I woke this morning with a tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with the night before.
The sleep had been deep, the room cool, the sea audible through the open window. Everything about this place says rest. And yet my body woke braced, as though preparing for something that never arrived.
I lay still for a long time, watching the ceiling lighten. Trying to name what I was feeling.
It took a while to find the word. When it came, it surprised me.
Fear.
The Shape of It
The fear lives elsewhere. I have settled into Loreto more easily than I expected. Solitude has become companionable. Silence I am learning to inhabit.
The fear is of what happens if I truly let go.
For years, decades, I have held myself together through effort. Through vigilance. Through the constant, quiet work of monitoring, anticipating, and performing competence. I have been the one who could be counted on. The one who showed up prepared. The one who held more than her share because holding felt safer than asking for help.
That holding has become so familiar that I cannot quite imagine who I would be without it.
And so the fear: if I release the grip, if I stop the vigilance, if I truly rest, will I ever want to return to life as it was? Will I lose the capacity for striving that kept me employed, that kept me useful, that kept me worthy of belonging?
Will I, in some fundamental way, stop being the person I have always been?
The Paradox of Letting Go
There is a strange paradox here. I came to this retreat because I was exhausted by the holding. Because the vigilance had worn grooves in my nervous system that no longer served me. Because I wanted, desperately, to rest.
And now that rest is possible, I am afraid of it.
Afraid that rest will undo me. That I will sink into it and never surface. The woman who emerges from this month will be unrecognizable to herself and to others. That she will have lost her edge, her drive, her usefulness.
The fear reveals how deeply I have tied my worth to my capacity for effort. How thoroughly I have believed that I am only as valuable as what I produce.
Brené Brown (2010) calls this the use of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as a measure of self-worth. She identifies it as one of the things we must consciously release if we want to live what she calls a wholehearted life. Reading those words years ago, I nodded in recognition. Living them is harder.
Title: Halfway There
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creating Safety for the Self
In my academic work, I have written about psychological safety: the conditions that allow people to take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, shame, or punishment (Edmondson, 1999). In classrooms and workplaces, psychological safety means being able to ask questions, admit mistakes, and offer ideas that might fail. It means knowing that vulnerability will be met with support rather than judgment.
I have spent years trying to create psychological safety for students. I have rarely thought about creating it for myself.
What would it mean to approach my own interior with the same care I offer others? To make it safe for myself to rest without proving I deserve it? To let go without requiring a plan for what comes next?
Psychological safety, I am learning, begins within. It begins with the quiet assurance that I will stay with myself, whatever surfaces. That I will meet my need for rest with gentleness. That I will carry this retreat forward as what it is: a return to myself.
The body knows when it is safe. Stephen Porges (2022) has shown that feelings of safety arise from internal physiological states and from cues that signal the nervous system can stand down from vigilance. Those cues can come from the environment, from the relationship, from the breath, from the stillness.
They can also come from the stories we tell ourselves about what we are allowed to need.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
There is another fear beneath this one, harder to name.
I am afraid that if I let go completely, I will lose the capacity to love the life I have built. That the stillness will reveal how much of my striving was compensation rather than calling. That I will look back at my career, my choices, my years of effortful contribution, and feel only exhaustion rather than meaning.
I am afraid of becoming someone who no longer wants to return.
And beneath even that: I am afraid that letting go will reveal an emptiness I have been running from. That, without the structure of obligation, without the identity of educator, without the constant motion, I will find nothing but blank space where a self should be.
This is the fear that woke me this morning. This is what tightened my chest before dawn.
Staying With It
I left my phone untouched. I resisted the pull toward plans or tasks or the small urgencies that usually rescue me from discomfort.
I stayed.
I let the fear be present without trying to fix it. I breathed into the tightness in my chest. I asked, with as much curiosity as I could muster: What are you trying to protect?
The answer came slowly. The fear is trying to protect me from loss. Loss of identity. Loss of purpose. Loss of the scaffolding that has held my life in place for so long.
I thanked it. I mean that genuinely. The fear has kept me functional through years that might otherwise have broken me. It has helped me show up when showing up was required. It has been a kind of armour, and armour serves a purpose.
But armour is heavy. And I am in a place now where I can set it down, even briefly. Even experimentally.
An Experiment in Trust
What if letting go means finding? What if the woman who emerges from stillness is clarified rather than diminished? What if rest reveals presence rather than emptiness?
I cannot know without trying. I cannot know from the outside. I can only know by going in.
Brown (2010) writes about cultivating intuition and trusting faith, which requires letting go of the need for certainty. Certainty is what I have always sought. Plans, structures, contingencies. The illusion that if I prepare enough, I can prevent loss. The illusion that control keeps me safe.
Here in Loreto, the illusion is harder to maintain. The sea holds itself apart from my plans. The mountains hold their shape with or without my watching. The pelicans fish without consulting my schedule. Life here unfolds without my management, and it unfolds beautifully.
Perhaps I, too, can unfold without so much management.
Perhaps the self that emerges from stillness will be someone I recognize after all. Perhaps she will be someone I have been waiting to meet.
Morning, After
I made coffee. I carried it to the small balcony. I sat in the chair that had become familiar over these eight days and watched the light strengthen over the water.
The fear remained. It sat beside me like a companion, still present but no longer gripping. I had acknowledged it. I had listened. I had refused to let it drive me back into motion.
This, I think, is what the discipline of staying means. It means feeling the fear fully. It means feeling the fear and remaining anyway. It means creating enough safety within myself to be present with uncertainty, with open-handedness, with the vulnerability of letting go.
The morning was quiet. A boat moved slowly across the bay. Somewhere, someone was beginning their day with purpose and direction. I was beginning mine with a question still ahead of me.
That felt honest. That felt like enough.
¿Y si me suelto? What if I let go?
I hold the question open. But I am willing to find out.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden Publishing.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Porges, S. W. (2022). nervous system safety: Attachment, communication, finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
ACADEMIC LENS
The question at the heart of this post, ¿y si me suelto?, “what if I let go?”, names the central therapeutic and existential challenge that van der Kolk (2014) identifies in trauma recovery: learning to release the chronic muscular and psychic bracing that survival required, even when survival is no longer at stake. Menakem (2017) describes this as “settling the body”: the slow, somatic process of convincing the nervous system that it may relax its vigilance. The bilingual framing is significant: posing the question first in Spanish allows it to arrive before the analytical English mind can intercept and evaluate it. Anzaldúa (1987) argued that bilingual expression can bypass habitual cognitive filters, accessing emotional knowing that monolingual discourse forecloses. The arts-based imagery accompanying this reflection functions within what Levine (2010) calls the “felt sense”: the pre-linguistic bodily awareness that must be engaged for deep somatic change to occur. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou ontology also resonates: letting go may be understood as releasing the I-It relationship with one’s own body, the instrumental management of the self, in favour of a more receptive, present, and mutual encounter with one’s own experience.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
My mother is 80 years old. She now lives alone in an old folks’ home in Lethbridge, Alberta. I am sitting on a terrace in Mexico, watching the Sea of Cortez turn from blue to silver in the fading light, and I am thinking about her hands.
She has always had capable hands. Hands that kneaded bread dough on Sunday mornings, the kitchen warm with yeast and CBC radio playing softly in the background. Hands that crotched quilts for babies born, each stitch a prayer, each pattern chosen with care. Hands that combed my hair before church, her fingers quick and certain. The spirit of God’s hands, I think, though I hold that comparison with uncertainty, standing outside her faith and the faith I was raised in. Perhaps they are simply mother hands, shaped by decades of service, of showing up, of being useful to everyone but herself.
Recuerdos de Su Cocina / Memories of Her Kitchen
I remember standing on a step stool beside her at the counter, learning to roll pierogi. “Not too much flour,” she would say, her hands guiding mine. “You want it tender, not tough.” I was seven, maybe eight. The kitchen smelled of potatoes and cheese, and outside, the wind was blowing snow against the windows. I felt safe in that kitchen, in the warmth of the oven, in the certainty of her presence beside me.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer, writes about topophilia, the affective bond between people and place. My mother’s kitchen was my first topophilic space, a location where I learned that love could be measured in teaspoons and rolling pins, in the quiet act of making something nourishing with your hands. I carry that kitchen with me still, even here, 2,800 kilometres away, watching a sea she has never seen.
She taught me to can plums in late summer, the kitchen steaming, jars lined up on the counter like soldiers. We would work for hours, cutting and slicing and packing fruit into hot glass, the syrup sweet and golden. “This will taste like sunshine in January,” she would say, and she was right. Those jars, lined up in the cold room, were promises against the long, cold winter. They were her way of saying, “I will take care of you.” I will make sure you have enough.
El amor de una madre vive en lo que prepara.
A mother’s love lives in what she prepares.
La Fe de Mi Madre / My Mother’s Faith
She raised me in the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a faith I no longer practice but whose rhythms still live somewhere deep in my body. I remember the scratch of my Sunday dress against my legs, the smell of the Kingdom Hall a mix of old hymnals and furniture polish and the faint sweetness of old lady sweat. I remember my mother’s voice beside me, singing hymns she knew by heart, her alto steady and sure.
She believed, and still believes, in something with certainty as she later switched to the Mormon Church. I never saw “her God” in the way she did. For her, the gospel is as real as the mountains outside my home in British Columbia, as solid as the bread she bakes, as certain as the sun rising over the prairie. She knows that families are eternal, that her late husband waits for her beyond the veil, that God has a plan, and she is part of it. I envy her this certainty sometimes, the way it holds her steady through grief and loss and the long silence of widowhood.
I left the Church in my teens, quietly, without announcement, the way one might slip out of a party before the host notices. It was quiet, undramatic. There was no single moment of rupture, no crisis of faith that announced itself with thunder. It was more like a slow loosening, a gradual recognition that I no longer believed what I had been taught to believe, that the structure that held my mother so securely felt to me like a house I had outgrown.
Sandra Bloom (2007) writes about ambiguous loss, defined as grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. I wonder sometimes if my mother grieves the daughter she thought she was raising, the one who would marry in the temple and bear children in the covenant and sit beside her in the celestial kingdom. I am still her daughter, but I am also a kind of ghost of the daughter she imagined. This is a loss we hold in silence, a room in our relationship we have agreed to keep closed.
Pequeñas Bondades / Small Kindnesses
And yet she loves me. This I know. I know it in the way she asks about my work, even when my work puzzles her, her questions sincere and slightly bewildered: “So you are still teaching at that university?” Yes, Mom. Still teaching. Her way of showing love is more in spirit than in words or deeds.
Gary Chapman (1992) popularized the concept of love languages, the idea that people express and receive love in different ways: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. My mother’s love language has always been acts of service, the doing of things, the making and mending and bringing of soup through snowstorms. She rarely says “I love you” directly, but she says it in every jar of peaches, every quilt, every four-hour drive through dangerous weather.
El amor no siempre tiene palabras. A veces tiene sopa de pollo.
Love finds other vessels. Sometimes it has chicken soup.
Viuda / Widow
Her husband died two years ago. They had been married for only a few years, long enough that she had learned the shape of his presence: the way he took his soda, the sound of his wheelchair in the hallway, the weight of his hand on her leg as he sat next to her.
I think about her alone in that apartment, moving through rooms that still hold his absence. The recliner where he sat to watch the news. The side of the bed that is still, somehow, his side, even though he will never lie there again. Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to rush through rather than honour. For Greenspan, grief is what happens to love when it encounters loss, it is connection rendered as sorrow, and it carries within it the very bond it mourns.
My mother’s faith offers her a framework for this sorrow: the belief that marriage is eternal, that she will see him again, that death is a temporary separation rather than a final goodbye. I hold a different view, but I am grateful she has it. It gives her something to hold in the long nights, something to reach for when the house feels too quiet, and the bed feels too empty, and the grief feels too heavy to bear alone.
When I call her on Sunday evenings, she tells me about the temple sessions and the neighbour who helped her with the puzzle. She tells me about the weather, about the cat who visits her backyard, and about the book she is reading from the church library. She keeps to herself the moments when she reaches for him in the night and finds only empty sheets. She keeps to herself the crying in the shower, where no one can hear. These things I imagine, because I am her daughter, because I know her, because some things carry their meaning without words.
Lo Que Más Recuerdo / What I Remember Most
I remember her hands in the garden, turning soil, planting seeds, pulling weeds with a determination that seemed almost fierce. She grew tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, and every summer we would spend long evenings in the backyard, the light golden and slanted, the smell of earth and green things all around us. “Everything needs tending,” she told me once, her fingers in the dirt, a tomato plant cupped gently in her palm. “Gardens, families, faith. You have to show up and do the work.”
After she left my dad in 1977, I remember her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, paying bills by the light of a single lamp, her forehead creased with worry she tried to hide from us children. I had no way to understand then what I understand now: how hard she worked, how much she sacrificed, how many of her own dreams she set aside so that we could have enough. I wonder what she wanted to be before she became a mother. I wonder if she remembers.
I remember the way she cried when she missed my grade eight graduation, her face wet with loss and somehow also sad, almost knowingly, that she had to choose to put food on the table over celebration. For years, I made her feel guilty about this, but as a parent, only I can now understand how challenging life can be as a single mother. Love and loss are always tangled together; mothers carry a grief their children cannot fully see.
Judith Herman (1992), in her landmark work on psychological trauma, writes about the importance of witnessing, the act of truly seeing another person’s experience and honouring it as real. I want to witness my mother. I want to see beyond the capable hands and the Sunday faith and the birthday cards that arrive on time, but also the woman beneath all that doing, the woman who had dreams before she had children, who carries losses she has never spoken aloud, who has spent eighty years being useful and may never have learned that she was allowed to simply be.
Detrás de cada madre hay una mujer que olvidamos ver.
Behind every mother is a woman we forget to see.
La Distancia Entre Nosotras / The Distance Between Us
There are 2,800 kilometres between Loreto and Lethbridge. I looked it up. It would take thirty hours to drive, if you could drive across the Sea of Cortez, which, of course, you cannot. The distance feels larger than kilometres can measure: the distance between faith and its absence, between the life she imagined for me and the life I have made, between who she raised me to be and who I have become.
Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s moral development, argued that women often define themselves through relationships, through connection, through care for others. She called this the ethic of care, a moral framework centred on responsibility and responsiveness rather than abstract principles of justice. My mother embodies this ethic. She has spent eighty years caring for her children, her husbands, her clients, anyone who needed a casserole, a listening ear, or a quilt stitched with prayers. I wonder if she knows how to care for herself. I wonder if anyone ever taught her that she was allowed.
I am here in Mexico learning to rest, learning to be still, learning to believe that I am enough without producing, without performing, without earning my place. And I wonder: did I learn my relentlessness from her? Did she learn it from her mother? How many generations of women have run themselves ragged in service to others, believing that rest was selfishness, that stillness was sin, that their worth depended on their usefulness?
Una Carta Que No Enviaré / A Letter Left Unsent
Querida Mamá,
I am sitting by the sea in Mexico, thinking about you. I am thinking about your hands and your faith and the way you have always shown love through doing. I am thinking about the perogies you taught me to roll, the plums we canned in the summer heat, the quilt you drove through a snowstorm to bring me.
I am thinking about how tired you must be. How tired you have always been. How you never learned to rest because no one ever told you that rest was allowed. I wish I could give you what I am learning here: the knowledge that you are enough, that you have always been enough, that your worth was never something you had to earn.
I am sorry I left the Church. I am sorry I cannot be the daughter you imagined. I am sorry for all the silences between us, the questions we leave unasked, the truths we keep hidden to protect each other. But I am grateful, too. Grateful that you loved me anyway. Grateful that you still call on Sundays. Grateful that your faith gives you comfort even though I cannot share it.
I see you, Mom. I see the woman behind the capable hands, behind the Sunday faith, behind the chicken soup and the quilts. I see how much you have given. I see how much it costs. I wish I had told you sooner. I am telling you now, even though you will never read this letter.
Te quiero, Mamá. Siempre.
This letter will stay here. James Pennebaker (1997), whose research on expressive writing demonstrated the healing power of putting painful experiences into words, found that writing about difficult emotions can improve both psychological and physical health, even if the writing is never shared. The writing itself is the medicine. I am writing my way toward understanding, toward compassion, toward a peace I am still learning to name.
Esta Noche / Tonight
The sun has set. The sea is dark now, just the sound of waves and the occasional cry of a seabird. In Lethbridge, it is already late. My mother is probably in bed, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the empty space beside her filled with faith and memory and the shape of a husband who is no longer there.
I will call her tomorrow. I will ask about the church, the neighbour and whether she has been sleeping well. I will keep this essay to myself, keep the memories I have been turning over like stones, about the letter I wrote and will never send. Some things are better held gently, privately, like a prayer offered in silence.
But tonight, across 2,800 kilometres of desert and mountain and sea, I am holding her in my heart. I am thanking her for the hands that shaped me, even as I am learning to shape myself differently. I am forgiving us both for the silences, for the distances, for the love that has always struggled to find its words. I am seeing her, finally, fully: as my mother and as a woman: tired and faithful and braver than I ever knew, standing in her kitchen, rolling out pie crust, teaching me without words that love is something you make with your hands.
Ella es mi madre.
She is my mother.
Y yo soy su hija.
And I am her daughter.
Eso es todo. Eso es suficiente.
That is everything. That is enough.
References
Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419-420.
Chapman, G. (1992). The five love languages: How to express heartfelt commitment to your mate. Northfield Publishing.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Google. (2026). Mi Madre, a la distancia [Audio podcast episode]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
Translation Note
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
This bilingual elegy for the complexity of maternal relationships engages what Menakem (2017) calls intergenerational somatic transmission: the ways that unresolved nervous system patterns pass between generations through attachment, modelling, and the implicit choreography of family life. The grief described here is what Boss (1999) extends beyond personal loss, terms ambiguous loss: mourning a relationship that remains physically present but emotionally unresolved, or that exists in a form different from what was needed or imagined. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour applies here in a particular way: the lifelong management of one’s own emotional responses within complex family systems, the careful calibration of need, disappointment, and love that caregiving dynamics require. The distance between continents that frames this reflection also enacts what Tuan (1977) calls topophilia in reverse: the way geographical separation from formative places and relationships illuminates their emotional weight precisely through their absence. Writing this reflection in both Spanish and English performs Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands methodology: moving between tongues to access the full complexity of a relationship that neither language alone can hold.
I have been here one week now, and something has changed in my relationship with silence.
For the first several days, silence felt like an absence: the absence of traffic, of notifications, of the constant hum of obligation that had become the background noise of my life. I noticed silence the way one notices a missing tooth, by the shape of what was gone. The quiet felt strange, almost suspicious, as though it were hiding something.
This morning, sitting on the small balcony with coffee cooling in my hands, I realized that silence had become something else entirely. It had become a place. A place I could enter. A place I could inhabit. A place that held me rather than something I had to hold at bay.
The Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1948/1988), in his remarkable book The World of Silence, offers language for what I am experiencing. Picard argues that silence is neither void nor absence but rather an autonomous phenomenon: a presence that exists independently of speech and sound, a reality that begins beyond the falling away of noise.
Title: Silence as Substance
Charcoal Sketch: Amy Tucker, 2026
When language ceases, silence begins. But it begins for reasons beyond the ceasing of language. The absence of language simply makes the presence of silence more apparent.
Picard, 1948/1988, p. 15
This distinction matters. If silence were merely the cessation of sound, it would be defined entirely by what it lacks. It would be a negative space, an emptiness awaiting filling. But Picard insists that silence has substance, has being, has its own formative power. Silence, in his account, shapes human beings just as language shapes us, though in different ways.
Silence as Autonomous Phenomenon
When Picard describes silence as autonomous, he means that silence exists independently of human will or action. We uncover silence already present beneath the words. Silence, in this framework, is primary. Language emerges from silence and returns to it. The words we speak are like waves rising from and falling back into a vast sea of quiet that preceded them and will outlast them.
I have spent much of my adult life in noisy environments: classrooms full of voices, offices humming with machines, homes filled with the sounds of family and obligation. Silence, when it appeared, felt like an interruption rather than a foundation. I filled it quickly, almost reflexively, with music, with podcasts, with the radio playing in the background while I worked. The thought of sustained quiet made me uneasy in ways I left unexamined.
Now I understand that unease differently. What I was avoiding in silence was an encounter. Silence waits. It listens. Picard writes that where silence is, we are observed by silence. Silence looks at us more than we look at it. This is precisely what felt threatening: the sense that in silence, I would have to meet myself without distraction, without the buffer of activity and noise that kept me safely busy.
Here in Loreto, I am learning to enter silence rather than escape it. The learning has been gradual. In the first days, I noticed how quickly my mind rushed to fill the quiet. Thoughts formed into lists. Conversations from months ago replayed themselves. The body responded with tension, as though silence required vigilance, as though something might be hiding in the stillness.
Staying silent requires patience. Rather than filling it, I began to notice its texture. Silence, I discovered, carries layers. There are distant sounds within it: the far-off call of a bird, the whisper of wind, the rhythmic breathing of the sea. Silence holds space rather than collapsing inward. Over time, it revealed rhythm.
This has been the week’s revelation: silence is alive.
The sea rises and falls. Wind moves through the palm fronds in waves that sound like breathing. My own breath creates a gentle cadence if I stay still enough to notice. Even the light shifts in patterns that feel rhythmic, the slow arc of morning into afternoon into evening. Silence contains all of this motion. It lives. It moves. It pulses with a life I had been too busy to perceive.
Picard understood this. He wrote of the forest as a great reservoir of silence from which quiet trickles in a thin, slow stream, filling the air with its brightness. The image is precise: silence as source, as reservoir, as something that flows rather than simply exists. Here by the Sea of Cortez, the silence flows from the water, from the mountains, from the vast expanse of sky that has no interest in human schedules or human noise.
Table 1
Qualities of Inhabited Silence
Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction
What It Means
How It Manifests
Autonomous
Silence exists independently of human will or speech
Silence is uncovered rather than created; it precedes and outlasts words
Layered
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows
Wind, breath, distant birds, the sea: silence holds rather than excludes
Rhythmic
Silence has patterns, cycles, flows
Morning quiet differs from evening quiet; silence moves with time
Companionable
Silence accompanies without demanding; it witnesses without judging
A sense of being held, of belonging without performance
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows
Silence allows internal signals to surface; it reduces interpretive load
Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction
Note. The framework synthesizes the work of Picard (1948/1988), contemplative traditions, and personal observation. These qualities emerged through sustained attention rather than analysis.
After years shaped by disruption, urgency, and collective strain, silence offers what I had needed without knowing it: relief from constant interpretation.
In my working life, I was perpetually reading: reading student papers, reading institutional policies, reading the room in meetings, reading the unspoken tensions in corridors and committee gatherings. Every moment required assessment, response, and performance of understanding. Even leisure hummed with demand; podcasts, news, and social media all called me to process, evaluate, and react.
Silence asks for none of this. There is no need to respond. There is no performance required. Experience can simply exist without commentary. This permission feels revolutionary after decades of cognitive labour.
In silence, listening shifts from sound to sensation. From external cues to internal signals. Hunger is evident when no distraction overrides it. Fatigue makes itself known without shame. Contentment arises unannounced, without having to justify itself against productivity metrics.
Silence clarifies.
Silence and the Settling Body
The connection between silence and nervous system regulation is becoming clearer to me now. Yesterday, I wrote about the body beginning to remember safety. Today, I understand that silence is part of how that remembering happens.
Stephen Porges (2022) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, constantly scanning for signals of safety or threat. Chronic noise, whether literal sound or the metaphorical noise of constant demand, keeps the system in a state of vigilance. The body cannot fully settle when it must remain alert to incoming information that might require a response.
Silence provides what Deb Dana (2020) might call a cue of safety. In the absence of demands, the nervous system can begin to downregulate. Muscles soften. Breath deepens. The state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, that felt like normal alertness manifests as chronic tension, and that tension begins to subside.
I have noticed this in my own body over the past week. Each quiet morning reinforces the message that stillness can be supportive. Each evening without urgent input confirms that the world holds steady even when I am unreachable. The body learns through repetition, and silence provides the conditions for that learning.
When Silence Becomes Companionable
Perhaps the most unexpected discovery of this week is that silence can be companionable.
Title: Held Without Asking
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I arrived here expecting solitude to feel lonely, at least sometimes. I expected to miss conversation, to feel the absence of other voices. And there have been moments of longing, particularly in the evenings when the day’s warmth fades, and the darkness feels vast. But alongside that longing, something else has emerged: a sense of being accompanied by silence itself.
This is difficult to articulate without sounding more mystical than I mean. I mean something quite practical: that silence holds without judgment. It asks nothing of me in terms of interest, productivity, or usefulness. It holds my worth independent of output. Silence simply is, and in its presence, I am permitted to simply be.
Picard writes that when two people are conversing, a third is always present: silence is listening. I have begun to feel this even when alone. Silence listens to my thoughts without needing me to speak them. It witnesses my morning rituals, my wanderings to the water, and my afternoon rest. It accompanies without intruding.
Belonging within silence feels different than belonging through interaction. It carries steadiness rather than affirmation. It arises from alignment rather than exchange.
Picard wrote his meditation on silence in 1948, and even then, he worried about what he called the world of noise encroaching on human consciousness. He wrote of radio noise as something that surrounds us, accompanies us, and creates a false sense of continuity that substitutes for genuine presence. If he found the mid-twentieth century noisy, I can only imagine what he would make of our current moment.
We carry noise with us now. It lives in our pockets, vibrates against our bodies, follows us into bedrooms and bathrooms and the last quiet corners of our lives. The smartphone has colonized silence more thoroughly than any technology before it. There is no longer any space, Picard wrote presciently, in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.
Coming here required a deliberate choice to leave that noise behind. I brought my phone but set it to silent. I check email once a day, if that. I have no television, no radio, no podcasts playing while I walk. The withdrawal was initially uncomfortable, as with any withdrawal. The hand reached for the device reflexively. The mind generated reasons to check, to see, to know what was happening elsewhere.
Now, a week in, the reaching has slowed. The mind has settled into the rhythm of this place rather than the rhythm of the feed. Silence has expanded to fill the space that noise once occupied. And I am beginning to understand that this space was never empty. It was always full of silence, waiting for me to notice.
A Body-based Record
The body journal continues to reveal patterns. Day seven marks the emergence of what I can only call ease with silence, a comfort in quiet that was absent at the beginning of the retreat.
Table 2
body journal: Day 7
Time
Observation
Morning
Woke without alarm. Silence felt welcoming rather than empty. Sat with coffee in quiet for forty minutes without restlessness. Breath deep and steady. VV state.
Midday
Walked to water in silence. No impulse to fill quiet with podcast or music. Noticed layers within silence: wind, birds, waves. Felt companioned rather than alone.
Evening
Watched sunset in complete quiet. Silence felt like a place I could inhabit rather than endure. Body soft, jaw relaxed, shoulders down. Gratitude present.
VV sustained throughout the day. Silence is experienced as a supportive presence rather than an absence.
Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection. The emergence of silence as a companionable practice marks a qualitative shift from earlier periods.
Silence and Alonetude
I am beginning to understand that silence is one of the essential conditions for alonetude: the intentional, contemplative solitude I came here to practise. Without silence, solitude risks becoming merely physical isolation, a removal from others that leaves the inner noise intact. With silence, solitude opens into something spacious enough to hold reflection, restoration, and the slow work of becoming present to oneself.
Silence creates the conditions for attention to turn inward. It reduces the load of constant input that normally occupies cognitive and emotional resources. It allows the nervous system to settle, the body to soften, the mind to stop its endless scanning for threat or opportunity. In silence, energy conserves itself. Presence becomes possible.
This is why retreat centres and monasteries have always understood silence as discipline rather than deprivation. Silence asks to be inhabited rather than endured. Silence is itself the somewhere, the place where transformation becomes possible because we are finally still enough to receive it.
Evening, Day Seven
The sun is setting as I write this. The sky over the Sea of Cortez has turned the colour of ripe peaches, fading to lavender at the edges. The mountains across the water are silhouettes now, their details absorbed into the growing dark.
It is very quiet.
Quiet, mostly. I can hear the water lapping against the shore. A bird calls somewhere in the distance. My own breath moves in and out, marking time. But beneath and around these sounds, silence holds. Silence is the medium through which everything else moves, the space in which sound becomes possible.
Picard writes that silence contains everything within itself. It is always wholly present and completely fills the space in which it appears. I feel this now, sitting in the fading light. Silence asks nothing of me. It holds no anticipation of my next word or my next action. It simply holds, vast and patient and present.
One week ago, I arrived here full of noise: the noise of years of overwork, of worry, of the constant chatter of a mind that had forgotten how to be still. The noise is quieter now. It remains, and perhaps it always will. But silence has made room for itself within me, as it does this evening, surrounding and holding the small sounds of life without being diminished by them.
Silence is a place. I am learning to live here.
References
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.
Picard, M. (1988). The world of silence (S. Godman, Trans.). Gateway Editions. (Original work published 1948)
Porges, S. W. (2022). How the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
Academic Lens
Silence as place rather than absence is the lived-experience core of this entry, resonating with Bachelard's (1964) concept of inhabited space: silence becomes a room one can enter and dwell in. This is alonetude at its most concentrated, the capacity to be, in Winnicott's (1958) phrase, alone in the presence of the world without anxiety. The sea as acoustic environment contributes what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call fascination: the quality of an environment that holds attention without effort and allows the mind to rest.
The sky is doing that thing again. Blue becomes gold, becomes rose, becomes violet, and if you blink, you miss the exact moment one colour surrenders to the next. Del azul al oro, al rosa y al violeta. (For the record, I have to look up every word in Spanish in my translator.) I have been sitting here on the balcony watching it happen, trying to find words for what today felt like, and I keep circling back to the same inadequate word: different.
Different in a way that makes me realize how long I have been living in that other place. The one where everything costs. Where even simple things, getting out of bed, making coffee, being present in my own life, require negotiation and force and that particular grinding willpower that is really just exhausted determination wearing a productivity costume.
Today arrived without force. No tuve que forzar nada.
I woke without the usual calculation of whether I had enough in the tank to make it through. No caffeine required, no stubbornness invoked to override my body. No careful rationing of attention, like it might run out before sunset.
Things just… happened. Todo fluyó. Thoughts connected. Words came. My body moved through space without requiring constant management. Natural. Like breathing. Like the way I imagine other people, rested people, move through their days without even noticing how easy it is.
Three hours
This morning I wrote for three hours. Tres horas. The kind of writing where you look up and realize time passed, and you were simply in it, beyond counting, beyond the forcing of each sentence into existence through sheer will.
I wrote about what happened last night. About sleep architecture and nervous system states, and why my body finally trusted enough to sleep through. I wove together material from Walker (2017) on sleep cycles and Porges (2011) on the nervous system, along with what actually happened in my own body between 11 PM and 6 AM. Complex theoretical frameworks are talking to each other through my experience. All of it makes sense. All of it flowing.
Title: Sleep Cycle
Created: Gemini AI, 2o26
Three months ago, this would have been impossible.
Beyond hard. Impossible.
And I need to be precise about that distinction because it matters.
There is this thing that happens when you have been stressed and sleep-deprived for long enough. People talk about it like you are just a little foggy, a little slower, like turning down the volume on a radio. That description misses what it feels like from inside. From inside, it feels like parts of your brain just… stop. Go dark. Offline (Arnsten, 2009).
The prefrontal cortex, the part that does complex thinking, holds multiple ideas at once, synthesizes and integrates, and makes connections, needs massive resources to run. Blood flow. Glucose. Energy. And when your body thinks it is in danger, when your nervous system has been reading the environment as threatening for weeks or months, those resources get redirected. Away from thinking, toward surviving. The amygdala scans for threats. The brainstem is ready to react. Ancient survival systems running the show while the thinking parts go quiet (Arnsten, 2009; Goldstein & Walker, 2014).
Which makes perfect evolutionary sense if you are running from a predator. Nuance is useless when you need to run. You need fast, automatic, proven responses.
The problem is that economic precarity (precariedad económica) is no predator. Contract uncertainty cannot be outrun. But try telling that to a nervous system running million-year-old software that says: sustained threat equals redirect all resources to survival.
So the thinking parts go offline. Executive functions dim. And you tell yourself you are just tired, that you need to try harder, that you need more coffee.
Except that trying harder proves ineffective when the biological structures that underpin complex thinking have been taken offline to conserve resources for mere survival.
This morning, those structures were back. I could feel it, bodily, somáticamente, in my actual body. I read something from Walker’s work, and I could hold the concept while simultaneously connecting it to Porges and to what happened in my own sleep last night. Three frameworks, held together, talking to each other in my mind.
A month ago, reading that same passage, I would have had to stop. Reread. Make notes. Force comprehension through sheer determination. Today it just… made sense. La comprensión fluyó. Understanding flowed.
The Files
After lunch, I did something I have been avoiding. I opened my files. The pages I wrote months ago when sleep was breaking every night, when my nervous system was in constant alert, when exhaustion had become so normal I had stopped recognizing it as a state separate from just being me.
I was bracing for it to be bad. Full of gaps. Incoherent in places. The kind of work you produce when your prefrontal cortex is running on fumes, and you are just trying to get through.
It was good. Actually, genuinely good. The arguments held. The theory was solid. The thinking was clear.
And I sat there staring at these pages I wrote while barely functional and felt this complicated tangle of relief and grief. Una especie de duelo. Because if I could do that work while exhausted, produce something sound while my body was in survival mode, while parts of my brain were literally offline, what might I have been capable of if I had been rested?
What did I lose to those months of pushing through?
I watched the pelican outside my window for a long time. Dive. Rest. Zambullirse y descansar. Dive. Rest. Over and over. That simple rhythm. And something shifted in how I was thinking about the question.
The assumption underneath my grief was that exhausted-me and rested-me are the same person in different states. But that framing misses something. The work I produced while exhausted was shaped by that exhaustion. The questions I asked, the frameworks I reached for, the way I approached the material: all of it came from living inside chronic activation and precarity.
That work has value because it was written from within the very thing it seeks to understand. Nash (2004) argues that lived experience (experiencia vivida) is legitimate scholarly data when you examine it rigorously. My exhaustion was enriching the work. It was part of the data.
What restoration gives me goes beyond redoing that work “properly.” It is the chance to add another layer. To examine chronic activation from the perspective of someone who has lived both states and can now see the relationship between them.
Both matter. Both are real. Both contribute.
I have been writing down what I notice in my body at different points throughout the day. For no formal reason. Just because the consistency seemed worth documenting.
Morning: Waking without an alarm. The body knows what time it is from some internal clock that fragmented sleep had disrupted. That feeling of being actually rested sinks all the way into my bones. Quiet joy mixing with disbelief, mixing with gratitude. High energy but organic, unforced, free of chemical aid, just available. First conscious thought: I slept through.
Mid-morning: Three hours of writing behind me. Shoulders loose. Jaw soft. Hands steady. That focused clarity without the edge of strain I am so used to. Still high energy, sustained without effort. No fatigue. Apparently, complex intellectual work thrives beyond defensive states of the nervous system. Who knew.
Afternoon: After lunch. Gentle hunger satisfied. Digestion easy. Muscles relaxed. Just… contentment. Being in my body instead of trying to manage it from somewhere outside. Energy is moderate now, appropriate to midday. Body speaking up clearly about needs: thirst, hunger, time to move, instead of waiting until an emergency before getting my attention.
Later afternoon: Reading dissertation. Sitting comfortably without conscious effort. No tension accumulating in the neck and shoulders. Emotions are complex, that relief-grief tangle, present but manageable. Holding contradictory feelings without my nervous system reading emotional complexity as a threat. Energy is holding steady.
Evening: Sunset. Cooling air. Breath synchronized with waves. Body at ease. Deep peace. That gentle anticipation of evening unfolding. Energy naturally declines as the day winds down. Unwound rather than crashed. Present rather than depleted. Responsive to circadian rhythms, to what is actually needed now.
Night: Preparing for sleep. The body is already beginning the transition. Muscles releasing. Calm. Trust that sleep will come, that my body knows how to do this. Very low energy, sleep-ready. And here is what strikes me: no anxiety about whether tonight will repeat last night. Just readiness.
Looking at this pattern, the way energy moved across the day, I can see how it is supposed to work. La naturalidad. The naturalness of it. High when needed for writing. Moderate for reading. Naturally declining toward rest. Responsive. Appropriate. Organic.
For months, my energy looked nothing like this. Low despite caffeine. Forced into function through will. Brief spikes when adrenaline kicked in. Complete crashes. Forced back up. Anxious and activated at night when I needed sleep.
That is the nervous system thrown off balance, impairing its function. That is the nervous system thrown off balance. That is what happens when the nervous system cannot access the state that allows for appropriate energy modulation.
Today, my energy followed the pattern research says is healthy (Kaplan, 1995; Ryan & Deci, 2000). And I know that sounds abstract, mere “research says” abstraction, but from inside it feels like my body finally remembering how to be a body. How to respond to actual needs instead of just surviving threat after threat after threat.
My hands wanted charcoal this afternoon. For no reason except that they wanted it. So I drew the pelican. El pelícano. The one I have been watching all week. Beyond accuracy, trying to capture the quality of movement. The dive. The pause. The rest. El ritmo. That rhythm.
And here is what I am seeing: effort and ease work as partners. El esfuerzo y la facilidad no son opuestos. They are partners.
The dive takes everything. Wings folding, body plummeting, that violent entry into water, struggling with a fish. Real effort. Then the rest is complete. Body still on the surface, conserving, digesting. Real rest.
Neither negates the other. The effort is recognized; it simply requires rest. The rest is earned because it follows effort. They are both necessary. Both are part of the natural rhythm.
I have been living as if they are in competition. Like rest is something I have to earn through sufficient effort. Like, I can only access it once I have accomplished enough to justify it. Like, needing rest means I am weak, inefficient, or somehow failing.
El pelícano no piensa así. The pelican holds no such story. The pelican dives when hungry. Rests because the body needs to conserve energy between dives. Neither requires justification. Both are what the body needs.
I am learning this. Despacio. Slowly. Con dificultad. With difficulty. But learning.
What I am afraid of
It is almost time for bed, and there is a question I have been avoiding all day. What if last night was a fluke? What if tonight I wake at 2 AM with thoughts racing? What if my nervous system’s trust was temporary, contingent, fragile?
I can feel anxiety activating around this. Shoulders tensing. Breathe shallow. a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger creeping back: scanning, trying to control, attempting to guarantee through worry that last night repeats.
But here is what I learned this morning, what the research showed me: nervous systems bypass conscious decisions about safety entirely. They respond to environmental cues. Señales ambientales. To patterns repeated across time. To accumulate data (Porges, 2011).
Nine nights now. Same evening sequence. Same environmental cues. That is data my nervous system has been gathering.
One night of unbroken sleep does something more interesting than erase that pattern. It confirms it. The conditions that supported last night’s rest remain. Evening rhythm is stable. The acoustic environment provides low-frequency, rhythmic patterns that signal safety. Darkness is complete and held safely. Predictability that allowed my system to trust enough to release vigilance.
I cannot control whether I sleep through tonight. But I can maintain the conditions that supported last night. Follow the same sequence. Honrar el ritmo. Honour the rhythm. Trust my nervous system is doing what nervous systems do: gathering data, testing predictions, updating assessments.
And if I wake tonight? That is also data. Data. Information about how healing actually proceeds when you get close enough to see it.
Nine days
Nueve días. Nine cycles of morning and evening. Nine progressions dark to light to dark. The pattern repeats but is never exactly the same. Each day is similar in structure, unique in texture, in quality, in what it shows me.
Today showed capacity. Hoy reveló capacidad. The capacity to think clearly. Write with rigour and creativity. Hold complexity without overwhelm. Feel contradictory emotions without the nervous system thrown off balance. Notice what the body needs and respond appropriately.
I had begun to think these capacities were gone. Diminished permanently by months of stress and fragmentation. But they were offline, waiting. Estaban desconectadas. Waiting for conditions that would let them function.
Last night’s unbroken sleep provided those conditions. Seven hours of sustained regulation. Seven hours of complete sleep cycles. Seven hours of trust.
And today, the harvest. La cosecha de ese descanso. Clear thinking. Sustained energy. Natural rhythms.
Tomorrow night will bring its own data. Sleep through or wake; either contributes to understanding. The nervous system is learning what safety feels like. El sistema nervioso está aprendiendo cómo se siente la seguridad. Learning to recognize it. Trust it. That learning moves in spirals, circling back. Some nights, complete rest, some partial waking. Both teaching the system about regulation, about what supports healing, about the gradual recalibration from threat to safety.
What I know tonight, sitting here as the last light fades and first stars appear above the sea, mientras se desvanece la última luz del cielo y aparecen las primeras estrellas sobre el mar: healing is something concrete and measurable. It is a concrete, lived, measurable reality.
My body slept through last night. First time in months.
My mind engaged in complex theoretical work today. First time in weeks.
My energy was appropriately modulated throughout the day. First time I can remember.
Facts. Data points. The larger pattern of regulation and recovery is becoming visible.
El ritmo continúa. The rhythm continues. The pattern repeats. The body learns. And I am finally learning to trust this.
Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you, body.
Por este día de claridad. For this day of clarity.
Por mostrarme lo que es posible cuando descansas. For showing me what is possible when you rest.
Por enseñarme que el esfuerzo y la facilidad son socios, no enemigos. For teaching me that effort and ease are partners.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Goldstein, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2014). The role of sleep in emotional brain function. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 10, 679–708. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032813-153716
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Google. (2026). From survival mode to flow state [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
Academic Lens
What restoration makes possible, the return of curiosity, appetite, creative impulse, is the clinical literature's definition of recovery from burnout (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001): the restoration of engagement, efficacy, and energy that chronic overextension depletes. Ryan and Deci's (2000) self-determination theory frames this as the re-emergence of intrinsic motivation once external demands are suspended. This entry marks a pivot point in the inquiry: the beginning of the third phase, where alonetude stops being survival and starts being inquiry.
Evening Reflection: When the Shoulders Finally Drop
Video Credit: Gemini, 2026
The sky over the Sea of Cortez turns amber and rose as I write this, the eighth sunset of this retreat. Eight days. One complete week plus one day of threshold-crossing. Long enough for the body to begin believing what the mind decided: that this time is mine, that rest is permitted, that I can stop performing vigilance.
This evening, I sat on the small balcony with nothing but cooling coffee and the sound of waves returning to shore. No task. No plan. No productive purpose. Just sitting as the light changed, watching pelicans settle onto pilings for the night, their bodies perfectly still after a day of diving. They looked the way I feel tonight, arrived, finally, into stillness.
Title: Evening Tide, Sea of Cortez. Rhythm Without Demand.
La quietud. The quietness. The settling. The quality of being that emerges when striving pauses long enough for presence to surface.
Blue Background Water Colour
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2025
What Happens When the Body Exhales
For eight days now, I have been tracking my body-based state with the methodological rigour this research requires, but also with growing tenderness toward what the body reveals. This evening’s observation differs from previous entries in a manner best described as qualitative rather than quantitative. Something has shifted. Something has softened. The shoulders that have lived near my ears for years, decades, perhaps, have finally dropped.
Stephen Porges (2011, 2022) writes that the autonomic nervous system functions as a surveillance mechanism, continuously scanning for cues of safety or threat through what he terms the body’s instinct to scan for safety. This scanning occurs below conscious awareness, shaping our physiological state before we have language to describe our feelings. For years, my body’s instinct to scan for safety detected threat everywhere: in the precarity of contract work, in institutional politics, in the endless demands that arrived faster than I could meet them, in the quiet terror of never being enough.
Here, by the sea, the cues have changed. Predictable rhythm. Consistent warmth. The constancy of waves. The absence of urgent demands. No emails requiring immediate response. No meetings to navigate. No performances to sustain. Day by day, hour by hour, my nervous system has been gathering evidence: this place is safe. This time is protected. You can rest.
Tonight, the shoulders finally believed it. They dropped. And with that, the tears came.
It is a strange thing to discover that your body has been holding grief in places you had never thought to look. The shoulders, apparently, have been carrying years of it. The jaw, too, clenched through countless nights of fitful sleep, grinding away anxiety that had nowhere else to go. The chest, held tight against the vulnerability of being seen as struggling, as uncertain, as anything less than fully competent.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) documents how trauma, and I would add chronic stress, chronic precarity, and chronic performance of adequacy, gets stored in the body’s tissues, in patterns of tension and bracing that become so familiar we forget they were learned. The body keeps the score, he writes, when the mind refuses to. My body has been keeping score for a very long time.
As my shoulders dropped tonight, something released. Tears came, quiet and steady, undramatic, arriving like rain after a long drought. I wept for the woman who carried so much for so long. I wept for the years of vigilance that never brought the security they promised. I wept for all the moments I had held rigid because softening felt dangerous, because survival required staying braced.
Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is a kind of alchemy, transforming pain into wisdom when we allow ourselves to feel it fully rather than bypassing it in favour of premature healing. Tonight’s tears were recognition. They were recognized. They were the body finally releasing what it no longer needed to carry.
When we give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break. Adapted from Shakespeare, as cited in Greenspan (2004)
But sometimes grief needs no words. Sometimes the shoulders drop, and the body speaks its own truth.
Shoulders noticeably lower, jaw loose, deep breath available without effort
Peaceful, tender, slightly tearful
First evening where settling feels complete rather than effortful
7:30 PM
genuine safety
Warmth in chest, softness in belly, feet grounded
Grateful, present, emotionally open
Tears came and passed gently; no activation followed
9:00 PM
genuine safety
The first evening in years where sleep feels like an arrival rather than a collapse
Quiet contentment, readiness for rest
The first evening in years where sleep feels like an arrival rather than a collapse
Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection, characterized by parasympathetic activation, social engagement capacity, and felt safety (Porges, 2011). Tonight marks the first sustained evening-long state of genuine safety and connection without the body’s alert state spikes.
What Eight Days Has Taught
If someone had told me on Day 1 that eight days would be enough to feel this different, I would have dismissed the possibility entirely. Eight days against decades of patterning? Impossible. And yet here I am, shoulders lower, breath deeper, tears falling freely because safety has become believable enough for grief to surface.
the quiet way nature restores us Theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995) proposes that natural environments restore depleted cognitive and attentional resources through four key qualities: being away (psychological distance from demands), extent (environmental richness), the gentle pull of the natural world (gentle engagement), and compatibility (alignment between environment and purpose). This retreat has offered all four. But what the theory leaves unnamed, what no theory fully reaches, is the embodied dimension of restoration.
Restoration is body-based first. It is body-based. It is muscular. It is nervous-system-deep. The mind can decide to rest, but the body must be convinced. That convincing takes time, takes consistency, takes environmental cues repeated until the ancient mammalian brain that governs survival finally accepts: we are safe here.
Eight days. That is how long it took for my shoulders to believe it.
Deepening Inner Body Awareness
Another shift tonight: the clarity of internal signals. I knew I was hungry before hunger became uncomfortable. I felt thirsty early enough to address it gently. I noticed fatigue creeping in and sat down rather than pushing through. These micro-adjustments represent inner body-sensing awareness, the capacity to perceive and interpret internal bodily states (Craig, 2002; Mehling et al., 2012), and represent a significant development from Week 1.
When the nervous system operates in chronic defence, inner body awareness dims. The body’s quieter signals get overridden by louder demands: deadlines, obligations, others’ needs. We learn to ignore hunger until it becomes urgent, to override fatigue with caffeine and willpower, to silence the body’s requests for rest because rest feels dangerous when survival depends on constant output.
Here, eight days into chosen stillness, inner body awareness has returned. I am learning again to hear what my body communicates. I am remembering that these signals are information, data rather than weakness; that responding to them is wisdom, deep listening rather than indulgence.
Table 2 inner body-sensing Awareness Development: Days 1–8
Struggled to sustain attention to the body; mind wandered constantly
Day 1
Day 8
Noticing
Difficult to detect subtle bodily cues; awareness fragmented
Clear, early detection of hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature changes
Struggled to sustain attention to body; mind wandered constantly
Attention to body was fragmented; mind wandered constantly
Can maintain gentle attention to internal states without forcing
Emotional Awareness
Disconnection between physical sensation and emotional state
Growing recognition of how emotions manifest in the body
finding our own calm
Limited capacity to use bodily awareness for regulation
Beginning to use breath, posture, movement responsively
Body Listening
Tendency to override or ignore bodily signals
Increasing trust in body’s communications
Trusting
Body felt unreliable, unpredictable
Emerging sense that body’s signals are trustworthy data
Note. Framework adapted from Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA; Mehling et al., 2012). inner body-sensing capacity improves with reduced cognitive load and increased felt safety.
Tonight’s artifact collection includes the grey-blue pebble I found this morning on the beach walk, smooth, palm-sized, temperature-neutral. I have carried it all day, a tangible reminder of what settling feels like. The stone has been tumbled by tides for who knows how long, its roughness worn away by countless returns to shore. It is complete without being perfect. It is whole because the sea has shaped it, held whole by that very shaping.
I also photographed my hands this evening, palms open and resting on my thighs, fingers slightly curled. The image captures something about receptivity, about the body’s capacity to be open without gripping. These hands have held so much: students’ struggles, institutional politics, my own relentless standards. Tonight they are empty. Tonight they rest.
Tomorrow I will try charcoal drawing. I want to capture the quality of light at sunset, the way amber and rose bleed into each other across the water. Charcoal feels right for this: the smudging, the imprecision, the way it cannot be controlled entirely. A medium that requires surrender.
Theoretical Integration: When Safety Permits Grief
Tonight’s experience illuminates a vital relationship between nervous-system regulation and emotional processing. Porges (2022) emphasizes that the social engagement system, which involves a state of genuine safety and connection, must be activated before deeper emotional work becomes possible. When we are in the body’s alert state (fight-or-flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze), we lack the physiological capacity for the kind of emotional experience that supports integration and healing.
This explains why my grief waited eight days to arrive. The tears had to wait until my body released its defence mode. Safety had to stabilize first. The state of genuine safety and connection had to become reliable, consistent, and trustworthy. Only then could the grief surface without overwhelming me, without triggering a return to vigilance.
Deb Dana (2018, 2020), translating how the nervous system responds to safety and threat into therapeutic practice, describes this as “building the genuine safety muscle,” strengthening the nervous system’s capacity to remain regulated even when difficult emotions arise. Eight days of consistent safety cues have built enough genuine safety capacity that I could cry tonight without dysregulating. The tears came and passed like weather, leaving me softer rather than depleted.
This has implications for our understanding of healing from burnout. We cannot think our way out of the nervous system, which is thrown off balance. We cannot use willpower to override autonomic states shaped by years of chronic stress. We need environments that consistently communicate safety. We need time, more than we think, less than we fear. We need conditions that allow the body to gather evidence slowly, patiently, until it finally believes: we are allowed to rest.
Spanish Lessons the Sea Teaches
Title: Memories of the Sea
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Spanish phrase I learned today from a local fisher: déjate llevar, let yourself be carried. He was describing how to swim in the Sea of Cortez, how to work with the current rather than against it. But the phrase resonated beyond its literal meaning.
Déjate llevar. Let yourself be carried. Stop resisting. Stop bracing. Allow the existing support.
I have spent decades swimming against currents that were stronger than I could overcome: institutional precarity, economic insecurity, and cultural narratives that equate worth with productivity. I exhausted myself with that swimming. Here, eight evenings into learning a different way, I am beginning to understand the expression “dejar de llevar.” I am beginning to let the sea, this place, this time, this intentional solitude, carry me.
The shoulders dropped tonight because I finally trusted what was holding me. The grief came because safety made space for it. The healing is happening because I stopped swimming long enough to float.
End of Day Eight
Day 8 marks the threshold: the body has settled enough that analysis can be sophisticated without overwhelming. The artifacts I have been collecting, pebbles, photographs, and journal entries documenting sensory experience, can now begin to speak to one another, to reveal patterns, and to illuminate the mechanisms by which solitude supports healing.
But tonight, analysis waits. Tonight, there is only the amber sky fading to violet, the pelicans motionless on their pilings, the sound of water returning to shore. There is only this body, finally soft, finally believing in its own safety. There is only gratitude for eight days that changed everything by teaching one simple thing:
The shoulders can drop. The grief can come. The healing can happen. All we need is time, permission, and a place that holds us gently while we remember who we are when we stop performing strength.
La quietud. The settling. The arrival. Finally being here.
Gracias, Mar. Thank you, seaa
Por enseñarme a descansar. For teaching me to rest.
Title: Figure X. The Body-based Arrival: How the Body Learns to Let Go
Image Credit: NotebookLM 2026
Note: The Body-based Arrival: A conceptual synthesis of nervous system settling, inner body-sensing return, and grief release observed across Days 1–8 of the retreat.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? inner body awareness: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Google. (2026). La Quietud [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Google. (2026). Evening Reflection: When the Shoulders Finally Drop [AI-generated video]. Gemini. https://gemini.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Mehling, W. E., Price, C., Daubenmier, J. J., Acree, M., Bartmess, E., & Stewart, A. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA). PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking Press.
ACADEMIC LENS
Vespers, the evening prayer office, provides the spiritual frame for what Porges (2011) describes as the physiological shift into parasympathetic rest: the moment the nervous system registers that the day’s demands have concluded and safety can be inhabited. The observation that “the shoulders finally drop” documents this transition somatically, naming what Levine (2010) calls the completion of a defensive response and the return to a regulated baseline. The eighth day as a symbolic threshold also resonates with Turner’s (1969) analysis of ritual structure: sufficient duration to begin genuine transformation, the liminal space no longer new and still finding its resolution. The amber and rose sky of the Sea of Cortez functions as what Ulrich (1983) identified as a restorative environment: natural settings with soft fascination that hold attention without requiring effortful processing, allowing the nervous system to discharge accumulated tension. The evening practice of intentional rest described here aligns with Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) argument that the researcher’s own body is a legitimate site of inquiry, and that attending to it carefully, without agenda, constitutes a form of data collection.
Goodbye, Baja. Me voy, y me duele. I am leaving, and it hurts.
Title: Between Departure and Return: The Material Weight of Becoming
Artist Statement
This photograph holds a quiet moment between departures. The open suitcase sits on the bed, overfilled and only partially closed, revealing the lived reality of constant movement. Books, journals, clothing, conference materials, and personal items spill outward. What appears at first glance to be simple travel preparation begins to feel more like an inventory of a life in motion. Packing becomes reflective work. I find myself asking what is essential, what supports my thinking, and what emotional weight I continue to carry from place to place.
I had only just arrived home and was already preparing to leave again. The suitcase became a temporary resting place where solitude, scholarship, advocacy, and embodiment intersected. Its bright orange shell, stretched and resistant to closing, felt symbolic of the inner tension of living between spaces. Between rest and responsibility. Between reflection and action. Between the need for solitude and the call to remain engaged with others.
There is no attempt in this image to tidy the moment or create order. The disorder feels honest. Intellectual life and emotional life rarely fold neatly into compartments. They expand, they press outward, and they reveal the fullness of what we carry forward as we continue moving through the world.
You met me gently, and then you undid me. Slowly, the way the sea works on stone. Each morning, you loosened something I had been holding too tightly. Each night, you gave me dreams I hadn’t yet known I was ready to have.
I cried here in ways I had forgotten how to cry. Beyond the sharp, panicked kind, but the kind that comes when the body finally believes it is safe. Tears warmed my eyes and spilled without apology. A release. Un permiso. A permission I had yet to recognize was awaiting me.
I dreamed deeply in Baja. Dreams filled with water and doorways and people I had long ceased thinking about. Dreams where I was walking without hurry. Dreams where I was simply present without explaining. I would wake with my heart open and think, ah… esto es. This is it. This is what it feels like when the nervous system exhales.
There were moments of sudden clarity, pequeños relámpagos de verdad. Standing at the sink with morning light on the tiles. Walking the shoreline and realizing I was no longer scanning for danger. Lying down in the afternoon and discovering that rest carried no punishment. Ah-ha moments that arrived quietly rather than shouting, but settled quietly into my bones.
I realized here that I have spent years surviving what I was never meant to endure. That exhaustion exists beyond personal failure. That my body has been keeping score even when my mind tried to move on. Entendí que no estaba rota. I understood that I was never broken. Only tired. Only braced. Only waiting for warmth long enough to soften.
Baja, you gave me that warmth. You gave me days without urgency and nights that felt held. You taught me that solitude can be chosen, inhabited, even loved. That I can sit with myself without flinching. That I can listen inward and trust what I hear.
I am leaving you now, but I am anything but empty-handed. I carry the dreams. I carry the tears. I carry the quiet knowing that arrived when I finally stopped running. Llevo el mar en el pecho. I carry the sea in my chest.
Gracias por sostenerme. Gracias por devolverme a mí misma. Thank you for holding me while I remembered how to stay.
Adiós, Baja. No te dejo atrás. I take you with me.
I carry the sea in my chest.
Title: Ascending What Cannot Be Rushed
Artist Statement
This photograph was taken during a morning walk when the path revealed itself as a gradual climb rather than an open horizon. The stone steps were uneven and worn, asking for care with every step. I was unable to move quickly, and there was little room for distraction. Each placement of my foot required attention. As I moved upward, I felt something similar happening within me. The climb felt like endurance rather than achievement. It felt like endurance.
Stairs are often used as symbols of progress, but this moment felt quieter than that. The stones were rough beneath my feet, and the incline asked for patience rather than momentum. Growth, in this space, felt slow and intentional. The walls on either side created a narrow passage that held me in the experience. There was guidance in that containment, a sense of being gently directed forward.
I came to experience the climb as a conversation between my body and the land. Effort became a way of listening. The photograph holds something beyond arrival. Instead, it holds the steady work of continuing upward, even when the destination remains out of sight.
In Baja, aloneness arrived first. It was unfamiliar, and at times it was heavy. But place matters. The sea, the light, the daily repetition of shoreline and breath created the conditions for something else to emerge.
Aloneness softened into solitude. Solitude became alonetude: a practised way of being with myself, chosen rather than endured, held by place and carried beyond it.
What began as absence became presence. What was imposed became intentional.
This is a beginning held within what looks like an ending. It is a way of living I will continue to practise.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
The “material weight of becoming” named in this post’s artwork title engages Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of intimate objects: the overfilled suitcase holds the accumulated somatic experience of the month, the changed nervous system state, the recovered creative capacity, the grief and relief and wonder that thirty days of embodied inquiry have generated. Van Gennep’s (1960) rites of passage framework describes departure as the first phase of transition: the separation from the liminal space that has made transformation possible. The bilingual grief of “me voy, y me duele” is performed in both languages because neither alone holds the full weight of what is being left: Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands methodology suggests that the emotions that live in the space between languages are among the most honest available to the bilingual self. Tuan’s (1977) concept of topophilia, place-love, is at its most acute in departure: we know how much we love a place most fully in the moment of leaving it. What Turner (1969) would note is that this departure marks a passage beyond the pre-liminal condition, a carrying-forward of the transformation: the suitcase that was packed on January 1 and is now being packed again holds a different person than the one who first filled it.
Really cried. The kind of crying that starts somewhere below your ribs and moves through your whole body. The kind that makes you sit down because standing requires more structure than you have right now.
I was watching pelicans. Just watching pelicans fish. And suddenly I was weeping.
For seventeen days, I have been here, establishing safety and learning to sleep. Learning to play. Touching rocks. Watching whales. Allowing my nervous system to register that threat has passed, that I am here, that nothing is chasing me.
And this morning, my body decided it was safe enough. Safe enough to feel what I have been carrying. Safe enough to let the grief arrive.
Finalmente segura para sentir. Finally safe enough to feel.
What Greenspan Teaches About Dark Emotions
I brought Greenspan’s (2004) Healing Through the Dark Emotions with me to Mexico. Have been reading it in small pieces, letting it teach me what I am experiencing rather than rushing ahead to understand before feeling.
Greenspan argues that what we call “negative emotions” are badly felt energies, suppressed or misunderstood, rather than inherently problematic. She writes:
According to Greenspan (2004), dark emotions serve a purpose. Like physical pain, they are signals asking to be heard.
This stopped me in my tracks when I first read it weeks ago. Stopped me again this morning when the crying started.
The grief is purposeful. It is calling for attention. It has been calling for seventeen days, but I could hear it only once my nervous system registered enough safety to allow it.
El dolor tiene propósito. The pain has purpose.
Greenspan identifies grief as one of three “dark emotions” alongside fear and despair. She refuses to call them negative, insisting that dark emotional energy is neutral in itself. What makes emotions toxic is how we handle them: suppressing, denying, transcending prematurely, avenging, and escaping. The emotions themselves are neutral. Essential. Carrying information our bodies need us to know.
This reframes everything.
For five months before this retreat, I carried enormous grief. Witnessing someone I love disappear into addiction. Watching helplessly as the person I knew was displaced by someone whose behaviour felt profoundly other. Boss (1999) calls this ambiguous loss: grief without closure because the person remains physically present while psychologically transformed.
But I could cry about nothing else. My nervous system was in a constant state of threat response. Porges (2011) explains that the social engagement system (which supports emotional expression, connection, and facial expressiveness) goes offline during the body’s alert state or dorsal vagal shutdown. You cannot process grief when your body is preparing for fight or flight or freeze.
So I carried it. Held it. Waited.
And this morning, watching pelicans, my nervous system signalled: it is safe now. You can feel this now.
Ahora es seguro. Now it is safe.
The Three Skills of Emotional Alchemy
Greenspan offers what she calls “emotional alchemy,” transforming dark emotions from lead into gold through three core skills:
Skill 1: Attending. Learning to listen to the emotion. To notice it. To turn toward it rather than away.
Skill 2: Befriending. Feel it to heal it. Allowing the emotion to be present without trying to fix, change, or understand it. Just feeling it.
Skill 3: Surrendering. To let it go, you have to let it flow. Allowing the emotion to move through you, trusting that emotions are temporary, that they crest and subside like waves.
Sitting on the patio this morning, pelicans fishing below, I practised these skills.
I attended. Noticed the tightness in my chest. The way my breath was catching. The pressure behind my eyes. The heat in my throat. I turned toward the grief rather than distracting myself with coffee, reading, or planning the day.
I befriended. Sat with the feeling. Did my best to allow it without needing to understand why pelicans triggered weeping. Without needing to make sense of timing. Without needing the emotion to be different from what it was. Just: this is grief. It is here. It is allowed to be here.
I surrendered. Let the crying happen. Let it move. Let it flow without trying to contain, control, or finish it quickly. Greenspan (2004) argues that surrendering to fear is itself a way of living honestly. The same is true for grief. Surrendering to grief is allowing life to move through you honestly.
Greenspan (2004) opens one chapter with the image of an open heart as a threshold, that even in the darkest places, the world retains its charge of the sacred.
This terrifies me and compels me at the same time.
For seventeen days, I have been building protection. Routine. Predictability. Environmental consistency. The conditions that allow the nervous system to regulate. And this has been necessary. Essential. I could do nothing else first.
But now protection is sufficient that I can afford brief moments without it. Can afford to open slightly. Can afford to let grief arrive.
Greenspan (2004) frames this as vulnerability as a form of radical openness rather than weakness, openness, a willingness to remain available to pain and loss, but equally to love, wonder, intimacy, and the full aliveness of being human. In her framing, vulnerability is the condition that makes genuine experience possible.
This is what alonetude is teaching me. That safety is the condition that allows vulnerability rather than its opposite. That I came here to establish enough protection to risk having no protection. The open heart requires the regulated nervous system first.
La vulnerabilidad requiere seguridad primero. Vulnerability requires safety first.
Brené Brown (2012) writes extensively about vulnerability requiring courage. But what I am learning here is that vulnerability also requires nervous system regulation. You cannot risk openness when your body is in chronic threat. Cannot allow grief to flow when every resource goes toward survival.
Alonetude creates conditions where vulnerability becomes possible. Where dark emotions can arrive because the body finally trusts that it can handle them.
Emotions Live in the Body
One of Greenspan’s (2004) seven foundations holds that emotions are embodied: they live in the body rather than purely as mental events; they and in the world.
This feels obvious once you pay attention, but for most of my life, I believed emotions lived in my head. Was that crying something you chose? That grief was a cognitive state you could think your way through.
But this morning taught me otherwise. The grief arrived in the body before I had conscious thought about it. My chest tightened. My breath caught. My eyes filled. Only then did my mind notice: oh. I am crying. Something is moving through me.
van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes this: the body keeps the score. Emotions are stored in the nervous system, accessed through body-based pathways rather than through thought. This is why talk therapy alone often fails with trauma. The body holds what language cannot reach.
El cuerpo guarda lo que las palabras no pueden tocar. The body holds what words cannot touch.
Watching myself cry this morning, I understood something new. The grief was never absent. It was present all along, stored in my body, waiting for conditions where it could be processed safely. My nervous system was protecting me by keeping it stored until I had the capacity to feel it. Now, seventeen days into alonetude, capacity has increased slightly. Enough for this morning’s grief. Probably insufficient for all the grief I carry. But enough for today.
This is what Porges (2011) describes: nervous system regulation as creating capacity for emotional experience. When we are thrown off balance, we cannot access the full range of emotional life. Regulation restores access gradually, bit by bit, as the system learns to be safe.
Dark Emotions
Greenspan offers a process for working with dark emotions that feels remarkably similar to what I have been doing intuitively:
Step 1: Intention. Focusing your spiritual will. Deciding consciously to work with the emotion for healing and transformation.
Step 2: Affirmation. Developing an emotion-positive attitude. Believing that emotions are purposeful rather than problematic.
Step 3: Bodily Sensation. Sensing, soothing, naming emotions as they arise in the body.
Step 4: Contextualization. Telling a wider story. Understanding the emotion within its broader personal and social context.
Step 5: Non-Action. Befriending what hurts. Being simply present without trying to avoid, cling to, fix, or even understand.
Step 6: Action. Social action, spiritual service. Hearing what the emotion is asking of you and responding from the heart.
Step 7: Transformation. The way of surrender is allowing the emotion to flow and transform naturally.
This morning, I moved through these steps without consciously intending to:
I set an intention by recognizing grief was present and choosing to sit with it rather than distract myself.
I affirmed that grief is purposeful by remembering Greenspan’s teaching that dark emotions carry essential information.
I attended to bodily sensation: tightness, heat, pressure, trembling, the specific texture of grief in my chest and throat.
I contextualized this grief by connecting it to five months of witnessing addiction, to ambiguous loss, to the accumulated weight of helplessness.
I practised non-action by simply sitting. Without trying to make the crying stop. Without needing to understand it fully. Just being with it.
Action will come later. For now, the grief is teaching me what it needs to teach.
And transformation is happening whether I direct it or experience it passively. The crying eventually subsided. My breath evened. The pressure eased. Something shifted. Something moved. Something that was stored became something that flowed.
Algo que estaba almacenado se convirtió en algo que fluyó. Something that was stored became something that flowed.
Alonetude is proving more complex than I initially understood.
I came here thinking alonetude was about rest. About nervous system regulation. About recovering playfulness and establishing a routine. And it is all of those things.
But alonetude is also about creating conditions where difficult emotions can finally be processed. Where grief that has been held in the body for months can surface because the nervous system finally has the capacity to feel it.
Greenspan (2004) writes that healing requires a witness, that without something to hold the emotional experience, the process cannot complete itself. In conventional therapeutic contexts, the listener is the therapist. But in alonetude, the listener is the self. Is the body attending to itself? Is the nervous system learning to hold what it previously could hold only in stored, frozen form?
En la alonetud, me escucho a mí misma. In alonetude, I listen to myself.
This feels important methodologically. Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) positions lived experience as legitimate data when properly contextualized. But what I am learning is that some lived experiences cannot be accessed until nervous system conditions allow it. The data exists in the body but remains inaccessible until safety permits processing.
Alonetude creates these conditions. Seventeen days of consistent safety. Seventeen days of routine. Seventeen days of play returning, of rocks teaching, of whales breathing, of stones offering patience. All of this accumulated into sufficient nervous system regulation that this morning my body decided: now. Now we can feel the grief about what happened before we came here.
Title: Sands of Time
The Widsom of Grief
Greenspan calls this “the wisdom of grief” (2004). She argues that grief serves crucial functions:
It connects us to what we have loved and lost
It teaches us about attachment and impermanence
It opens our hearts to compassion
It reminds us we are vulnerable, alive, and capable of deep feeling
It transforms us from who we were before loss into who we become through integrating loss
Sitting here now, hours after this morning’s crying, I feel different. Lighter somehow. As though releasing some of the stored grief made space for something else. Made breathing easier. Made my chest less tight.
This is what Greenspan means by transformation. From grief to gratitude. Gratitude arrives through grief rather than replacing it, moving through grief makes gratitude accessible again. Makes joy possible. Makes life feel less heavy.
Del dolor a la gratitud. From pain to gratitude.
The pelicans are still fishing. The sea is still calm. The stones still sit patiently, teaching their lessons about deep time. Nothing external has changed.
But something internal has shifted. Some energy that was frozen is now flowing. Some stored emotion is now being partially processed.
And I am grateful. Grateful that my body knew to wait until safety was established. Grateful that alonetude created conditions where grief could arrive. Grateful for Greenspan’s framework that helps me understand what is happening. Grateful for the pelicans who somehow triggered the release I needed.
Gracias por la seguridad que permite sentir. Thank you for the safety that permits feeling.
Gracias por el dolor que enseña. Thank you for the pain that teaches.
Gracias por las lágrimas que fluyen. Thank you for the tears that flow.
Gracias por el cuerpo que sabe cuándo es el momento. Thank you for the body that knows when it is time.
Title: Frameworks and Concepts for Healing Dark Emotions
Concept or Framework Name
Author(s) or Source Cited
Key Definition or Description
Associated Stages or Skills
Body-based or Psychological Purpose
Source
Dark emotions are purposeful energies that carry essential information; their pain calls for attention, as physical pain does, for healing and transformation.
Greenspan (2003)
Dark emotions are purposeful energies that carry essential information; their pain calls for attention, like physical pain, for healing and transformation.
Dark emotions are purposeful energies that carry essential information; their pain calls for attention similar to physical pain for the purpose of healing and transformation.
[1]
how the nervous system responds to safety and threat / Social Engagement System
Porges (2011)
A neurophysiological framework explaining how the nervous system regulates emotional expression and connection based on perceived safety or threat.
1. the body’s alert state (fight/flight), 2. Dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze), 3. Social engagement system.
Creates the capacity for emotional experience; the body must register safety to move out of threat response and allow the social engagement system to process grief.
[1]
Alonetude
A state of intentional solitude is used to establish safety, routine, and nervous system regulation.
A state of intentional solitude used to establish safety, routine, and nervous system regulation.
Establishing safety, learning to sleep/play, touching rocks, watching nature, and establishing routine.
Absent from the source
An intentional state of solitude is used to establish safety, routine, and nervous system regulation.
The Body Keeps the Score / Body-based Storage
van der Kolk (2014)
The concept that emotions and trauma are stored in the nervous system and body rather than just as cognitive thoughts.
Accessing body-based pathways rather than just language or talk therapy.
The body protects the individual by storing emotions until the nervous system has the capacity to process them safely.
[1]
Vulnerability as the Power of No Protection
Greenspan (2003); Brown (2012)
An openness beyond pain and loss, extending to love, intimacy, and wonder; it is the state of having an open heart allowed by a regulated nervous system.
Requires nervous system regulation and courage.
Allows an individual to be truly touched or seen and to experience the “sheer adventure of being alive” once sufficient protection/safety is established.
[1]
Ambiguous Loss
Boss (1999)
A type of grief occurring without closure because a person remains physically present but is psychologically transformed or absent (e.g., through addiction).
Absent from source
Identifies the specific source of unresolved grief where typical closure is unavailable.
[1]
Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN)
Nash (2004)
A methodological approach that positions lived experience as legitimate data when properly contextualized.
Contextualizing lived experience.
Validates the individual’s personal journey and bodily experiences as a source of knowledge and truth.
[1]
Note. Safe Enough to Feel: The Alchemy of Grief, Source Blog Post Day 17, 2026
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Academic Lens
What arrives when you are ready, unforced and unscheduled, is the subject of intrinsic motivation theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000): genuine curiosity and creative impulse emerge when the conditions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met, and collapse under surveillance and external contingency. The readiness named here is also body-based: van der Kolk (2014) argues that the body must settle before the mind can receive. This entry documents what Lorde (1988) called the uses of the erotic, the knowledge that arrives through feeling rather than analysis.
Las piedras hablan. The stones speak. A bilingual scholarly reflection on trauma, alonetude, and what it means to learn through geological time beside the shore of Loreto, Baja California Sur.
Reading Time: 8minutes
Las piedras no tienen prisa. Tampoco el dolor. Stones know no hurry. Neither is grief.
A Bilingual Scholarly Reflection on Geological Time, Trauma, and Alonetude
Las piedras hablan / The Stones Speak
I have been collecting stones since my first walk along this shore.
Gathering without purpose. Without cataloguing or arranging. Simply bending down, picking something up, turning it over in my palm, feeling its weight, its smoothness, its particular refusal to be hurried. Some I carry back to my room. Some I return to the water. Most I hold for a moment and set back down exactly where I found them.
This practice arrived unexpectedly. But here I am, two weeks into thirty days beside the Sea of Cortez, and the stones are teaching me something available through no other path.
Las piedras hablan. Pero no con palabras.
The stones speak. In a language beyond words.
Tiempo profundo / Deep Time
The stones on this shore are old in a way that rearranges something in the mind.
Geologists use the term deep time to describe the vast timescale of Earth’s history, a scale so large that human life occupies only a tiny fraction of it. The volcanic stone of the Sierra de la Giganta, rising at the edge of this bay, formed over millions of years. What I am holding in my hand has been shaped by water, wind, and heat across timescales I cannot fully imagine. And yet here it is. Smooth. Patient. Present.
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) writes about the relationship between place and time, arguing that our sense of place deepens with duration, that the body learns a place slowly, through repeated contact and accumulating familiarity. The shore is teaching me this. Each morning, I walk the same stretch of beach, and it is never quite the same beach. The tide has rearranged it. The light falls differently. A stone I noticed yesterday has been turned over by water, offering me a different face.
El lugar me enseña paciencia. / The place teaches me patience.
This feels important. I have spent nineteen years in precarious employment, living inside what Rob Nixon (2011) calls slow violence: harm that unfolds gradually, accumulating across time without announcement. Slow violence has its own temporal logic. It teaches the body urgency. It teaches the nervous system that time is always running out, that the next contract may fail to arrive, and that rest is a risk. The body learns to treat duration as a threat.
The stones are teaching the opposite. They are evidence that time can accumulate as beauty rather than damage. That something can be shaped by forces larger than itself and emerge refined rather than broken.
I have been thinking about what stones and bodies have in common.
Both are shaped by what they have been through. Both carry the evidence of their history on their surfaces and in their structures. A stone makes no decision toward smoothness. Smoothness is what the water makes of it, over time, through persistent contact. And a body makes no decision to brace. Bracing is what survival is made of, over the years, through persistent exposure to uncertainty.
Resmaa Menakem (2017) writes that trauma is stored in the body rather than only in the mind, passed between generations through nervous system inheritance. What the body learned to survive, it continues to enact, even when the original threat has passed. The stone cannot stop being smooth simply because the water has receded. And for a long time, stopping the bracing was beyond my reach simply because the contracts had stopped.
El trauma vive en el cuerpo. La curación también.
Trauma lives in the body. So does healing.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how the body keeps its own score, maintaining a somatic record of experiences the conscious mind may have rationalized or set aside. Healing extends beyond intellectual understanding of what happened. It is to give the body new experiences that gradually teach the nervous system a different story. New evidence. Repeated contact with safety. The slow accumulation of something other than harm.
Holding a stone, I notice something release in my shoulders.
Gaston Bachelard (1969) argues that we think with our hands as much as with our minds, that the imagination is deeply material rather than purely visual or verbal, rooted in touch, weight, and texture. There is a kind of knowing that arrives only through the hands. Picking up a stone, I feel it rather than think about it, receiving what it has to offer through the sensory channels that precede language.
There is a kind of thinking that happens only in the hands. The stone offers no argument. It simply offers itself, and the body receives it.
The practice of picking up stones is a practice of alonetude.
Alonetude, as I am developing it, differs from both loneliness and the performed solitude of the retreat or the meditation app. It is a quality of presence, a willingness to be fully here with what is here, without an audience, without a purpose beyond the presence itself. It is the opposite of the hypervigilance that precarious labour instilled in me, the constant scanning, the waiting for the next demand, the inability to fully arrive in any moment because the next moment always carries a threat.
Estar sola, completamente presente. / To be alone, completely present.
When I pick up a stone, my full attention belongs to the stone. The stone requires my full attention, because presence itself requires it; once is simply what the encounter asks. I turn it over. I feel its weight shift. I notice the colour change where my warm hand has touched it. For these seconds, the sessional instructor waits for a contract to fall away. The researcher is anxious about the output falling away. I am a body in relation to a stone, and the stone is indifferent to all the rest.
This indifference is, strangely, a relief.
Philosopher Martin Buber (1970) distinguishes between I-Thou and I-It relationships, where genuine encounter requires full presence and mutuality. Most of my institutional life has been I-It: instrumental, transactional, surveilled. The stone cannot evaluate my performance. It cannot renew or decline to renew my contract. Its indifference holds no unkindness. It is entirely outside the economy of institutional assessment, and in that outside-ness, I find something I had almost forgotten how to feel.
La piedra no me juzga. / La piedra no me juzga. The stone withholds all judgment.
I know this intellectually, in the way geologists know it: that the smoothness of a river stone records the duration and force of the water that shaped it, that the colour of volcanic rock carries information about the temperature at which it formed, that the weight in my hand is a compressed record of pressures and processes that unfolded across scales of time I cannot inhabit.
But I also know it in another way. The way the body knows things.
Menakem (2017) writes about the concept of the somatic narrative: the story the body tells through tension, posture, gesture, and breath. The body’s story lives beyond words. It is told in holding patterns, in the places breath has learned to avoid, in the flinch that arrives before the threat is even named. To heal is to learn to read this narrative, to listen to what the body has been trying to say.
The stones, in their patient silence, are teaching me to practise this listening.
Clark Moustakas (1961) writes about loneliness as an inescapable dimension of human experience, one that contains within it the possibility of deep self-knowledge. Genuine solitude, for Moustakas, transcends the absence of others: it is the presence of oneself, a turning toward rather than a turning away. Picking up stones alone on a shore in Mexico, I am practising this turning. Meeting myself in the quiet that forms between me and the geological world.
Las historias de vida de las piedras son también las mías.
I have been choosing them carefully over the past two weeks. Neither the most beautiful nor the most dramatic. Three ordinary stones that fit together in my hand, that have become familiar to me through repeated handling, that carry now the warmth of my attention.
Robert Levine (2010) writes about the body’s capacity to complete interrupted experiences, the way trauma keeps a process alive that was never allowed to finish. Healing, in this framing, is completion: returning to something left unfinished and allowing it to resolve. I think of the past nineteen years as an interrupted experience. A process that never reached resolution because the conditions for resolution, security, time, witness, and safety, were never present.
These thirty days are the beginning of completion.
The stones will come with me as witnesses. Evidence that I was here. That something in me held still long enough to be shaped by something other than urgency. That the body can learn, slowly, the way stone is learned by water: through patient and repeated contact with what is real.
Estas piedras son testigos. / These stones are witnesses.
References
Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1958)
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)
Levine, P. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Moustakas, C. (1961). Loneliness. Prentice-Hall.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Tuan, Y-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Academic Lens
This reflection engages what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) describe as the essential function of Scholarly Personal Narrative: using the first-person account as a site of rigorous inquiry, where the researcher’s lived experience becomes both data and analysis. The stones function here as what Tuan (1977) calls place objects: material things that anchor us to a place and through that anchoring, to ourselves. The somatic learning described is aligned with Menakem's (2017) argument that healing must reach the body level beyond the cognitive, and with Bachelard's (1969) phenomenology of material imagination, the insight that we think with the substances of the world, and that stone in the hand is already a kind of knowing.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
For a full list of all sources cited throughout this project, see the References page.
This morning, I caught myself humming. No song. Just sound making itself because it wanted to. I stopped mid-hum and thought: when did I stop doing this? When did humming become something I had to notice rather than something that just happened?
Hundreds of them off the coast of Loreto, leaping and spinning and riding waves with what looked like pure, uncomplicated joy. And here is what struck me: they were older. Many had grey muzzles. Scarred bodies. The marks of decades in the ocean. These were old sea lions. Experienced sea lions. Sea lions who had survived sharks and storms and whatever else the ocean throws at bodies over time.
And they were playing.
No different from young sea lions in their abandon. No careful moderation, no appropriate dignity. Just playing. Leaping. Spinning. Riding waves because riding waves feels good. Their age seemed entirely irrelevant to the equation.
I sat in the boat watching them, and something in my chest cracked open. Cracked, yes, but opened. Like a window that had been sealed shut for so long, I forgot windows could open, and suddenly there was air and light and the possibility of something beyond naming, but my body recognized it immediately.
Joy unattached to happiness, contentment, or satisfaction with accomplishments. Joy. The kind that bubbles up from somewhere that has nothing to do with achievement, productivity, or being a responsible adult who takes life seriously. The kind the sea lions have. The kind I seem to have misplaced somewhere between twenty and sixty. The kind I am just now realizing I want back.
What I Learned About Growing Up
Somewhere along the way, I learned that growing up means growing serious. I cannot point to the exact moment this lesson took hold. There was no single conversation or event. It was more like osmosis. The gradual absorption of cultural messages about what mature adults do and avoid. Adults work. Adults are responsible. Adults plan, achieve, and contribute. Adults avoid wasting time. Adults avoid play.
Or if they play, it is scheduled, optimized, and turned into another form of productivity. Exercise that counts as play. Hobbies that produce results. Social games that serve networking functions. Play with purpose. Play with outcomes. Play that justifies itself.
But what the sea lions were doing yesterday required no justification. It served no purpose I could identify. Exercise was incidental (though movement was involved). Socializing was incidental (though they played near each other). Skill practice was incidental (though the skills were evident). They were just… playing. For its own sake. Because it felt good. Because they were alive and the ocean was there, and their bodies knew how to move through it joyfully.
I watched them and thought, “I used to know how to do this.” I did. I remember childhood summers when entire afternoons disappeared into invented games that had no point beyond playing them. I remember the absorption. The timelessness. The way my body knew what to do without my mind directing it. And then I grew up. And growing up meant putting that away. Meant learning that time is currency, that activities should have purpose, that joy without justification is frivolous, immature, something you outgrow.
Except the sea lions seem to have skipped entirely. The grey-muzzled, scarred, elderly sea lions seem to have missed any memo about dignity, seriousness, and age-appropriate behaviour. They are still playing. Still joyful. Still leaping. And I am sitting here at sixty, realizing: I got it wrong. The sea lions were right all along.
Title: What the Research Says (And Why It Matters That I Am Reading It)
I am reading research on play and aging because that is what I do when I am trying to understand something. I read. I find frameworks. I look for explanations. This is probably part of why I lost play in the first place: I cannot just experience things. I have to understand them. Analyze them. Fit them into existing knowledge structures.
But the research is helping, so I am allowing it.
Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that play is a lifelong human need, no mere developmental stage we pass through. They studied adults across the lifespan and found that people who maintain a capacity for play show better physical health, stronger social bonds, greater creativity, and more resilience when life gets difficult. The absence of play in adulthood is due to suppression rather than to natural maturation. It is suppression.
This word stopped me: suppression.
Something different from absence. From outgrowing. Suppression. This implies that something was there and was pushed down. Which implies it might still be there. Which implies it could be recovered.
I sat with this for a long time yesterday evening after the boat returned. Suppression. What suppressed my play? And the answer came quickly, almost too quickly, as though it had been waiting to be asked:
Everything. Work suppressed it. Poverty suppressed it. Precarity suppressed it. Chronic stress suppressed it. Cultural messages about what serious academics do suppressed it. Nineteen years of contract work, where every moment had to be productive because any moment could be your last, I suppressed it. My play was buried alive under layers of survival necessity, cultural expectation, and internalized messages about what maturity demands.
But suppression is different from death. Suppression means it is still there. Somewhere. Under all those layers. Waiting.
The sea lions confirmed this. They looked nothing like they were working to play. They looked like playing was the most natural thing in the world. This suggests that play is natural. This suggests that the unnatural thing is the absence of play. Which suggests I have been living unnaturally for a very long time. Qué alivio. What relief. To know it endures. Just suppressed. Just waiting.
The Neuroscience of Joy (Or: Why Play Eluded Me Even When I Wanted It) Here is something I learned from Porges (2011) that changed how I understand the last five months, the last five years, possibly the last nineteen years: Play requires safety.
Something beyond cognitive understanding of safety. Beyond intellectual knowledge, you are probably fine. Physiological safety. The kind that the nervous system detects below conscious awareness through what Porges calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety. The body is constantly scanning the environment, asking: Am I safe? Can I rest? Can I play?
And if the answer is no, the social engagement system goes offline. This is the neural pathway that supports play, connection, and spontaneous joy. When the nervous system is in threat mode (preparing to fight, to flee, to freeze), the social engagement system shuts down. You cannot access Play. Cannot feel lightness. Cannot allow the vulnerability that playfulness requires.
This is autonomic regulation, beyond choice. The body makes decisions about resource allocation at levels below consciousness. For five months before I came here, my nervous system never registered safety long enough for play to become possible. I was in constant crisis mode. Waiting for calls. Waiting for bad news. Waiting for the next emergency. My body had no resources for playfulness, for vulnerability, for the energy expenditure that play requires when every resource must go toward threat management.
My nervous system chose for me. The choice to avoid play was never mine.
And reading this, understanding this, I felt something unexpected: compassion. For myself. For my body. For the nineteen years before that, when contract work meant my nervous system never fully relaxed because security was always provisional, always temporary, always one crisis away from disappearing.
Of course play was unavailable to me. Of course, joy became impossible. Because my body was doing something very right rather than anything wrong: keeping me alive under conditions that offered no support for flourishing.
But here is what the research also says: nervous systems remain plastic across the lifespan. The capacity for play can be restored at any age if conditions support it. If safety can be established. If the threat can be interrupted. If the social engagement system can come back online.
I am sixty years old, and my nervous system is learning to feel safe. And as it learns safety, play is beginning to return. Quietly, incrementally. In small signals: humming. Swimming for pleasure. Watching pelicans without needing to make it productive.
Small. But real. And growing.
Pequeños milagros. Small miracles. Pero milagros de todos modos. But miracles nonetheless.
What Play Looks Like When It First Returns
This morning, I walked in the water along the seashore.
This is a small thing. Maybe it seems like nothing. But for someone who has spent decades organizing every activity around productivity, purpose, and outcomes, swimming because the water looks inviting feels revolutionary. I got in. The cold shocked me like it does every morning. But instead of swimming laps, instead of counting strokes, instead of trying to improve my form, I just… moved. Followed curiosity about underwater rocks. Let my body do what feels good. Floated when floating felt right. Dove when diving felt right.
No plan. No goal. No timer.
And I realized: this is play. Unlike what I remember from childhood. Unlike what the sea lions do. My version. Sixty-year-old-woman-in-the-Sea-of-Cortez version. Modified. Tentative. Still learning. But real.
Guitard et al. (2005) studied play in older adults and found that play often looks different from childhood play but serves similar functions: engagement with novelty, absorption in the process rather than the outcome, pleasure for its own sake, and temporary suspension of everyday concerns. Older adults play through gardening, cooking, music, crafts, and exploration.
I am playing through swimming. Through humming. Through letting myself be curious about things without turning curiosity into research questions. Through allowing time to be unstructured. Through following impulses that have no justification beyond: this sounds good right now.
Small things. But they add up. Each one teaches my nervous system: it is safe to be spontaneous. Safe to follow pleasure. Safe to let go of control slightly and see what happens.
Each one is a tiny rebellion against the internalized voice that says: You are sixty years old, what are you doing? You should be serious. You should be productive. You should be concerned about declining capacities, limited time, and making every moment count.
Each one is a tiny agreement with the sea lions who say: ” No. Play. Leap. Spin. Your age is beside the point. Your joy is the point.
Estoy aprendiendo. I am learning.
Lentamente. Slowly.
Lero aprendiendo. But learning.
The Paradox That Makes Me Laugh
Here is something that makes me laugh now that I can laugh about it: I am conducting research on rest and recovery and nervous system regulation. I am documenting how environmental conditions affect play capacity. I am reading literature on playfulness, aging, and successful life transitions.
I am turning the recovery of play into academic work.
This is very me. Very on-brand. Cannot just play. Have to study play. Have to document play. Have to theorize play. Have to turn play into scholarship because scholarship is how I make meaning, and scholarship carries legitimacy that pure experience often lacks in my mind.
But here is what I noticed yesterday watching the sea lions: they were documenting nothing. Reading no literature on play theory. Conducting no comparative analysis of their play behaviours across developmental stages. They were just playing.
And I thought: yes. That is the point. The point is to do it, first and foremost, with understanding secondary.
But I also thought: maybe both are okay. Maybe I can study, play, and also play.
Maybe the studying helps me trust that play is legitimate enough to allow.
Maybe the research gives me permission that my body needs before it can relax into playfulness.
Maybe there is no single right way to recover and play at sixty. Maybe scholarly-personal-narrative-researcher-trying-to-learn-to-be-playful-again is a valid way to do it.
The sea lions need no research to justify their play. But I might. At least for now. At least until my nervous system trusts playfulness enough to allow it without justification.
And maybe that is okay. Maybe that is my version. Nerdy. Academic. Needing frameworks before I can allow experience. But still moving toward the same place the sea lions are already inhabiting: joy. Lightness. Permission to leap.
Me río de mí misma. I laugh at myself.
What Sixty Knows That Twenty Could Barely Imagine
There is something sixty understands that twenty lacks the ground to know:
Nothing is permanent. Nothing is as high-stakes as it seems. Most of what feels catastrophic becomes a foundation. Failures leave you standing. Mistakes are survivable. The things you think will last forever dissolve. The things you think will destroy you become stories you tell.
At twenty, play was impossible because everything felt too important. Every choice felt permanent. Every failure felt existential. The stakes were always maximum.
At sixty I know better. I know that very little is as important as it seems. That most catastrophes become footnotes. That reputation is less fragile than fear suggests. That dignity survives embarrassment. That making mistakes carries no verdict on your worth.
This knowledge could support play. Could create psychological space where experimentation feels safe, where outcomes matter less than process, where I can be silly without it threatening my sense of self. But knowledge alone falls short. The nervous system has to believe it. Has to feel safe enough to trust that playfulness leads somewhere other than catastrophe.
This is the work I am doing. Teaching my sixty-year-old body what my sixty-year-old mind already knows: it is safe enough to play. And here is what is helping: the sea lions.
When I skip for three steps, I am completely here. Future thoughts quiet. Past replays absent. Just: body moving, sun warm, this feels good. That presence is what I lost. What chronic stress took from me. What I am reclaiming now, three steps at a time.
And here is what surprises me: it feels good. Beyond the skipping. The reclaiming. The gradual return of lightness. The sense that my body is becoming a place where joy is possible again.
For years, my body was a site of vigilance. Of tension. Of preparing for a threat. Now it is becoming something else. Something softer. Something more playful. Mi cuerpo se está curando. My body is healing.
No sólo descansando. More than resting.
Curando. Healing.
Y parte de la curación es recordar cómo jugar. And part of healing is remembering how to play.
What the Sea Lions Teach About Successful Aging
Traditional models of successful aging emphasize maintaining function. Physical health. Cognitive capacity. Productivity. Contribution. (Rowe & Kahn, 1997).
But the sea lions suggest a different model.
Successful aging might be: maintaining the capacity for joy. For curiosity. For absorption in the present moment. For play.
Their bodies are older. Scarred. Slower now, less agile than young bodies. But they play anyway, through aging rather than despite it. Their play is a present-moment engagement, no effort to recapture youth. It is present-moment engagement with being alive in the body they have now.
This feels important.
Twenty again holds no appeal for me. No idealized version of youth calls to me. I want to be sixty and playful. Sixty and joyful. Sixty and capable of skipping for three steps when skipping feels right.
I want what the sea lions have: age that leaves joy intact. Experience that carries lightness alongside wisdom. Wisdom that includes lightness.
Henricks (2015) argues that play in later life serves a generative function: modelling joyful engagement for younger generations, resisting cultural narratives that equate aging with decline, and demonstrating that vitality persists across the lifespan.
If this is true, then learning to play at sixty is a contribution, not a form of regression. It is resistance. It is saying, “This is what aging can look like.” Alive. Present. Joyful. Still learning. Still curious. Still capable of surprise. No grimness, no resignation, no decline toward inevitable loss.
The sea lions model this every day. I am trying to learn from them. Slowly. With academic footnotes and self-consciousness, they never carry. But learning.
And occasionally, when I forget to monitor myself, when I am absorbed in water or surprised by pelicans or simply here, I play. Just for a moment. Just for three steps. Just for one spontaneous laugh. But it is there. Real. Growing.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Guitard, P., Ferland, F., & Dutil, É. (2005). Toward a better understanding of playfulness in adults. OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, 25(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/153944920502500103
Henricks, T. S. (2015). Play and the human condition. University of Illinois Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Rowe, J. W., & Kahn, R. L. (1997). Successful aging. The Gerontologist, 37(4), 433–440. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/37.4.433
Academic Lens
Age and play in the same frame raises the question of what Brown (2010) calls the permission to be imperfect: the cultural prohibition on adult play is internalized most deeply in those whose worth has been contingent on productivity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) identifies play as the purest form of autotelic experience, activity valuable in itself beyond any outcome. The bodily joy described in this entry is also a body-based signal of the nervous system's continued decompression: Porges (2011) notes that playfulness is a marker of genuine safety engagement, a physiological state unavailable under chronic threat.
The boat tour was about the island, about Coronado with its ancient volcanic stone rising from the sea like something too dramatic to be real. I wanted to see the geology. Wanted to understand how fire becomes stone, how destruction becomes foundation, how violence cooled into something that now holds life.
The whales were absent from the itinerary. They were passing through. We were lucky, the captain said. Muy afortunados.
I felt anything but lucky at first. I felt unprepared. As though I should have known this was possible, should have researched grey whale migration patterns, should have brought a better camera, should have been ready for this moment rather than sitting in a small boat with no idea where to look or what I was about to see.
Then the water broke, and there was a back. Grey. Massive. Longer than our boat. The whale surfaced, breathed (a sound I cannot describe except to say it sounded like the ocean exhaling), and disappeared again into water that closed over it as though nothing that large had just been there.
I forgot about being prepared. Forgot about cameras. Just watched the space where the whale had been, waiting, holding my breath, aware suddenly of my own breathing in a way I had forgotten since the panic attacks that brought me here began to ease. The whale breathes air like I breathe air. We are both mammals. Both carry our ancestors’ decision to leave the ocean and then (in the whale’s case) the decision to return. Both are shaped by evolutionary pressures I can name but struggle to fully comprehend.
The whale surfaced again. Fifty metres ahead this time. I could see barnacles clustered on its head, the mottled grey of its skin, like stone worn smooth by water. Another breath. Another dive. And I realized I was crying. Quietly, undramatically. Just tears on my face that I left alone because they felt like the right response to whatever was happening.
van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma resolution occurs less through understanding than through the body’s learning to feel safe again. I have been here two weeks learning that lesson: letting my body remember what safety feels like. But something about the whale’s presence intensified it. The whale’s breath synchronized my own breathing in ways beyond my control. My nervous system responded to the whale’s presence before my mind registered what I was seeing. This is what Porges (2011) calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety, the body’s capacity to detect safety or danger below conscious awareness through environmental cues, including, apparently, the respiratory patterns of other mammals.
For two weeks, I have been learning to feel small in ways that leave me whole. Small against the stars. Small against the sea. Small against geologic time. But the whale is different. The whale is something other than cosmic distance or abstract deep time. The whale is right here, breathing the same air I am breathing, made of the same carbon and oxygen and complexity. And it is so much larger than me that my body cannot quite process it.
Fifteen metres long, the guide said. Up to forty tonnes. These are numbers. They mean nothing until you are in a six-metre boat and a whale surfaces close enough that you understand: I am the size of the whale’s eye. Maybe smaller. The whale could overturn this boat without meaning to, just by surfacing in the wrong place. We are here because the whale allows it. Because the whale, in its vast mammalian intelligence, has chosen to regard us as harmless.
This is different from the stars’ indifference. The stars choose nothing. They simply are, and my presence or absence makes no difference to them. But the whale is aware. The whale has agency. The whale sees me (I watched its eye track our boat as it passed) and makes decisions about whether I am worth noticing, worth avoiding, or worth approaching. I am in a relationship with the whale, regardless of my intention. And the whale, by refraining from destroying us, by passing peacefully, by allowing us to witness, is teaching me something about coexistence I had no idea I needed to learn.
Buber (1923/1970) writes about I-Thou relationships, encounters in which the other is met as a subject rather than an object, where genuine relation becomes possible even across vast differences. The whale encounter fell short of I-Thou in Buber’s full sense (the whale was silent toward me, was entering no reciprocal relation), and yet it resisted the category of I-It (the whale as object, as thing to be observed). It was something in between. Something more like: we share this moment. We share this water. We share the fact of being alive at the same time in the same place, and that sharing, however brief, however one-sided, matters.
Boss (1999) writes about ambiguous loss, about relationships that defy clear categories. I am thinking about this now in a different context. What is my relationship with the whale? Beyond connection in the usual sense (the whale carries no knowledge of me). Beyond threat (I pose none). Beyond kinship (though we share mammalian ancestry, that seems too distant a claim to make). Something else. Something more like a witness. I witnessed the whale. The whale, perhaps, witnessed me. And that mutual witnessing, even without recognition or acknowledgment, creates a kind of relation that matters.
The whale needs nothing from my witnessing. But I seem to need to witness the whale. Need to know that something this large, this ancient (grey whales as a species evolved approximately 2.5 million years ago; Swartz, 2018), this indifferent to human concern still exists. Still migrates. Still breathes air, nurses its young, and navigates thousands of kilometres using senses I cannot imagine. The whale’s existence, independent of my need for it, feels like permission. Permission to exist independently of others’ needs for me. Permission to migrate toward what I need without justifying the journey. Permission to be large in my own right, even when that largeness is invisible to those who look at me and see only the surface.
Fire Becoming Stone: On Transformation and Time
We continued toward Coronado Island, and I was quiet.
The others in the boat were talking about the whales, about luck, about whether we might see more on the return trip. I had no words. No way to translate what I was feeling into words that would make sense to people who had seen the same thing I had seen, but seemed to have experienced it differently. They saw whales. I saw something I still lack language for.
The island rose ahead of us. Red and black stone. Sharp angles softened by millennia of erosion, but are still clearly volcanic. The guide explained the geology: an ancient volcano, now extinct, part of the volcanic chain formed when tectonic plates pulled apart millions of years ago, and magma rose to fill the gaps. The red is iron oxide. The black is basalt. The textures tell stories about how quickly lava cooled, how gas bubbles were trapped and never escaped.
I listened, but I was thinking about something else. About fire becoming stone. About destruction becoming a foundation. About the fact that everything solid was once liquid, once too hot to touch, once actively destroying everything it encountered. And now it sits peacefully in the sun. Now it is a habitat. Now birds nest on it, sea lions bask on it, and fish hide in its underwater crevices.
What does it take for violence to cool into peace? How long? Under what conditions? Can a human lifetime be long enough for that transformation, or do we need geologic time, millions of years, the patient work of water and wind wearing down sharp edges until they are smooth?
Herman (1992) writes that trauma recovery unfolds in stages: establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma narrative, and restoring connections with others. But she acknowledges that recovery follows no straight line, that setbacks occur, that some trauma leaves permanent marks even as healing proceeds. The volcanic stone teaches something similar. The violence of eruption is permanent in some sense; the stone will always be volcanic stone, carrying the signature of fire in its composition and structure. But it is also transformed. Cooled. Made into something that can be touched, that can hold life, that is no longer actively destructive even as it remembers destruction.
I am carrying violence inside me. None of it is my own. Violence witnessed. Violence absorbed through trying to protect someone beyond my reach. The past five months have been volcanic: sudden eruptions, molten rage, heat that destroyed everything it touched. And I came here hoping that distance, time, and consistency might cool it. Might turn it from something actively harmful into something that can be lived with. Maybe even something that becomes a foundation.
Two weeks may be enough. If thirty days will be enough. If any amount of time in any location will be enough. But watching volcanic stone hold seabirds and sea lions, I felt something like hope. If fire can become this, maybe anything can transform. Maybe cooling is less about erasing what happened but about integration. About the violence becoming part of your structure without remaining your defining characteristic. About carrying fire’s memory without burning.
Touching Ground: what the body knows
We anchored in a small bay, and the captain said we could swim if we wanted.
I lowered myself into the water, and the cold shocked every thought out of my head. My body contracted. My breath stopped. Then started again, harsh and fast. Then slowed. Then the cold became bearable. Then it became exactly right.
I swam toward the island’s edge where stone met water. Underwater, volcanic rock was even more dramatic: sharp ridges, smooth faces, crevices dark with shadow and possibility. I reached out and touched it. Ran my hand along the surface. Rough. Solid. Still holding some memory of heat, though that heat is millions of years old and has cooled now to ocean temperature.
My body knows stone differently from my mind. My body reads texture, temperature, and solidity. My body has no use for tectonic plates or million-year timescales. My body just knows: this is real. This is here. This can be touched. And touching it changes something. The stone remains indifferent. But me. I have been changed by touching the stone that was once fire.
Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) writes about embodied perception, about how we know the world primarily through our bodies before we know it through concepts. The body’s knowledge is immediate, pre-reflective, and cannot be fully translated into language. This is what Sheets-Johnstone (2011) calls kinesthetic knowing, knowledge that emerges through movement and touch, through the body’s direct engagement with the material world. This knowing precedes and often exceeds what language can capture.
This is what I was experiencing in the water. Feeling the volcanic stone rather than thinking about it. Learning it through skin, through the resistance it offered when I pushed against it, through the way it scraped my palm when I held on too tightly. My body was gathering information my mind struggled to process: the stone’s texture, its temperature gradients, its stability, its indifference to my presence. All of this registered in the body before I had words for any of it.
Damasio (1994) argues that emotion and feeling are fundamentally embodied, and that what we call consciousness emerges from the body’s ongoing process of finding our own calm and responding to the environment. The body knows before the mind knows. The body responds before conscious thought directs it. And often the body knows things the mind never fully grasps because those things exist at the level of sensation, of immediate experience, of contact with the world that exceeds conceptual capture.
I stayed in the water longer than I intended. Kept swimming around the island’s edge, kept touching stone, kept trying to understand through my hands what my mind had yet to grasp. Eventually, I climbed back into the boat. Wrapped a towel around myself. Sat in the sun, which felt impossibly good after the cold. And thought: I came here to touch ground. That is what this month is. Touching ground after years of free-fall. Learning what is solid. Learning what holds.
Finding Pattern in Movement
The whales we saw this morning migrate up to twenty thousand kilometres annually. Arctic feeding grounds to Baja breeding lagoons and back. They navigate using what scientists believe is a combination of magnetic field detection, sun position, memory of coastline features, and possibly echolocation. Grey whales are baleen whales rather than toothed whales, so their sonar works differently from that of other sea mammals (Swartz, 2018).
What strikes me is the fact itself, more than the mechanism. Twenty thousand kilometres. Every year. For their entire lives. They stay in no one place. They are built for movement. Their survival requires migration, leaving feeding grounds when food runs out, travelling to warm water to give birth, and trusting that the journey is possible even when you cannot see the destination.
I have been thinking about this in relation to my own life. The constant movement. The inability to stay. Nineteen years of contract work meant never knowing whether I would be in the same place next semester or next year. Always preparing to leave. Always holding relationships lightly because attachment to place or people or routine felt dangerous when any of it could be taken away with two weeks’ notice.
Standing (2011) writes about the precariat, the growing class of workers whose employment is temporary, insecure, and without benefits or stability. Precarious workers live in perpetual uncertainty, unable to plan for the future, unable to establish roots, always one crisis away from catastrophe. This precarity creates what Standing calls “status frustration” and chronic stress that accumulates over time, wearing away at health, relationships, and sense of self.
But the whale’s migration is different from my precarity. The whale chooses to leave. The whale knows where it is going. The whale has done this journey before and will do it again. There is certainty in the pattern, even though each journey is unique, even though conditions change, even though some years are harder than others. The whale’s movement carries no precarity. It is rhythm. It is a pattern. It is a kind of stability that emerges through movement, even because of it.
What I am attempting here is something like that. No true migration (I will return to the same city, the same life), but the development of a pattern. The trust that this rhythm I am establishing can be carried forward. That I can know where I am going even when I cannot yet see it. That leaving may carry no loss. Sometimes, leaving is how you find your way home.
Witness of Joy
On the trip, we also saw hundreds of sea lions.
Title: Sea Lions Playing
I watched them and cried again. No particular sadness in it. No pure happiness either. Just the body’s response to witnessing something it recognizes but cannot name. What we call joy in humans belongs to a wider mammalian inheritance.
But watching them, my mind moved away from neuroscience. I was thinking about the five months before I came here. The heaviness. The way joy became impossible, through no choice for sadness but because the capacity for lightness had been worn away by constant vigilance, constant crisis, constant weight. I forgot that joy was possible. Forgot that bodies can move just for the pleasure of movement. Forgot that play is a real thing animals do, a fundamental expression of being alive.
Porges (2011) describes the social engagement system, the neural pathways that support play, connection, facial expression, and vocalization. This system only functions when the nervous system registers safety. When we are in threat states (the body’s alert state or dorsal vagal shutdown), the social engagement system goes offline. We cannot play. Cannot connect easily. Cannot access the lighter states that make joy possible. Play requires a nervous system at rest, a body that trusts its environment enough to lower its defences.
Play has been absent from my life for months. Maybe years. Have been too vigilant, too responsible, too aware of everything that could go wrong to allow the kind of unselfconscious absorption that play requires. But watching the sea lions, I felt something shift. Recognition rather than permission. Recognition that the capacity for play still exists in me somewhere. That it has been temporarily inaccessible, dormant but alive. The nervous system can shift from a chronic threat response back to states in which play becomes possible.
The sea lions do it. That whales do it (I read later that grey whales are known to approach boats, allowing humans to touch them, seeming curious about us in ways that look like play). That maybe, given enough time, safety, and consistency, I can do it too.
Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that play is essential rather than frivolous, serving crucial functions in mammalian development and adult well-being: reducing stress, building social bonds, enhancing creativity, and maintaining cognitive flexibility. The absence of play, they suggest, is a marker of systems under stress, of lives organized around survival rather than flourishing.
I understood: I have been in survival mode. The return to play will signal that something fundamental has shifted. That I am safe enough to be playful again.
Making Meaning
Back at the dock, stepping from boat to land, I felt unsteady.
Physically, I was fine. But something about spending hours on water had changed my relationship with solid ground. The architectural structures of human settlement: buildings, walls, boundaries, and water lacks.
Title: Afternoon Seista
That evening, I lay in a hammock and thought about the day. About whales’ breathing. About volcanic stone, teaching me that fire can be cooled. About sea lions playing. About my body’s response to all of it: unplanned tears, unexpected joy, a steadiness that came from witnessing things beyond my control continuing to exist in their full complexity.
Nash (2004) writes that scholarly personal narrative requires staying with experience long enough to understand what it means, resisting the rush to conclusions and allowing meaning to emerge through sustained reflection. This is the work of sense-making, as Park (2010) describes the process by which individuals integrate difficult experiences into their life narratives, restoring a sense of coherence and purpose. sense-making bypasses silver linings and forced positive interpretations. It is about the harder work of acknowledging what happened, sitting with its difficulty, and gradually discovering how it connects to the larger story of who you are and what matters to you.
I am doing that now. Making no claim to understand what today meant, only acknowledging that it did. That seeing whales changed something in me I cannot yet name. That touching volcanic stone mattered. That witnessing sea lions mattered. That my body knows things my mind has yet to find language for.
Tomorrow I will wake, and the whales will be farther north. The sea lions will be somewhere else in the sea. The volcanic stone will still be there, still cooling, still becoming whatever it is becoming over timescales I cannot comprehend. And I will still be here, still learning what it means to be small and temporary and witness to things larger and older and more indifferent than I am.
But I will carry today. The sound of whale breath. The texture of volcanic stone under my hand. The sight of the sea lions. The recognition that my body still remembers how to cry in response to beauty, still registers awe even after months of numbness, still has capacity for the kind of witness that feels like prayer even when belief in anything to pray to has left you.
Por saber cómo llorar cuando las palabras no bastan. For knowing how to cry when words fall short.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam.
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Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011). The primacy of movement.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
Swartz, S. L. (2018). Grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus). In B. Würsig, J. G. M. Thewissen, & K. M. Kovacs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of marine mammals (3rd ed., pp. 422–428). Academic Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Academic Lens
Whales and stone: two orders of time meeting the human body. The whale's presence, a creature of vast scale, indifferent to the observer, is a profound instance of what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call extent: an environment large enough to contain and exceed the self, producing the felt sense of being part of something beyond individual concern. This encounter also instantiates alonetude (Tucker, 2026) at its most expansive: alone in the presence of something vast, the self becomes appropriately small, and the experience is freeing rather than frightening.
