I woke this morning with a tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with the night before.
The sleep had been deep, the room cool, the sea audible through the open window. Everything about this place says rest. And yet my body woke braced, as though preparing for something that never arrived.
I lay still for a long time, watching the ceiling lighten. Trying to name what I was feeling.
It took a while to find the word. When it came, it surprised me.
Fear.
The Shape of It
The fear lives elsewhere. I have settled into Loreto more easily than I expected. Solitude has become companionable. Silence I am learning to inhabit.
The fear is of what happens if I truly let go.
For years, decades, I have held myself together through effort. Through vigilance. Through the constant, quiet work of monitoring, anticipating, and performing competence. I have been the one who could be counted on. The one who showed up prepared. The one who held more than her share because holding felt safer than asking for help.
That holding has become so familiar that I cannot quite imagine who I would be without it.
And so the fear: if I release the grip, if I stop the vigilance, if I truly rest, will I ever want to return to life as it was? Will I lose the capacity for striving that kept me employed, that kept me useful, that kept me worthy of belonging?
Will I, in some fundamental way, stop being the person I have always been?
The Paradox of Letting Go
There is a strange paradox here. I came to this retreat because I was exhausted by the holding. Because the vigilance had worn grooves in my nervous system that no longer served me. Because I wanted, desperately, to rest.
And now that rest is possible, I am afraid of it.
Afraid that rest will undo me. That I will sink into it and never surface. The woman who emerges from this month will be unrecognizable to herself and to others. That she will have lost her edge, her drive, her usefulness.
The fear reveals how deeply I have tied my worth to my capacity for effort. How thoroughly I have believed that I am only as valuable as what I produce.
Brené Brown (2010) calls this the use of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as a measure of self-worth. She identifies it as one of the things we must consciously release if we want to live what she calls a wholehearted life. Reading those words years ago, I nodded in recognition. Living them is harder.
Title: Halfway There
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creating Safety for the Self
In my academic work, I have written about psychological safety: the conditions that allow people to take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, shame, or punishment (Edmondson, 1999). In classrooms and workplaces, psychological safety means being able to ask questions, admit mistakes, and offer ideas that might fail. It means knowing that vulnerability will be met with support rather than judgment.
I have spent years trying to create psychological safety for students. I have rarely thought about creating it for myself.
What would it mean to approach my own interior with the same care I offer others? To make it safe for myself to rest without proving I deserve it? To let go without requiring a plan for what comes next?
Psychological safety, I am learning, begins within. It begins with the quiet assurance that I will stay with myself, whatever surfaces. That I will meet my need for rest with gentleness. That I will carry this retreat forward as what it is: a return to myself.
The body knows when it is safe. Stephen Porges (2022) has shown that feelings of safety arise from internal physiological states and from cues that signal the nervous system can stand down from vigilance. Those cues can come from the environment, from the relationship, from the breath, from the stillness.
They can also come from the stories we tell ourselves about what we are allowed to need.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
There is another fear beneath this one, harder to name.
I am afraid that if I let go completely, I will lose the capacity to love the life I have built. That the stillness will reveal how much of my striving was compensation rather than calling. That I will look back at my career, my choices, my years of effortful contribution, and feel only exhaustion rather than meaning.
I am afraid of becoming someone who no longer wants to return.
And beneath even that: I am afraid that letting go will reveal an emptiness I have been running from. That, without the structure of obligation, without the identity of educator, without the constant motion, I will find nothing but blank space where a self should be.
This is the fear that woke me this morning. This is what tightened my chest before dawn.
Staying With It
I left my phone untouched. I resisted the pull toward plans or tasks or the small urgencies that usually rescue me from discomfort.
I stayed.
I let the fear be present without trying to fix it. I breathed into the tightness in my chest. I asked, with as much curiosity as I could muster: What are you trying to protect?
The answer came slowly. The fear is trying to protect me from loss. Loss of identity. Loss of purpose. Loss of the scaffolding that has held my life in place for so long.
I thanked it. I mean that genuinely. The fear has kept me functional through years that might otherwise have broken me. It has helped me show up when showing up was required. It has been a kind of armour, and armour serves a purpose.
But armour is heavy. And I am in a place now where I can set it down, even briefly. Even experimentally.
An Experiment in Trust
What if letting go means finding? What if the woman who emerges from stillness is clarified rather than diminished? What if rest reveals presence rather than emptiness?
I cannot know without trying. I cannot know from the outside. I can only know by going in.
Brown (2010) writes about cultivating intuition and trusting faith, which requires letting go of the need for certainty. Certainty is what I have always sought. Plans, structures, contingencies. The illusion that if I prepare enough, I can prevent loss. The illusion that control keeps me safe.
Here in Loreto, the illusion is harder to maintain. The sea holds itself apart from my plans. The mountains hold their shape with or without my watching. The pelicans fish without consulting my schedule. Life here unfolds without my management, and it unfolds beautifully.
Perhaps I, too, can unfold without so much management.
Perhaps the self that emerges from stillness will be someone I recognize after all. Perhaps she will be someone I have been waiting to meet.
Morning, After
I made coffee. I carried it to the small balcony. I sat in the chair that had become familiar over these eight days and watched the light strengthen over the water.
The fear remained. It sat beside me like a companion, still present but no longer gripping. I had acknowledged it. I had listened. I had refused to let it drive me back into motion.
This, I think, is what the discipline of staying means. It means feeling the fear fully. It means feeling the fear and remaining anyway. It means creating enough safety within myself to be present with uncertainty, with open-handedness, with the vulnerability of letting go.
The morning was quiet. A boat moved slowly across the bay. Somewhere, someone was beginning their day with purpose and direction. I was beginning mine with a question still ahead of me.
That felt honest. That felt like enough.
¿Y si me suelto? What if I let go?
I hold the question open. But I am willing to find out.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Porges, S. W. (2022). nervous system safety: Attachment, communication, finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
ACADEMIC LENS
The question at the heart of this post, ¿y si me suelto?, “what if I let go?”, names the central therapeutic and existential challenge that van der Kolk (2014) identifies in trauma recovery: learning to release the chronic muscular and psychic bracing that survival required, even when survival is no longer at stake. Menakem (2017) describes this as “settling the body”: the slow, somatic process of convincing the nervous system that it may relax its vigilance. The bilingual framing is significant: posing the question first in Spanish allows it to arrive before the analytical English mind can intercept and evaluate it. Anzaldúa (1987) argued that bilingual expression can bypass habitual cognitive filters, accessing emotional knowing that monolingual discourse forecloses. The arts-based imagery accompanying this reflection functions within what Levine (2010) calls the “felt sense”: the pre-linguistic bodily awareness that must be engaged for deep somatic change to occur. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou ontology also resonates: letting go may be understood as releasing the I-It relationship with one’s own body, the instrumental management of the self, in favour of a more receptive, present, and mutual encounter with one’s own experience.
I have been here one week now, and something has changed in my relationship with silence.
For the first several days, silence felt like an absence: the absence of traffic, of notifications, of the constant hum of obligation that had become the background noise of my life. I noticed silence the way one notices a missing tooth, by the shape of what was gone. The quiet felt strange, almost suspicious, as though it were hiding something.
This morning, sitting on the small balcony with coffee cooling in my hands, I realized that silence had become something else entirely. It had become a place. A place I could enter. A place I could inhabit. A place that held me rather than something I had to hold at bay.
Title: The Pause Before the Storm
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Silence as Autonomous Presence
The Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1948/1988), in his remarkable book The World of Silence, offers language for what I am experiencing. Picard argues that silence is neither void nor absence but rather an autonomous phenomenon: a presence that exists independently of speech and sound, a reality that begins beyond the falling away of noise.
Title: Silence as Substance
Charcoal Sketch: Amy Tucker, 2026
When language ceases, silence begins. But it begins for reasons beyond the ceasing of language. The absence of language simply makes the presence of silence more apparent.
Picard, 1948/1988, p. 15
This distinction matters. If silence were merely the cessation of sound, it would be defined entirely by what it lacks. It would be a negative space, an emptiness awaiting filling. But Picard insists that silence has substance, has being, has its own formative power. Silence, in his account, shapes human beings just as language shapes us, though in different ways.
Silence as Autonomous Phenomenon
When Picard describes silence as autonomous, he means that silence exists independently of human will or action. We uncover silence already present beneath the words. Silence, in this framework, is primary. Language emerges from silence and returns to it. The words we speak are like waves rising from and falling back into a vast sea of quiet that preceded them and will outlast them.
Title: Bench, Waiting…
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Learning to Enter
I have spent much of my adult life in noisy environments: classrooms full of voices, offices humming with machines, homes filled with the sounds of family and obligation. Silence, when it appeared, felt like an interruption rather than a foundation. I filled it quickly, almost reflexively, with music, with podcasts, with the radio playing in the background while I worked. The thought of sustained quiet made me uneasy in ways I left unexamined.
Now I understand that unease differently. What I was avoiding in silence was an encounter. Silence waits. It listens. Picard writes that where silence is, we are observed by silence. Silence looks at us more than we look at it. This is precisely what felt threatening: the sense that in silence, I would have to meet myself without distraction, without the buffer of activity and noise that kept me safely busy.
Here in Loreto, I am learning to enter silence rather than escape it. The learning has been gradual. In the first days, I noticed how quickly my mind rushed to fill the quiet. Thoughts formed into lists. Conversations from months ago replayed themselves. The body responded with tension, as though silence required vigilance, as though something might be hiding in the stillness.
Staying silent requires patience. Rather than filling it, I began to notice its texture. Silence, I discovered, carries layers. There are distant sounds within it: the far-off call of a bird, the whisper of wind, the rhythmic breathing of the sea. Silence holds space rather than collapsing inward. Over time, it revealed rhythm.
Silence Has a Rhythm
Title: Breath of the Canopy
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This has been the week’s revelation: silence is alive.
The sea rises and falls. Wind moves through the palm fronds in waves that sound like breathing. My own breath creates a gentle cadence if I stay still enough to notice. Even the light shifts in patterns that feel rhythmic, the slow arc of morning into afternoon into evening. Silence contains all of this motion. It lives. It moves. It pulses with a life I had been too busy to perceive.
Picard understood this. He wrote of the forest as a great reservoir of silence from which quiet trickles in a thin, slow stream, filling the air with its brightness. The image is precise: silence as source, as reservoir, as something that flows rather than simply exists. Here by the Sea of Cortez, the silence flows from the water, from the mountains, from the vast expanse of sky that has no interest in human schedules or human noise.
Table 1
Qualities of Inhabited Silence
Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction
What It Means
How It Manifests
Autonomous
Silence exists independently of human will or speech
Silence is uncovered rather than created; it precedes and outlasts words
Layered
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows
Wind, breath, distant birds, the sea: silence holds rather than excludes
Rhythmic
Silence has patterns, cycles, flows
Morning quiet differs from evening quiet; silence moves with time
Companionable
Silence accompanies without demanding; it witnesses without judging
A sense of being held, of belonging without performance
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows
Silence allows internal signals to surface; it reduces interpretive load
Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction
Note. The framework synthesizes the work of Picard (1948/1988), contemplative traditions, and personal observation. These qualities emerged through sustained attention rather than analysis.
Title: Inhabited Silence
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
After years shaped by disruption, urgency, and collective strain, silence offers what I had needed without knowing it: relief from constant interpretation.
In my working life, I was perpetually reading: reading student papers, reading institutional policies, reading the room in meetings, reading the unspoken tensions in corridors and committee gatherings. Every moment required assessment, response, and performance of understanding. Even leisure hummed with demand; podcasts, news, and social media all called me to process, evaluate, and react.
Silence asks for none of this. There is no need to respond. There is no performance required. Experience can simply exist without commentary. This permission feels revolutionary after decades of cognitive labour.
In silence, listening shifts from sound to sensation. From external cues to internal signals. Hunger is evident when no distraction overrides it. Fatigue makes itself known without shame. Contentment arises unannounced, without having to justify itself against productivity metrics.
Silence clarifies.
Silence and the Settling Body
The connection between silence and nervous system regulation is becoming clearer to me now. Yesterday, I wrote about the body beginning to remember safety. Today, I understand that silence is part of how that remembering happens.
Stephen Porges (2022) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, constantly scanning for signals of safety or threat. Chronic noise, whether literal sound or the metaphorical noise of constant demand, keeps the system in a state of vigilance. The body cannot fully settle when it must remain alert to incoming information that might require a response.
Silence provides what Deb Dana (2020) might call a cue of safety. In the absence of demands, the nervous system can begin to downregulate. Muscles soften. Breath deepens. The state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, that felt like normal alertness manifests as chronic tension, and that tension begins to subside.
I have noticed this in my own body over the past week. Each quiet morning reinforces the message that stillness can be supportive. Each evening without urgent input confirms that the world holds steady even when I am unreachable. The body learns through repetition, and silence provides the conditions for that learning.
When Silence Becomes Companionable
Perhaps the most unexpected discovery of this week is that silence can be companionable.
Title: Held Without Asking
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I arrived here expecting solitude to feel lonely, at least sometimes. I expected to miss conversation, to feel the absence of other voices. And there have been moments of longing, particularly in the evenings when the day’s warmth fades, and the darkness feels vast. But alongside that longing, something else has emerged: a sense of being accompanied by silence itself.
This is difficult to articulate without sounding more mystical than I mean. I mean something quite practical: that silence holds without judgment. It asks nothing of me in terms of interest, productivity, or usefulness. It holds my worth independent of output. Silence simply is, and in its presence, I am permitted to simply be.
Picard writes that when two people are conversing, a third is always present: silence is listening. I have begun to feel this even when alone. Silence listens to my thoughts without needing me to speak them. It witnesses my morning rituals, my wanderings to the water, and my afternoon rest. It accompanies without intruding.
Belonging within silence feels different than belonging through interaction. It carries steadiness rather than affirmation. It arises from alignment rather than exchange.
The Noise We Carry
Title: One Missed Call
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Picard wrote his meditation on silence in 1948, and even then, he worried about what he called the world of noise encroaching on human consciousness. He wrote of radio noise as something that surrounds us, accompanies us, and creates a false sense of continuity that substitutes for genuine presence. If he found the mid-twentieth century noisy, I can only imagine what he would make of our current moment.
We carry noise with us now. It lives in our pockets, vibrates against our bodies, follows us into bedrooms and bathrooms and the last quiet corners of our lives. The smartphone has colonized silence more thoroughly than any technology before it. There is no longer any space, Picard wrote presciently, in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.
Coming here required a deliberate choice to leave that noise behind. I brought my phone but set it to silent. I check email once a day, if that. I have no television, no radio, no podcasts playing while I walk. The withdrawal was initially uncomfortable, as with any withdrawal. The hand reached for the device reflexively. The mind generated reasons to check, to see, to know what was happening elsewhere.
Now, a week in, the reaching has slowed. The mind has settled into the rhythm of this place rather than the rhythm of the feed. Silence has expanded to fill the space that noise once occupied. And I am beginning to understand that this space was never empty. It was always full of silence, waiting for me to notice.
A Body-based Record
The body journal continues to reveal patterns. Day seven marks the emergence of what I can only call ease with silence, a comfort in quiet that was absent at the beginning of the retreat.
Table 2
body journal: Day 7
Time
Observation
Morning
Woke without alarm. Silence felt welcoming rather than empty. Sat with coffee in quiet for forty minutes without restlessness. Breath deep and steady. VV state.
Midday
Walked to water in silence. No impulse to fill quiet with podcast or music. Noticed layers within silence: wind, birds, waves. Felt companioned rather than alone.
Evening
Watched sunset in complete quiet. Silence felt like a place I could inhabit rather than endure. Body soft, jaw relaxed, shoulders down. Gratitude present.
VV sustained throughout the day. Silence is experienced as a supportive presence rather than an absence.
Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection. The emergence of silence as a companionable practice marks a qualitative shift from earlier periods.
Silence and Alonetude
I am beginning to understand that silence is one of the essential conditions for alonetude: the intentional, contemplative solitude I came here to practise. Without silence, solitude risks becoming merely physical isolation, a removal from others that leaves the inner noise intact. With silence, solitude opens into something spacious enough to hold reflection, restoration, and the slow work of becoming present to oneself.
Silence creates the conditions for attention to turn inward. It reduces the load of constant input that normally occupies cognitive and emotional resources. It allows the nervous system to settle, the body to soften, the mind to stop its endless scanning for threat or opportunity. In silence, energy conserves itself. Presence becomes possible.
This is why retreat centres and monasteries have always understood silence as discipline rather than deprivation. Silence asks to be inhabited rather than endured. Silence is itself the somewhere, the place where transformation becomes possible because we are finally still enough to receive it.
Evening, Day Seven
The sun is setting as I write this. The sky over the Sea of Cortez has turned the colour of ripe peaches, fading to lavender at the edges. The mountains across the water are silhouettes now, their details absorbed into the growing dark.
It is very quiet.
Quiet, mostly. I can hear the water lapping against the shore. A bird calls somewhere in the distance. My own breath moves in and out, marking time. But beneath and around these sounds, silence holds. Silence is the medium through which everything else moves, the space in which sound becomes possible.
Picard writes that silence contains everything within itself. It is always wholly present and completely fills the space in which it appears. I feel this now, sitting in the fading light. Silence asks nothing of me. It holds no anticipation of my next word or my next action. It simply holds, vast and patient and present.
One week ago, I arrived here full of noise: the noise of years of overwork, of worry, of the constant chatter of a mind that had forgotten how to be still. The noise is quieter now. It remains, and perhaps it always will. But silence has made room for itself within me, as it does this evening, surrounding and holding the small sounds of life without being diminished by them.
Silence is a place. I am learning to live here.
References
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.
Picard, M. (1988). The world of silence (S. Godman, Trans.). Gateway Editions. (Original work published 1948)
Porges, S. W. (2022). How the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
Academic Lens
Silence as place rather than absence is the lived-experience core of this entry, resonating with Bachelard's (1964) concept of inhabited space: silence becomes a room one can enter and dwell in. This is alonetude at its most concentrated, the capacity to be, in Winnicott's (1958) phrase, alone in the presence of the world without anxiety. The sea as acoustic environment contributes what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call fascination: the quality of an environment that holds attention without effort and allows the mind to rest.
I woke this morning without an alarm, and for several minutes I lay still, noticing.
My shoulders rested flat against the mattress. My jaw hung loose. My breath moved in long, unhurried waves, rising and falling like the sea I could hear through the open window. These details might seem unremarkable to someone who has always slept peacefully, but for me, they marked a shift I had almost forgotten was possible.
For years, I have woken braced. Shoulders already climbing toward my ears. Jaw clenched against the night. Breath shallow and quick, as though the day’s demands had already begun pressing against my chest before I opened my eyes. I had normalized this state to the point that I no longer recognized it as anything other than how mornings felt.
This morning was different. The body had begun to remember something older than vigilance. It had started to remember safety. And with that, remembering came something I had tried to avoid. The grief.
The Science of Felt Safety
Stephen Porges (2011, 2022), the neuroscientist who developed the Polyvagal Theory, helps me understand what happened this morning. Safety is a physiological state rather than a thought, regulated by the autonomic nervous system below the level of conscious awareness. We arrive there through the body first. Porges calls this the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the body reading the environment and deciding, before the mind catches up, whether we are safe.
Title: The Pool
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The body’s instinct to scan for safety
The body’s instinct to scan for safety refers to the nervous system’s continuous, unconscious scanning of the environment and internal bodily signals for cues of safety, danger, or life threat (Porges, 2003, 2004). Unlike perception, which involves conscious awareness and interpretation, the body’s instinct to scan for safety operates below the threshold of awareness, triggering reflexive shifts in autonomic state without requiring conscious evaluation of the environment. This process evolved to enable our ancestors to respond rapidly to threats, but it can become miscalibrated by chronic stress, trauma, or prolonged exposure to demanding environments.
Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory proposes that mammals possess three primary autonomic states, each associated with distinct neural circuits that emerged at different points in evolutionary history (Porges, 2011). These states form a hierarchy, with the newest and most sophisticated circuit supporting social connection and calm, and the oldest supporting immobilization and shutdown.
What I Am Learning in the Body
Understanding the theory helps me name what I have been experiencing. For much of the past several years, and perhaps much longer, my nervous system has operated in a state of chronic alert. The demands of academic work, the precarity of contract positions, the emotional labour of supporting students through their own struggles, the vigilance required to navigate institutional politics: all of these kept my body in a low-grade state of mobilization, ready to respond to the next challenge, the next deadline, the next crisis.
I became so accustomed to this state that I mistook it for normal. The tight shoulders, the clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the difficulty sleeping through the night: these seemed features of adult life rather than symptoms of a nervous system stuck in defence mode. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. The body becomes a place of tension rather than rest, alert rather than ease.
Here, by the Sea of Cortez, something is shifting. The cues my nervous system receives have changed. The rhythm of the waves provides what Porges might call prosodic cues of safety: low-frequency sounds that signal the absence of threat. The warmth of the sun, the slow pace of the days, the absence of urgent demands, and the faces of people moving without hurry all communicate safety to a body that has been listening for danger.
Deb Dana (2018, 2020), whose work translates how the nervous system responds to safety and threat into practical application, describes the process of befriending one’s nervous system. She writes about learning to notice the micro-moments of genuine safety connection, what she calls glimmers: small sparks of safety and calm that can be cultivated and expanded over time. I am learning to notice these glimmers here. The warmth of coffee in my hands. The sound of pelicans diving. The way my breath deepens when I sit by the water.
Title: Pelicans Waiting for Dinner
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Grief That Comes With Softening
But here is what arrived unbidden: as the body begins to soften, grief rises to meet it.
This morning, after noticing my loose jaw and flat shoulders, I lay in the early light and felt the tears come. They were tears of relief, certainly, but they were also tears of mourning. Mourning for all the years I spent braced against a world that demanded constant vigilance. Mourning for the woman who took on contract after contract because she was terrified that if she said no, there would be nothing. Mourning for the version of myself who believed she had to be everything for everyone, and who quietly disappeared in the effort.
Miriam Greenspan (2003), in her essential work Healing Through the Dark Emotions, argues that grief, fear, and despair are transformative rather than pathological when we allow ourselves to experience them fully. She calls this process emotional alchemy: the transmutation of difficult emotions into wisdom and connection. But the alchemy only works if we are willing to feel what we have been avoiding.
Title: The Circle of Life
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Emotional Alchemy
Emotional alchemy refers to the transformational process through which emotions culturally labelled as negative, such as grief, fear, and despair, can become pathways to gratitude, joy, and faith when they are authentically and mindfully felt rather than suppressed or bypassed (Greenspan, 2003). This framework challenges the dominant cultural emphasis on emotional control and positivity, suggesting instead that what we call healing requires moving through rather than around rugged emotional terrain.
I have been avoiding this grief for a very long time. There was no space for it in a life organized around survival. When you are juggling three contracts across two institutions, preparing courses in whatever hours remain after committee meetings and student advising, there is no time to sit with the question of what you might be losing in the process. The hamster wheel of precarious academic labour does what it is designed to do: it keeps you running too fast to notice that you are running in place.
An Accounting of What Was Lost
What did I lose in those years of overwork and fear-driven striving? The list is long, and I am only beginning to acknowledge it.
Time with people I love. The dinners declined because I had marking. The phone calls were cut short because I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class. The visits went untaken because there was no time, no money, no energy left over after the institution had taken its share.
My own creative work. The writing projects set aside, year after year, while I wrote endless course outlines, assessment rubrics and committee reports. The ideas flickered and faded for lack of sustained time to develop them.
My health. The chronic tension I normalized. The sleep I sacrificed. The stress that accumulated in my body while I told myself I was fine, I could handle it, this was just what working hard looked like.
Presence. The capacity to be fully present where I was, rather than mentally composing tomorrow’s lecture or worrying about next semester’s contract while sitting at my own dinner table. The ability to rest without feeling guilty, to play without calculating what I should be accomplishing instead.
Myself. Somewhere along the way, in trying to be everything for everyone, I lost track of who I was outside of producing, performing, and proving my worth through labour. The woman who existed before she became a human productivity machine.
Title: Crab Life
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Fear Beneath the Overwork
Why did I accept so many contracts? Why did I work through weekends, through holidays, through the body’s increasingly urgent signals that something was wrong?
The answer is simple and painful: fear.
Fear that if I said no to one contract, there might never be another. Fear that I would be forgotten, passed over, rendered invisible in a system that treats contract employees as interchangeable parts. Fear that my value depended entirely on my usefulness, and that the moment I stopped being maximally useful, I would cease to matter
This fear was entirely rational. The conditions of precarious academic employment are designed to produce exactly this kind of anxiety. As I explored in my earlier research on contract faculty experiences, the structure of term-by-term appointments creates what scholars have called artificial scarcity: a manufactured sense that opportunities are scarce, competition is fierce. One must constantly prove one’s worth to secure even temporary belonging.
Title: Prayers for the Sailors
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artificial Scarcity
Artificial scarcity is the institutional production of resource scarcity that serves extractive logics rather than reflecting genuine constraints. In academic contexts, this manifests as deliberately limited contract renewals, competition for positions that could be made permanent, and funding models that pit workers against one another for resources that institutions choose to withhold. The effect is to transfer risk from institution to worker while intensifying individual self-exploitation to maintain employability.
Greenspan (2003) writes that suppressed fear often converts into anxiety, a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, or what she calls “toxic rage” that finds no appropriate outlet. For me, the fear transmuted into overwork: a constant striving that kept the terror at bay by keeping me too busy to feel it. The hamster wheel spun fast enough that I could pretend I was going somewhere.
Allowing the Dark Emotions
Title: The Land Before Time
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Greenspan (2003) insists that we cannot heal by bypassing the dark emotions. We can only heal by moving through them. This morning, lying in the grey light with tears running into my hair, I began to let myself grieve what was lost.
I grieved for the years of contracted time, sold in increments to institutions that refused to commit. I grieved for the version of myself who believed she had to earn her right to exist through constant productivity. I grieved for the students I taught while running on empty, giving them less than they deserved because I had nothing left to give. I grieved for the relationships I neglected, the boundaries I failed to uphold, and the needs I refused to acknowledge, because acknowledging them would have required slowing down.
And I grieved for the woman I might have become if I had been able to trust that I was enough. The woman who wrote her own work, who rested without guilt, who knew her value, stood apart from her usefulness to others. The woman who could be, without having to justify her existence through labour constantly.
That woman is still possible. She is emerging slowly, her shoulders learning to drop and her jaw to soften. However, her emergence requires mourning the years during which she had been unable to exist fully. Grief is part of becoming.
Title: Pillars of Life
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
A Body-based Record
Following the methodology I developed for this project, I have been tracking my body-based state each morning and evening. The patterns are beginning to reveal themselves. What I notice now is that the emergence of grief marks a new phase in the body’s work. The nervous system begins to settle, and the emotions held at bay by chronic activation begin to surface.
Table 1 body journal: Days 1–6
Day
Morning Observation
Evening Observation
Primary State
1
Tight chest, shallow breathing, jaw clenched
Restless, difficulty settling
SA
2
Woke with a loose jaw
Some softening after water time
SA → VV
3
Breath deeper, still some tension
Easier sleep, fewer interruptions
SA/VV
4
Woke with a loose jaw
Calm, present, grounded
VV
5
Woke with a looser jaw
Emotional release, then peace
SA → VV
6
Shoulders flat, jaw loose; grief arose
Tears for lost years; then gentle calm
VV + grief
Note. States are classified according to Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011). VV = genuine safety; SA = the body’s alert state. The trajectory across Days 1–6 reflects a gradual shift from the body’s alert state toward genuine safety regulation, with grief emerging as a regulated and tolerable affective state.
Day six marks the continuation of physical settling alongside the emergence of emotional content that demands its own kind of attention. The body softens enough to feel what it has been protecting me from feeling. This is precisely what Greenspan describes: the dark emotions arise when we finally create conditions safe enough to hold them.
Complicating the Framework
Title: Paradise
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
It would be tempting to treat this grief as purely personal, a private mourning for private losses. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the structural dimensions of my experience.My nervous system became thrown off balance through specific, structural conditions. The conditions of precarious academic labour, the expectations of constant productivity, and the erosion of secure employment are systemic features of contemporary work that affect millions.
Byung-Chul Han (2010/2015), in The Burnout Society, describes how neoliberal economies produce subjects who exploit themselves more thoroughly than any external master could. We become subjects of achievement, experiencing our self-exploitation as freedom, as choice, as personal ambition. The violence is hidden because it comes from within. The exhaustion feels like personal failure rather than structural extraction.
Healing my own nervous system, while valuable, leaves untouched the conditions that initially caused the nervous system to be thrown off balance. I hold both truths: personal healing matters, and structural change remains necessary. The grief I feel this morning is mine, but it is also collective. It belongs to every contract worker who said yes when they wanted to say no. It applies to anyone who has tried to be everything for everyone and lost themselves in the effort.
Title: The Monkey Face
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Body Archive
One of the most generative ideas I have encountered in my research is the body as archive. The body stores experience in ways that resist verbal articulation but emerge vividly through attention to body-based sensation. Muscle tension, posture, breath patterns, sensory associations: these hold histories that may never have been consciously processed or integrated into narrative memory.
When I notice my shoulders dropping, I am reading the archive. The body is releasing its record of vigilance, one slight relaxation at a time. When my jaw softens in sleep, the body is revising its story, replacing the narrative of threat with emerging evidence of safety. When tears come, the body finally allows what was stored to flow outward. The grief I feel is archived, years of unshed tears for years of unlived moments.
van der Kolk (2014) describes trauma as an experience that becomes stuck in the body, unable to complete its natural cycle of activation and discharge. The inverse may also be true: healing becomes possible when the body finds conditions that allow it to complete cycles interrupted by chronic stress. The sea, the warmth, the solitude, the absence of demand: these may be creating the conditions my body needs to process what it has been carrying. The grief is part of that processing.
Title: Sea Lions
What the Pelicans Know
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Later this morning, after the tears had passed and I had dressed and walked to the water, I watched the pelicans again. They rest on the water between dives, floating with apparent ease, their bodies loose and buoyant. They seem to know something about the alternation between effort and rest, between activation and recovery, that I am only now beginning to learn.
The pelicans show no sign of grief. But perhaps that is because they have never lost access to their own rhythm. They have never been asked to produce constantly, to prove their worth through labour, to fear that rest makes them dispensable. They dive when hungry, float when satisfied, and fly when they choose. The simplicity of it undoes something in me.
Porges (2022) argues that safety is a biological imperative, suggesting that social connectedness and the experience of felt safety are fundamental human needs wired into our physiology. Perhaps the grief I feel is the recognition of how long I lived without this safety, how long I ran on vigilance and fear, how much I sacrificed to a system that asked everything and offered no guarantee in return.
Day six. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw is learning to soften. The breath is learning to deepen. And the tears are learning to fall. All of it is necessary. All of it is the body doing its quiet work of remembering what it means to be safe, and mourning the years when safety had been beyond reach.
Greenspan (2003) promises that, when fully felt, grief transmutes into gratitude. I am still on the way. But I trust the process. I trust the tears. I trust the sea and the pelicans and this slow, patient body, finally allowed to feel what it has been carrying.
Safety, it turns out, is something the body both recognizes and grieves. It is something the body grieves when it finally arrives.
Title: The Path
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Title: Life on the Sea
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I am still here.
References
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton.
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton.
Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.
Porges, S. W. (2003). Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1008(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1301.004
Porges, S. W. (2004). The body’s instinct to scan for safety: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.
Porges, S. W. (2022). how the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
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
This post documents what Porges (2011) terms a shift from sympathetic to ventral vagal activation: the nervous system’s gradual movement from sustained threat-readiness toward the physiological state associated with safety, social engagement, and rest. The specific somatic markers described, loose jaw, resting shoulders, unhurried breath, are precisely what Levine (2010) identifies as indicators of successful nervous system discharge following chronic mobilisation. Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that trauma treatment cannot proceed through cognitive reframing alone; the body must be given new physical experiences of safety that gradually revise its baseline predictions. The brown pelican observed in this entry functions as what Ulrich (1983) called a restorative natural element: organisms with purposeful, unhurried movement that invite matching attentional rhythms in the observer. The bilingual Spanish-English structure of this post also enacts the methodological argument: that meaning-making happens in the space between languages, and that bilingual expression can access emotional registers unavailable in a single tongue, an insight developed in Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands theory of code-switching as an epistemological practice.
Reading Time: 14minutesCaminando el Malecón on the fourth day: a bilingual reflection on walking the seafront promenade in Loreto, and what the body learns when it is given permission to move slowly, without destination.
Reading Time: 14minutes
Title: The Bench That Waits
Artist Statement
It was empty when I arrived.
Empty, waiting. The kind of waiting that holds space for whoever might need it, without straining toward arrival. Positioned between palms and water, the bench faced outward, offering its view without instruction. Sit or continue. Stay or keep walking. The invitation was gentle enough to refuse.
I noticed how naturally my body moved toward it.
As if rest recognizes itself. The slats still cool from morning air, the sea stretching steady beyond the shoreline, mountains holding their distance across the water. Nothing demanded attention. The bench offered comfort directly. It simply provided it.
I stayed just long enough.
But long enough to feel the pause it offered. Long enough to understand that some forms of support ask nothing in return. They exist so that, when needed, we can set our weight down for a moment and remember what it feels like to be held without expectation.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
This morning, I walked.
It sounds unremarkable, and perhaps it is. People walk every day for transportation, exercise, and the simple need to move from one place to another. But this walking was different. This walking was deliberate, unhurried, without destination. I walked the malecón, the seaside promenade that curves along Loreto’s waterfront, and somewhere between my first step and my last, something shifted. I began to find myself in the rhythm of my own feet.
Rebecca Solnit (2001), in her meditation on the history and meaning of walking, observes that the physical rhythm of walking and the movement of thought are deeply intertwined, each step through a landscape corresponding to a movement through ideas. Walking, she argues, is locomotion and so much more. It is a mode of being in the world, a way of thinking with the body, a practice that has shaped philosophers, poets, and pilgrims for millennia. I set out this morning simply to move. I set out to move. But movement, I am learning, has its own intelligence.
El Malecón / The Promenade
The malecón stretches along the edge of the Sea of Cortez, a paved path bordered by palm trees on one side and water on the other. In the early morning, before the heat becomes oppressive, it fills with walkers: elderly couples moving slowly arm in arm, young mothers pushing strollers, fishermen heading to their boats, tourists like me trying to find our place in this unfamiliar landscape.
I joined the flow without speaking to anyone. I was alone in a crowd, solitary yet surrounded, occupying what the sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) called civil inattention: a delicate social contract in which strangers acknowledge each other’s presence through brief eye contact or a nod, then politely look away, granting each other the privacy of public space. There is a particular freedom in being unknown. No one on this malecón knows my name, my history, my roles, my failures. I am simply a woman walking, indistinguishable from any other woman walking, anonymous in the best possible way.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer whose work explores the relationship between people and place, distinguishes between space and place. Space, he suggests, is abstract, undifferentiated, open. Place is space that has been given meaning through experience, through movement, through the accumulation of memory and feeling. I am in the process of transforming this malecón from space into place, step by step, morning by morning, until it becomes somewhere I belong rather than somewhere I am visiting.
Title: Looking Up
Artist Statement
I noticed the sky because the trees asked me to.
Their trunks moved upward and outward, drawing my gaze away from the ground I had been watching all morning. Palms reaching, bending slightly, as if shaped by years of wind and salt air. I stood beneath them, small in comparison, aware of how rarely I stop long enough to look up without purpose. What held me there was the layering.
Fronds crossing one another. Dark silhouettes against a pale, clouded sky. Movement without urgency. Even the stillness felt alive, suspended between breeze and pause. It reminded me that perspective shifts quietly, sometimes offered by nothing more than changing the direction of your gaze. I stayed a moment longer than expected.
Simply allowing the upward view to hold me. A reminder that rest arrives in many forms beyond lying down. Sometimes it arrives in the simple act of lifting your eyes and letting the world open above you.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
El Ritmo de los Pies / The Rhythm of Feet
There is something about the pace of walking that matches the pace of thought. Frédéric Gros (2014), the French philosopher who wrote a book-length exploration of walking as a philosophical practice, observes that walking is human. When we walk, we move at approximately five kilometres per hour, the pace at which humans have moved for most of our evolutionary history. This is the speed at which the world makes sense, at which details can be noticed, at which the mind can wander without becoming lost.
I noticed things this morning that I would have missed from a car or a bus. A pelican perched on a piling, utterly still, watching the water. An old man mending a fishing net, his fingers moving with the ease of decades of practice. A child chasing pigeons, her laughter bright against the morning quiet. Bougainvillea spilling over a white wall in shades of magenta and coral. A dog sleeping in a patch of sun, so profoundly at peace that I envied him.
These small observations accumulated as I walked, asking nothing, just offering themselves to my attention. This is what the Kaplans (1989) meant by “the gentle pull of the natural world”: the gentle engagement with the environment that allows the mind to rest while remaining alert. Walking provides a constant stream of such fascination: the changing view, the shifting light, the small dramas of ordinary life unfolding at the edges of the path. My attention was held without being captured. I was present without being vigilant.
Una Mujer Caminando Sola / A Woman Walking Alone
There is a particular experience of being a woman walking alone in a public space. Lauren Elkin (2017), in her exploration of female flânerie, the art of wandering through city streets, notes that the figure of the flâneur, the leisurely male stroller who observes urban life, has historically had no female equivalent. Women in public spaces have been subject to scrutiny, harassment, and assumptions about their availability or their morality. The freedom to wander, to be seen without being accosted, to occupy space without justification, has been a privilege unevenly distributed.
Here on the malecón, I felt safe. The morning light, the presence of families, and the openness of the waterfront all contributed to a sense of ease. However, I am aware that this ease is neither universal nor guaranteed. I carry decades of conditioning about where women can go, when, and with whom. I have the vigilance that women learn early, the constant low-level assessment of threat that becomes so habitual it feels like instinct. Walking alone, as a woman, at 60, in a foreign country, is an act of quiet defiance. It is a claiming of space, a declaration that I have as much right to this malecón as anyone.
Sara Maitland (2009), writing about her own experiments with solitude, describes how aloneness for women has historically been framed as socially suspect, as something pathological, dangerous, or a sign of having failed at the relational obligations expected of women. A woman alone must be waiting for someone. A woman alone must be lonely. A woman alone must require rescue, company, or protection. These assumptions persist even when we have consciously rejected them. Walking the malecón alone, I am practising a different narrative: that solitude can be chosen, that a woman can be complete unto herself, that walking alone is pure presence.
I am finding myself, precisely here.
Caminar Como Pensar / Walking as Thinking
Title: Standing with Myself
Artist Statement
I saw the shadow before I saw the photograph. Cast long across the sand, shaped by a sun beyond my direct view, my body appeared as outline rather than detail. No expression. No colour. Just form held briefly on the surface of the earth. I stood still for a moment, noticing how unfamiliar it felt to look at myself without the usual identifiers. No face. No eyes. Only presence. What stayed with me was the clarity of the silhouette.
There is honesty in shadow. It removes performance. Removes the small adjustments we make when we know we are being seen. What remains is posture. Weight distribution. The simple fact of occupying space. I realized I was looking at evidence of being there rather than proof of who I am. A quieter form of documentation. The sand held me without resistance.
Wind-shaped ridges moving outward in soft repetition, my shadow resting across them without altering their pattern. Temporary. Already shifting as the sun moved. I stood there aware that this is what much of life feels like, moments of presence held briefly on landscapes that existed long before us and will continue long after. I let the shadow remain a while.
I let the shadow remain intact a little longer, recognizing it as companion rather than absence. Beyond loneliness. Beyond solitude. Just the simple act of standing with myself, visible in outline, grounded in light.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The philosophers understood what neuroscience is only beginning to confirm: that walking changes how we think. Aristotle taught while walking, his students strolling beside him through the Lyceum’s colonnades. Rousseau claimed that he could compose only while walking. Nietzsche held that genuine philosophical thought could only arise in motion (as cited in Gros, 2014). Wordsworth walked an estimated 180,000 miles in his lifetime, composing poems with each step.
Contemporary research supports these intuitions. Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014), in a series of experiments at Stanford University, found that walking significantly increases creative divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple solutions to open-ended problems. Participants who walked, whether on a treadmill or outdoors, produced more creative responses than those who sat. The effect persisted even after walking ended, suggesting that movement primes the mind for creative thought in ways that outlast the activity itself.
This morning, as I walked, thoughts arose that had been inaccessible during the first three days of sitting and settling. Ideas for writing. Insights about patterns in my life. Connections between things I had read and things I had experienced. It was as if the movement of my body had loosened something in my mind, allowing thoughts that had been stuck, dammed up behind the exhaustion, vigilance, and accumulated tension of years to flow. Walking, I began to think again. Walking, I began to find the thoughts that had been waiting for space to emerge.
Title: A Small Signal
Artist Statement
The self-portrait arrived without intention. I was watching the shoreline, the way the stones gathered where the tide had last reached, when my shadow entered the frame. Familiar now, this outline of myself appearing unannounced. My hand lifted without planning, two fingers raised in a quiet gesture. For no audience at all. Just a small signal that I was here, standing between water and land, present in the light of that moment.
What stayed with me was how brief it was. The sea kept moving. The sand kept holding its patterns. My shadow shifted as the sun moved, the gesture dissolving almost as soon as it formed. And yet it felt enough. A soft reassurance offered inward rather than outward. I am here. I am steady. Still arriving, even now.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
El Cuerpo Recuerda Cómo Moverse / The Body Remembers How to Move
I have been a swimmer, a triathlete, a woman who pushed her body through marathons and triathlons. Movement has always been part of who I am. But somewhere in the last few months, I stopped. The demands of work, the weight of caregiving, the creeping exhaustion that made even small exertions feel impossible: these accumulated until I no longer recognized myself as someone who moved. I became sedentary. I became still in all the wrong ways.
Walking the malecón this morning, I felt my body remember. The swing of arms, the push of feet against pavement, the rhythm of breath deepening with exertion. It was gentle, nothing like the intensity of training, but it was movement. It was my body doing what bodies are designed to do: carrying us through the world, encountering terrain, responding to the demands of gravity, distance, and time.
Researchers in embodied cognition argue that thinking extends beyond the brain, distributed throughout the body and its interactions with the environment (Shapiro, 2019). We think through the world rather than about it from a position of detachment; we think through our bodies, with our bodies, as our bodies. Walking is a form of thinking. Movement is a form of knowing. When I walk, I am doing something beyond transporting my mind from place to place. I am engaging in a fundamentally different mode of cognition, one that integrates body and world in ways that sitting cannot replicate.
Encuentros / Encounters
Near the end of the malecón, where the pavement gives way to sand, and the tourist hotels yield to fishing shacks, I stopped to rest on a bench. An elderly woman sat at the other end, her face weathered by sun and time, her hands folded in her lap. We nodded at each other, the universal greeting of strangers sharing space.
“Bonita mañana,” she said after a moment. Beautiful morning.
“Sí,” I agreed. “Muy bonita.”
We sat in companionable silence, watching the water. I knew nothing of her name, her story, nothing about the life that had brought her to this bench on this morning. She knew nothing of mine. And yet there was a connection, brief and wordless, the kind of connection that can only happen between strangers who have no agenda, no history, no expectation of each other. Just two women, sharing a bench, watching the sea.
The sociologist Georg Simmel (1908/1971), writing about urban life, described the paradox of proximity and distance that characterizes encounters with strangers. We are physically close, often closer than we would be with intimates, yet socially distant, protected by conventions of anonymity. This distance, Simmel argued, can be liberating. It allows us to be seen without being known, to exist in public without the weight of personal history.
The woman rose to leave, gathering a small bag I had missed until that moment. “Que le vaya bien,” she said. May it go well for you. “Igualmente,” I replied. Same to you. She walked away, and I stayed on the bench, holding the small gift of that encounter, that moment of human connection that asked nothing and gave everything.
Encontrándome / Finding Myself
Title: Where the Water Waits
Artist Statement
I found it tucked into the wall as though it had always been there, water gathering quietly beneath the carved lion’s face. The stream was gentle, almost ceremonial, falling into the basin without urgency. I stood there longer than I expected, listening to the soft repetition of water meeting stone. There was something grounding in its rhythm, a steadiness that asked nothing of me and yet held the space all the same.
What struck me most was the feeling of offering. The fountain asked nothing of thirst. It simply waited, holding water for whoever might arrive needing pause, reflection, or refreshment. I felt that invitation without having to drink. Just standing near it was enough, reminded that restoration often lives in small, quiet places, flowing patiently until we are ready to receive it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
What does it mean to find yourself? The phrase is so common that it has become cliché, the stuff of self-help books, wellness retreats and midlife crisis narratives. And yet, walking back along the malecón this morning, I understood something about what it might actually mean.
Finding yourself is encountering something in motion, beyond any unchanging core that has been there all along, hidden beneath roles and responsibilities. The self is no buried treasure. Instead, as the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) argues, the self is something we construct through our choices, our relationships, our engagements with the world. Taylor (1989) suggests that selfhood is constituted by the things that genuinely matter to us; identity is formed through what w rather than simply discovered,e care about and choose to orient ourselves toward. We find ourselves by discovering what matters, by choosing what to attend to, by moving toward what calls us.
Walking matters to me. I had forgotten, but this morning I remembered. Movement matters. The body in space, encountering the world at the speed of feet, matters. Solitude in public, the freedom to be alone among others, matters. The malecón is teaching me what matters. Each step is a small declaration: this is who I am. This is who I am becoming.
Dan McAdams (2001), the narrative psychologist, suggests that identity is fundamentally a story we tell about ourselves, a personal myth that integrates past, present, and anticipated future into a coherent sense of who we are. Finding yourself in this framework means revising the story. It means writing new chapters. It means recognizing that the self is fluid, authored, made.
I am making myself on this malecón. Step by step, I am writing a new chapter in which I am a woman who walks alone, who claims space, who moves through the world at the speed of thought, who finds herself through solitude, because of it.
Paso a paso, me estoy convirtiendo en quien siempre fui.
Step by step, I am becoming who I always was.
Reflexión de la tarde / Evening Reflection
Title: Daybreak Crossing
Artist Statement
I arrived before the sun cleared the mountains, when the sea was still holding night in its depths. The horizon glowed slowly, a thin line of gold widening by the minute, as though the day were being poured carefully into the world. Birds crossed the sky in loose formation, their wings catching the first light. I stood still, aware of how quietly morning begins when no one is rushing it forward.
What I felt most was permission. The water moved without urgency. The light unfolded at its own pace. Nothing demanded that I be anything other than present to the crossing from dark to day. In that moment, I understood arrival differently, as something ongoing, something that happens gradually, like sunrise, asking only that I remain long enough to witness it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I walked again this evening, as the sun dropped toward the mountains and the light turned golden. The malecón was different at this hour: more crowded, more festive, families out for their evening paseo, that lovely Latin custom of strolling together as the day cools. I was alone among the couples and the families, and I felt held by that rhythm. I felt held by the rhythm of the walk, the beauty of the light, the simple pleasure of a body in motion.
Tomorrow I will walk again. And the day after that. Walking has become my practice here, my daily discipline, my way of being in this place and in this body. Each walk is different: different light, other encounters, different thoughts arising from the rhythm of feet. And each walk is the same: the same path, the same sea, the same self, meeting the world one step at a time.
Solnit (2001) remarks that the pace of genuine thought roughly matches the pace of walking, and that contemporary life, moving far faster than either, routinely outruns the capacity for real reflection. Here in Loreto, I am slowing down to the speed of thought. I am letting my mind keep pace with my feet. I am finding myself in the ordinary miracle of movement, of breath, of a body carrying me through a world that reveals itself slowly, step by step, along a malecón I am learning to call my own.
El camino me enseña quién soy.
The path teaches me who I am.
Un paso a la vez.
One step at a time.
Title: My Dirty Shoes
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Elkin, L. (2017). Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Goffman, E. (1963). Behaviour in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press.
Gros, F. (2014). A philosophy of walking (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Maitland, S. (2009). A book of silence. Granta.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100
Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577
Shapiro, L. (2019). Embodied cognition (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Simmel, G. (1971). The stranger. In D. N. Levine (Ed.), Georg Simmel: On individuality and social forms (pp. 143–149). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908)
Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
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
Walking the malecon as daily ritual embodies what Pink (2013) calls sensory ethnography: knowledge gathered through the moving, attentive body in a specific place. The body adapting to a new rhythm, new smells, sounds, temperatures, signals the early stages of body-based regulation that Levine (2010) describes as the nervous system's capacity to "track" safety. The bilingual form of this entry reflects the way the Spanish-speaking environment was generating a different kind of cognitive and embodied presence.
ACADEMIC LENS
Walking as a research method has a long tradition in what O’Rourke (2013) calls “walking methodologies”: the mobile body as instrument of inquiry, the act of moving through space as a form of thinking. This day-four entry on the malecón traces what Tuan (1977) calls the phenomenology of place attachment: how a landscape becomes meaningful through repeated bodily encounter, through the accumulation of sensory memory that gradually transforms space into place. The proximity of the sea is methodologically central rather than incidental,ral: Blue Mind research (Nichols, 2014) documents the measurable calming effect of blue spaces on the human nervous system, partially explaining the restorative quality of this daily practice. The bilingual notation, moving between Spanish place names and English reflection, performs what Anzaldúa (1987) describes as the writing of the borderlands: language that belongs fully to neither territory and thus opens a third epistemological space. The early-project quality of this walk, still tentative, still scanning, still learning what it means to move without agenda, also documents the initial stages of what Levine (2010) calls somatic re-orientation: teaching the nervous system, through repeated safe experience, that purposeless movement is permitted.
Reading Time: 4minutesPuesta 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.
Reading Time: 4minutes
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 recognized 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
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 theorize 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.
ACADEMIC LENS
The distinction drawn here between “being by myself” and “being genuinely with myself” names the phenomenological core of alonetude: the difference between structural solitude and the experiential quality of self-presence that Moustakas (1961) describes as genuine encounter with oneself. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou framework applies inwardly: the sunset constitutes something beyond a backdrop,, through its beauty and its indifference to the observer’s agenda, the conditions for an I-Thou encounter with one’s own experience. Ulrich’s (1983) restorative environment research contextualizes the sunset’s particular power: the horizon, the large sky, the setting light constitute exactly the fascination and scope that natural environments provide, allowing the directed attention system to rest and the deeper self to surface. Van der Kolk (2014) observes that the capacity to be genuinely present with oneself, rather than managing or performing one’s inner states, is one of the fruits of trauma recovery: the sunset at day two marks the first glimpse of this capacity reasserting itself, evidence that the body has already begun to remember what safety feels like.
Reading Time: 13minutesLlegada, 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.
Reading Time: 13minutes
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 organize them.
But when I sat with it longer, I realized 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. Body-based. 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, characterized 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 characterized by unmet expectations in social relationships. Solitude, by contrast, can be chosen, 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 recognizing 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 organizing 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 how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, explains that the autonomic nervous system continuously scans for cues of safety or danger through a process he calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety. 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, the body’s instinct to scan for safety 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 the body’s sense of being safe, the body shifts from states of protection into states of restoration. The genuine safety 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. 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.
Title: 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
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 learning to settle the nervous system. 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 finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
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 what the body knows.
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 in-between 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 agonizing 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 realizing 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 decentralizes hierarchy. Everything matters. Everything belongs.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
What We Hold in Our Bodies Before We Have Words for It
By the door, my orange suitcase sits unopened. It is my “transformational object,” a vessel for the “what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it,” 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 nineteen 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) work on how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, I recognize I am struggling to move from hyper-vigilance into a state of genuine safety and connection. 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.
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.
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 practising 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 practising 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 state of genuine safety and connection, recognizing 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.
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 recognizes 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 recognize it now as a psychological landscape. Mountain. Forest. Water. Ground. Stability, density, restoration, and movement held in one frame.
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 what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. 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 finding our own calm. 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 still forming. 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.
Title: 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 realize, is more than logistical. It is a body-felt practice of identity negotiation. What I choose to carry, what I leave behind, and how I tolerate the uncertainty in that space become 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 sense-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 conceptualizing 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 with what Brown (2021) describes as vulnerability: 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 body-based inquiry emphasizes 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 easily 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.
This image speaks to what is left behind when identity shifts. Some roles, expectations, and former necessities fall away quietly, without ceremony.
The boot signals completion as much as loss. 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 Idealizing 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 body-based. 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 reorganized 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 recognize 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.
