I woke this morning with a tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with the night before.
The sleep had been deep, the room cool, the sea audible through the open window. Everything about this place says rest. And yet my body woke braced, as though preparing for something that never arrived.
I lay still for a long time, watching the ceiling lighten. Trying to name what I was feeling.
It took a while to find the word. When it came, it surprised me.
Fear.
The Shape of It
The fear lives elsewhere. I have settled into Loreto more easily than I expected. Solitude has become companionable. Silence I am learning to inhabit.
The fear is of what happens if I truly let go.
For years, decades, I have held myself together through effort. Through vigilance. Through the constant, quiet work of monitoring, anticipating, and performing competence. I have been the one who could be counted on. The one who showed up prepared. The one who held more than her share because holding felt safer than asking for help.
That holding has become so familiar that I cannot quite imagine who I would be without it.
And so the fear: if I release the grip, if I stop the vigilance, if I truly rest, will I ever want to return to life as it was? Will I lose the capacity for striving that kept me employed, that kept me useful, that kept me worthy of belonging?
Will I, in some fundamental way, stop being the person I have always been?
The Paradox of Letting Go
There is a strange paradox here. I came to this retreat because I was exhausted by the holding. Because the vigilance had worn grooves in my nervous system that no longer served me. Because I wanted, desperately, to rest.
And now that rest is possible, I am afraid of it.
Afraid that rest will undo me. That I will sink into it and never surface. The woman who emerges from this month will be unrecognizable to herself and to others. That she will have lost her edge, her drive, her usefulness.
The fear reveals how deeply I have tied my worth to my capacity for effort. How thoroughly I have believed that I am only as valuable as what I produce.
Brené Brown (2010) calls this the use of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as a measure of self-worth. She identifies it as one of the things we must consciously release if we want to live what she calls a wholehearted life. Reading those words years ago, I nodded in recognition. Living them is harder.
Title: Halfway There
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creating Safety for the Self
In my academic work, I have written about psychological safety: the conditions that allow people to take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, shame, or punishment (Edmondson, 1999). In classrooms and workplaces, psychological safety means being able to ask questions, admit mistakes, and offer ideas that might fail. It means knowing that vulnerability will be met with support rather than judgment.
I have spent years trying to create psychological safety for students. I have rarely thought about creating it for myself.
What would it mean to approach my own interior with the same care I offer others? To make it safe for myself to rest without proving I deserve it? To let go without requiring a plan for what comes next?
Psychological safety, I am learning, begins within. It begins with the quiet assurance that I will stay with myself, whatever surfaces. That I will meet my need for rest with gentleness. That I will carry this retreat forward as what it is: a return to myself.
The body knows when it is safe. Stephen Porges (2022) has shown that feelings of safety arise from internal physiological states and from cues that signal the nervous system can stand down from vigilance. Those cues can come from the environment, from the relationship, from the breath, from the stillness.
They can also come from the stories we tell ourselves about what we are allowed to need.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
There is another fear beneath this one, harder to name.
I am afraid that if I let go completely, I will lose the capacity to love the life I have built. That the stillness will reveal how much of my striving was compensation rather than calling. That I will look back at my career, my choices, my years of effortful contribution, and feel only exhaustion rather than meaning.
I am afraid of becoming someone who no longer wants to return.
And beneath even that: I am afraid that letting go will reveal an emptiness I have been running from. That, without the structure of obligation, without the identity of educator, without the constant motion, I will find nothing but blank space where a self should be.
This is the fear that woke me this morning. This is what tightened my chest before dawn.
Staying With It
I left my phone untouched. I resisted the pull toward plans or tasks or the small urgencies that usually rescue me from discomfort.
I stayed.
I let the fear be present without trying to fix it. I breathed into the tightness in my chest. I asked, with as much curiosity as I could muster: What are you trying to protect?
The answer came slowly. The fear is trying to protect me from loss. Loss of identity. Loss of purpose. Loss of the scaffolding that has held my life in place for so long.
I thanked it. I mean that genuinely. The fear has kept me functional through years that might otherwise have broken me. It has helped me show up when showing up was required. It has been a kind of armour, and armour serves a purpose.
But armour is heavy. And I am in a place now where I can set it down, even briefly. Even experimentally.
An Experiment in Trust
What if letting go means finding? What if the woman who emerges from stillness is clarified rather than diminished? What if rest reveals presence rather than emptiness?
I cannot know without trying. I cannot know from the outside. I can only know by going in.
Brown (2010) writes about cultivating intuition and trusting faith, which requires letting go of the need for certainty. Certainty is what I have always sought. Plans, structures, contingencies. The illusion that if I prepare enough, I can prevent loss. The illusion that control keeps me safe.
Here in Loreto, the illusion is harder to maintain. The sea holds itself apart from my plans. The mountains hold their shape with or without my watching. The pelicans fish without consulting my schedule. Life here unfolds without my management, and it unfolds beautifully.
Perhaps I, too, can unfold without so much management.
Perhaps the self that emerges from stillness will be someone I recognize after all. Perhaps she will be someone I have been waiting to meet.
Morning, After
I made coffee. I carried it to the small balcony. I sat in the chair that had become familiar over these eight days and watched the light strengthen over the water.
The fear remained. It sat beside me like a companion, still present but no longer gripping. I had acknowledged it. I had listened. I had refused to let it drive me back into motion.
This, I think, is what the discipline of staying means. It means feeling the fear fully. It means feeling the fear and remaining anyway. It means creating enough safety within myself to be present with uncertainty, with open-handedness, with the vulnerability of letting go.
The morning was quiet. A boat moved slowly across the bay. Somewhere, someone was beginning their day with purpose and direction. I was beginning mine with a question still ahead of me.
That felt honest. That felt like enough.
¿Y si me suelto? What if I let go?
I hold the question open. But I am willing to find out.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Porges, S. W. (2022). nervous system safety: Attachment, communication, finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
ACADEMIC LENS
The question at the heart of this post, ¿y si me suelto?, “what if I let go?”, names the central therapeutic and existential challenge that van der Kolk (2014) identifies in trauma recovery: learning to release the chronic muscular and psychic bracing that survival required, even when survival is no longer at stake. Menakem (2017) describes this as “settling the body”: the slow, somatic process of convincing the nervous system that it may relax its vigilance. The bilingual framing is significant: posing the question first in Spanish allows it to arrive before the analytical English mind can intercept and evaluate it. Anzaldúa (1987) argued that bilingual expression can bypass habitual cognitive filters, accessing emotional knowing that monolingual discourse forecloses. The arts-based imagery accompanying this reflection functions within what Levine (2010) calls the “felt sense”: the pre-linguistic bodily awareness that must be engaged for deep somatic change to occur. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou ontology also resonates: letting go may be understood as releasing the I-It relationship with one’s own body, the instrumental management of the self, in favour of a more receptive, present, and mutual encounter with one’s own experience.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body abandonment, trauma, and the nervous system’s response to harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity.
Title: Please Honour This Boundary
Artist Statement
I stopped because the request was gentle.
The sign carries no threat. It carries no scolding. It asks. Please. It marks a boundary in soft language, inviting care rather than compliance. Behind it, the dunes rise slowly, grasses holding sand in place, doing the quiet work of restoration. Beyond that, the water moves, and the mountains remain steady, indifferent to whether I step forward or hold still.
This image brought my relationship with boundaries to the forefront. For a long time, I understood boundaries as exclusion or denial, something imposed from outside. Here, the boundary exists in service of recovery. It protects what is fragile and still becoming. It honours a process that cannot be rushed.
I stood there longer than necessary, noticing how restraint can be an act of respect. Remaining outside is a form of presence. It is participation through care. The land is witnessed without requiring my footsteps. It needs space. It needs time. It needs people willing to stop at the edge and let healing happen without interruption.
This sign speaks to a lesson I am learning in my own life. Restored spaces require protection. Emerging strength requires limits. There is dignity in stepping back when something is growing.
I took this photograph as a reminder that care often looks like a pause. That listening sometimes means remaining at the threshold. That asking permission of land, of body, of self, is a way of staying in right relationship.
The running shoes sat in the corner of my room for three weeks before I touched them. I had packed them with intention, tucked between journals and watercolours, believing that here, in this place of alonetude beside the Sea of Cortez, I might find my way back to my body. This morning, I finally laced them on.
Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity. In this sense, solitude becomes a micro-practice of justice, reclaiming time, body, and attention from institutional regimes that normalize depletion.
The soles felt strange against my feet. Foreign. As if they belonged to someone I used to know.
Where universities track contracts, outputs, and enrolments, these artifacts track fatigue, healing, consent, and refusal.
Image: Waiting to Move
Artist Statement
These running shoes exist for return, never speed.
They have carried me through early mornings and late afternoons, through streets that asked nothing of me and paths that asked me to pay attention. They hold the imprint of repetition, of breath finding rhythm, of the body remembering that it knows how to move without explanation.
What these shoes remind me of is how care can be practical. They absorb impact quietly. They meet the ground again and again without complaint. They do the work they were made to do, and in doing so, they allow me to keep going. There is something deeply grounding in that kind of reliability.
Running, for me, has become a practice of listening rather than pushing. I notice how my feet land. I notice when my stride shortens, when my body asks for gentleness rather than distance. These shoes have learned my pace. They hold evidence of effort and rest equally.
I have spent many years moving through systems that rewarded endurance without regard for wear. These shoes offer a different lesson. Support matters. Cushioning matters. Fit matters. Progress happens when the body feels held rather than driven.
This image belongs to my inquiry into recovery, embodiment, and the ethics of care. Forward motion asks for presence over urgency. Sometimes it simply requires something steady beneath you and the willingness to take the next step.
My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a body-based assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold the right to safe and secure work. Precarious academic labour extends far beyond an employment condition; it is a human rights issue. International frameworks recognize the right to decent work, rest, and health, yet contingent academic systems routinely undermine these rights through chronic insecurity, unpaid labour, and performance surveillance.
For years, running functioned as infrastructure, a way to metabolize contract uncertainty, wildfire seasons, pandemic isolation, and the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. My body was both coping and complying. The shoes, therefore, archive institutional extraction, marking how academic capitalism extends into muscle, breath, and gait.
Title: Move
Artist Statement
I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.
What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.
As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.
I stopped running last August. The word stopped implies a decision, a deliberate cessation. That framing feels too clean. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue. I attempted to start running in October, then in November, and, well, today.
For years, running had been my anchor. Through the relentless cycles of precarious academic labour (contract after contract, never knowing if the next semester would bring employment), my morning runs held the chaos at bay. I ran through smoke seasons when Kamloops air turned orange with wildfire haze. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and uncertainty. I ran through the accumulating weight of what Han (2010/2015) calls the burnout society: that particular form of exhaustion that emerges when self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-improvement.
Until I could run no more.
Title: Discarded Shelter: A Small Artifact of Passage
Artist Statement
This photograph captures a worn cap resting on dry soil and creeping groundcover, an object displaced yet held by the landscape. As a personal artifact, the cap signals exposure and release, something once worn for protection, now relinquished to the elements. It functions as a micro archive of movement and passage, marking a moment where containment gives way to vulnerability.
The surrounding textures of dust, stone, and persistent vegetation speak to resilience within aridity. These materials carry their own histories of endurance and adaptation. Placed together, they form a quiet record of how presence fades without disappearing entirely.
Positioned at the threshold between human trace and ecological continuity, the cap holds tension between what is left behind and what endures. As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents departure, rest, and the ethics of letting go through material evidence rather than narrative explanation.
The language of “stopping” is too orderly for what actually happened. It suggests a managerial decision, a tidy life choice, a rational pivot. Bodies rarely follow rational life plans, and exhaustion rarely arrives that way. What happened was more like surrender: the moment when a body simply refuses to continue performing a capacity it no longer possesses.
For fifteen years, running was far more than a hobby. It was infrastructure. It was how I metabolized stress, uncertainty, grief, ambition, and institutional precarity. I ran through contract cycles, through wildfire smoke, through pandemic isolation, through the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. Running functioned as a regulator, a refuge, and an identity. It was both a coping mechanism and a performance of resilience.
That framing feels too clean, almost managerial. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue.
Running has been a huge part of my life. It structured my mornings and offered a sense of coherence in a life shaped by academic precarity, seasonal contracts, and the constant uncertainty of whether the next semester would bring work. I ran through wildfire seasons when Kamloops air turned orange and thick with ash. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and anxiety. I ran through the accumulation of what Han (2010/2015) describes as the burnout society, where self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-care, and productivity masquerades as virtue.
My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a body-based assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold it.
Title: Vulnerability: A Body Returns to Motion
Artist Statement
This photograph depicts a single running shoe resting on volcanic sand, functioning as a quiet ethnographic artifact. It holds the quiet rather than staging crisis or spectacle. Instead, it holds the ordinary materiality of stopping.
The shoe operates as an extension of the body, a prosthetic of movement shaped by repetition, impact, and endurance. Set down on the ground, it marks a pause rather than a failure. It bears witness to exhaustion as an embodied state and to the moment when motion, once necessary for survival, is interrupted.
What emerges here is a material trace of rupture in an identity long organized around forward movement. The shoe records effort without explanation. It carries the imprint of kilometres travelled and the weight of what it has absorbed. In resting, it shifts function from propulsion to evidence.
As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents the ethics of stopping, the legitimacy of rest, and the quiet knowledge held by materials once devoted to endurance.
In qualitative terms, this image functions as data. It documents a threshold moment in which the body asserted its limits against institutional, psychological, and cultural demands. The shoe, half-buried, speaks to sedimentation, the layering of fatigue, trauma, ambition, and discipline that eventually accumulates into refusal. In this sense, stopping is a form of information rather than failure.
There is vulnerability in this artifact, but also a possibility. The shoe holds both cessation and return. It sits on the edge of movement, implying that motion may re-emerge on different terms. Returning to running now feels less like reclaiming a former self and more like negotiating a new relationship with embodiment, one that privileges consent, slowness, and care over endurance and performance.
If loneliness is the pain of being alone, solitude is its glory. Similarly, if exhaustion is the pain of productivity, rest may be its quiet counterpart. The body’s refusal becomes a form of wisdom, a boundary that resists the neoliberal logic of infinite capacity.
Title: Shadow at the Threshold
Artist Statement
This image records my shadow elongated across water and shore, a body doubled by reflection and light. I am present twice here and fully in neither place. The shadow stretches into the lake while my feet remain on land, marking a quiet division between where the body stands and where the self extends.
What this moment holds for me is a sense of suspension. The water is still enough to reflect sky and mountain, yet shallow enough to reveal the ground beneath. The shadow moves across both states at once. It belongs to surface and depth simultaneously. I held still. I resisted pulling back. I stayed exactly where I was and let the image form around that decision.
The length of the shadow speaks to timing rather than identity. It records the angle of the sun, the hour of the day, the season of light. My form is stretched thin by circumstance, shaped by forces beyond my control. This feels honest. It mirrors a period in my life where identity is extended, reworked, and softened by context rather than fixed by definition.
As visual data, the photograph captures an embodied moment of orientation. The shoreline becomes a site where body, environment, and time co-produce meaning. The self appears as trace rather than subject, relational and temporary. The shadow is evidence of presence. It is evidence of standing still long enough to be shaped by what surrounds me.
The shadow also gestures toward institutional surveillance, in which the academic self is often experienced as an object observed and measured rather than as a sovereign subject. Such surveillance practices implicate academic freedom and the right to dignity at work, where bodies become sites of audit and governance rather than care.
This section demonstrates vulnerability as knowledge-based data, revealing how institutional precarity inscribes itself on the nervous system and how embodied refusal constitutes knowledge.
Scholarly Engagement: The Archive of Exhaustion
Understanding what happens when a body collapses from prolonged occupational stress requires theoretical frameworks that honour what the body knows. The polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges (2011), offers essential language for what I experienced. Porges describes three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal state (social engagement, safety, connection), the sympathetic state (fight-or-flight, mobilization), and the dorsal vagal state (shutdown, collapse, conservation).
Title: Learning to Shuffle: Safety as Relational Practice
Artist Statement
This photo centres on a warning sign for manta rays that instructs walkers to shuffle their feet as they enter the sea. The directive is practical, grounded in ecological care and mutual vulnerability. Shuffling helps alert manta rays to human presence, reducing the risk of harm to both. Yet the instruction also operates symbolically, asking the human body to slow down, to signal itself, and to move with awareness rather than entitlement.
What interests me here is how movement becomes ethical practice. The body is asked to alter its habitual patterns in recognition of another being’s habitat and dignity. Shuffling becomes a pedagogy of relational care, a way of learning through the feet that the shoreline is shared space. This is an ecosystem beyond empty leisure where human and more-than-human lives intersect continuously.
The manta ray remains unseen beneath the surface, yet it is central to the instruction. Its invisibility matters. Ethical movement depends on attention to what cannot always be perceived directly. The sign makes visible an obligation to those who are present without being immediately legible, reminding the walker that care often begins before encounter.
As visual data, this artifact extends my inquiry into alonetude and embodied ethics. Movement here is framed neither as conquest nor extraction, but as negotiated presence. The directive to shuffle offers a quiet counterpoint to productivity culture. Slow down. Sense the ground. Acknowledge others. Move in ways that minimize harm. In this sense, the sign functions as both ecological instruction and philosophical metaphor for ethical being-in-place.
The sign offers a counter-ways of knowing to academic capitalism: a movement guided by relational accountability rather than speed, competition, and extraction.
For years, my nervous system oscillated between the body’s alert state and desperate attempts to reach genuine safety safety. The constant a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger of precarious employment (Will there be a contract next term? Am I performing well enough to be renewed? What happens if I speak too honestly about institutional failures?) kept my body in a state of chronic threat, what Porges (2011) calls neuroception: the nervous system’s unconscious scanning for danger. My nervous system read danger everywhere, even when my conscious mind insisted everything was fine.
By August, my body had shifted into dorsal vagal shutdown. This is the state of last resort: what happens when fight-or-flight fails, when mobilization depletes beyond recovery. The system conserves by collapsing. Energy withdraws. Movement becomes effortful. The world flattens into grey.
Running became impossible because running requires mobilization energy. When the tank is truly empty, even self-care becomes another demand the body simply cannot meet.
Table 1
nervous system States and Physical Activity: A Personal Cartography
nervous system State
Physical Activity Capacity
Workplace Conditions
Body-based Markers
Ventral Vagal (Safety/Connection)
Full capacity; movement feels enjoyable and restorative
Note. This table integrates Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory with personal experience during the transition from occupational burnout to healing retreat. The nervous system states are mapped to physical activity capacity, workplace conditions, and body-based markers, as documented over the research period. Adapted for SPN methodology where lived experience constitutes primary data.
Perspective: This Morning’s Run
I walked to the waterfront before dawn. The air held that particular softness that exists only in the hours before the desert sun asserts its dominance. My body felt tentative, as if asking permission to inhabit space differently than it has for months.
Image Before the Sun
Artist Statement
The pre-dawn hour offers what Porges (2011) describes as environmental safety cues: low stimulation, softened light, and the absence of social demand. This temporal threshold between night and day mirrors a physiological transition, as the body begins to move from dorsal vagal shutdown toward genuine safety engagement.
In this moment, the environment participates actively in regulation. Still water reflects rather than interrupts. Sound is muted. Movement is minimal. Nothing asks for response. The scene supports a gradual return to relational capacity without forcing alertness or productivity. Safety is communicated through quiet continuity rather than reassurance.
What draws my attention here is how regulation emerges through context rather than effort. The body requires no instruction to calm itself. It responds to cues offered by light, temperature, and space. The landscape becomes co-regulator, holding the nervous system in a state of readiness without demand.
As visual data, this image documents a condition of becoming. The water gestures toward possibility rather than outcome. Regulation is present as potential rather than performance. This pre-dawn interval holds the ethics of alonetude, a chosen presence that allows the body to re-enter connection on its own terms.
I began slowly. Pace itself became a form of care. My feet found rhythm on the packed sand near the water’s edge, where the surface offered just enough cushion to absorb impact.
For the first few minutes, my body resisted. Muscles complained. The lungs protested the unfamiliar demand for deeper oxygen exchange. This is what Levine (1997) describes in Waking the Tiger: the body’s natural protective response to resuming activities associated with periods of distress. My nervous system remembered that running used to accompany exhaustion, anxiety, and the desperate attempt to outpace institutional harm.
I kept moving anyway. I let the complaints arise without trying to silence them. I noticed the tightness in my shoulders, the guarding in my jaw, the way my breath wanted to stay shallow.
Title: Sands of Time
Artist Statement
Faint footprints along the shoreline mark movement, presence, and impermanence. They are body-based traces of a body in motion, briefly impressed into wet sand and already in the process of being taken back by the tide. The marks exist within a narrow window of visibility, held only until water returns.
What this image holds for me is the relationship between embodiment and erasure. Presence here is real, yet provisional. The body leaves evidence, but it releases any insistence on permanence. The shoreline registers contact and then releases it, responding through its own rhythm rather than human intention.
The tide functions as collaborator rather than force. It participates in making and unmaking the trace, reminding me that movement always occurs within relational systems. No step exists in isolation. Each imprint is shaped by timing, pressure, moisture, and return.
As visual data, the photograph documents how presence is enacted and dissolved through the shared rhythms of body and sea. The footprints carry no intention of enduring. They mark a moment of passage, offering a quiet lesson in how to move through the world while allowing what follows to take its course.
Porges (2011) describes this shift as the nervous system receiving cues of safety from the environment. The rhythm of waves. The cool air on my skin. The absence of screens, notifications, and institutional surveillance. The steadiness of my own footfalls established a new relationship with this body, this moment, this place.
My shoulders dropped. My jaw softened. My breath deepened of its own accord, without instruction or force. A state of genuine safety and connection emerged. For the first time in months, I felt my body organizing itself around presence rather than threat.
Here I am.
That moment asked for a theory: to understand how, rather than to explain it away, something so structural could feel so intimate.
Theory: Bodies as Archives of Structural Harm
The exhaustion that brought my running practice to a halt was never merely personal. Academic capitalism, the systematic transformation of higher education into a market-driven enterprise prioritising revenue generation, productivity metrics, and competitive positioning (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), creates bodies like mine with systematic precision. The precarious labour conditions that define contemporary university employment produce specific physiological consequences: chronic stress activation, disrupted sleep architecture, inflammatory cascades, and metabolic the nervous system thrown off balance.
Al Serhan and Houjeir (2020) found significant correlations between the intensification of academic capitalism and faculty burnout, documenting how market-driven educational environments create unsustainable demands that erode well-being and professional capacity. Their research validates what my body already knew: this exhaustion is structural, produced by systems designed to extract maximum labour from minimally compensated workers.
Precarious academic labour extends beyond a labour-market condition; it is also a human rights concern. These rights are articulated in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966), which affirms the right to just and favourable conditions of work, including rest and reasonable limitation of working hours.
The right to decent work, security of employment, and safe working conditions is recognized in international human rights frameworks, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. My body’s collapse thus reflects more than personal vulnerability; it indexes institutional arrangements that systematically violate the right to dignified, secure, and health-sustaining work.
My body’s collapse is thus beyond the simply anecdotal; it is indicative of systemic rights erosion in contemporary higher education.
Title: Strata of the Third Shore: Sea as Memory, Land as Archive
Artist Statement
This painted stone renders the sea as layered strata, with bands of blue, rust, green, and sand-toned pigment evoking shoreline, sediment, and water in dialogue. The rock functions as both canvas and collaborator, carrying its own geological history while receiving contemporary marks of experience. In this sense, the piece becomes a micro archive where land and memory meet.
The horizontal bands suggest temporal and emotional layers. Surface calm gives way to deeper currents, sedimented grief, and emergent healing. The luminous blue at the base gestures toward movement and continuity, while warmer earth tones recall land-based memory and embodied history. The stone resists smoothness, insisting on texture and unevenness. This resistance mirrors the non linear nature of recovery and becoming.
As an arts-based research artifact, this work operates as multimodal data within Scholarly Personal Narrative and humanities inquiry. Painting the sea onto land material enacts a relational methodology in which body, pigment, stone, and place co-produce knowledge. The object becomes a tactile record of alonetude, presence, and the ethics of witnessing landscape as teacher.
Hochschild (1983) named this phenomenon emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. For contingent academics, emotional labour extends beyond classroom performance to include the constant performance of enthusiasm, the manufactured gratitude for unstable employment, and the suppression of legitimate grievances. This labour is invisible, uncompensated, and ultimately depleting.
My body stopped running because it had nothing left. The collapse was honest. The collapse was necessary.
Title: Bleached Architecture: Coral as Witness and Afterlife
Artist Statement
A bleached coral fragment rests on volcanic sand, marking presence, loss, and ecological time. Its porous structure carries traces of former life, openings where relation once flowed. The surface records exposure. What remains is delicate, weight-bearing, and altered by conditions beyond its control.
This fragment brings my attention to fragility as a shared condition. Coral lives through interdependence, relying on temperature, chemistry, and rhythm held in balance. When that balance shifts, the body changes. What appears inert is, in fact, a record of relation strained beyond capacity.
Encountering this piece, I felt my own exhaustion placed within a wider field of precarity. The fragment situates bodily depletion alongside ecological harm, linking labour extraction and environmental degradation as intersecting justice concerns. Both operate through systems that normalize overuse, accelerate demand, and treat depletion as acceptable cost.
Here, coral functions as ecological witness and material archive. It indexes how patterns of strain reverberate across bodies, institutions, and environments, leaving evidence that is quiet yet enduring. The fragment holds no accusation. It remains. In doing so, it asks for attention, care, and a recalibration of how value, labour, and life are held.
Healing requires completing interrupted defensive responses; movement releases trapped survival energy
Body-led pacing allows completion of protective responses; running becomes discharge rather than demand
Note. This table synthesises trauma theory, organizational psychology, and embodiment scholarship to contextualize the cessation and resumption of physical activity following occupational burnout. Sources verified through institutional databases. Framework aligned with Nash’s (2004) SPN requirement that personal narrative engage substantively with scholarly literature.
Action: Movement as Reclamation
I ran for perhaps fifteen minutes this morning. By any previous standard of mine (when I could cover ten kilometres before breakfast, when running was discipline and distance and doing), fifteen minutes would have felt inadequate. A failure.
This morning, those fifteen minutes felt like a revolution.
Title: Daybreak at the Cliff
Artist Statement
Pelicans rest on volcanic rock as dawn light opens the horizon, holding stillness, tide, and geological time in quiet relation. The birds are present without urgency, bodies folded into rest as the ocean continues its steady rhythm. The rock beneath them carries a deeper temporality, shaped by forces that long predate both tide and wing.
What this scene brings into focus is co-presence across scales. Avian life, ocean movement, and volcanic strata occupy the same frame without hierarchy. Dawn holds each rhythm without favouring one over another. It simply reveals them together. The pelicans remain part of the landscape rather than interrupting it. They belong to it, momentarily aligned with processes that exceed any single lifespan.
The image situates time as layered rather than linear. The immediate softness of morning light sits alongside the slow pulse of the sea and the vast duration held in stone. This convergence invites attention to continuity rather than event, to relationship rather than action.
As visual data, the photograph documents a moment where species, elements, and temporalities meet without demand. It foregrounds an ethics of shared presence, reminding me that rest, movement, and endurance can coexist within the same horizon, each holding space for the others.
The difference lies in how I returned. Previously, my running was extraction, demanding performance from a body that had already given everything. The running that happened this morning was related. I moved with my body rather than at it.
Sunderland et al. (2022) describe how trauma-informed movement practices differ fundamentally from conventional exercise frameworks. Rather than imposing external goals on the body, trauma-informed movement invites the body to lead, to set pace, to determine duration, to signal completion. The practitioner’s role shifts from taskmaster to listener.
This morning, I listened. When my body asked to slow down, I slowed down. When it wanted to stop and watch pelicans dive for fish, I stopped. When it asked to walk the final stretch, I walked. Each choice was a conversation rather than a command.
Title: The Pause That Teaches
Artist Statement
The pelicans offered an unplanned lesson in embodied presence. Their hunting unfolds through complete attentiveness to the moment. Hovering. Assessing. Committing fully to the dive. There is no excess movement, no rehearsal. Each action arises from readiness rather than force.
Watching them, I felt my own body slow. The run paused without ending. Breath settled. Attention sharpened. The act of observing became a parallel practice, one that allowed stillness to exist inside motion rather than in opposition to it. The pelicans approached the water without rushing. They waited until the moment was right, and then they moved without hesitation.
This experience reframed how I understand interruption. Within trauma-informed movement, pauses are often misread as failure or loss of discipline. Here, the pause functioned as information. It carried data about safety, timing, and deep listening. The body knew when to stop watching and when to move again.
As visual and body-based data, this moment documents a shift in relationship to movement. Attention becomes a form of care. Stillness becomes part of momentum. The pelicans model a way of being that honours precision over speed and presence over persistence, offering permission to pause without abandoning forward motion.
Alonetude made this possible. In solitude, there is no audience for performance. No fitness tracker is demanding improvement. No institutional gaze measuring productivity. There is only the body, the breath, the sea, the slowly brightening sky.
Without witnesses, the body can tell the truth.
Title: Step into the Tide
Artist Statement
A bare foot meets the shoreline, marking contact, return, and the body’s quiet consent to re-enter the sea. The gesture is small, almost unremarkable, yet it carries weight. Skin touches water without armour or urgency. The body chooses proximity rather than distance.
What this moment holds for me is the ethics of consent in movement. The foot pauses before fully entering, allowing sensation to arrive first. Temperature, texture, resistance. The sea is met slowly, on equal terms. This is a return that requires no immersion. It honours readiness.
The shoreline becomes a threshold where the body negotiates trust. Years of holding tension and bracing against impact have taught my body to hesitate. Here, hesitation is attentiveness. It is listening. The foot lowers when the nervous system agrees. Contact becomes collaboration rather than conquest.
As visual data, this image documents an embodied decision point. Re-entry is framed as relational, shaped by timing, sensation, and choice. The body resists rushing to belong. It waits until belonging feels possible.
van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body keeps the score, that our tissues, organs, and nervous systems hold the memory of what we have survived. If this is true, then my body has been keeping meticulous records of nineteen years of precarious labour. The chronic tension. The interrupted sleep. The constant calibration of self-presentation to meet institutional expectations. The grief of contracts that ended, relationships that frayed under unsustainable demands, and dreams deferred and deferred again.
Yet if the body keeps the score of harm, perhaps it can also keep the score of healing. Perhaps these fifteen minutes by the sea, this small, trembling, imperfect return to movement, registers in my tissues as evidence that safety is possible. That rest can be trusted. That the body, given sufficient care and time and solitude, remembers how to feel alive.
Little by Little
This is what alonetude offers: the space to let the body lead. To stop performing wellness and actually experience it. To run slowly along a shoreline at dawn, asking nothing of the moment except presence, and to feel something inside slowly, tentatively, begin to heal.
Little by little, the body finds its way back.
Image: Shadow Self
Artist Statement
This image captures my self-shadow at the water’s edge, marking a liminal encounter between body and sea, presence and erasure. Rendered only as a silhouette, the figure allows for self-observation without the self-consciousness of direct gaze. The body appears indirectly, shaped by light rather than asserted through form.
The advancing foam operates as both boundary and invitation. It traces a shifting line where land, body, and ocean negotiate contact. In this moment, the tide functions as a temporal and relational force, advancing and retreating without urgency. I stand at the threshold, neither immersed nor withdrawn, embodying what I understand as alonetude, a chosen presence within a larger ecological field.
The shadow stretches and softens across wet sand, signalling a body in transition. It reflects a state that has moved beyond contraction and exhaustion, yet is still reassembling itself into certainty. The image holds that in-between condition with care.
As visual data, this photograph documents an what the body knows-based moment. The shoreline becomes a research site where identity, nervous system state, and environment co-produce experience. The self emerges here as relational rather than fixed, a silhouette shaped by water, light, and ground rather than by narrative or performance.
I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.
What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.
As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.
Tonight, as the sun sets over the Sierra de la Giganta, I feel the pleasant ache of muscles reawakening. It is a different ache than the chronic tension I carried for months. This one speaks of use rather than depletion, of a body asked to participate in its own life rather than merely endure.
Tomorrow I may run again or walk. Or I may simply sit by the water and breathe. The point is no longer the activity itself but the relationship, the ongoing conversation between intention and capacity, between what the mind desires and what the body can sustain.
The body knows. And finally, I am learning to listen.
Title: Day’s End
Artist Statement
Carmen emerges as a dark silhouette across the Sea of Cortez, anchoring the horizon and holding the quiet of distance, water, and sky. The landmass withholds assertion through detail or texture. It remains intact through outline alone, a steady presence shaped by light rather than proximity.
What this image offers me is a sense of orientation without demand. Carmen holds the horizon gently, giving the eye a place to rest while allowing the surrounding space to remain open. Water and sky expand around it, and time seems to slow in response. The distance matters. It preserves separation while sustaining relationship.
As visual data, the silhouette functions as a stabilising reference point within a wide field of stillness. It reflects how grounding can occur without closeness, how connection can be maintained through recognition rather than arrival. Carmen remains where it is, and that is enough to hold the scene together.
Methodological Reflection: SPN as Healing Practice
I understand Scholarly Personal Narrative as both a method and a practice. Nash and Bradley (2011) describe SPN as a way of transforming lived experience into scholarly knowledge through theory-informed reflection and an honest engagement with vulnerability. In writing this entry, This entry reaches beyond reporting on experience; it inhabits the methodology. My morning run becomes data. The subtle shift in my nervous system becomes evident. My body’s responses become a legitimate site of knowledge production.
The VPAS framework helps me organize this inquiry. Vulnerability appears in my account of collapse, in the moment my body withdrew consent to continue running. Perspective emerges as I trace the movement from depletion toward tentative return, noticing how hope arrives quietly, almost imperceptibly. Action is present in the fifteen minutes of running, but also in the choices to slow down, to stop, to breathe, and to listen. Scholarly engagement threads through this narrative as I situate my embodied experience within Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory, trauma scholarship, and critiques of academic capitalism.
I extend Scholarly Personal Narrative through multimodal, artifact-based inquiry. The shoes, stones, shadows, and watercolours serve as more than decoration. They are co-researchers. They hold memory, affect, and institutional inscription. By treating these objects as data, I am expanding what counts as evidence in organizational, educational, and human rights research. Framing embodied exhaustion as a human rights issue allows me to move beyond personal narrative and into structural critique, linking my body to policy, labour conditions, and institutional design.
I no longer understand chronic dorsal vagal shutdown as a personal pathology. I understand it as an institutional outcome. My nervous system collapsed beyond isolationtion. It was shaped by contingent contracts, constant performance evaluation, and the quiet pressure to be endlessly available. In this sense, my body becomes diagnostic. It registers what policy documents and strategic plans cannot: the physiological cost of precarious academic labour.
This shift in framing, from personal pathology to institutional outcome, is the move that institutional gaslighting forecloses. The inversion that locates harm inside the worker is precisely the inversion this thesis refuses. My body is not the problem. The body is the evidence.
Alonetude has become a methodological condition for this work. In solitude, I hear my body more clearly. Without students, emails, metrics, or surveillance, my body speaks in sensation, breath, and fatigue. Here, data emerges in the body rather than performatively. I am practising scholarship from the inside out, allowing embodiment to guide analysis rather than treating it as an object to be analyzed.
Learning to listen to my body feels both intimate and political. It is a healing practice and also a refusal. It interrupts the logic of extraction that shaped my academic life. It challenges the primacy of productivity as a measure of worth. It insists that limits are forms of knowledge, but forms of knowledge and ethical boundaries.
I believe that if higher education institutions are serious about equity, inclusion, and well-being, they must confront the embodied consequences of precarious labour. Secure employment, reasonable workloads, and psychological safety are human rights obligations rather than luxuriesgations. Without structural change, universities will continue to produce bodies calibrated for collapse and then misrecognize that collapse as individual weakness rather than as a failure of institutional design.
Writing this section is therefore both research and resistance. It is an act of counter-archiving, inserting the body back into institutional memory and insisting that embodied experience counts as knowledge.
References
Al Serhan, O., & Houjeir, R. (2020). Academic capitalism and faculty burnout: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 15(5), 1368–1393. https://doi.org/10.18844/cjes.v15i5.5350
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
International Labour Organization. (1999). Decent work. International Labour Office. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/decent-work/lang–en/index.htm
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sunderland, N., Graham, P., & Lorenz, D. (2022). Trauma-informed dance/movement therapy: Considerations for practice. In S. L. Brooke & C. E. Myers (Eds.), The use of creative arts therapies in trauma and recovery (pp. 15–32). Charles C Thomas Publisher.
United Nations. (1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. United Nations Treaty Series, 993, 3.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Translation note. Spanish language passages in this post were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning and are intended as guides to meaning rather than certified linguistic interpretations.
ACADEMIC LENS
The concept of bodily abandonment named in this title engages van der Kolk’s (2014) clinical argument that the most pervasive injury of chronic trauma is what the body carries from inside out, rather than what happened from outside but what the person learned to do to the body from inside: to leave it, to override its signals, to treat it as a vehicle for performance rather than a subject of care. Menakem (2017) calls this “self-abandonment,” distinguishing it from the harm inflicted by others: it is the secondary layer of injury, the person’s own learned disconnection from somatic experience, that must be addressed for healing to be sustained. The photographic journal format of Day 22, with its many images and artist statements, enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call arts-based inquiry: using visual documentation to explore rather than illustrate pre-formed conclusions, to surface knowledge that verbal reflection alone cannot reach. Levine’s (2010) concept of the “somatic narrative,” the story the body tells through sensation, posture, and movement, is what these artworks attempt to read. The body that remembers its own abandonment also, in remembering, begins to undo it: the act of witnessing, even through art, constitutes what Levine calls a “corrective somatic experience.”
I woke before the light this morning. I woke free of anxiety. My thoughts moved gently rather than racing toward demands. I was simply awake in the way an animal wakes: aware, present, responsive to some internal signal that sleep was complete and consciousness could return. I slept solidly last night.
The darkness held a particular quality at this hour. It was dense and gentle. The Sea of Cortez whispered rather than spoke, its sound intimate and close, as though sharing secrets only pre-dawn can hear. I lay there listening, tracking the gradual shift from deep black to grey to that moment just before sunrise, when the world begins to remember colour.
Fifth morning of unbroken sleep. Cinco mañanas.
I notice how differently I hold this information now than on Day Nine, when the pattern first established itself. Then it felt miraculous, fragile, something that might shatter if examined too closely. Now it feels ordinary. It is natural-ordinary, the way breathing is ordinary: essential, life-sustaining, but no longer requiring constant amazement.
My system no longer scans for threats upon waking. It simply wakes, assesses the environment as safe through accumulated data points (consistent sounds, familiar light patterns, the absence of disruption), and allows consciousness to emerge without the defensive mobilization that characterized my mornings for months before arriving here. This is how we steady one another with place. The sea, the light, and the flight patterns of pelicans are my companions in restoration. My nervous system orients to their constancy.
This is re-inhabitation. A return to the deeper rhythms that survived beneath who I had to become. Learning has shifted from conscious recognition to what the body knows. From something I observe to something I am.
I can see it even with my eyes closed: the gradual brightening that comes before sunrise, the world remembering itself. I get up, pull on clothes, and walk to the balcony. The pelicans are already fishing, their morning routine as established as my own has become.
I watch one pelican dive. The complete commitment of it: wings folding, body dropping, the compact missile of intention entering water with barely a splash. Surfaces. Waits. The fish is visible in the throat pouch, and the backward tilt of the head sends it down. Then stillness. Complete stillness. The body rests on water while the system processes what it has caught. No hurry. The pelican rests with what it has before seeking the next fish. Digests. Allows the body to complete one cycle before beginning another.
Esto también es una enseñanza. This, too, is a teaching.
The pelican dives because its body signals hunger, beyond any schedule that dictates it should fish at this hour. This is intrinsic motivation in its purest form: action arising from internal states rather than external pressures or rewards.
For nineteen years, I lived according to externally imposed rhythms. What I was experiencing, I now understand, was chronic autonomy frustration, one of the three basic psychological needs Self-Determination Theory identifies as essential for well-being.
This kind of exhaustion is disproportionately borne by women. Especially those navigating midlife in systems that reward endless availability and punish embodied limits. What I am naming here extends beyond personal recovery. It is a reclamation of rhythm in a world that teaches women to ignore their own. What Gabor Maté (2022) calls “the myth of normal” is unravelling. I no longer pathologize exhaustion or anxiety as personal flaws. I see them as natural responses to abnormal conditions, conditions I am now beginning to unlearn.
Twelve days ago, I arrived here holding the question of whether I could stay. I am here. The days unfold. The routine continues. And somewhere in the last twelve days, I stopped asking for permission and simply started living.
This is what Haraway (1988) means by situated knowledge: beyond abstract theorizing about what knowledge might be, grounded in the concrete recognition that I am in this body, in this place, at this moment, noticing what I notice. That observation matters.
Coming here, choosing this documentation, claiming this experience as scholarship: these are acts of resistance against that denial. I am saying my knowing matters. My observation counts. My embodied experience constitutes valid data.
The sunrise is happening now. The pattern provides structure. The variation provides life.
How do I document my own experience with enough rigour to make it a scholarship while remaining present enough to actually experience what I am documenting?
The theoretical scaffolding continues to build. But this morning, before the reading begins, I simply sit with what is here. Water. Birds. Light. Breath. The embodied reality that theory helps me understand but cannot replace.
And you, reading this: what has your morning taught you? What rhythms in your life have asked to be trusted, held without cross-examination?
Coffee now. The smell of it. The warmth of the cup. The first sip that signals morning has arrived, you are awake, and the day is beginning.
I think about routine again. It has stopped feeling like a constraint and has become a container. The predictability allows spontaneity because the calculating has quieted.
My body is learning to read time by sunrise, by the pelicans’ fishing patterns, by the quality of light at different hours. These serve as zeitgebers, helping my disrupted circadian system recalibrate to a more natural rhythm.
Now I know the difference. Freedom is a structure you choose that holds you safely and that you can trust to continue even when you stop monitoring it.
Soon I will swim. What I am learning through swimming is what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls flow, though the flow I experience is quieter than what he typically describes.
Perhaps this is what alonetude looks like in motion. Beyond performance or accomplishment. Just being fully present with yourself in an activity that asks nothing beyond presence itself.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.
ACADEMIC LENS
The quality of waking described here, “aware, present, responsive to the world and unbraced against it,” represents what Porges (2011) calls ventral vagal activation: the biological state that underlies genuine curiosity, openness, and engagement. Van der Kolk (2014) distinguishes this from the forced calmness of emotional suppression: true regulation is characterized by ease rather than management. The image of “waking the way an animal wakes” deliberately bypasses the self-monitoring of the institutionalised academic subject, invoking instead Menakem’s (2017) concept of embodied animal wisdom: the somatic knowing that precedes and grounds conceptual thought. The word “continuation” also carries methodological weight: this entry records the continuation rather than any breakthrough or arrival, ongoing quality of a process, the steady accumulation of new somatic experience that Levine (2010) identifies as the mechanism of healing. It is the persistence of the changed nervous system state across days, rather than a single dramatic shift, that constitutes genuine recovery. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) would recognize this daily writing practice itself as part of the inquiry: the journal entry as data, the noticing as method.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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, 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: 13minutes
Title: When I am Feeling Blue
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: 2minutes
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.
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.
