Puesta de sol, sunset on Day Two in Loreto. A bilingual reflection on the particular quality of light at the end of a first full day by the sea, and what the body begins to release when the world turns gold.
Sunset at the horizon.
This was something else entirely: a quality of presence, of being genuinely with myself rather than merely by myself.
Title: The Gathering
Artist Statement
They gathered where the land gives way to water.
Perched along the rocks, they faced different directions, yet remained part of the same quiet formation. No urgency. No competition for space. Just bodies arranged along the shoreline, each holding its own stillness while sharing the same horizon.
I stood at a distance watching them.
What struck me was their patience. The way they waited without signalling waiting. The way they scanned the water without appearing restless. There was a rhythm to their presence that felt familiar to me, a kind of learned stillness that comes from spending long periods observing rather than intervening.
In that moment, I recognised something of my own practice reflected back.
This work of standing at edges. Of watching what moves beneath the surface. Of trusting that some moments ask only to be witnessed. Some moments ask only for attention. For steadiness. For remaining long enough that the landscape forgets you are there.
The mountains behind them held their own quiet authority, grounding the scene in time beyond the immediate. Water, rock, wing, distance. Each element coexisting without demand.
I kept my distance.
I allowed the distance to remain intact, understanding that proximity rarely determines connection. Sometimes respect lives in observation alone.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
References
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
The evening I arrived in Loreto, Mexico, I stood on the malecón watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez, and I felt something without a name.
Some moments ask only for attention.
It was something beyond loneliness, though I was profoundly alone, 3,000 kilometres from home, knowing no one, with thirty days of solitude stretching before me. Neither was it the comfortable solitude I had glimpsed in rare moments throughout my life, those brief pauses between obligations when I might read undisturbed or walk without destination.
I had no words for this experience. During Covid, I learned to call this place alonetude.
For decades, psychological research has approached solitude primarily through a deficit lens, and rightly so. Social isolation carries mortality risks equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily. Loneliness predicts cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and depression. The public health imperative to address what former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called an “epidemic of loneliness” has produced essential knowledge and helped countless people.
But this focus created a gap. By treating solitude primarily as the absence of connection, we overlooked solitude as presence: the presence of self, meaning, and restoration that becomes available when social demands recede.
Alonetude requires four elements working together like legs of a table:
Intentional choice: Solitude must be chosen, never imposed. Research shows that autonomous motivation predicts positive outcomes regardless of introversion.
Felt safety: The nervous system must register it as safe. You cannot think your way into alonetude while your body scans for threat.
Present-moment awareness: Beyond rumination or distraction, genuine presence, what emerges when attention settles.
Meaning integration: Connection to values, purpose, or something larger than the passing moment.
Remove any one element, and the table collapses. Strength in one cannot compensate for the absence of another. This is the threshold model at the heart of the framework.
The Sea of Cortez cares nothing about whether humans theorise about solitude. The pelicans dive and surface following rhythms older than language. The mountains turn rose and gold at sunset regardless of who watches. But for those willing to participate, genuinely, patiently, with bodies regulated and hearts open, something becomes available. Presence to life, rather than escape from it. Presence of self, rather than absence of others.
Beyond loneliness and beyond mere solitude, something for which I needed a new word.
That word is alonetude. I offer it now as an invitation.
Presence to life, rather than escape from it.
Title: Welcome to Loreto
Artist Statement
My arrival was anything but quiet.
The letters announced it before I could. Large, textured, impossible to ignore. Covered in stickers layered over time, each one evidence that others had stood here too, marking their presence in colour and adhesive and memory. I stepped into the frame, aware that this was a different kind of shoreline moment than the solitary ones.
This was a public threshold.
Behind me, the Sea of Cortez stretched wide and steady, holding its own depth regardless of the spectacle in front of it. Mountains sat low along the horizon, grounding the scene in geological time while the foreground pulsed with tourism, movement, and human imprint. The contrast was immediate. Vastness behind. Declaration in front.
Traveller. Researcher. Body in place. Name unspoken yet presence visible. Unlike the quieter images, this one carries performance within it. Beyond the institutional sense of performance, simply acknowledging that sometimes presence is witnessed, documented, shared. That being in a place can hold both interior meaning and outward expression.
I left soon after the photograph.
I stepped away from the letters and back toward the waterline, where scale shifts again and the body becomes smaller against land and sea. Yet the image remains important because it marks arrival in a way solitude cannot do alone.
A pause between anonymity and recognition. Between landscape and inscription. Between being there and being seen.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
I am still here.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
Llegada, Arrival. Day Two in Loreto, Baja California Sur: the body touches down at last. A bilingual reflection on what it means to arrive somewhere alone, and to let the sea be the first thing you say hello to.
Arrival is the doorway through which everything else enters.
Screenshot
Artist Statement
This one came through quickly.
Unplanned. Unscripted. I drew it the way thoughts sometimes arrive when the body is tired but the mind is still moving. Lines first. Meaning later.
At first glance, it looks almost childlike. Loose marks. Unsteady figures. A pathway that curves without precision. Mountains on one side. Water on the other. Small symbols scattered across the space as if they surfaced faster than I could organise them.
But when I sat with it longer, I realised it was mapping something internal rather than geographical.
The road runs down the centre. Winding. Circuitous. It bends, loops, redirects. There are arrows that suggest movement but without certainty. It is a path that is being negotiated rather than followed.
On one side, there are figures and shapes that feel relational. Animals. Faces. Presences that suggest companionship, memory, or watchfulness. On the other side, sharper lines. Mountains. Edges. Terrain that feels more solitary, more effortful to cross.
There is even a small structure near the end of the path. Almost like a village, or a place of arrival. Yet it carries no detail. It sits lightly on the page, more suggestion than destination.
What strikes me most is the openness of the centre space. So much white. So much unfilled terrain.
It feels honest.
This drawing makes no claim to the whole route. It records movement in progress. The way journeys are often held internally before they become visible externally.
It reminds me that mapping is rarely about accuracy. Sometimes it is about witnessing where you are in the moment you draw the line.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
The plane descended over mountains I had only imagined. Below, the Sea of Cortez stretched turquoise and still, the body of water that Jacques Cousteau famously called the world’s aquarium (Pulitzer Centre, 2023). The desert rose glowed golden behind it, ancient and patient. I had come alone, deliberately, to a place where silence would be allowed to remain.
The flight attendant announced our arrival in two languages, but I barely heard her. My body had already begun the quieter work of landing. I noticed my shoulders softening, my breath slowing, the steady thrum of anticipation giving way to something gentler. Arrival, I would learn, begins before the wheels touch ground.
Where Desert Meets Sea
Loreto sits at the edge of two worlds. To the east, the Sea of Cortez stretches toward the Mexican mainland, its waters teeming with nearly 900 species of fish and 32 types of marine mammals (PanAmerican World, 2018). To the west, the Sierra de la Giganta rises abruptly from the desert floor, granite and volcanic rock shaped by millennia, holding canyons and ancient springs in its folds. This is a landscape of stark beauty, where the desert’s dry heat meets the sea’s salt-laden air.
This place carries layers of history that I was only beginning to understand on arrival. On October 25, 1697, the Jesuit missionary Juan María de Salvatierra founded the Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó at an Indigenous settlement called Conchó, home to the Monquí people (Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó, 2025). It became the first permanent Spanish mission on the Baja California peninsula. It served as the administrative capital of both Baja and Alta California for more than a century. The town’s motto still reads: “Loreto: Cabeza y Madre de las Misiones de las Californias,” which translates to “Head and Mother of the Missions of the Californias.”
Before the missions arrived, Indigenous peoples had inhabited this peninsula for thousands of years. The Cochimí lived in the central regions to the north, their rock art still visible in the Sierra de San Francisco, with paintings carbon-dated to over seven thousand years before present (Kuyimá Ecotourism, 2025). These were semi-nomadic peoples who moved with the rhythms of the desert and sea, living in small family bands that travelled seasonally in search of water, edible plants, and game (Cochimí, 2025). To the south lived the Guaycura and the Pericú. European diseases and colonial disruption would decimate these populations within a few generations, and by the nineteenth century, the Cochimí language had become extinct (Laylander, 2000; Indigenous Mexico, 2024). Their memory endures in archaeological sites and oral history, a reminder that the land I walked upon held stories far older than my own.
I arrived without consciously carrying this history. It was only later, walking the malecón, the seafront promenade, in the evening light, that I began to understand why this place felt layered. Silence here seemed to hold more than absence. It held memory.
Title: The History of Time
Artist Statement
I almost missed it.
It sat quietly among the other stones, indistinguishable at first glance. Just another fragment in a shoreline made of fragments. It was only when I bent down, slowed my gaze, that the spiral revealed itself.
Perfectly held inside the rock.
A fossil. A record of life that once moved through water long before my own footsteps ever reached this shore. What struck me was its patience, more than its age. The way it had remained intact while everything around it had eroded, shifted, broken down into smaller pieces.
Time was visible here.
As compression. As density. As felt weight. Layers folded inward. Motion turned into memory. The spiral itself felt symbolic, but I resisted making it symbolic too quickly. Instead, I stayed with its material presence. Its texture. Its quiet persistence.
Holding this image, I thought about how many histories live beneath our feet without announcement. How much survives without spectacle. The fossil requires no demand. It waits for recognition.
There is humility in that.
It reminded me that archives take many forms beyond the written. Some are geological. Somatic. Embedded in landscapes that remember what human timelines often forget.
I left it there.
It felt important that it remain where it was found. Still held by the shoreline. Still in conversation with water, weather, and time.
Sometimes witnessing is enough.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
Why I Came Alone
Before I left, people asked whether I was nervous about travelling alone. Whether I was running from something or toward it. Whether thirty days was too long or too short. I had no clean answers.
What I knew was simpler: I was tired in ways that sleep alone could never reach. After years of institutional pressure, caregiving across generations, and the collective exhaustion that followed the pandemic, my nervous system had forgotten how to settle. Stillness felt dangerous. Silence felt loud. Being alone had become entangled with being abandoned, and I had lost the ability to tell the difference.
I came to Loreto to learn how to be with myself again. To practise what I have come to call alonetude, a term I use to describe the intentional, generative space between solitude and loneliness. I define alonetude as an enduring contemplative orientation toward chosen solitude, characterised by intentionality, presence, meaning, and a sense of safety. It is a posture of chosen presence with oneself, distinct from both the pain of loneliness and the mere fact of being physically alone.
Researchers have long distinguished between solitude and loneliness. Loneliness, understood as the painful gap between desired and actual social connection, persists even in crowds (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010). As Nguyen (2024) describes, it is an experience of perceived isolation characterised by unmet expectations in social relationships. Solitude, by contrast, can be volitional, meaning chosen or self-determined, and restorative, meaning it supports recovery and wellbeing. Research shows that when individuals autonomously decide how to spend their solitary time, they experience more positive emotions and lower stress (Nguyen et al., 2018). The key distinction lies in motivation: self-determined solitude occurs when a person spends time alone to gain emotional benefits or engage in meaningful activities, whereas non-self-determined solitude happens when aloneness is imposed by circumstance or social exclusion (Nguyen et al., 2024).
Somewhere between those poles lies the quieter possibility I was seeking: the decision to remain present with oneself, without urgency or escape. And so I chose a place where the sea would be my witness and the mountains my backdrop. A place with enough history to remind me I was small, and enough stillness to let that smallness feel like relief.
Title: My Space
Artist Statement
It was the stillness that met me first.
Quiet, contained, that only temporary rooms seem to hold. The bed was made with precision. Pillows aligned. A folded throw placed carefully across the centre as if anticipating arrival before I had even stepped inside.
I remember standing in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary.
There is always something disorienting about entering a space that is prepared for you, a stranger to itself. A room that offers comfort without history. Function without attachment. It asks nothing, but it also holds nothing of you yet.
My suitcase rested against the wall. Half-unpacked. A visible reminder that I was both arriving and already preparing, in some distant way, to leave.
The mirror reflected me back into the frame of the room. Researcher. Traveller. Body in transition. The image felt less like documentation and more like evidence of in-betweenness. Neither fully settled nor unsettled. Simply passing through.
What drew me most was the order.
Clean lines. Neutral tones. A controlled environment that contrasted with the emotional complexity I had carried with me. In that contrast, I felt a subtle recalibration begin. The nervous system recognising safety through predictability. Through the ordinary rituals of placing belongings, arranging clothing, setting a journal on the bedside table.
Temporary spaces can be profoundly instructive.
They remind us how little is required to begin again each day. A bed. A window. A place to write. A place to rest the body between movements.
Nothing extravagant. Just enough.
I let the room be what it was. I let it remain neutral. Let the relationship form slowly. Presence before imprint.
It was never meant to be mine.
Only to hold me for a while.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
The First Hours
At the small airport, the air hit me first. Dry and warm, carrying salt and something mineral. January in British Columbia had been grey and wet; here, the sky stretched blue without apology. I collected my bag and stepped outside. No one was waiting.
That fact landed differently than I expected. There was relief in it. No negotiation, no performance, no need to translate my fatigue into something legible for others. I hailed a taxi and watched the desert roll past the window. Cardon cacti stood like sentinels along the road, their arms raised to the sky. Smaller plants hugged the ground, adapted to scarcity.
When I arrived at my small casa, I sat with my bags still packed. I sat on the edge of the bed. I noticed the texture of the light coming through the shutters. I noticed my shoulders drop. I saw the impulse to fill the silence, to check messages, to plan, to narrate the moment to someone far away, and I let the impulse pass.
This is the work of arrival: resisting the urge to fill the space you have just entered immediately. Allowing the body to land before the mind begins its commentary. Trusting that orientation will come without forcing it.
I opened the windows. Outside, I could hear unfamiliar birds. The sea was close and visible from where I sat. I drank water slowly. I let the room remain unfinished around me.
Title: Morning Views
Artist Statement
I kept returning to this balcony without meaning to. It became a quiet threshold in my days, a place suspended between inside and outside, between the life I carried with me and the landscape that asked nothing in return.
In the mornings, I would step onto the cool tiles barefoot, still half inside sleep. The body would register the air, the light, the slow movement of the palms before my mind began its usual work of organising and anticipating. I came to value that order. Sensation first. Thought later.
There was no spectacle here. Just rhythm. Wind moving through the trees. The horizon holding steady. Light arriving gradually across sand and railing. Nothing hurried me. Nothing required interpretation. I could stand at the edge of the day without performing readiness for it.
Over time, this space became orienting. Internally, rather than geographically. I stood here without writing or planning. I stood, breathed, and allowed myself to arrive slowly. The thatched roof overhead offered shelter, while the open railing kept me connected to the wider world. Protected, yet open.
It reminded me that solitude often lives in these in-between spaces. Places where one can look outward while staying grounded inward. Places where presence is enough.
This balcony was never dramatic. That is why it mattered. It held me quietly as each day began.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
Listening to the Body
That evening, I walked to the water. The malecón curved along the shore, lined with benches and the quiet activity of a small town at dusk. Pelicans floated in loose formations offshore. The light turned gold, then amber, then something closer to rose.
Title: All in a Line
Artist Statement
They were already gathered when I arrived.
A line of pelicans along the shoreline, facing the water as if the horizon had called them into formation. I stood back and watched. What held me was the pace of it, more than the scene itself. No urgency. No competition. Just bodies resting in proximity, each one holding its place without needing to claim it.
I noticed how easily they occupied stillness.
Waiting, unhurried. Together, without entanglement. The sea moved behind them in long, steady breaths, and I felt my own body begin to match that rhythm. In that moment, I was witnessing something, I was witnessing a posture. A way of being that measured nothing.
I stayed back.
Distance felt right. I stayed where I was, letting the scene remain intact. Watching them, I felt reminded that presence rarely requires action. Sometimes it is enough to stand at the edge of things, attentive, unhurried, and willing to belong to the pause.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
I found a bench and sat. I had no book, no phone in hand, no task. Just the sound of water lapping against stone and the slow parade of families walking after dinner. A child ran past laughing. A couple held hands. An older man fished from the rocks nearby, patient and unhurried.
The body knows arrival before the mind catches up. It registers safety in the loosening of the jaw, the deepening of breath, the release of tension held so long it had become invisible. Stephen Porges (2011), in his foundational work on polyvagal theory, explains that the autonomic nervous system continuously scans for cues of safety or danger through a process he calls neuroception. This term refers to the neural evaluation of risk and safety that occurs below conscious awareness, reflexively triggering shifts in physiological state (Porges, 2022). Unlike perception, which involves mindful awareness, neuroception operates automatically, distinguishing environmental features that are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening.
When the nervous system detects sufficient cues of safety, what Porges (2022) describes as a neuroception of safety, the body shifts from states of protection into states of restoration. The ventral vagal complex, a branch of the vagus nerve associated with calm, connection, and social engagement, becomes activated. This shift arrives below conscious choice. It is something we allow by creating conditions where safety can emerge.
Sitting there on that bench, watching the pelicans dive and the light change, I felt something unclench. Quietly, almost imperceptibly. The vigilance I had carried for years began, very slowly, to set itself down.
Arrival creates conditions for this shift. By slowing down. By resisting the impulse to perform or produce. By letting the first hours remain unstructured. When nothing is demanded, the nervous system begins to trust the moment.
An Invitation
Arrival, I learned that first evening, is a threshold. It marks the movement from one way of being into another. Thresholds resist rushing. When crossed too quickly, they close before anything has time to change.
You can practise arriving anywhere. It can happen in a parked car before going inside. In a quiet kitchen after everyone has gone to bed. In the first moments of waking, before you reach for your phone. These small arrivals matter. Research suggests that even brief periods of self-selected solitude can foster relaxation and reduce stress (Nguyen et al., 2018).
Wherever you are reading these words, I offer this as an invitation. Let yourself arrive here. Notice the surface beneath you. Notice your breath. Let the moment widen without needing it to mean something yet.
Arrival offers orientation before transformation. It offers orientation. The chance to acknowledge where you are, physically, emotionally, internally, before asking yourself to be anywhere else.
That first night in Loreto, I fell asleep to the sound of distant waves. The room was still unpacked. The days ahead were unplanned. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, that openness felt like permission rather than a threat.
Llegada. Arrival. The doorway through which everything else enters.
The Sea of Cortez, Loreto, Mexico
Artist Statement
The light arrived before I was ready for it.
I stepped outside and the sky was already holding colour, soft pinks moving slowly across the horizon, settling into the edges of the clouds as if the day were being introduced rather than announced. The palms moved in the wind, with weathered resilience, gently,. They bent without breaking. They have done this many times before.
I stood there longer than I planned to.
Watching the movement of the trees, the stillness of the sand, the quiet line where water meets land. What held me was the atmosphere of endurance, alongside the beauty. Nothing here was rushing. Even the wind felt patient. I noticed how my body responded, how my breathing slowed without instruction.
In that moment, I felt accompanied without needing company.
The landscape asked nothing of me. It simply allowed me to arrive as I was, tired, reflective, present. Standing there, I understood that rest arrives in many forms beyond full stopping. Sometimes it comes from witnessing something that knows how to keep standing, even in constant wind.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
References
Cochimí. (2025, November 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochimí
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness matters: A theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Annals of Behavioural Medicine, 40(2), 218–227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-010-9210-8
Indigenous Mexico. (2024, September 4). Indigenous Baja California: The rarest of the rare. https://www.indigenousmexico.org/articles/indigenous-baja-california-the-rarest-of-the-rare
Kuyimá Ecotourism. (2025, August 24). The Cochimí: Indigenous tribe of Baja California Sur. https://www.kuyima.com/cochimi-indigenous-tribe/
Laylander, D. (2000). The linguistic prehistory of Baja California. In D. Laylander & J. D. Moore (Eds.), The prehistory of Baja California: Advances in the archaeology of the forgotten peninsula (pp. 1–94). University Press of Florida.
Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó. (2025, February 7). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misión_de_Nuestra_Señora_de_Loreto_Conchó
Nguyen, T.-V. T. (2024). Deconstructing solitude and its links to well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(11), Article e70020. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.70020
Nguyen, T.-V. T., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Solitude as an approach to affective self-regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 92–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733073
PanAmerican World. (2018, November 21). Sea of Cortez: The world’s aquarium. https://panamericanworld.com/en/magazine/travel-and-culture/sea-of-cortez-the-worlds-aquarium/
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
Pulitzer Centre. (2023). Mexico: Emptying the world’s aquarium. https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/sea-of-cortez-aquaculture-ocean-fish-farming-global-market
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
Academic Lens
Arrival at Loreto enacts what van Gennep (1960) calls the threshold crossing of a rite of passage: the moment of separation from the previous structure is complete, and the liminal phase begins. The wonder recorded here — the shock of a different sensory world — corresponds to what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) term restorative experience: environments that require involuntary attention and allow directed attention to recover. Writing bilingually at this moment is itself a methodological choice: language as a site of embodied knowledge.
This photograph holds a simple orientation practice. Feet placed on patterned carpet, body paused between one step and the next. What draws my attention is the grounding rather than the destination. The ornate floor beneath me becomes a visual anchor, a reminder that movement begins in contact.
Within my work on alonetude, I return often to these micro-moments of bodily awareness. Solitude can be interior, quiet, and located anywhere. Sometimes it is interior, quiet, and located in transitional spaces such as hallways, lobbies, or thresholds between obligations.
The worn denim, the casual shoes, the downward gaze all signal an unguarded state. There is no performance here. Only presence. The body orienting itself gently within space.
This image documents a pause that might otherwise go unnoticed. A small act of returning to oneself before continuing on.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I am sitting in a hotel room in Calgary. I am a ghost haunting my own transition.
This space is the architectural equivalent of a blank stare. It is clinical and sterile, a box designed for the thousands of weary travellers who have sat in this exact chair before me, leaving behind nothing but the faint scent of industrial cleaner and the echo of a television left on too long. There is a bed, a desk, a television, and the relentless, mechanical humming of the mini-fridge. This low-grade vibration mimics the anxious, internal chatter of my own mind.
I have set up my maintenance equipment on the desk: my laptop, my books, and the literature review I am currently using as a shield. I wake at 5:00 a.m. sharp, Pacific Standard Time, my body moving as if this were a typical workday of busyness, as if staying occupied might still offer a sense of order.
The Trap of the Rehearsal
Even here, in this Neutral Zone between the life I left in British Columbia and the Alonetude awaiting me in Loreto, I am desperately trying to establish structure. I can feel my old self, the one who built an entire identity around reliability, availability, and competence, attempting to reestablish control.
The rehearsals begin almost immediately. Do I wake early to watch the sunrise, as someone grounded and intentional might? Do I anchor the day by watching the sunset, as if presence itself could be scheduled?
I am mentally planning my arrival as if it were a syllabus. I find myself agonising over the mundane details of a life still waiting to begin:
The Routine: Should I plan a strict writing schedule to ensure productivity?
The Performance: Should I jog at 7:00 am to prove I am still disciplined, or should I swim at 1:00 pm and siesta at 2:00 pm like a proper retiree?
The Logistics: Where should I shop? How will I navigate the village without looking like just one inadequate person at a table?
The Diet: Should I maintain a strict low-carb regime, or finally learn to “go with the flow” and listen to what my body actually needs?
I am realising that these questions are just the lies that burnout tells. They are my rehearsed explanations and elaborate to-do lists used to avoid the disorienting blankness of being truly alone.
I am addicted to the dopamine hit of a completed task, and I am terrified that if I stop acting, I will discover I am nothing.
Title: Holding Presence
Artist Statement
This piece emerged without agenda.
I began placing colour onto the page as one might place stones into a circle, to feel weight, texture, and relation rather than build structure. The shapes arrived organically. Some large and declarative. Others small, almost hidden, requiring closer attention.
What interests me is the coexistence as much as the brightness. No single colour dominates the field. Even the boldest tones must live beside quieter ones. The black outlines create containment, allowing intensity to exist without overwhelming the whole.
Within my alonetude practice, this work reflects the interior landscape of solitude. Solitude is often misread as emptiness. My experience is the opposite. When external noise recedes, interior colour intensifies. Memory, sensation, grief, curiosity, and calm all surface together.
This page holds that plurality. A visual mapping of inner life that resists simplification. There is no central focal point because solitude decentralises hierarchy. Everything matters. Everything belongs.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Unthought Known
By the door, my orange suitcase sits unopened. It is my “transformational object,” a vessel for the “unthought known,” the knowledge held in my body still awaiting words to name it. Christopher Bollas (1987) suggests that such objects hold parts of the self waiting to be rediscovered. Inside that suitcase is more than just linen and walking shoes; it keeps the “ash” of twenty-five years of academic performance and the quiet grief of the pandemic years that hollowed me out.
As I sit here, my nervous system is in a state of chronic activation, scanning for demands even in this unlived-in room. Drawing on Stephen Porges’ (2011) Polyvagal Theory, I recognise I am struggling to move from hyper-vigilance into a Ventral Vagal state of safety. I am a ghost haunting my own morning, showering without feeling the water, eating without tasting the food.
I am already mentally in the Sea of Cortez, replaying the past and rehearsing the future, while completely missing the sensory reality of the present.
The 25-Year Performance
For the past quarter-century, I have been juggling roles: the mother, the educator, the spouse, the neighbour, and the athlete. I sat on endless committees unpaid. I was the graduate student competing for two degrees at once, yet never taking the time to finish either, always rushing to the following requirement, truly.
I was the poster child of institutional success, the office superhero who showed up at 8:00 a.m. and stayed long after the day was over. I collected the markers of value:
The Best Teacher
The Best Employee awards.
The Interculturalization Award
Doctorate Research Award
Student Experience Award(twice)
The Advocate for precarious workers
I was kind, present, and reliable. I was shouting to the world: Look at me, I am a person of value and worth. But standing here now, I have to ask: Who was I trying to prove my worth to?
Nobody was listening. I included.
The Discipline of Staying
The invitation this morning is to stop the rehearsal.
I must notice the urge to escape into planning and “doing”.
I must pause and breathe through the fridge’s clinical hum.
I must practice the discipline of staying, staying with the silence, staying with the transition, and staying with the discomfort of having no next thing pressing against me.
Today, I leave the clinical layover in Calgary on the direct flight to Loreto. I am flying south to a place where the light is soft, and the water is gold. But the work of Arrival begins here, in the sterile quiet, by letting go of the need to manage the menu of my own transformation.
Actual arrival is about presence in the internal sense: being fully where you are, with no next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing. By letting go of the need to manage the menu of my own transformation, I am practicing what William Bridges (2019) identifies as the difficult necessity of the transition process: allowing the old identity to fall away before the new one has even begun to take shape.
As I prepare to board, I am consciously practicing the discipline of staying, staying with the silence and the discomfort of having no role to perform. I am moving from a state of hyper-vigilance into a Ventral Vagal state of safety, recognising that my body is already softening as I move toward the Sea of Cortez.
I am leaving behind the office superhero and the award-winning educator. I am choosing to be a body in water, a being alive on a planet spinning through space, rather than a vehicle carrying a brain to a meeting. I had arrived. And for this morning, in this clinical box, that has to be enough.
Title: Where the Body Remembers Green
Artist Statement
This landscape began as sensation, before scenery. It began as sensation.
I found myself returning to the memory of mountains, as orientation rather than geography. The peaks rise in the background, steady and unmoved, holding a kind of presence that the body recognises before the mind does. In painting them, I was trying to replicate a feeling I have carried, beyond any specific place I had seen. The mountains became anchors. Forms of steadiness. Witnesses to endurance.
Below them, the forest gathers in dense strokes of green. It is textured, layered, almost overgrown. I notice how the brush moves differently here, less controlled, more instinctive. The green accumulates the way experience accumulates. Years of labour, fatigue, survival, and adaptation sedimented into the body. And yet, within that density, there are sparks of orange and yellow. Small interruptions. Signals of life persisting even in exhaustion.
The water sits in the middle of the canvas as a pause. A reflective space. A place where the eye can rest and the breath can slow. This composition arrived without conscious planning, but I recognise it now as a psychological landscape. Mountain. Forest. Water. Ground. Stability, density, restoration, and movement held in one frame.
Within the Alonetude inquiry, this painting becomes an act of re-entering relationship with land, even from memory. It is less about depicting nature and more about locating where the body still feels safe enough to soften. Painting becomes a way of touching that softness without needing to explain it.
This is a place I returned to, beyond travel.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Free Association Books.
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Academic Lens
The airport layover as a site of dissociation is a form of liminality (Turner, 1969): suspended between the identity one is leaving and the one not yet formed. The "unlived life" named here is a recurring motif in the literature on ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999) — grief for a self that was foreclosed rather than lost. The body in transit, performing calm, reflects Hochschild's (1983) concept of emotional labour: the management of feeling as professional and social obligation.
January 1 is often treated as a symbolic reset, a cultural insistence that renewal can be declared on demand. Yet for many of us, particularly those shaped by long periods of precarity, caregiving, and professional vigilance, beginnings arrive with residue.
Image: The Orange Suitcase
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
They arrive through the body.
On the morning of January 1, I pack an orange suitcase. The act is deliberate, slow, and unexpectedly revealing. Packing, I come to realise, is more than logistical. It is an embodied practice of identity negotiation. What I choose to carry, what I leave behind, and how I tolerate the uncertainty created by that space becomes a form of inquiry into who I am becoming.
Identity as Process, as Becoming
Identity is often narrated as stable or cumulative, something we have rather than something we continuously do. Sociological and narrative scholars have long challenged this assumption, arguing that identity is formed through ongoing meaning-making, particularly at moments of transition (Giddens, 1991; Bruner, 2004). January 1, framed as a beginning, intensifies this process.
As I pack, I notice what is absent. I leave behind teaching materials. I leave behind contingency plans. I leave behind symbols of productivity. This absence is intentional. For decades, my professional identity as an educator within precarious academic labour has required constant preparedness and an outward orientation shaped by what Butler (2004) describes as the demand to render oneself intelligible and viable within institutional norms. Packing without these artifacts is a quiet refusal of that script.
This is a suspension of identity rather than an abandonment. A temporary loosening that creates space for becoming.
Anxiety, Uncertainty, and the Body
Transitions often activate anxiety, particularly when identity has been tethered to performance and responsibility. Rather than conceptualising anxiety here as pathology, I approach it as a learned response to prolonged uncertainty. As Ahmed (2010) reminds us, emotions reside within relationships and structures, beyond any single individual; they circulate through social and institutional arrangements.
Packing on January 1, anxiety appears as an impulse rather than panic. The urge to overpack. The desire to anticipate every scenario. The need to force clarity before it is available. These impulses are familiar. They once served as safety strategies.
What shifts in this moment is my response. Instead of obeying the impulse to force certainty, I practice restraint. I leave space in the suitcase. I allow questions to remain unanswered. In doing so, I engage what Brown (2021) describes as vulnerability as a willingness to remain present without guarantees, beyond any performance of exposure.
This is tolerance rather than fearlessness.
Relearning Safety Through Ordinary Acts
Much of the literature on trauma-informed and somatic inquiry emphasises that safety is established experientially rather than cognitively (van der Kolk, 2014; Carello & Butler, 2015). Packing becomes one such ordinary site of relearning safety.
Folding clothes slowly. Choosing comfort over appearance. Closing a suitcase that rests easy at the seams. These small acts register in the body as signals: there is no emergency here. Nothing needs to be forced.
This reframing matters. In neoliberal academic cultures that reward speed, output, and endurance, rest and restraint are often misread as failure (Hersey, 2022). Yet what unfolds here is recalibration rather than disengagement. A shift from vigilance to attentiveness.
Title: What is Left Behind
Artist Statement
It was lying alone on the concrete. A single rubber boot, worn, dirt-marked, hollowed of its wearer.
I stopped because it felt like an artifact rather than debris.
There is something about abandoned footwear that registers immediately in the body. Shoes hold weight, direction, labour. They carry the imprint of terrain and the memory of distance travelled. When separated from the person who moved within them, they become evidence without narrative.
Within the Alonetude inquiry, this image speaks to what is left behind when identity shifts. Some things are left behind when identity shifts. Some roles, expectations, and former necessities fall away quietly, without ceremony.
The boot signals completion as much as loss. It signals completion. A task finished. A terrain crossed. A version of self that no longer requires the same protection.
Placed alongside images of suitcases, thresholds, and horizons, this photograph introduces a necessary counterpoint. Departure carries what we hold alongside what we release. It is also about what we release, whether intentionally or through time.
Less is carried. More is understood.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Leaving Without Idealising Arrival
A common narrative trap in stories of departure is idealization. The assumption that leaving automatically produces healing, clarity, or transformation. I resist this framing intentionally.
As I pack, I refuse to script who I will be on the other side of this journey. The destination requires no justification for leaving. This aligns with Nash and Bradley’s (2011) description of Scholarly Personal Narrative as one that resists premature closure, allowing meaning to emerge rather than be imposed.
What I carry forward instead is presence. Attention. A commitment to noticing without narrating every experience into productivity or insight.
Title: Where the Water Holds the Sky
Artist Statement
This painting emerged slowly, without a preliminary sketch and without a fixed outcome. I worked in layers of blue, violet, and green, allowing the horizon to surface rather than be imposed. What appears as landscape is less geographic than somatic. It reflects how place is held in the body after extended solitude.
The darker band across the upper plane suggests mountain or shoreline, yet it resists precision. This lack of sharpness matters. Memory rarely preserves edges. It holds tone, atmosphere, and emotional temperature more than cartographic accuracy. The water below carries movement through colour rather than line, mirroring how stillness and motion coexist within reflective practice.
Within my broader inquiry on intentional solitude, painting becomes a parallel method of knowledge production. Where writing works through language and citation, visual expression registers what remains pre-verbal. The blending of pigments, the refusal to overcorrect, and the acceptance of diffusion all echo the ethical stance of alonetude: to stay with experience rather than discipline it into immediate coherence.
What interests me most is the meeting line between water and land. It is neither fixed nor symmetrical. It wavers. This wavering reflects the threshold state I often write about, the space between arrival and departure, knowing and sensing, holding and releasing.
The painting documents an internal geography rather than a specific location. It documents an internal geography shaped by time near water, open sky, and unstructured attention. It is less a representation of where I was and more an imprint of how I was while there.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
January 1 as Ethical Beginning
What emerges through this act of packing is integrity rather than resolution. January 1 becomes less about reinvention and more about consent. Consent to begin again without erasing the past. Consent to carry less. Consent to meet uncertainty without escalation.
In this way, packing becomes both method and metaphor. A lived demonstration of identity as process, anxiety as information rather than command, and beginning again as a practice grounded in care rather than force.
The orange suitcase closes easily. That, too, appears to be data.
Title: Threshold Work
Artist Statement
There is always a precise moment when departure becomes real. It arrives beyond the booking of flights or the packing of suitcases. It happens when the bag is placed by the door and left standing there, upright and waiting. In that quiet positioning, the decision settles into the body. The balcony still held the same view that had framed my days: palms shifting lightly in the wind, the ocean stretching outward, the familiar horizon line that had slowly reorganised my internal pace. Nothing in the landscape had changed, yet something in me had.
What struck me in this moment was the composure of the suitcase itself. It felt unhurried. Unburdened. It felt deliberate. Within my research on intentional solitude, I have come to understand that departure is part of solitude's practice rather than its opposite. One enters solitude with intention, but one must also learn how to leave it without abandoning what was restored there. The suitcase, in this sense, holds more than belongings. It carries journals filled with reflection, rhythms that have slowed, breath that has steadied, and a nervous system that has had time to soften.
Standing in the doorway, I became aware that thresholds rarely announce themselves dramatically. More often they appear as ordinary architectural spaces: tiled floors, wooden railings, a partially open door. Yet these are the sites where integration begins. The work is no longer only about being away. It is about what is brought forward.
This image marks that pause. The moment of standing still long enough to recognise that something meaningful has occurred, and that it can be carried, carefully, into what comes next.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Title: Exit as a Method
Artist Statement
The sign appears ordinary at first glance. Functional. Directive. Institutional. Salida de Emergencia. Emergency Exit. It is designed to move bodies quickly, efficiently, without reflection. Yet what drew my attention was the quiet permission it offers rather than any urgency it implies.
In spaces shaped by productivity, expectation, and performance, exits are rarely named with such clarity. They exist, but they are obscured. Emotional exits. Cognitive exits. Spiritual exits. The pathways through which one might step away without crisis are seldom marked.
Within my research on intentional solitude and identity transition, this image registers as metaphor as much as documentation. It asks: What constitutes an emergency? Who decides when leaving is justified? And what happens when departure is restorative rather than reactive?
The figure on the sign is always in motion, always mid-stride. There is no depiction of hesitation, grief, or complexity. Institutional language simplifies leaving into action. Yet lived experience complicates it. To exit a role, an identity, or a way of being often requires extended negotiation with fear, responsibility, and belonging.
Photographing this sign became a moment of recognition. Of option rather than crisis. A reminder that leaving can be chosen with care rather than driven by collapse. It can be chosen with awareness. With timing. With care.
Within the broader Alonetude inquiry, the emergency exit becomes reinterpreted. As movement toward safety rather than escape from danger alone. A passage away from environments that demand constant readiness and toward spaces that allow restoration.
The sign remains fixed to the wall. The body, however, retains the agency to decide when the threshold has been reached.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.
Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691–710.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge.
Carello, J., & Butler, L. D. (2015). Practicing what we teach: Trauma-informed educational practice. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 35(3), 262–278.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Academic Lens
Packing as identity-work surfaces the concept of alonetude (Tucker, 2026) as a deliberate construction: the choice to arrive without an audience. The residue of long precarity described here connects to slow violence (Nixon, 2011) — harm accumulated so gradually that its weight only becomes visible in moments of departure. The body's reluctance to begin again reflects what Levine (2010) calls the nervous system's conservatism: prior threat states leave physiological traces that no calendar can reset.
