30 Days by the Sea Archives - Page 3 of 5

Day 31: Goodbye

Reading Time: 16 minutes

Crossing Back, Carrying Forward

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

The sweetness is gone, yet the form persists.

Title: Weathered Sweetness

Artist Statement

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

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

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

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

The Last Morning

How does one leave a threshold?

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

Se acaba. It ends.

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

Title: Before the Sun

Artist Statement

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

What the Anthropologists Knew

Title: What Remains After Tide

Artist Statement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Title: The Doorway I Will Leave Through

Artist Statement

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

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

The Third Shore as Liminal Space

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

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

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

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

Table 1

Van Gennep’s Three Phases Applied to the Alonetude Retreat

Departure from Canada; loss of institutional identity as a contract academic; physical journey to Loreto	Van Gennep’s Definition	Application to Alonetude Retreat
Return to society in a new status; reintegration with a transformed identity; carrying liminal wisdom into ordinary life	Removal from ordinary social structure and previous status; symbolic death of former identity	Departure from Canada; loss of institutional identity as contract academic; physical journey to Loreto
Liminality	Threshold period of ambiguity; “betwixt and between”; outside normal classifications; transformation becomes possible	The thirty days of retreat; walking the third shore between loneliness and solitude; practising alonetude; gathering fragments; allowing rest
Return to society in a new status; reintegration with a transformed identity; carrying liminal wisdom into ordinary life	Return to society in new status; reintegration with transformed identity; carrying liminal wisdom into ordinary life	Return to Canada; carrying forward what the body knows of rest, attention, and self-worth; maintaining alonetude practice within ordinary life

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

We pass through thresholds, but the thresholds stay behind.

What I Carry Forward

Title: Sky Practice

Artist Statement (Scholarly Personal Narrative Reflection)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Title: What Fits in a Bag

Artist Statement

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

The Danger of Re-Entry

The third shore is where that transformation occurs.

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

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

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

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

Title: Footprints Filling

Artist Statement

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

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

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

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

Alonetude as Ongoing Practice

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

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

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

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

Title: The Sea Will Still Be Here

Artist Statement

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

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

Crossing the Threshold

Title: Where the Boundary Gives Way

Artist Statement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Title: After

Artist Statement

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

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

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

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

Cruzo ahora. Sigo adelante. Llevo todo conmigo.

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am valuable because I am. Full stop.

ACADEMIC LENS

Departure from the liminal space of the Third Shore constitutes what Turner (1969) calls reincorporation: the return from threshold experience to ordinary social life, carrying the transformation that the liminal period made possible. Van Gennep’s (1960) rites of passage model suggests that this moment is structurally precarious: the transformation achieved in the liminal phase requires active tending in the conditions that originally generated the problem. The “sweetness persisting in the form” image captures what Levine (2010) calls somatic integration: the healing experience becomes embodied rather than merely remembered, changing the body’s baseline patterns rather than simply being added to the cognitive archive. Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative framework suggests that the value of this month’s research lies in the quality of inquiry beyond any particular conclusions, inquiry sustained throughout: the willingness to stay with uncertainty, attend to experience, and find language for what the body knows. The question of what the Third Shore teaches remains open rather than answered at departure: a living research question that the body continues to carry into whatever comes next.

Day 30: What Faces Inward

Day 30: the last full day by the sea. A reflection on what faces inward when the outward noise falls away, on grief, solitude, embodiment, and what thirty days of alonetude has revealed about the shape of a life.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Title: What Gives Me Life

Artist Statement

I stopped when I saw them lined up like that. My medications. Each bottle a different part of the story, the anxiety, the sleep, the pain that became chronic somewhere in my forties. I set them on the windowsill in the morning light and photographed them because I am done hiding them.

These medications are architecture, never crutches for the broken. They are architecture for survival, structures that hold space for healing to occur.
Amy Tucker, 2026

For years, I hid these interventions in shame, viewing them through a lens of failure. The wellness industry had convinced me that my need for pharmaceutical support indicated weakness, that natural remedies and willpower should be enough. Yet what I have come to understand is something different entirely.

There is no romance in them. Only practicality. Only the quiet persistence of someone determined to continue despite the weight of invisible struggles. The different hues of the capsules and tablets, the varied dosages: these represent my refusal to disappear, to fade into the background or surrender to the pull of despair.

I took this photograph as a witness, beyond any admission. Proof that seeking help is a strength. Understanding what your body and mind require is clarity; never compromise. On the wooden shelf, they sit, ordinary objects transformed into something sacred through the simple act of being seen.

Title: What Depression Looks Like

Artist Statement

I discovered this structure on one of my walks and paused for a long time before it. The darkness within held a terrible familiarity. Depression manifests as a corridor you cannot see beyond, a place where things vanish. The barbed wire felt equally recognizable, the barriers between where I am and where I want to be. The ways in which moving toward wholeness becomes an act requiring deliberate will.

The empty bottles scattered in the dirt became a meditation on difference. I thought of my own medications, the ones I depend on. The contrast is stark. Some are abandoned, left behind. Others continue their work, filling the spaces within me, allowing me to stand upright and document this moment, rather than being consumed by the darkness they represent.

The structure itself offers no explanation. It simply opens into shadow. Some days that is precisely what occurs in the landscape of my own mind.
Amy Tucker, 2026

The diagnosis arrived two years ago, though in retrospect I can trace its shape much further back. What I had named dedication, I was in fact describing the shape of anxiety. What I believed was discipline was the armour of a mind protecting itself. For years, I confused my ability to maintain momentum with evidence of my worth, all the while describing the symptoms of a mind under siege.

This photograph makes no claim to resolve the discomfort. It bears witness to it. Without drama, without explanation. Simply two mismatched things, a presence and its opposite, existing together in the frame.

Title: The Shape I Left Behind

Artist Statement

This bed records a quiet interval between rest and return. The sheets are unsettled, the pillows uneven, bearing the imprint of a body that has risen yet lingers in its leaving. Nothing here is staged. This is how the night ended and how the morning began.

These are the moments I find most honest: the ones where nothing is being performed. An unmade bed is often read as disorder, yet what I see is evidence of care extended inward. Rest taken seriously. A body allowed to occupy space without apology, without tidying itself away for an imagined audience.

The layering of textures matters to me. The weight of the blankets, the softness of the pillows, and the slight collapse at the centre all speak to containment rather than chaos. This is presence. A body that rested here. A person who allowed herself to stay a little longer.

I photographed this moment as a form of witness. To honour rest as labour. To acknowledge that recovery leaves marks. To remind myself that it is acceptable, necessary even, to leave evidence of having been here.

How Geography Became My Responsibility

I came believing that place could remake me.
That distance from everything I knew could reconstruct what was broken.
México was supposed to be my healing place,
the sea, the light, the possibility of becoming someone lighter. But the land had other intentions.
What began as respite unfolded into confrontation.
I learned, in the hush of the tide, what I had avoided understanding for decades:
that geography alone cannot do the work of healing.
That no distance is far enough to outrun yourself. I thought I was coming to a sanctuary.
I have learned instead that I am the sanctuary.
That the work of healing happens less through location
than through the refusal to disappear,
through the willingness to face what presents itself.
Through medication and practice.
Through therapy and truth-telling.
Through the small acts of continued presence. The medicines on the shelf speak to this.
They whisper: you are worth keeping alive.
They testify: your suffering is real and your resistance is real.
They proclaim: wellness is beside the point, you have only to show up. I have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety.
Two years now, and the understanding only deepens.
What I thought was strength was the weight of unprocessed grief.
What I believed was discipline was the armour of a mind protecting itself. But I am tired of that work.
So on this third shore, México, I am learning a different language.
Spanish words, yes, among others.
Rather, the language of permission.
The vocabulary of limits.
The grammar of self-compassion. Mexico was supposed to be my healing place.
It still may be.
But in ways I had never imagined.
Instead, it is becoming the place where I learn
that healing is the practice of becoming, beyond transformation into someone new.
It is the practice of showing up, exactly as I am,
again and again and again.

P.S.

I arrived in México without knowing that the next thirty days would fundamentally change how I understood myself. I came expecting the sea, the warmth, the distance to heal me. Instead, I have come to realize that healing is something you do, rather than something that happens to you. It is something you become willing to do.

These photographs, this documentation of my daily pills and the darkness of depression, are evidence of that willingness. They show me, now in retrospect, that I have stopped hiding. That somewhere between arriving broken and these final days, I learned to call myself by my real name instead of apologizing for taking up space.

This journey has changed what I believe is possible. The struggle stays, and I can live alongside it with honesty. With medication and practice. With the simple, radical act of showing up for myself, again and again.

That is the real transformation.

Here rests the evidence of care: beyond cure, beyond triumph, the steady labour of staying.
These objects mark a life held together by honesty, support, and the courage to be seen.
I name them without shame, as architecture for survival and witnesses to persistence.
I was here. I chose to remain.

Title: What the Ceiling Could No Longer Hold

Artist Statement

I noticed this damage only after I had stopped looking for meaning. The ceiling, a surface meant to be invisible and dependable, had begun to give way. Paint peeled back in layers, exposing what lay beneath, tracing a quiet rupture that had been forming long before it announced itself.

I am drawn to these moments of structural honesty. The failure is cumulative, rarely sudden. Moisture, pressure, time. What appears as neglect is often endurance pushed past its capacity. This image became a mirror for how strain registers when it is carried silently, when maintenance replaces care, and when surfaces are expected to remain intact regardless of what they absorb.

I photographed this as testimony, beyond any record of decay. A record of something refusing to perform wholeness any longer. The peeling paint refuses to dramatize its condition. It simply tells the truth of what it can no longer contain.

In attending to this fracture, I am practising a form of witnessing that matters deeply to my work: staying with what breaks slowly, without assigning blame, and allowing the evidence of wear to be seen.

Title: I am Still Here

Artist Statement (Scholarly Personal Narrative Reflection)

This photograph was taken while standing at the edge of still water, where reflection replaces surface and the ground seems to hold more than it reveals. I had no intention of photographing myself. I was noticing the clarity of the water, the way the mountain line folded into the sky, when my shadow entered the frame. Long, elongated, almost unfamiliar in proportion, it stretched across the shoreline and into the mirrored landscape beyond.

I paused when I saw it. There was something steadying in the recognition. The body appears here only as silhouette, reduced to outline and posture, yet unmistakably present. The shadow performs nothing. It explains nothing. It simply marks existence within a particular moment of light.

In my reflective practice, I have been thinking about visibility and endurance. About what remains when identity markers fall away, when professional roles, expectations, and external validations grow quieter. The shadow becomes a kind of evidence. Proof of standing. Proof of continuing. Proof that presence requires no spectacle to be real.

The water holds both the world and its inversion. Sky below, earth above. The image rests within that reversal, suggesting that survival is rarely linear. We move through reflection, through distortion, through unfamiliar angles of self-recognition. Yet even within inversion, the body remains upright, held by gravity and ground.

This photograph reminds me that persistence is often quiet. It rarely announces itself in milestones or declarations. Sometimes it appears as a shadow at the shoreline, lengthened by late light, steady and unbroken.

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.

ACADEMIC LENS

The morning light on the medication bottles constitutes what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call a “found data” moment: an arrangement of ordinary objects that suddenly crystallizes the research’s central concerns. The medications, each representing a different dimension of the body’s history of unaddressed distress, enact what van der Kolk (2014) documents as the somatisation of accumulated stress: the way psychological burden, when unattended, eventually registers as physiological disorder. The decision to look inward on day thirty, rather than outward toward the sea that has dominated the month’s attention, marks a developmental shift in the inquiry: from the restorative (looking out) to the integrative (looking in). Moustakas (1961) describes this as the “creative synthesis” phase of heuristic inquiry: the moment when all that has been gathered is brought together in a new, more complex understanding. The question “what gives me life?” also resonates with the World Health Organization’s (1948) definition of health as the presence of wellbeing rather than merely the absence of disease, the presence of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing: a standard that precarious institutional life systematically undermines.

Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak

Day 29: the shore begins to speak in a language that requires stillness to hear. On presence, wonder, nature, and the particular quality of knowing that comes when you have been quiet long enough for the world to trust you.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Title: Two Among Many

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 1.

Artist Statement

I stopped when I saw them. Two pale stones resting together in a field of red, their muted tones pressing close as if they had arrived as a pair. The volcanic rock surrounding them was textured and vivid, pocked with air bubbles from ancient heat, dyed the colour of rust and dried blood. The two lighter stones held their difference quietly, without apology.

This is one of the rare photographs in my collection that I have kept in colour. The decision was deliberate. Most of my photographs are black and white. Colour, for me, has to earn its place. Here, the red demanded to be seen. The contrast between the two pale stones and the field of crimson that held them would have collapsed into sameness without it. The image required colour to speak its meaning.

I am drawn to what resists matching. To the presence that stands apart without performing its difference. These two stones arrived without design. They were placed by no one, creating contrast and illustrating a point. They simply came to rest where the ground received them, and in resting, they found each other. The image holds no drama. It offers only the quiet fact of two things that belong together amid a landscape to which they bear no resemblance.

I have often felt like the pale stone in a field of red. Present but visibly different. Held by the same ground as everyone else, yet marked by texture and tone that set me apart. This photograph makes no claim to resolve that feeling. It simply witnesses it. The two stones lean toward one another, their edges nearly touching, as if proximity itself were a form of kinship.

The volcanic rock speaks to heat and transformation, to pressure that reshapes matter into something porous and lasting. The pale stones speak to another origin, another journey. They share the frame without sharing a story. What holds them together is only the ground beneath and the eye that noticed them, paused, and chose to preserve the encounter.

Where the Shore Begins to Speak

Wonder was far from what I came here seeking.
I came to rest,
to fold the sharp corners of thought
into something dull and silent.

But the land had other plans.
It began in the hush of the tide,
a language I almost remembered.
Salt tracing old maps across my ankles,
sand whispering through the creases of my shoes.

A shell, cracked.
A stone, too smooth to be accidental.
Even the wind seemed to pause,
just long enough
to ask if I was listening.

I watched a crab write its name in the shallows,
unconcerned with permanence.
Watched a gull lift, drop, lift again,
more patient than I have ever been.

Slowly,
The shore began to stitch its rhythm into me.
Beyond grandeur,
with quiet insistence,
the way grief teaches,
or healing,
or soil under fingernails.

Here, I found interest,
an invitation rather than a spark.
A kind of leaning-in
to what has always waited
beneath the noise of being useful.

And I began to understand:
The land asks nothing of performance.
It asks for presence
And maybe, at last,
I am learning how to offer that

Title: Tidebound

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 2.

Artist Statement

This image captures a solitary brick caught in the meeting of ocean and sand an object out of place, yet strangely grounded. I was struck by the quiet resilience of this fragment of construction, shaped for structure and permanence, now yielding to saltwater and tide. It no longer serves its original purpose, and yet it remains, weathered, softened, still unmistakably present.

In the context of my broader research on alonetude, embodiment, and recovery from institutional extraction, this photograph becomes a visual metaphor for the self in transition. The brick speaks to what remains after long periods of performance, labour, and containment. It holds the memory of function, but it no longer needs to fulfil it. The tide surrounds it without resistance. There is no urgency to prove worth.

This moment asks: what happens when we stop resisting erosion? When we allow the forces around us to touch us, wear us down, soften our edges, transforming rather than defeating?

Here, the brick becomes more than debris. It becomes evidence. Of survival. Of change. Of the beauty that emerges when we are no longer trying to hold our original shape.

Title: Trace of Ascent

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 3.

Artist Statement

This feather, resting alone on darkened sand, holds the quiet memory of flight. It is no longer airborne, yet it carries the architecture of uplift: spine, barbs, hollow shaft, all evidence of having once moved with wind and intention. What drew me to this image was its stillness, residue rather than absence: the presence of something that has passed through, marked by both release and belonging.

In the context of my arts-based inquiry into alonetude and embodied presence, this feather becomes a metaphor for what remains after movement. It invites reflection on what we shed, what we carry, and what we recognize only after landing. Unlike the frantic need to perform, this moment asks nothing. It simply offers itself as witness.

Here, the feather is returned, beyond lost. To earth. To texture. To the soft hush of enoughness.

Title: To Need No Monument

I walk,
beyond arriving,
to remember
what it feels like
to move without performance.

Each step presses gently
into the wet hush of sand,
a temporary record,
beyond purpose,
simply presence.

No one is watching.
There is no rubric for how I place my feet.
No metrics trace the curve of my wandering.
Still, the earth notices.

The tide asks nothing
of earning this peace.
It rises all the same,
softening the edges of every impression
until all that remains
is rhythm.

I am learning to love
What is passing?
To walk for the sake of walking.
To be the kind of story
That holds its truth
beyond the telling.

Let the waves erase me.
Let the next morning’s light find
no evidence but smoothness.
That, too, is a kind of grace,
to know I was here,
and to need no monument.

Title: Evidence of Passing

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 4.

Artist Statement

This image captures a winding trail of footprints pressed into damp shoreline, slowly softening under the pull of tide and time. What compelled me to take this photograph was their impermanence rather than their presence, the quiet truth that every mark we make is always in the process of being undone.

As part of my inquiry into alonetude and embodied recovery, this image speaks to the paradox of solitude: we walk alone, yet leave traces. In academic and institutional contexts, I was conditioned to believe that only visible, measurable output mattered. But here, the act of walking, with no destination, no audience, no performance, is itself enough. The shore records without judgment, erases without malice.

Evidence of Passing reminds me that presence requires no permanence as proof. It is proven through being. Each footprint is both an arrival and a letting go.

Title: What the Rocks Remember

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 5.

Artist Statement

This image captures a gathering of volcanic stones, worn shells, and sunbaked earth: a convergence of textures that have withstood heat, weight, and time. I was drawn to the contrasts: hardness beside fragments, shadows against brightness, the jagged edges of endurance softening into the granular memory of dissolution.

Each rock holds a story that predates language. Each shell, a hushed echo of a body once held. Together, they create a kind of grounded archive: one requiring no explanation, only attention. In the context of my arts-based inquiry into precarity, embodiment, and alonetude, this scene offers a reminder that presence can take many forms, and some resist smoothness and easy containment.

Here, survival is sedimented rather than silent, deliberate rather than dramatic. These exceed the traditional monument. They are records of what withstood and what remains, unpolished, unnamed, enough.

Title: Altar of the Ordinary

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 6.

Artist Statement

This shoreline shrine, assembled from painted shells, broken tiles, and sea-washed stones, stands as a communal gesture, unofficial, unclaimed, yet unmistakably sacred. I was moved by the way everyday objects, often overlooked, had been offered with quiet intention. A single blue rock. A painted Virgin. A bottle nestled among fragments. Nothing expensive, nothing pristine. And yet, everything chosen.

In the context of my research into alonetude, belonging, and the ethics of presence, this altar reveals the sacredness of the unremarkable. Built without fanfare, maintained without instruction, it is a collective act of noticing. These materials were gathered to witness, beyond any desire to impress. To remember. To offer.

There is no plaque here, no inscription. Only the evidence that someone stopped long enough to care, to arrange, to leave something behind. It reminds me that memory can be handmade. That holiness can be found in what the sea returns.

This exceeds any monument to power. It is a testament to tenderness.

Title: Throne for No One

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 7.

Artist Statement

This weathered structure, assembled from slabs of broken concrete and rimmed with small white shells, sits quietly before a vast and mountainous horizon. It evokes a throne, but one with no occupant, no ceremony, no claim. What moved me most was its paradox: it suggests importance, yet resists ownership. It holds form, yet refuses to declare function.

In my research on alonetude, trauma-informed practice, and the ethics of retreat from visibility, this piece became a meditation on authority reimagined. Who gets to take up space? Who builds thrones, and who are they for? This monument seems to ask a different question altogether: What if the seat of power is emptiness? What if it invites rest rather than dominance?

The shells, carefully placed along the cracks, remind us that care can live within ruin. This is beyond a pedestal. Beyond an altar. It is a possibility: a place where no one rules, yet everything is held.

Title: What Remains May Smile

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 8.

Artist Statement

This fragment of bone, likely a lower jaw, worn smooth by time and sand, lay half-buried, yet unmistakably visible. What caught my eye was the accidental pattern of holes, worn into something resembling a smile. Unintentional. Uncanny. A gesture of joy etched into what should speak of loss.

In my arts-based inquiry into alonetude, institutional fatigue, and the body’s quiet ways of knowing, this image became a moment of unsettling wonder. Even in decomposition, there is expression. Even in absence, there is form. It asks us to consider the meanings we impose, and the ones that emerge without effort.

This exceeds the traditional memento mori. It cautions against nothing, glorifies no decay. Instead, it suggests something quieter: that even what breaks down can still hold presence, can still gesture toward feeling, can still, perhaps by accident, smile.

Title: Fragments That Refuse Disappearance

Photograph from “Day 29: When the Shore Begins to Speak”, image 9.

Artist Statement

I noticed these fragments while walking a narrow, uneven path where the ground was layered with stone, dust, and small evidence of what had once passed through. At first, the field of view felt monochrome, muted by earth tones and dryness. Then the glass caught the light. Small shards, dark and amber, scattered among the rocks as if the land itself had exhaled them.

I held my ground. I stood where I was and allowed my eyes to adjust, tracing the contrast between what was natural and what had been left behind. The glass belonged to a different time than the geological hillside. It belonged to interruption, to human presence, to a moment of discard now weathering into the terrain.

In my reflective practice, I am often drawn to sites where rupture and endurance coexist. These fragments hold that tension. Once whole, once functional, now broken and partially buried, they remain visible despite time and erosion. The land holds them in a kind of stasis, neither rejecting nor absorbing them fully. They exist in a suspended state, neither fully integrated nor entirely separate.

I photographed the scene as I encountered it, resisting the urge to rearrange or collect. There was meaning in the placement itself. The brokenness read as testimony rather than failure. Evidence that impact leaves trace. Evidence that what shatters persists. It persists, altered but present.

This image sits within my inquiry into what remains after disruption. Into how landscapes, like bodies, hold memory in fragments. Into how even the smallest shards carry narrative weight when we are willing to pause long enough to see them.

Epitaph

Here lies a fragment, once part of breath,
Now shaped by salt, silence, and time.
Changed but present,
Still telling a story,
Still holding a smile.

ACADEMIC LENS

At day twenty-nine, the shore’s voices are louder precisely because the body has become quiet enough to hear them. This is what Moustakas (1961) calls the “final dialogue” of heuristic inquiry: the phase in which the phenomenon under investigation begins to reveal its deepest dimensions, after sufficient time and attention have prepared the researcher to receive them. The two pale stones “resting together in a field of red” function as what Bachelard (1969) calls an image of intimacy: a small, particular arrangement of matter that holds more meaning than its scale suggests, opening the imagination into larger territories of relatedness and belonging. Van der Kolk (2014) observes that one of the fruits of trauma recovery is the restoration of this kind of perceptual aliveness: the capacity to be genuinely moved by ordinary things, which chronic hypervigilance and emotional numbing progressively foreclose. The nearing end of the thirty-day period also introduces the existential quality that Heidegger (1962) identified as the intensification of presence that finitude produces: knowing that this particular configuration of time, place, and selfhood is ending makes it even more available to attention.

Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours

Reading Time: 14 minutes

Finding Beauty in the Unexpected

Title: Held Within the Field

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 1.

Artist Statement

This piece emerged through repetition rather than planning. I began with a single shape, then another, and another, allowing colour and form to accumulate without imposing hierarchy. What developed was a dense field of rounded figures, each contained, each distinct, yet held within a shared space. The work unfolded beyond linear intention, through a quiet attentiveness to what wanted to appear.

In my reflective practice, circular and stone-like forms often surface when I am thinking about belonging, plurality, and the coexistence of emotional states. No single shape dominates the composition. Larger forms draw the eye momentarily, but they are held in balance by the many smaller presences surrounding them. This distribution mirrors how experience lives within me. No one memory or feeling stands alone. Each is shaped by proximity to others.

Colour operates here as emotional register. Bright pinks, deep blues, citrus orange, moss greens, and earth tones sit beside one another without blending. They remain intact, suggesting that complexity requires no resolution. Contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously without cancelling one another out. The dark outlines serve as holding structures, containers rather than barriers, allowing each fragment to remain visible while contributing to the whole.

What interests me most is the tension between density and spaciousness. Although the surface appears crowded, there is rhythm in the placement. Pathways of dark ground weave between the forms, creating movement and breath within the field. The composition holds fullness without collapse.

I understand this drawing as an exploration of internal multiplicity. A recognition that identity is plural rather than singular, gathered, layered, and continuously reassembled. Each form holds its own colour, its own boundary, its own story. Together, they create a living mosaic of presence.

The Flash of Perception

I almost walked past it. An orange, vivid and whole, resting on the dry earth as if it had been placed there by intention rather than chance. The ground around it was grey and brown, scattered with stones, dried grass, and brittle leaves. The orange held its colour like a small act of defiance. It did nothing to blend in. And yet here it was, this bright sphere of sweetness against a landscape of dust and stillness.

The orange held its colour like a small act of defiance.

This is the moment contemplative photographers call the flash of perception: that instant when something in the visual field stops you, interrupts the continuous scroll of seeing, and asks to be noticed. Karr and Wood (2011) describe this experience as connecting with perception before concept takes over, before the mind labels and dismisses. The orange was simply colour and form before it became orange, before it became a question of how it arrived or what it might mean.

This is the moment contemplative photographers call the flash of perception.

Me detuvo en seco. It stopped me cold. And in that stopping, I recognized something I had been missing in my practice of alonetude: the permission to see in colour.

I recognized something I had been missing in my practice of alonetude: the permission to see in colour.

Title: Sweetness in Dust

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 2.

Artist Statement

The orange arrived without explanation. Perhaps it fell from a bag. Perhaps it rolled from a table and was never retrieved. Perhaps someone left it as an offering, though to whom or what I cannot say. The fruit showed no sign of decay. Its skin was smooth, its form intact. Its slow return to the earth had yet to begin. For now, it simply rested, bright and round, waiting for what would come next. This is the only photograph in my collection that I have kept in colour. The choice was deliberate. In a body of work committed to black and white, to reduction and restraint, this image demanded something different. The orange refused to be muted. Its brightness was the point. To convert it to greyscale would have been to erase what made the encounter remarkable: the unexpected presence of sweetness in a landscape of dust and stillness. Amy Tucker, January 2026

I moved closer. This is what contemplative practice asks of us: to stay with what stopped us, to look longer, to resist the urge to glance and move on. The closer I came, the more the orange revealed. The texture of its skin. The small star where the stem once attached. The way light fell across its curved surface. In my years of academic work, I learned to keep distance, to analyze from above, to maintain the scholarly remove that institutions reward. This practice of moving closer feels like unlearning. The orange cares nothing about my credentials or my theoretical frameworks. It simply exists, vivid against volcanic pebbles, asking nothing of me except presence. Acercarme es un acto de confianza. Moving closer is an act of trust.

In my years of academic work, I learned to keep distance. This practice of moving closer feels like unlearning.

Defining Key Concepts

The decision to notice the orange was beyond me. My body responded before my mind caught up.

Visual Salience

Title: Fractures That Hold Light

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 3.

Artist Statement

This drawing began as an exploration of fragmentation. I was thinking about how experience rarely arrives in seamless form. Instead, it presents itself in angles, interruptions, and shifting planes. I allowed the lines to move first, creating divisions that felt organic rather than measured. Only afterward did colour enter, filling the spaces that had already claimed their boundaries.

What emerged was a stained-glass effect, though untied to any sacred architecture. The sacredness here feels internal. Each segment holds its own intensity. Bright yellows sit beside deep violets. Saturated pinks meet earth browns and dense blues. The colours resist blending. They remain intact, suggesting that contrast is coexistence rather than conflict.

In my reflective practice, fractured compositions often mirror psychological landscapes. Identity, memory, and healing rarely unfold as continuous surfaces. They exist in pieces that must learn to sit beside one another. Some segments feel expansive and open. Others feel enclosed, heavier, or more opaque. Yet all are necessary to the integrity of the whole.

The black lines function as both separation and structure. They divide, but they also hold. Without them, the colours would dissolve into each other. With them, each fragment is given legitimacy, a defined presence. I understand these lines as boundaries that have formed through experience. Protective, clarifying, and sometimes shaped by rupture rather than design.

There is no single focal point. The eye moves continuously, tracing edges, following colour pathways, pausing where intensity gathers. This movement reflects the ongoing nature of integration. Healing is a sustained process of learning how the pieces live together.

I see this work as a meditation on wholeness assembled through fracture. A recognition that brokenness rearranges beauty rather than eliminating it. Light enters differently through divided spaces. And sometimes, it is precisely the fractures that allow illumination to pass through at all.

Visual salience refers to the quality that makes certain elements in a visual field stand out from their surroundings and automatically capture attention. Neuroscience research shows that the human visual system has evolved to detect stimuli that differ markedly from their context, particularly in colour, contrast, and luminance (Treue, 2003). When we encounter a bright orange against a field of browns and greys, our nervous system responds before conscious thought engages. This bottom-up attention capture served evolutionary purposes, helping our ancestors detect ripe fruit, potential predators, and social signals.

The decision to notice the orange was beyond me. My body responded before my mind caught up.

What stops me every time I think about it: I made no choice to notice the orange. My body chose. My body responded before my mind had a chance to form an opinion. This is what Porges (2011) describes in how the nervous system responds to safety and threat as the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the nervous system’s capacity to evaluate environmental cues without conscious involvement. In the context of healing from occupational trauma, relearning to trust these automatic responses feels like reclaiming territory that exhaustion had claimed.

Contemplative Photography

Contemplative photography is a practice that uses the camera as a tool for mindful seeing rather than technical image-making. Originating in Buddhist meditation traditions and systematically developed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s students, this approach emphasizes presence over perfection, perception over concept. Karr and Wood (2011) explain that the practice involves three stages: recognizing the flash of perception, stabilising connection through continued looking, and forming an image that captures what was seen rather than what the photographer wanted to see.

Karr and Wood (2011) define contemplation as a practice of receptive, open-ended presence, being with a subject rather than analysing it, allowing meaning to emerge rather than extracting it.

This definition resonates deeply with the practice of alonetude. To be present with something in an open space is precisely what this retreat asks of me: to remain in the liminal territory between loneliness and solitude, to transform imposed isolation into chosen presence through attention itself.

Playing with Bright Colours: A Departure

Throughout this retreat, I have committed to black-and-white photography, to reduction and restraint, to the greyscale palette that strips scenes down to their essential forms. This choice emerged from the desire to document exhaustion, aftermath, and the quiet work of healing without the distraction of colour’s emotional pull. Black-and-white photography creates distance, allows objects to become symbols, and privileges texture and contrast over the seduction of hue.

And yet.

Walking through Loreto, I found myself stopped again and again by colour. Bright, saturated, unapologetic colour that refused to be muted even in my imagination. The red of a plastic cup abandoned among grey leaves. The crimson of a painted butterfly on a white stone. The vivid orange of bougainvillea against ancient rock. The cheerful red of a classic Volkswagen Beetle parked on a quiet street. These colours were asking something of me, and what they asked was this: to let go, just a little, of the aesthetic framework I had imposed. To allow brightness back in.

El colour también es una forma de conocimiento. Colour is also a way of knowing.

Title: Party’s Over

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 4.

Artist Statement

I know this cup. I have held this cup at faculty gatherings, at end-of-term celebrations, at the casual socials that punctuated academic life before everything changed. The red Solo cup is North American shorthand for festivity, for letting loose, for the brief suspension of professional performance. Finding one here, among the grey leaves and brittle grass of a Loreto afternoon, felt like encountering an artifact from another life. Someone celebrated here. Someone gathered with others, drank something, discarded the evidence. The cup remains, cheerful and incongruous, long after the party ended. I photograph it because I recognize both the celebration and the aftermath. Because I am learning that endings leave traces, and sometimes those traces are bright red against a field of grey. Because the cup, like me, persists in a landscape that was never quite its home. Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Title: Someone Else’s Transformation

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 5.

Artist Statement

I have been painting stones throughout this retreat, transforming found objects into small monuments of presence and process. This stone was painted by someone else. I found it resting among grey pebbles, its white surface marked with a red butterfly, wings spread as if caught mid-flight. The butterfly is imperfect. The paint has texture and variation. This was made by hand, by a person who chose to mark this stone with a symbol of transformation and left it here for anyone to find. No estoy sola en esta práctica. I am alone in my practice, yet hardly the only one who practices. Somewhere in Loreto, or passing through, someone else felt the impulse to transform stone into meaning. Someone else left evidence of attention, of care, of the quiet human need to make marks on the world. I photograph this stone because it reminds me that alonetude connects to a larger community of those who attend, who notice, who create small beautiful things and release them into the world. Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Title: Global Red

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 6.

Artist Statement


The red of the Coca-Cola label is engineered to be seen. Billions of dollars and decades of research have ensured that this particular shade of red captures attention in any context, any culture, any landscape. Here it lies, crushed and discarded on dusty earth, still vivid, still demanding to be noticed. I have complicated feelings about photographing corporate debris. There is critique here: the reach of globalized consumer culture, the persistence of plastic in natural environments, the way branded objects colonize every corner of the world. And there is also simple visual truth: the red is beautiful against the brown. The bottle, for all it represents, still stopped me. Still asked to be seen. In my practice, I try to hold both truths. The systems that produce such objects are worthy of critique. The objects themselves still carry colour, still participate in the visual world, still have something to teach about persistence and salience and the stubborn brightness of things that refuse to disappear. Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Title: What the Land Offers

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 7.

Artist Statement

Unlike the cup, the bottle, the painted stone, this colour emerged from the land itself. Bougainvillea evolved its crimson bracts to attract pollinators, to ensure reproduction, to continue its lineage across generations. The red serves biological purpose. It exists because it works.

Against the grey stone of a Loreto wall, the flowers blazed with the kind of beauty that requires no justification, no theoretical framework, no scholarly analysis. They were simply, extravagantly, themselves.

I photograph them because they remind me that colour is older than human culture, that attention capture served survival long before it served commerce, that beauty has reasons we may never fully understand. La tierra también sabe crear belleza. The land also knows how to create beauty. In the practice of alonetude, where I am learning to trust my body's responses, these flowers offer evidence that brightness is natural, that noticing what is vivid is coded into the very structure of perception. Amy Tucker, January 2026

El Vocho Rojo: The Red Beetle

On a quiet street in Loreto, a red Volkswagen Beetle sat in the afternoon light like something from another decade. In México, these cars are called vochos, and they carry cultural significance beyond their mechanical function. For decades, the Beetle was the affordable, reliable car that connected communities, carried families, and moved through landscapes with a particular personality that contemporary vehicles somehow lack.

This one was red. Very red.

This one was red. Very red. Its colour commanded attention against the palm trees and blue sky, against the dusty street and white buildings. I photographed it twice: once from behind, its rounded form echoing the organic shapes of the oranges I had noticed elsewhere, and once from the side, showing its classic profile and the wear of years in a desert climate.

Hay belleza en lo que ha durado. There is beauty in what has endured.

Title: El Vocho: From Behind

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 8.

Amy Tucker, January 2026

Artist Statement

From behind, the Beetle's curves echo something organic. The rounded rear window, the gentle slope of the body, the way light plays across the painted surface. There is a face-like quality to this view, though I resist the urge to anthropomorphise. What strikes me instead is the car's solidity, its thereness, its quality of having persisted. This vocho has lived through decades of Baja California sun. Its red has faded slightly but remains vivid. Its form remains classic, recognisable, beloved. I photograph it because I am thinking about persistence, about what remains bright despite time and exposure, about the objects that carry cultural memory in their very shape. In my own life, I am learning what persists after institutional belonging ends. What colours remain when the context changes. What shape I hold when the structures that once defined me fall away. The vocho offers no answers, only presence: still red, still here, still beautiful after all these years. Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Title: El Vocho: Profile of Persistence

Photograph from “Day 27: Playing with Bright Colours”, image 9.

Artist Statement

Amy Tucker, January 2026

The side view reveals the Beetle's full profile: the distinctive silhouette that made it one of the most recognizable vehicles in history. Behind it, a building bears the words "Creo California," anchoring the scene in this place, this Baja California Sur afternoon. The car shows its age here.

Small imperfections, the patina of desert years, the evidence of continued use rather than museum preservation. This is a working vehicle, loved and maintained, still serving its purpose decades after it rolled off the assembly line. I see myself in this persistence. I am also showing my age, carrying my patina of difficult years, bearing the evidence of continued use. The vocho neither apologizes for its imperfections nor hides its history. It simply continues, red and present and itself. Seguir adelante también es una forma de belleza. To keep going is also a form of beauty. Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Table 1

Colour Instances and Their Personal Resonances

Image Title	Visual Element	Personal Connection
Connection to my own stone-painting practice; recognition that alonetude links to the larger community; shared impulse to create	Orange fruit on dry earth	Permission to see in colour; the flash of perception that initiated this collection; trusting automatic responses
Closer Still	Orange in close-up view	Unlearning scholarly distance; moving closer as an act of trust; presence over analysis
Party’s Over	Red plastic cup among leaves	Recognition of academic celebrations past; understanding endings leave traces; persistence after displacement
Someone Else’s Transformation	Painted butterfly stone	Connection to my own stone-painting practice; recognition that alonetude links to larger community; shared impulse to create
Global Red	Crushed Coca-Cola bottle	Holding critique and beauty simultaneously; learning to acknowledge complicated truths; seeing persistence in the problematic
What the Land Offers	Crimson bougainvillea	Trusting embodied responses; remembering colour is natural; beauty that requires no justification
El Vocho	Red VW Beetle	What persists after context changes; carrying patina with dignity; keeping going as a form of beauty

Note. This table maps each image to its visual content and the personal resonances that emerged through the practice of contemplative photography within the alonetude framework.

Reflection: What Colour Asks of Us

Permission to notice joy even in landscapes of recovery. Permission to be stopped by beauty that has nothing to do with achievement or productivity. Permission to let the eye rest on something simply because it delights.

Greenspan (2003) writes about befriending dark emotions as pathways to wisdom. But what of bright colours? What do they ask when they interrupt our carefully curated palette of greys and browns, of exhaustion and restraint? I think they ask for permission. Permission to notice joy even in landscapes of recovery. Permission to be stopped by beauty that has nothing to do with achievement or productivity. Permission to let the eye rest on something simply because it delights.

Paintner (2013) describes how a contemplative approach to seeing trains us to find beauty in ordinary things, recognizing the sacred embedded in the surfaces of everyday life. This kind of attentive looking, she argues, opens perception in ways that more casual or distracted seeing cannot.

These photographs hold a tension I am learning to inhabit: between my commitment to black-and-white documentation and the insistence that colour be seen. Both truths are real. Restraint has its purpose. And brightness has its own knowledge to offer. In the practice of alonetude, perhaps both are necessary. The greyscale for processing what has been lost. The vivid hue for remembering what remains.

I photographed the orange because I could neither look away nor imagine it in greyscale. I kept it in colour because some things ask to be seen exactly as they are. And in doing so, I gave myself permission to notice that healing includes brightness, that recovery holds room for delight, that even in the labour of alonetude, something sweet and vivid can rest on the ground, waiting to be found.

La belleza existe. Existe aquí. Existe ahora.

Beauty exists. It exists here. It exists now.

Some things ask to be seen exactly as they are.

References

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

Karr, A., & Wood, M. (2011). The practice of contemplative photography: Seeing the world with fresh eyes. Shambhala.

Paintner, C. V. (2013). Eyes of the heart: Photography as a Christian contemplative practice. Sorin Books.

Pink, S. (2013). Doing visual ethnography (3rd ed.). SAGE.

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

Treue, S. (2003). Visual attention: The where, what, how and why of saliency. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 13(4), 428-432. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0959-4388(03)00105-3

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

ACADEMIC LENS

The “unexpected beauty” described in this colour exploration reflects what Ulrich (1983) and Kaplan (1995) document as the aesthetic response to natural and created environments: an attention to vivid, complex colour that is intrinsically restorative. The artwork described here, emerging through “repetition rather than planning,” enacts what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls flow: the absorption in an intrinsically motivated activity where self-consciousness recedes and skill and challenge are in productive balance. Bachelard (1969) argued that colour, like all material phenomena, carries an imaginative charge that exceeds its perceptual properties, and that working with colour is a form of phenomenological engagement with the world’s affective dimensions. Van der Kolk (2014) identifies creative engagement as neurologically significant: the rhythmic, absorptive quality of making regulates the nervous system in ways that cognitive processing alone cannot. The bright colours pursued here also perform a small political act: Brown (2010) identifies colour, playfulness, and joy as forms of resistance to the cultural demand for muted, managed self-presentation that institutional life enforces.

Day 25: Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and On My Own

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and on My Own

Title: Blue Sea, Held by the Blue Sky

Artist Statement

This painting emerged as a gesture of return. After weeks of walking the shoreline, collecting fragments, and listening to land and water, I needed to place the sea onto a surface I could hold. The layered blues follow the rhythm of tide and breath, moving from deep saturation to lighter wash. Each stroke records a moment of presence, a quiet settling of the body into colour and movement. This work reflects alonetude as practice, where the sea becomes both subject and teacher, and painting becomes a form of embodied listening. It will be a background in a future painting.

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

For a long time, I believed my creativity belonged to institutions.
To students who needed me.
To colleagues who relied on me.
To the fragile promise of a contract renewed.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped making anything beyond what served a syllabus, a publication target, or an institutional metric. My creative life narrowed into productivity. Art became output. Curiosity became compliance.

And then, quietly, I stopped creating.

Title: What Moves When I Stop Directing

Photograph from “Day 25: Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and On My Own”, image 2.

Artist Statement

I made this by staying with the movement rather than correcting it. Line followed line. Colour arrived before meaning. I skipped the sketching. I skipped the planning. I let the markers travel until they decided where to pause and where to press harder.

What this piece reminds me of is how much information lives in rhythm. The bands of colour feel like layers of time rather than landscape. Some are steady. Some break and rejoin. Some thicken where attention lingered. Others thin where the hand grew lighter. Nothing here is accidental, but nothing is controlled either. It emerged through staying present.

As I worked, I noticed how my body settled into repetition. The act became almost meditative. My breathing slowed. My thinking quieted. The colours began to speak to one another without my intervention. This feels important to name. I am learning to trust processes that unfold without explanation, to allow form to emerge through persistence rather than intention.

I have spent many years being rewarded for clarity, structure, and outcomes. This work lives outside that logic. It values continuity over completion. It holds variation without resolving it. The layered lines remind me that experience rarely moves in straight trajectories. It accumulates. It overlaps. It leaves traces.

This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of allowing. Allowing colour to lead. Allowing time to stretch. Allowing myself to make something without translating it into purpose or proof. What moves here is what happens when I stop directing and start listening.

This month by the sea, something shifted. Beyond drama. Beyond heroics. Imperfectly. Slowly. In fragments.

I began picking up broken tiles from an empty field. Photographing shadows. Washing stones. Holding a small crystal in my palm, noticing how geological time had softened my urgency. These were beyond grand projects. They were gestures. Small acts of attention. But they felt like the return of something that had been taken from me.

Title: Morning Memories

Photograph from “Day 25: Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and On My Own”, image 3.

Artist Statement

This painting emerged as a memory of light rather than a literal horizon. The layered oranges, reds, and soft purples trace the moment when day releases itself into evening, and the body follows. The low sun and mirrored water create a quiet symmetry that feels both external and internal, a horizon held in the mind as much as on the page.

This work reflects alonetude as a temporal practice, where colour becomes a way of marking time, emotion, and transition. Painting this scene was an act of slowing, of staying with a moment that would otherwise pass unnoticed.
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Creativity research tells us that creative processes often emerge through incubation, wandering attention, and unconscious processing rather than deliberate effort (Dijksterhuis & Meurs, 2006; Sio & Ormerod, 2009). In other words, creativity returns when we stop forcing it. It returns when we walk, when we notice, when we allow the body to lead.

Title: Learning Where to Stand

Photograph from “Day 25: Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and On My Own”, image 4.

Artist Statement

I began this piece without knowing where it would settle. Colour arrived first, then shape, then a sense of ground. The mountains emerged gradually, as forms that hold rather than landmarks to be conquered, their place quietly. Below them, layers of colour gathered and curved, suggesting movement, water, and time passing without urgency.

What this work brings forward for me is the question of position. Where I place myself in relation to what feels vast. The mountains leave the page undominated. They sit within it, held by the same field of colour that moves around and beneath them. This feels important. I have spent years orienting myself upward, toward peaks of achievement and recognition. This piece asks me to notice what happens when I attend instead to the layers that carry me forward.

As I worked, I felt a steadying in my body. The repetition of lines became grounding. The colours shifted from sharp to blended, from separate to relational. Nothing here is fixed. Everything is in conversation. The land, the water, the sky, and the unseen movements between them coexist without hierarchy.

This drawing belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and listening for where I am held rather than where I am headed. It reflects a growing trust in process and in place. I am learning that orientation rarely comes from striving upward. Sometimes it comes from noticing the ground beneath my feet and allowing the landscape, internal and external, to shape how I stand.

Trauma research echoes this. Arts-based practices are widely recognized as therapeutic pathways for emotional regulation, sense-making, and recovery (Leavy, 2020; van der Kolk, 2014). Creativity is beyond decoration. It is a regulation. It is restoration. It is a way back to ourselves.

I am learning that my creativity has no requirement to be polished, productive, or legible to anyone else. Peer review is no requirement for validity. Grant language is no requirement for justification. It can be quiet. It can be messy. It can be mine.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described creativity as a state of flow, where attention is absorbed and time dissolves (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). I am finding glimpses of that flow again, through drawing and noticing rather than in writing articles or designing courses, through noticing light on glass, arranging fragments on a table, walking slowly across a field that once looked empty.

Title: Layers I Can Live Inside

Photograph from “Day 25: Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and On My Own”, image 5.

Artist Statement

This piece arrived through accumulation rather than decision. I worked from the top down and the bottom up at the same time, letting bands of colour stack, interrupt, and settle into one another. The lines are deliberate yet fluid. They move because my hand moved, because my body needed rhythm more than precision.

What this work reflects back to me is a growing comfort with complexity. Nothing here resolves into a single horizon. The mountains press forward, the water holds steady, the fields pulse with texture, and the sky refuses to remain quiet. Each layer insists on its own presence while making room for the others. That feels true to how I am living right now.

I notice how the black outlines both contain and release the colour. They mark edges without closing things off completely. This matters to me. I have spent a long time inside structures that demanded clarity, hierarchy, and singular direction. This drawing allows for overlap. It allows for coexistence. It allows for a landscape that can hold many tempos at once.

As I worked, my body stayed engaged. The repetition of horizontal movement grounded me. The brighter colours emerged where energy rose. The cooler tones settled where I needed rest. I let the unevenness stand. I let it speak. The drawing became a record of attention rather than a depiction of place.

This piece belongs to my inquiry into how layers form a life. Experience accumulates. It layers rather than replaces itself cleanly. Old patterns remain visible beneath new ones. What matters is whether the layers can be lived inside without strain.

Here, they can.

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

This feels like a small rebellion against academic capitalism, against the extraction of time, against the idea that creativity must always be monetised, published, or measured. It feels like choosing to create for no audience except myself and the land that is teaching me how to look again.

I am imperfectly bringing back my creativity on my own.
And that feels like freedom.

Title: Fragments, Returning

Photograph from “Day 25: Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and On My Own”, image 6.

Artist Statement

This image marks my return to creative practice in fragments rather than finished forms. I gathered these objects, glass, tile, stone, and crystal, while walking through places I once passed without stopping. Each piece carries traces of use, weather, and abandonment, yet also holds colour, texture, and presence. Collecting them was intuitive, guided by the body before the mind could explain why.

For many years, my creativity was shaped by institutional demands, productivity metrics, and the precarious rhythms of contract academic labour. This work emerges from stepping outside those structures. The fragments are both material and metaphor. They reflect how creative life returns imperfectly, in partial gestures, slow noticing, and unplanned encounters with place.

This photograph is part of my arts-based inquiry into trauma, recovery, and relational ways of knowing. Handling these fragments grounded me in the present moment and offered a tactile form of mindfulness. Creativity here is beyond outcomes. It is a practice of attention, a refusal to walk past what appears empty, and a quiet reclaiming of making as personal, relational, and ethical work.

Reference

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.

Dijksterhuis, A., & Meurs, T. (2006). Where creativity resides: The generative power of unconscious thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(1), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.03.007

Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014212

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

ACADEMIC LENS

The “gesture of return” that this post names in relation to painting describes what Winnicott (1971) called the recovery of the capacity for play that institutional life suppresses. The decision to paint imperfectly, and explicitly on one’s own terms, is a methodological as well as an artistic statement: it enacts what Brown (2009) identifies as the essential quality of genuine play, that it is intrinsically motivated rather than performed for an audience. Bachelard (1969) argued that creative work with material substances, paint, water, the physical resistance of the canvas, engages the imagination at a pre-linguistic level, allowing the body’s knowing to find form before conceptual thought can intervene and redirect it. Van der Kolk (2014) identifies creative expression as one of the primary pathways through which trauma recovery occurs: the nervous system’s frozen energy, held in bodily tension, releases through the rhythmic, sensory engagement of making. The Sea of Cortez placed on canvas is also a form of what Tuan (1977) calls topophilic attachment made visible: the love of place taking on permanent form through the hand’s repeated, intimate encounter with its colours and shapes.

Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired

Reading Time: 10 minutes

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

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

When Something Breaks Open

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

The absence of reading revealed a movement toward presence.

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

The disruption became data.

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

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 1.

Cover image sourced from Amazon for reference purposes.

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

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

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

I chose to read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience at this moment because After years of equating movement with meaning and busyness with worth, I wanted to return to a text that speaks directly to the quality of attention rather than the quantity of output. Csikszentmihalyi’s work has long been associated with peak performance and optimal functioning, but what drew me back to it now was a quieter question: what does it mean to be fully engaged without being consumed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading as a Way of Avoiding Feeling

Title: Travelling Library

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 2.

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

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

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

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

Title: Between Shelter and the Sky

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 3.

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

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

Performance, Identity, and Misnaming Eccentricity

Title: Multiplicity Beyond Fracture

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 4.

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

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

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

What Alonetude Actually Asks of Me

Title: Setting Down What Once Carried Me

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 5.

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

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

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

Alonetude asks me to sit without filling the silence.

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

What I Understand Now

Title: Stillness, with a Pen in Hand

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 6.

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

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

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

What would it take to stay?

Title: Grounded Enough to Stay

Photograph from “Day 21: The End of Escape: I Am Tired”, image 7.

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACADEMIC LENS

“Something breaks open” names the phenomenon that Levine (2010) describes as the somatic completion of a long-held defensive response: the moment when the body, having been given sufficient safety and time, releases what survival had held in check. Van der Kolk (2014) observes that this surfacing of grief and exhaustion is a sign of healing rather than regression: it requires more safety to feel what has been carried than it does to continue carrying it. The exhaustion described here is thus paradoxically evidence of progress. Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence helps explain why the grief arrives in force only now: nineteen years of accumulated harm cannot be processed on the timeline that produced it; recovery requires the counter-temporality of unhurried, unclaimed time. Menakem (2017) describes this phase of somatic work as “metabolizing”: the body processing what it has held, converting frozen energy into movement, sensation, and feeling. The discipline maintained through this period, the continued practice of presence and inquiry, is what Moustakas (1961) calls the commitment of heuristic research: staying with the phenomenon even when it becomes uncomfortable.

Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista

Reading Time: 11 minutes

What Arrives When You Are Ready

Title: Can You See Me?

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 1.

The Grief I Have Been Holding

This morning I cried.

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

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

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

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

Finalmente segura para sentir. Finally safe enough to feel.

What Greenspan Teaches About Dark Emotions

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

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

According to Greenspan (2004), dark emotions serve a purpose. Like physical pain, they are signals asking to be heard.

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

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

El dolor tiene propósito. The pain has purpose.

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

This reframes everything.

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

Title: Turkey Vulture

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 2.

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

So I carried it. Held it. Waited.

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

Ahora es seguro. Now it is safe.

The Three Skills of Emotional Alchemy

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

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

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

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

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

Title: An Afternoon Scratch

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 3.

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

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

I surrendered. Let the crying happen. Let it move. Let it flow without trying to contain, control, or finish it quickly. Greenspan (2004) argues that surrendering to fear is itself a way of living honestly. The same is true for grief. Surrendering to grief is allowing life to move through you honestly.

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

Vulnerability as the Power of No Protection

Greenspan (2004) opens one chapter with the image of an open heart as a threshold, that even in the darkest places, the world retains its charge of the sacred.

This terrifies me and compels me at the same time.

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

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

Greenspan (2004) frames this as vulnerability as a form of radical openness rather than weakness, openness, a willingness to remain available to pain and loss, but equally to love, wonder, intimacy, and the full aliveness of being human. In her framing, vulnerability is the condition that makes genuine experience possible.

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

La vulnerabilidad requiere seguridad primero. Vulnerability requires safety first.

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

Title: I See You

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 4.

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

Emotions Live in the Body

One of Greenspan’s (2004) seven foundations holds that emotions are embodied: they live in the body rather than purely as mental events; they and in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Title: Pelicans Flying Over the Sea

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 5.

What This Means

Alonetude is proving more complex than I initially understood.

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

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

Greenspan (2004) writes that healing requires a witness, that without something to hold the emotional experience, the process cannot complete itself. In conventional therapeutic contexts, the listener is the therapist. But in alonetude, the listener is the self. Is the body attending to itself? Is the nervous system learning to hold what it previously could hold only in stored, frozen form?

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

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

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

Title: Sands of Time

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 6.

The Widsom of Grief

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

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

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

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

Del dolor a la gratitud. From pain to gratitude.

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

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

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

Title: Safe Enough to Feel

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 7.

Credit: NotebookLM, 2026

Title: Can You See Me?

Photograph from “Day 17: Lo Que Llega Cuando Estás Lista”, image 8.

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

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

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

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

Title: Frameworks and Concepts for Healing Dark Emotions

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and 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.

Academic Lens

What arrives when you are ready, unforced and unscheduled, is the subject of intrinsic motivation theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000): genuine curiosity and creative impulse emerge when the conditions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met, and collapse under surveillance and external contingency. The readiness named here is also body-based: van der Kolk (2014) argues that the body must settle before the mind can receive. This entry documents what Lorde (1988) called the uses of the erotic, the knowledge that arrives through feeling rather than analysis.

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

Reading Time: 10 minutes

I spent the last few days talking to rocks.

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

And here is the thing. They answered.

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

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

Title: Rock Chairs

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 1.

The Rock That Looks Like It Is Melting

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

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

Title: The History of Time

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 2.

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

I stood there for twenty minutes just staring.

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

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

Hold the memory of heat without burning.

Carry what happened without being destroyed by it.

Be transformed by fire but remain myself through the transformation.

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

Esta piedra recuerda. This stone remembers.

And it is teaching me how to remember without burning.

The One That Is Broken But Still Standing

Title: Crack in the Wall

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 3.

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

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

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

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

I looked at this fracture for a long time.

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

And I thought maybe breaking is just honest.

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

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

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

Here is where I broke.

Here is where stress exceeded capacity.

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

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

It is part of the story.

The Smooth One That Should Be Rough

Title: Rock Face

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it feels the opposite.

It feels freeing.

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

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

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

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

Simplemente sucede. It simply happens.

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

Title: Rock Tunnel

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 5.

The One Covered in Barnacles

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

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

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

And I thought this is me at sixty.

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

And this is okay.

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

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

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

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

The Fingers Reaching Toward Sky

Title: Fingers Reaching for the Sky

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 6.

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

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

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

But they look like they’re reaching.

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

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

And I thought maybe this is enough.

Maybe reaching without grasping is valid.

Maybe the attempt itself matters.

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

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

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

Alcanzar sin llegar. To reach without arriving.

This too is valid.

The effort itself matters.

Title: Rock Face

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 7.

What I Am Learning From Stone

Title: Life in the Stone

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 8.

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

And here is what they are teaching me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Small Stone I Carried Home

Title: Special Rock

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 9.

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

I brought it back to the cottage.

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

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

This rock is a teacher I brought home.

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

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

Will be cool under my hand when I need cooling.

Will be solid when I need grounding.

Will be patient when I have forgotten how.

Esta piedra recuerda a mí. This rock reminds me.

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

Y está bien. And that is okay.

A Question For You

Title: Standing Dreams

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 10.

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

No analyzing. No using. No thinking about it. Simply sitting with it. Letting it teach through its presence. It is patience. It’s a way of being in the world.

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

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

And I am finally slow enough to learn.

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

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

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

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

Title: Rock Stories

Photograph from “Day 16: Talking to Rocks (And Listening When They Answer)”, image 11.

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

ACADEMIC LENS

The practice of conversing with rocks described here enacts what Abram (1996) calls the animist dimension of perceptual experience: the way deep, unhurried attention to non-human others can restore the reciprocal quality of perception that modernity has flattened. Tuan’s (1977) phenomenology of place attachment is central: the volcanic rock faces of Coronado Island become meaningful through the sustained, curious attention that transforms mere space into intimate place. Bachelard (1969) argued that the imagination thinks through material substances, and that stone carries particular phenomenological qualities of resistance, duration, and permanence that offer the imagination something to lean against. The phrase “they answered” is a methodological claim rather than metaphorical naïveté,ly rigorous claim: Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry holds that genuine attention to any phenomenon eventually generates disclosure. Van der Kolk (2014) would contextualize this practice within the wider somatic recovery project: learning to attend patiently to something outside the self, without agenda, as a rehearsal for attending patiently to the self in the same way.

Day 15: La Edad y El Juego

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Age and Play

Title: Playing in the Sand

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 1.

The Sea Lions Know Something I Forgot

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

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

And then yesterday. The sea lions.

Title: Lions Playing on the Rocks

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 2.

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

And they were playing.

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

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

Title: Star Sunshine

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 3.

Alegría. Joy.

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

What I Learned About Growing Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 4.

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

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

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

This word stopped me: suppression.

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

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

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

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

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

Title: Sea Lions Playing

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small. But real. And growing.

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

What Play Looks Like When It First Returns

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

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

No plan. No goal. No timer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Estoy aprendiendo. I am learning.

Lentamente. Slowly.

Lero aprendiendo. But learning.

The Paradox That Makes Me Laugh

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

I am turning the recovery of play into academic work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 6.

Me río de mí misma. I laugh at myself.

What Sixty Knows That Twenty Could Barely Imagine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Title: Volcanic Rocks

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 7.

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

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

No sólo descansando. More than resting.

Curando. Healing.

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

What the Sea Lions Teach About Successful Aging

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

But the sea lions suggest a different model.

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

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

This feels important.

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

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

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

If this is true, then learning to play at sixty is a contribution, not a form of regression. It is resistance. It is saying, “This is what aging can look like.” Alive. Present. Joyful. Still learning. Still curious. Still capable of surprise. No grimness, no resignation, no decline toward inevitable loss.

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

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

Title: New Directions

Photograph from “Day 15: La Edad y El Juego”, image 8.

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Lens

Age and play in the same frame raises the question of what Brown (2010) calls the permission to be imperfect: the cultural prohibition on adult play is internalized most deeply in those whose worth has been contingent on productivity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) identifies play as the purest form of autotelic experience, activity valuable in itself beyond any outcome. The bodily joy described in this entry is also a body-based signal of the nervous system's continued decompression: Porges (2011) notes that playfulness is a marker of genuine safety engagement, a physiological state unavailable under chronic threat.

Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra

Reading Time: 14 minutes

Ballenas y Piedra / Whales and Stone

Title: The Sea of Cortez

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 1.

I had no plan to see whales.

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

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

Title: Grey Whale

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 2.

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

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

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

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

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

Learning Scale Through Bodies

I have been thinking about scale.

Title: Egypt Gods

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 3.

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

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

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

Title: Sea Lions on the Rocks

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 4.

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

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

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

Fire Becoming Stone: On Transformation and Time

We continued toward Coronado Island, and I was quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touching Ground: what the body knows

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

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

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

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

Title: Volcano Rocks

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 5.

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

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

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

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

Finding Pattern in Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witness of Joy

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

Title: Sea Lions Playing

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 6.

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

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

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

Title: The Lioness

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 7.

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

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

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

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

Making Meaning

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

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

Title: Afternoon Seista

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 8.

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

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

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

Title: Sea Lions

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 9.

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

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

Title: Rock Formations

Photograph from “Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra”, image 10.

Gracias, ballenas. Thank you, whales.

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

Gracias, piedra volcánica. Thank you, volcanic stone.

Por recordarme el juego. To remind me about play.

Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you, body.

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

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

References

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

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Academic Lens

Whales and stone: two orders of time meeting the human body. The whale's presence, a creature of vast scale, indifferent to the observer, is a profound instance of what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call extent: an environment large enough to contain and exceed the self, producing the felt sense of being part of something beyond individual concern. This encounter also instantiates alonetude (Tucker, 2026) at its most expansive: alone in the presence of something vast, the self becomes appropriately small, and the experience is freeing rather than frightening.