I have been watching all week. Beyond accuracy, trying to capture the quality of movement. The dive. The pause. The rest. El ritmo. That rhythm.

And here is what I am seeing: effort and ease work as partners. El esfuerzo y la facilidad no son opuestos. They are partners.

The dive takes everything. Wings folding, body plummeting, that violent entry into water, struggling with a fish. Real effort. Then the rest is complete. Body still on the surface, conserving, digesting. Real rest.

Neither negates the other. The effort is recognized; it simply requires rest. The rest is earned because it follows effort. They are both necessary. Both are part of the natural rhythm.

I have been living as if they are in competition. Like rest is something I have to earn through sufficient effort. Like, I can only access it once I have accomplished enough to justify it. Like, needing rest means I am weak, inefficient, or somehow failing.

El pelícano no piensa así. The pelican holds no such story. The pelican dives when hungry. Rests because the body needs to conserve energy between dives. Neither requires justification. Both are what the body needs.

I am learning this. Despacio. Slowly. Con dificultad. With difficulty. But learning.

What I am afraid of

It is almost time for bed, and there is a question I have been avoiding all day. What if last night was a fluke? What if tonight I wake at 2 AM with thoughts racing? What if my nervous system’s trust was temporary, contingent, fragile?

I can feel anxiety activating around this. Shoulders tensing. Breathe shallow. a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger creeping back: scanning, trying to control, attempting to guarantee through worry that last night repeats.

But here is what I learned this morning, what the research showed me: nervous systems bypass conscious decisions about safety entirely. They respond to environmental cues. Señales ambientales. To patterns repeated across time. To accumulate data (Porges, 2011).

Nine nights now. Same evening sequence. Same environmental cues. That is data my nervous system has been gathering.

One night of unbroken sleep does something more interesting than erase that pattern. It confirms it. The conditions that supported last night’s rest remain. Evening rhythm is stable. The acoustic environment provides low-frequency, rhythmic patterns that signal safety. Darkness is complete and held safely. Predictability that allowed my system to trust enough to release vigilance.

I cannot control whether I sleep through tonight. But I can maintain the conditions that supported last night. Follow the same sequence. Honrar el ritmo. Honour the rhythm. Trust my nervous system is doing what nervous systems do: gathering data, testing predictions, updating assessments.

And if I wake tonight? That is also data. Data. Information about how healing actually proceeds when you get close enough to see it.

Nine days

Nueve días. Nine cycles of morning and evening. Nine progressions dark to light to dark. The pattern repeats but is never exactly the same. Each day is similar in structure, unique in texture, in quality, in what it shows me.

Today showed capacity. Hoy reveló capacidad. The capacity to think clearly. Write with rigour and creativity. Hold complexity without overwhelm. Feel contradictory emotions without the nervous system thrown off balance. Notice what the body needs and respond appropriately.

I had begun to think these capacities were gone. Diminished permanently by months of stress and fragmentation. But they were offline, waiting. Estaban desconectadas. Waiting for conditions that would let them function.

Last night’s unbroken sleep provided those conditions. Seven hours of sustained regulation. Seven hours of complete sleep cycles. Seven hours of trust.

And today, the harvest. La cosecha de ese descanso. Clear thinking. Sustained energy. Natural rhythms.

Tomorrow night will bring its own data. Sleep through or wake; either contributes to understanding. The nervous system is learning what safety feels like. El sistema nervioso está aprendiendo cómo se siente la seguridad. Learning to recognize it. Trust it. That learning moves in spirals, circling back. Some nights, complete rest, some partial waking. Both teaching the system about regulation, about what supports healing, about the gradual recalibration from threat to safety.

Title: What Direction?

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 6.

What I know tonight, sitting here as the last light fades and first stars appear above the sea, mientras se desvanece la última luz del cielo y aparecen las primeras estrellas sobre el mar: healing is something concrete and measurable. It is a concrete, lived, measurable reality.

My body slept through last night. First time in months.

My mind engaged in complex theoretical work today. First time in weeks.

My energy was appropriately modulated throughout the day. First time I can remember.

Facts. Data points. The larger pattern of regulation and recovery is becoming visible.

El ritmo continúa. The rhythm continues. The pattern repeats. The body learns. And I am finally learning to trust this.

Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you, body.

Por este día de claridad. For this day of clarity.

Por mostrarme lo que es posible cuando descansas. For showing me what is possible when you rest.

Por enseñarme que el esfuerzo y la facilidad son socios, no enemigos. For teaching me that effort and ease are partners.

Por el ritmo. For the rhythm.

Title: The Lion’s Breath

Photograph from “Day Nine: Lo Que La Restauración Hace Posible”, image 7.

Translation Note

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Goldstein, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2014). The role of sleep in emotional brain function. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 10, 679–708. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032813-153716

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

Google. (2026). From survival mode to flow state [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

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 finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.

Academic Lens

What restoration makes possible, the return of curiosity, appetite, creative impulse, is the clinical literature's definition of recovery from burnout (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001): the restoration of engagement, efficacy, and energy that chronic overextension depletes. Ryan and Deci's (2000) self-determination theory frames this as the re-emergence of intrinsic motivation once external demands are suspended. This entry marks a pivot point in the inquiry: the beginning of the third phase, where alonetude stops being survival and starts being inquiry.

Public Healing

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Why I Am Writing This

I have been thinking lately about what it means to heal in public. Rather than performing healing, which is something else entirely, but to simply allow the work of becoming to be visible while it is happening. For most of my life, I believed that healing was a private matter. Something you did quietly, in the space between appointments, in the early mornings before anyone was watching. You arrived at the outcome first, and then, if you chose to, you spoke about what you had survived. You spoke from the other side of it. You kept the unfinished parts hidden.

I have begun to question that assumption. And the reason I am writing this, honestly, is that I have begun to suspect the old belief was costing me something. It was keeping me silent in seasons when speaking might have helped me. It was asking me to wait until I had figured things out before I was allowed to say anything, and I am no longer convinced that figuring things out ever fully happens. I am writing this because I want to examine, out loud, what it means to live and write and create from inside the work rather than after it.

Title: Sweet Indulgence

A scoop of dark chocolate ice cream in a white paper cup with a compostable straw, set on weathered pink-painted wood planks.

Why Public Healing Is Different

What I am learning, slowly and with considerable discomfort, is that healing in public is a different kind of work than healing in private. It asks more of you and asks for something different. In private, healing can happen in whatever order your body and mind require. You can be messy. You can circle back. You can unravel a belief on a Tuesday and rebuild it on a Thursday and change your mind again by the weekend. No one is watching, so no one has expectations. The work belongs entirely to you.

Public healing is something else entirely. When you write about what you are learning while you are still learning it, you hand the reader something unfinished. You say, in effect, I am still inside it, finding out. I am inside it with you. The ground shifts under my feet as well. That is a vulnerable offer to make, and for a long time, I thought it was also irresponsible. I thought people needed the finished version. The lessons learned, the wisdom arrived at, the neat closing paragraph that tied everything together and assured the reader that the writer had figured it out.

Title: The River Remembers

A wide blue river curves toward distant mountains under a partly cloudy sky, with a railway truss bridge crossing the water and a sandy shore in autumn light.

Why the Unfinished Version Is the One That Helps

But the truth is that I have never been helped by that kind of writing. Rarely, if ever. The writing that has actually reached me in my life, the writing that has sat down beside me in hard seasons and said, “You are with company,” has almost always been writing from inside the process rather than from after it. It was unpolished. It made no claim to know more than it did. It simply told the truth, as honestly as the writer could, from wherever they actually were at the time.

That is the kind of writing I am trying to do now. I write a wellness column for the Kamloops Chronicle. I keep a blog. I share book reviews, reflections, and pieces of my art. Each of these is a small act of showing up in public with something unfinished, and each one asks something slightly different of me. The column reaches readers I will never meet, people pouring a morning coffee or picking up the paper on a Saturday, and I have to trust that something honest said in plain language might find one of them in a moment they needed it. The blog is a different kind of space, more interior, where the work can be messier, and the thinking can take longer to arrive. The book reviews are a chance to place myself in conversation with other writers and say here is what this book opened in me, which is itself a small act of showing my own interior. The art is the quietest of the four, and sometimes the most revealing, because an image can say what a sentence cannot yet articulate.

Title: Welcoming Wellness – Kamloops Chronicle

A newspaper page open to a Kamloops Chronicle column headlined The only one in the room who was not somewhere else, with a photograph of the writer beside the headline.

Why I Share From The Middle Of Things

I share these things without having arrived at some wise vantage point from which to teach others. I share them because I am in the middle of my own unfolding, and I have decided, with some reluctance, that I choose to speak now rather than wait for the other side of it. The other side may exist differently than I once imagined. I think this is the terrain. I think we are all, in our own ways, walking through something, and the question is when and how to speak, honestly, when we do.

Title: Warm Light

A Himalayan salt lamp glowing orange on a wooden tabletop, casting warm light against a pale wall.

Why It Is Hard

What makes public healing hard, for me, is that it requires giving up a particular kind of control. I have spent decades curating how I am perceived. I am a careful person. I think about my words before I write them. I consider how something will land before I say it out loud. That is partly professional training and partly something deeper, something about having learned, early, that being understood required effort and that language was how I earned the right to be heard. To write from inside my own unfinished work is to relinquish some of that curation. It is to accept that a reader might meet me mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-belief, and form an opinion about me based on who I am still becoming. That is uncomfortable. It is also, I am beginning to think, honest in a way that the curated version never quite was.

Title: One Step at a Time

Looking down at two mismatched feet on pavement: one in a pink lace-up sneaker, the other in a black rubber rain boot.

Why I Want to Be Careful About What This Is

There is a version of public healing that I want to be careful about, because it differs from what I mean. This is nothing like the kind of sharing that performs rawness as a strategy. This is also nothing like the kind of vulnerability that is actually a request of the reader. There is a great deal of online writing now that looks like healing but is actually something else underneath, and I choose to add nothing to it. What I am describing is quieter than that. It is writing that requires no response. It is writing that asks the reader for neither rescue nor admiration. It is writing that simply places a true thing in the world and then lets the reader decide what to do with it. It is a book review that says, “Here is what this book changed in me,” without pretending the change is complete. It is a column that names something most of us feel but rarely say out loud. It is a piece of art that leaves itself open.

Title: Present Tense

A brown-and-white dog looks up directly at the camera, sitting indoors on tile floor near a red chair.

Why It Matters

I think public healing, done well, is a form of service, though I hesitate to use that word because it can sound grand. What I mean is smaller. I mean that when one person tells the truth about what they are carrying, other people who are carrying similar things feel less alone. That is all. It carries no grand redemption. It fixes no one. It just removes one small layer of the isolation that tends to grow up around unfinished things, and that removal, multiplied across many readers, many writers, and many honest small acts of saying what is true, is how cultures of healing are actually built. Through something other than experts arriving with answers. Through ordinary people, in ordinary voices, saying here is what I am learning, and here is what remains unknown to me.

Title: Unfinished and Perfect

A tan-and-black puppy with large ears and pale eyes lies down with its tongue out, looking alert and joyful.

Why I Still Feel the Pull Toward Disclaimers

I remain somewhat uncomfortable with this. I notice, as I write, that a part of me wants to stop and add disclaimers. That wants to assure you, the reader, that I have done the proper work, that I have the proper credentials, that this reflection is grounded in the proper literature and will keep you on sound ground. That part of me is the part that still believes my worth must be demonstrated before I am allowed to speak. I am choosing to set her aside today. She may have a point, exactly, but because her instincts belong to an older version of my life, and the writing I am trying to do now asks for a different kind of trust.

Title: First Light

A clump of young green daffodil shoots emerging from dry brown soil in early spring sunlight.

Why It Is Actually for Me

What I am coming to understand is that public healing is, at its core, about the self rather than the public. It is about me giving myself permission to exist in the middle of the process. It is about me deciding that my unfinished self is allowed to be seen. Other people may benefit from the writing, and I hope they do, but the first beneficiary is always the writer, because the act of saying a thing out loud, in front of witnesses, changes the thing. It becomes more real. It can no longer be tucked away and forgotten. Once you have written a belief down publicly and named what it cost you, going back to pretending you had no knowledge becomes impossible. The public piece of public healing is, in that sense, less about teaching others and more about refusing to let yourself off the hook.

Title: Still Believing

Two white ceramic unicorn-head bookends with gold horns, side by side on a striped woven mat.

Why the Column, the Blog, the Reviews, the Art

The column does that for me. The blog does that for me. The book reviews do that for me, in a quieter way, because to say honestly what a book has opened in you is to acknowledge that you were mid-process when you picked it up. The art does it most of all. A painting tells only the truth. A drawing refuses compromise. Whatever I am when I sit down to make something visual arrives on the page, willing or otherwise, and there have been many times when I have seen something in my own work that I had kept at a distance from feeling. That is what it means to make things and to share them. You end up meeting yourself, in front of witnesses, and the witnesses become part of how you come to know who you are.

Title: Words Made Solid

A collection of small painted river stones arranged on a striped mat, each bearing a hand-lettered word such as Love, Trust, Joy, Faith, Be Kind, Peace, and I Love You.

Why I Am Writing Inside Uncertainty

I have yet to discover how this chapter ends. I have yet to discover which of the beliefs I am examining will fully loosen their grip and which will remain with me, quieter but still present, for the rest of my days. I have yet to learn which of the identities I have carried will be set down entirely and which will be revised into something more spacious. I am writing inside uncertainty. That is what public healing is, I think. It is writing inside uncertainty, and trusting that the writing itself is part of the becoming, rather than a report delivered from safer ground, after the fact.

Title: The Colour of Making

A blue plastic cup printed with the words Nova Scotia sits on a colourful mandala-patterned coaster, surrounded by small paint pots and craft supplies.

Why This Is for You Too

If you are reading this and you are in the middle of your own becoming, I want you to know that your unfinished work is welcome here. You are welcome to speak before you arrive. You are allowed to speak before it is figured out. You are allowed to be where you are, and to say so out loud, and to trust that the saying itself is part of how you get to wherever you are going.

That is the work. That is all it has ever been.

Title: Desert Fire

A painted landscape of two saguaro cacti silhouetted against an orange-and-pink desert sunset, with distant mountains and a foreground of wildflowers.

Artist Statement

These works were made in the middle of things, at the kitchen table, between the sentences of other writing. Each piece carries the marks of where I actually was when I made it.

Coda

A coda to thirty days by the sea: a photograph of a suitcase open on a bed, holding the material weight of departure. The pause before leaving, and the grief that comes with knowing you are becoming someone different than the person who arrived.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Title: The Pause Before Departure

Artist Statement I attend to moments where the body recognizes transition before the mind has found language for it. Here, departure is already present, even though no taxi has arrived and no door has closed. The suitcase becomes a proxy for intention, carrying the weight of decisions alongside belongings, attachments, and unfinished conversations with place. It waits as I wait. This image speaks to my inquiry into alonetude and what the body knows. I was alone when I took the photograph, yet held within a sense of belonging. The stillness was chosen. 

The pause was deliberate. In that pause, I could sense how places enter the body and remain there, long after one has left. The railing frames the view without enclosing it, suggesting care rather than constraint. What lies ahead is visible, waiting to be entered. I have come to understand transition as a form of learning. Leaving teaches us what mattered. Waiting teaches us how to listen. This photograph holds that lesson gently. It holds the moment without rushing it. It allows departure to arrive in its own time. Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Me voy, pero no me voy vacía.
Me llevo el mar en el cuerpo
y la calma que aprendí a sentir sin miedo.

Aquí lloré.
Aquí soñé.
Aquí descansé por primera vez en mucho tiempo.

Entendí que no estaba rota,
solo cansada,
solo esperando permiso para soltar.

Gracias por sostenerme
cuando no sabía cómo sostenerme yo.

Adiós, Baja.
La tercera orilla vive en mí ahora.
Donde vaya, la llevo conmigo.
Amy Tucker, 2026

I am still here.

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.