Bilingual Writing – Page 3 – 30 Days by the Sea

Day Seven: El Silencio Como Lugar

Silence as a Place

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 realised 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 Pause Before the Storm

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Silence as Autonomous Presence

The Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1948/1988), in his remarkable book The World of Silence, offers language for what I am experiencing. Picard argues that silence is neither void nor absence but rather an autonomous phenomenon: a presence that exists independently of speech and sound, a reality that begins beyond the falling away of noise.

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.

Bench, Waiting…

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Learning to Enter

I have spent much of my adult life in noisy environments: classrooms full of voices, offices humming with machines, homes filled with the sounds of family and obligation. Silence, when it appeared, felt like an interruption rather than a foundation. I filled it quickly, almost reflexively, with music, with podcasts, with the radio playing in the background while I worked. The thought of sustained quiet made me uneasy in ways I left unexamined.

Now I understand that unease differently. What I was avoiding in silence was an encounter. Silence waits. It listens. Picard writes that where silence is, we are observed by silence. Silence looks at us more than we look at it. This is precisely what felt threatening: the sense that in silence, I would have to meet myself without distraction, without the buffer of activity and noise that kept me safely busy.

Here in Loreto, I am learning to enter silence rather than escape it. The learning has been gradual. In the first days, I noticed how quickly my mind rushed to fill the quiet. Thoughts formed into lists. Conversations from months ago replayed themselves. The body responded with tension, as though silence required vigilance, as though something might be hiding in the stillness.

Staying silent requires patience. Rather than filling it, I began to notice its texture. Silence, I discovered, carries layers. There are distant sounds within it: the far-off call of a bird, the whisper of wind, the rhythmic breathing of the sea. Silence holds space rather than collapsing inward. Over time, it revealed rhythm.

Silence Has a Rhythm

Breath of the Canopy

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

This has been the week’s revelation: silence is alive.

The sea rises and falls. Wind moves through the palm fronds in waves that sound like breathing. My own breath creates a gentle cadence if I stay still enough to notice. Even the light shifts in patterns that feel rhythmic, the slow arc of morning into afternoon into evening. Silence contains all of this motion. It lives. It moves. It pulses with a life I had been too busy to perceive.

Picard understood this. He wrote of the forest as a great reservoir of silence from which quiet trickles in a thin, slow stream, filling the air with its brightness. The image is precise: silence as source, as reservoir, as something that flows rather than simply exists. Here by the Sea of Cortez, the silence flows from the water, from the mountains, from the vast expanse of sky that has no interest in human schedules or human noise.

Table 1

Qualities of Inhabited Silence

Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction	What It Means	How It Manifests
Autonomous	Silence exists independently of human will or speech	Silence is uncovered rather than created; it precedes and outlasts words
Layered	Silence contains subtle sounds, movements, textures within it	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, contentment become perceptible without distraction

Note. The framework synthesises Picard (1948/1988), contemplative traditions, and personal observation. These qualities emerged through sustained attention rather than analysis.

Inhabited Silence

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

After years shaped by disruption, urgency, and collective strain, silence offers what I had needed without knowing it: relief from constant interpretation.

In my working life, I was perpetually reading: reading student papers, reading institutional policies, reading the room in meetings, reading the unspoken tensions in corridors and committee gatherings. Every moment required assessment, response, and performance of understanding. Even leisure hummed with demand; podcasts, news, and social media all called me to process, evaluate, and react.

Silence asks for none of this. There is no need to respond. There is no performance required. Experience can simply exist without commentary. This permission feels revolutionary after decades of cognitive labour.

In silence, listening shifts from sound to sensation. From external cues to internal signals. Hunger is evident when no distraction overrides it. Fatigue makes itself known without shame. Contentment arises unannounced, without having to justify itself against productivity metrics.

Silence clarifies.

Silence and the Settling Body

The connection between silence and nervous system regulation is becoming clearer to me now. Yesterday, I wrote about the body beginning to remember safety. Today, I understand that silence is part of how that remembering happens.

Stephen Porges (2022) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, constantly scanning for signals of safety or threat. Chronic noise, whether literal sound or the metaphorical noise of constant demand, keeps the system in a state of vigilance. The body cannot fully settle when it must remain alert to incoming information that might require a response.

Silence provides what Deb Dana (2020) might call a cue of safety. In the absence of demands, the nervous system can begin to downregulate. Muscles soften. Breath deepens. The hypervigilance 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.

Held Without Asking

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I arrived here expecting solitude to feel lonely, at least sometimes. I expected to miss conversation, to feel the absence of other voices. And there have been moments of longing, particularly in the evenings when the day’s warmth fades, and the darkness feels vast. But alongside that longing, something else has emerged: a sense of being accompanied by silence itself.

This is difficult to articulate without sounding more mystical than I mean. I mean something quite practical: that silence holds without judgment. It asks nothing of me in terms of interest, productivity, or usefulness. It holds my worth independent of output. Silence simply is, and in its presence, I am permitted to simply be.

Picard writes that when two people are conversing, a third is always present: silence is listening. I have begun to feel this even when alone. Silence listens to my thoughts without needing me to speak them. It witnesses my morning rituals, my wanderings to the water, and my afternoon rest. It accompanies without intruding.

Belonging within silence feels different than belonging through interaction. It carries steadiness rather than affirmation. It arises from alignment rather than exchange.

The Noise We Carry

One Missed Call

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Picard wrote his meditation on silence in 1948, and even then, he worried about what he called the world of noise encroaching on human consciousness. He wrote of radio noise as something that surrounds us, accompanies us, and creates a false sense of continuity that substitutes for genuine presence. If he found the mid-twentieth century noisy, I can only imagine what he would make of our current moment.

We carry noise with us now. It lives in our pockets, vibrates against our bodies, follows us into bedrooms and bathrooms and the last quiet corners of our lives. The smartphone has colonised 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 Somatic Record

The somatic log 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

Somatic Log: 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 = ventral vagal state. 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 practice. 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). Polyvagal 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). Polyvagal theory: 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 phenomenological 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.

Day Six: El Cuerpo Comienza a Recordar la Seguridad

Brown Pelican

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Body Begins to Remember Safety

I woke this morning without an alarm, and for several minutes I lay still, noticing.

My shoulders rested flat against the mattress. My jaw hung loose. My breath moved in long, unhurried waves, rising and falling like the sea I could hear through the open window. These details might seem unremarkable to someone who has always slept peacefully, but for me, they marked a shift I had almost forgotten was possible.

For years, I have woken braced. Shoulders already climbing toward my ears. Jaw clenched against the night. Breath shallow and quick, as though the day’s demands had already begun pressing against my chest before I opened my eyes. I had normalised this state to the point that I no longer recognised it as anything other than how mornings felt.

This morning was different. The body had begun to remember something older than vigilance. It had started to remember safety.
And with that, remembering came something I had tried to avoid. The grief.

The Science of Felt Safety

Stephen Porges (2011, 2022), the neuroscientist who developed Polyvagal Theory, offers a framework for understanding my experience this morning. His research demonstrates that feelings of safety emerge from internal physiological states regulated by the autonomic nervous system, which operates largely below conscious awareness. We arrive at safety through the body, long before conscious thought; the body perceives it first, through what Porges terms neuroception.

Title: The Pool

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Neuroception

Neuroception refers to the nervous system’s continuous, unconscious scanning of the environment and internal bodily signals for cues of safety, danger, or life threat (Porges, 2003, 2004). Unlike perception, which involves conscious awareness and interpretation, neuroception operates below the threshold of awareness, triggering reflexive shifts in autonomic state without requiring conscious evaluation of the environment. This process evolved to enable our ancestors to respond rapidly to threats, but it can become miscalibrated by chronic stress, trauma, or prolonged exposure to demanding environments.

Polyvagal Theory proposes that mammals possess three primary autonomic states, each associated with distinct neural circuits that emerged at different points in evolutionary history (Porges, 2011). These states form a hierarchy, with the newest and most sophisticated circuit supporting social connection and calm, and the oldest supporting immobilization and shutdown.

What I Am Learning in the Body

Understanding the theory helps me name what I have been experiencing. For much of the past several years, and perhaps much longer, my nervous system has operated in a state of chronic sympathetic activation. The demands of academic work, the precarity of contract positions, the emotional labour of supporting students through their own struggles, the vigilance required to navigate institutional politics: all of these kept my body in a low-grade state of mobilization, ready to respond to the next challenge, the next deadline, the next crisis.

I became so accustomed to this state that I mistook it for normal. The tight shoulders, the clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the difficulty sleeping through the night: these seemed features of adult life rather than symptoms of a nervous system stuck in defence mode. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. The body becomes a place of tension rather than rest, alert rather than ease.

Here, by the Sea of Cortez, something is shifting. The cues my nervous system receives have changed. The rhythm of the waves provides what Porges might call prosodic cues of safety: low-frequency sounds that signal the absence of threat. The warmth of the sun, the slow pace of the days, the absence of urgent demands, and the faces of people moving without hurry all communicate safety to a body that has been listening for danger.

Deb Dana (2018, 2020), whose work translates Polyvagal Theory into practical application, describes the process of befriending one’s nervous system. She writes about learning to notice the micro-moments of ventral vagal connection, what she calls glimmers: small sparks of safety and calm that can be cultivated and expanded over time. I am learning to notice these glimmers here. The warmth of coffee in my hands. The sound of pelicans diving. The way my breath deepens when I sit by the water.

Title: Pelicans Waiting for Dinner

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Grief That Comes With Softening

But here is what arrived unbidden: as the body begins to soften, grief rises to meet it.

This morning, after noticing my loose jaw and flat shoulders, I lay in the early light and felt the tears come. They were tears of relief, certainly, but they were also tears of mourning. Mourning for all the years I spent braced against a world that demanded constant vigilance. Mourning for the woman who took on contract after contract because she was terrified that if she said no, there would be nothing. Mourning for the version of myself who believed she had to be everything for everyone, and who quietly disappeared in the effort.

Miriam Greenspan (2003), in her essential work Healing Through the Dark Emotions, argues that grief, fear, and despair are transformative rather than pathological when we allow ourselves to experience them fully. She calls this process emotional alchemy: the transmutation of difficult emotions into wisdom and connection. But the alchemy only works if we are willing to feel what we have been avoiding.

Title: The Circle of Life

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Emotional Alchemy

Emotional alchemy refers to the transformational process through which emotions culturally labelled as negative, such as grief, fear, and despair, can become pathways to gratitude, joy, and faith when they are authentically and mindfully felt rather than suppressed or bypassed (Greenspan, 2003). This framework challenges the dominant cultural emphasis on emotional control and positivity, suggesting instead that what we call healing requires moving through rather than around rugged emotional terrain.

I have been avoiding this grief for a very long time. There was no space for it in a life organised around survival. When you are juggling three contracts across two institutions, preparing courses in whatever hours remain after committee meetings and student advising, there is no time to sit with the question of what you might be losing in the process. The hamster wheel of precarious academic labour does what it is designed to do: it keeps you running too fast to notice that you are running in place.

An Accounting of What Was Lost

What did I lose in those years of overwork and fear-driven striving? The list is long, and I am only beginning to acknowledge it.

Time with people I love. The dinners declined because I had marking. The phone calls were cut short because I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class. The visits went untaken, because there was no time, no money, no energy left over after the institution had taken its share.

My own creative work. The writing projects set aside, year after year, while I wrote endless course outlines, assessment rubrics and committee reports. The ideas flickered and faded for lack of sustained time to develop them.

My health. The chronic tension I normalised. The sleep I sacrificed. The stress that accumulated in my body while I told myself I was fine, I could handle it, this was just what working hard looked like.

Presence. The capacity to be fully present where I was, rather than mentally composing tomorrow’s lecture or worrying about next semester’s contract while sitting at my own dinner table. The ability to rest without feeling guilty, to play without calculating what I should be accomplishing instead.

Myself. Somewhere along the way, in trying to be everything for everyone, I lost track of who I was outside of producing, performing, and proving my worth through labour. The woman who existed before she became a human productivity machine.

Crab Life

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Fear Beneath the Overwork

Why did I accept so many contracts? Why did I work through weekends, through holidays, through the body’s increasingly urgent signals that something was wrong?

The answer is simple and painful: fear.

Fear that if I said no to one contract, there might never be another. Fear that I would be forgotten, passed over, rendered invisible in a system that treats contract employees as interchangeable parts. Fear that my value depended entirely on my usefulness, and that the moment I stopped being maximally useful, I would cease to matter

This fear was entirely rational. The conditions of precarious academic employment are designed to produce exactly this kind of anxiety. As I explored in my earlier research on contract faculty experiences, the structure of term-by-term appointments creates what scholars have called artificial scarcity: a manufactured sense that opportunities are scarce, competition is fierce. One must constantly prove one’s worth to secure even temporary belonging.

Title: Prayers for the Sailors

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Artificial Scarcity

Artificial scarcity is the institutional production of resource scarcity that serves extractive logics rather than reflecting genuine constraints. In academic contexts, this manifests as deliberately limited contract renewals, competition for positions that could be made permanent, and funding models that pit workers against one another for resources that institutions choose to withhold. The effect is to transfer risk from institution to worker while intensifying individual self-exploitation to maintain employability.

Greenspan (2003) writes that suppressed fear often converts into anxiety, hypervigilance, or what she calls “toxic rage” that finds no appropriate outlet. For me, the fear transmuted into overwork: a constant striving that kept the terror at bay by keeping me too busy to feel it. The hamster wheel spun fast enough that I could pretend I was going somewhere.

Allowing the Dark Emotions

Title: The Land Before Time

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Greenspan (2003) insists that we cannot heal by bypassing the dark emotions. We can only heal by moving through them. This morning, lying in the grey light with tears running into my hair, I began to let myself grieve what was lost.

I grieved for the years of contracted time, sold in increments to institutions that refused to commit. I grieved for the version of myself who believed she had to earn her right to exist through constant productivity. I grieved for the students I taught while running on empty, giving them less than they deserved because I had nothing left to give. I grieved for the relationships I neglected, the boundaries I failed to uphold, and the needs I refused to acknowledge, because acknowledging them would have required slowing down.

And I grieved for the woman I might have become if I had been able to trust that I was enough. The woman who wrote her own work, who rested without guilt, who knew her value stood apart from her usefulness to others. The woman who could be, without having to justify her existence through labour constantly.

That woman is still possible. She is emerging slowly, her shoulders learning to drop and her jaw to soften. However, her emergence requires mourning the years during which she had been unable to exist fully. Grief is part of becoming.

Title: Pillars of Life

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

A Somatic Record

Following the methodology I developed for this project, I have been tracking my somatic state each morning and evening. The patterns are beginning to reveal themselves. What I notice now is that the emergence of grief marks a new phase in the body’s work. The nervous system begins to settle, and the emotions held at bay by chronic activation begin to surface.

Table 1
Somatic Log: Days 1–6

Day	Morning Observation	Evening Observation	Primary State
1	Tight chest, shallow breathing, jaw clenched	Restless, difficulty settling	SA
2	Woke with a loose jaw	Some softening after water time	SA → VV
3	Breath deeper, still some tension	Easier sleep, fewer interruptions	SA/VV
4	Woke with looser jaw	Calm, present, grounded	VV
5	Recognition of overachiever pattern	Emotional release, then peace	SA → VV
6	Shoulders flat, jaw loose; grief arose	Tears for lost years; then gentle calm	VV + grief

Note. States are classified according to Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011). VV = ventral vagal; SA = sympathetic activation. The trajectory across Days 1–6 reflects a gradual shift from sympathetic activation toward ventral vagal regulation, with grief emerging as a regulated and tolerable affective state.

Day six marks the continuation of physical settling alongside the emergence of emotional content that demands its own kind of attention. The body softens enough to feel what it has been protecting me from feeling. This is precisely what Greenspan describes: the dark emotions arise when we finally create conditions safe enough to hold them.

Complicating the Framework

Title: Paradise

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

It would be tempting to treat this grief as purely personal, a private mourning for private losses. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the structural dimensions of my experience. My nervous system became dysregulated through specific, structural conditions. The conditions of precarious academic labour, the expectations of constant productivity, and the erosion of secure employment are systemic features of contemporary work that affect millions.

Byung-Chul Han (2010/2015), in The Burnout Society, describes how neoliberal economies produce subjects who exploit themselves more thoroughly than any external master could. We become subjects of achievement, experiencing our self-exploitation as freedom, as choice, as personal ambition. The violence is hidden because it comes from within. The exhaustion feels like personal failure rather than structural extraction.

Healing my own nervous system, while valuable, leaves untouched the conditions that initially caused the dysregulation. I hold both truths: personal healing matters, and structural change remains necessary. The grief I feel this morning is mine, but it is also collective. It belongs to every contract worker who said yes when they wanted to say no. It applies to anyone who has tried to be everything for everyone and lost themselves in the effort.

Title: The Monkey Face

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Body Archive

One of the most generative ideas I have encountered in my research is the body as archive. The body stores experience in ways that resist verbal articulation but emerge vividly through attention to somatic sensation. Muscle tension, posture, breath patterns, sensory associations: these hold histories that may never have been consciously processed or integrated into narrative memory.

When I notice my shoulders dropping, I am reading the archive. The body is releasing its record of vigilance, one slight relaxation at a time. When my jaw softens in sleep, the body is revising its story, replacing the narrative of threat with emerging evidence of safety. When tears come, the body finally allows what was stored to flow outward. The grief I feel is archived, years of unshed tears for years of unlived moments.

van der Kolk (2014) describes trauma as an experience that becomes stuck in the body, unable to complete its natural cycle of activation and discharge. The inverse may also be true: healing becomes possible when the body finds conditions that allow it to complete cycles interrupted by chronic stress. The sea, the warmth, the solitude, the absence of demand: these may be creating the conditions my body needs to process what it has been carrying. The grief is part of that processing.

Title: Sea Lions

What the Pelicans Know

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Later this morning, after the tears had passed and I had dressed and walked to the water, I watched the pelicans again. They rest on the water between dives, floating with apparent ease, their bodies loose and buoyant. They seem to know something about the alternation between effort and rest, between activation and recovery, that I am only now beginning to learn.

The pelicans show no sign of grief. But perhaps that is because they have never lost access to their own rhythm. They have never been asked to produce constantly, to prove their worth through labour, to fear that rest makes them dispensable. They dive when hungry, float when satisfied, and fly when they choose. The simplicity of it undoes something in me.

Porges (2022) argues that safety is a biological imperative, suggesting that social connectedness and the experience of felt safety are fundamental human needs wired into our physiology. Perhaps the grief I feel is the recognition of how long I lived without this safety, how long I ran on vigilance and fear, how much I sacrificed to a system that asked everything and offered no guarantee in return.

Day six. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw is learning to soften. The breath is learning to deepen. And the tears are learning to fall. All of it is necessary. All of it is the body doing its quiet work of remembering what it means to be safe, and mourning the years when safety had been beyond reach.

Greenspan (2003) promises that grief, fully felt, transmutes into gratitude. I am still on the way. But I trust the process. I trust the tears. I trust the sea and the pelicans and this slow, patient body, finally allowed to feel what it has been carrying.

Safety, it turns out, is something the body both recognises and grieves. It is something the body grieves when it finally arrives.

Title: The Path

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Title: Life on the Sea

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I am still here.

References

Dana, D. (2018).
The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation.
W. W. Norton.

Dana, D. (2020).
Polyvagal exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices.
W. W. Norton.

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

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

Han, B.-C. (2015).
The burnout society.
Stanford University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2003).
Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1008(1), 31–47.
https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1301.004

Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.

Porges, S. W. (2011).
The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation.
W. W. Norton.

Porges, S. W. (2022).
Polyvagal theory: A science of safety.
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227

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

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

La confesión de una sobreexigida

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body shame, institutional harm, and the experience of exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

An overachiever’s confession

A Reckoning by the Sea

It happened while I was watching the pelicans.

They dive with such certainty, folding their wings at the last possible moment, surrendering to gravity and instinct. They trust the trajectory. They dive and let instinct decide the rest. They dive, surface, swallow, and rest on the water until the next impulse moves them.

Watching them, coffee cooling in my hands, I felt something crack open inside my chest. The realization arrived without announcement, without the careful preparation I usually require before allowing myself to know brutal truths.

I am an overachiever. And I am burned out.

The words felt foreign, even as I knew them to be true. For decades, I had called it other things: dedicated, committed, hardworking, passionate. I had worn exhaustion like a badge, proof that I was earning my place in a world that seemed to demand constant demonstration of worth.

What Remained Hidden

Brené Brown (2010), in The Gifts of Imperfection, names the belief system I had been living inside without recognising its walls. Her research reveals that perfectionism operates as a self-destructive and addictive pattern, rooted in the belief that flawless appearance, behaviour, and accomplishment can somehow shield us from shame, judgement, and blame. Brown’s work demonstrates that most perfectionists were raised receiving praise primarily for achievement and performance, whether academic grades, good manners, rule-following, or people-pleasing. Somewhere in that conditioning, many of us internalised a dangerous equation: our worth equals our accomplishments and how well we accomplish them.

Reading those words by the sea, I felt the shock of recognition. That belief had been the operating system of my entire adult life. Every committee I joined. Every extra course I taught. Every student crisis I absorbed as my own responsibility. Every late night, every weekend sacrificed, every moment of rest interrupted by the nagging sense that I should be doing something more, something better, something that would finally prove I deserved to be here.

Brown’s research reveals a more complicated truth: perfectionism fundamentally concerns itself with earning approval and acceptance rather than with genuine self-improvement (Brown, 2010). The pattern follows a predictable sequence: please, perform, perfect. I had been following that formula in education for twenty-five years, believing it would eventually lead to security, to belonging, to the sense that I had finally done enough.

It never did. It never could. That is the nature of the trap.

What Burnout Looks Like From the Inside

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter (2016), the researchers who developed the most widely used measure of occupational burnout, describe it through three interconnected dimensions. The first involves overwhelming exhaustion, the sense of being worn out, depleted, and unable to recover. The second manifests as cynicism and detachment from work, a protective numbing that separates us from caring too much. The third is a diminished sense of professional efficacy, a creeping belief that nothing we do makes a real difference.

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

What struck me, reading their work, was how the third dimension creates a vicious cycle. The more burned out we become, the less effective we feel. The less effective we think, the harder we push to prove our worth. The harder we try, the more depleted we become. I had been running that cycle for years, perhaps decades, without seeing it clearly.

Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in The Body Keeps the Score, observes that people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. While I would hesitate to claim trauma as an identity, I recognise its residue: the years of institutional vigilance, the constant calibration to others’ needs, the way exhaustion became so familiar I forgot it was exhaustion. My shoulders, perpetually braced. My jaw was clenched through the night. My sleep, fractured by worry that arrived without specific content, just a generalised dread that something was undone, someone was disappointed, some standard had been missed.

Here, by the sea, those symptoms have begun to ease. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw softens. Sleep comes and stays. The body is remembering safety, one quiet morning at a time.

Exhaustion as Status Symbol

Brown (2010) names something I had never consciously examined: the cultural tendency to treat exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as the measure of self-worth. In academic culture, in caregiving, in so many of the roles I have inhabited, exhaustion signals commitment. To admit tiredness is to demonstrate that I am working hard enough to deserve my place. To acknowledge a need for rest is to risk appearing uncommitted, unserious, insufficient.

The contract I wrote this morning, the one promising myself eight hours of sleep and mornings without performance, pushes directly against this belief. Every clause is a small rebellion against the culture that trained me to equate worth with output, value with visible effort.

Jenny Odell (2019), in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, writes about a different kind of productivity, one focused on maintaining oneself and healing rather than generating output. That concept stopped me when I first encountered it. The productivity of healing. As if rest could be framed as output. As if I needed permission, even from myself, to justify time spent recovering.

Perhaps I do need that permission. Maybe the language of productivity is the only dialect my overachiever’s mind can currently accept. If so, I will use it as a bridge until I can cross to the other side, where rest requires no justification at all.

What Solitude Makes Visible

Christopher Long and James Averill (2003), in their foundational study of positive solitude, found that being alone provides a particular kind of freedom: release from external constraints, from the performance demands of social interaction, from the need to calibrate ourselves to others’ expectations. In their research, people reported that solitude allowed them to see themselves more clearly, free from the distortions of social performance and others’ expectations. Solitude strips away the roles we perform, leaving us face-to-face with who we have become.

That confrontation can be painful. What I am seeing here by the Sea of Cortez is a woman who has spent decades outrunning her fear of inadequacy. A woman who believed, at some level too deep for conscious examination, that if she ever stopped performing, stopped achieving, stopped proving, she would discover she was nothing at all.

This is what Brown (2010) means when she describes perfectionism as a heavy shield we carry around, believing it will protect us, when in reality it prevents us from taking flight. I have been carrying that shield for so long that I forgot it was heavy. Here, I am finally setting it down.

What Comes After Recognition

The novelist Anna Quindlen once observed that the truly difficult and truly amazing work lies in giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself (as cited in Brown, 2010). That work starts here, in this place where no one knows my credentials or my accomplishments or how many hours I have logged in service to institutions that offered little security in return. Here, I am simply a woman by the sea. A woman learning to rest without guilt. A woman discovering that her worth existed before she proved anything, and will remain after she stops proving altogether.

Brown (2010) describes herself as a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enoughist. That phrase makes me smile, this gentle reframing of recovery from perfectionism. I am an aspiring good-enoughist. I am learning to accept that enough is a destination, perhaps the only one worth reaching.

The pelicans are diving again. They keep no score. They make no comparisons with yesterday’s haul. They rest when they are full and dive when they are hungry, floating on the water between efforts, trusting that the sea will continue to provide.

I am watching them. I am learning.

Learning to Be Alone Without Loneliness

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.

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

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

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311

Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

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

January 4: Día Cuatro: Caminando el Malecón

Caminando el Malecón on the fourth day: a bilingual reflection on walking the seafront promenade in Loreto, and what the body learns when it is given permission to move slowly, without destination.

Title: The Bench That Waits

Artist Statement

It was empty when I arrived.

Empty, waiting. The kind of waiting that holds space for whoever might need it, without straining toward arrival. Positioned between palms and water, the bench faced outward, offering its view without instruction. Sit or continue. Stay or keep walking. The invitation was gentle enough to refuse.

I noticed how naturally my body moved toward it.

As if rest recognises itself. The slats still cool from morning air, the sea stretching steady beyond the shoreline, mountains holding their distance across the water. Nothing demanded attention. The bench offered comfort directly. It simply provided it.

I stayed just long enough.

But long enough to feel the pause it offered. Long enough to understand that some forms of support ask nothing in return. They exist so that, when needed, we can set our weight down for a moment and remember what it feels like to be held without expectation.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

This morning, I walked.

It sounds unremarkable, and perhaps it is. People walk every day for transportation, exercise, and the simple need to move from one place to another. But this walking was different. This walking was deliberate, unhurried, without destination. I walked the malecón, the seaside promenade that curves along Loreto’s waterfront, and somewhere between my first step and my last, something shifted. I began to find myself in the rhythm of my own feet.

Rebecca Solnit (2001), in her meditation on the history and meaning of walking, writes that “the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts” (pp. 5–6). Walking, she argues, is locomotion and so much more. It is a mode of being in the world, a way of thinking with the body, a practice that has shaped philosophers, poets, and pilgrims for millennia. I set out this morning simply to move. I set out to move. But movement, I am learning, has its own intelligence.

El Malecón / The Promenade

The malecón stretches along the edge of the Sea of Cortez, a paved path bordered by palm trees on one side and water on the other. In the early morning, before the heat becomes oppressive, it fills with walkers: elderly couples moving slowly arm in arm, young mothers pushing strollers, fishermen heading to their boats, tourists like me trying to find our place in this unfamiliar landscape.

I joined the flow without speaking to anyone. I was alone in a crowd, solitary yet surrounded, occupying what the sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) called civil inattention: a delicate social contract in which strangers acknowledge each other’s presence through brief eye contact or a nod, then politely look away, granting each other the privacy of public space. There is a particular freedom in being unknown. No one on this malecón knows my name, my history, my roles, my failures. I am simply a woman walking, indistinguishable from any other woman walking, anonymous in the best possible way.

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer whose work explores the relationship between people and place, distinguishes between space and place. Space, he suggests, is abstract, undifferentiated, open. Place is space that has been given meaning through experience, through movement, through the accumulation of memory and feeling. I am in the process of transforming this malecón from space into place, step by step, morning by morning, until it becomes somewhere I belong rather than somewhere I am visiting.

Title: Looking Up

Artist Statement

I noticed the sky because the trees asked me to.

Their trunks moved upward and outward, drawing my gaze away from the ground I had been watching all morning. Palms reaching, bending slightly, as if shaped by years of wind and salt air. I stood beneath them, small in comparison, aware of how rarely I stop long enough to look up without purpose. What held me there was the layering.

Fronds crossing one another. Dark silhouettes against a pale, clouded sky. Movement without urgency. Even the stillness felt alive, suspended between breeze and pause. It reminded me that perspective shifts quietly, sometimes offered by nothing more than changing the direction of your gaze. I stayed a moment longer than expected.

Simply allowing the upward view to hold me. A reminder that rest arrives in many forms beyond lying down. Sometimes it arrives in the simple act of lifting your eyes and letting the world open above you.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

El Ritmo de los Pies / The Rhythm of Feet

There is something about the pace of walking that matches the pace of thought. Frédéric Gros (2014), the French philosopher who wrote a book-length exploration of walking as a philosophical practice, observes that walking is human. When we walk, we move at approximately five kilometres per hour, the pace at which humans have moved for most of our evolutionary history. This is the speed at which the world makes sense, at which details can be noticed, at which the mind can wander without becoming lost.

I noticed things this morning that I would have missed from a car or a bus. A pelican perched on a piling, utterly still, watching the water. An old man mending a fishing net, his fingers moving with the ease of decades of practice. A child chasing pigeons, her laughter bright against the morning quiet. Bougainvillea spilling over a white wall in shades of magenta and coral. A dog sleeping in a patch of sun, so profoundly at peace that I envied him.

These small observations accumulated as I walked, asking nothing, just offering themselves to my attention. This is what the Kaplans (1989) meant by “soft fascination”: the gentle engagement with the environment that allows the mind to rest while remaining alert. Walking provides a constant stream of such fascination: the changing view, the shifting light, the small dramas of ordinary life unfolding at the edges of the path. My attention was held without being captured. I was present without being vigilant.

Una Mujer Caminando Sola / A Woman Walking Alone

There is a particular experience of being a woman walking alone in public space. Lauren Elkin (2017), in her exploration of female flânerie, the art of wandering through city streets, notes that the figure of the flâneur, the leisurely male stroller who observes urban life, has historically had no female equivalent. Women in public spaces have been subject to scrutiny, harassment, and assumptions about their availability or their morality. The freedom to wander, to be seen without being accosted, to occupy space without justification, has been a privilege unevenly distributed.

Here on the malecón, I felt safe. The morning light, the presence of families, and the openness of the waterfront all contributed to a sense of ease. However, I am aware that this ease is neither universal nor guaranteed. I carry decades of conditioning about where women can go, when, and with whom. I have the vigilance that women learn early, the constant low-level assessment of threat that becomes so habitual it feels like instinct. Walking alone, as a woman, at 60, in a foreign country, is an act of quiet defiance. It is a claiming of space, a declaration that I have as much right to this malecón as anyone.

Sara Maitland (2009), writing about her own experiments with solitude, describes the gendered dimensions of being alone. “For women,” she observes, “aloneness has often been constructed as dangerous, improper, or indicative of failure” (p. 42). A woman alone must be waiting for someone. A woman alone must be lonely. A woman alone must require rescue, company, or protection. These assumptions persist even when we have consciously rejected them. Walking the malecón alone, I am practising a different narrative: that solitude can be chosen, that a woman can be complete unto herself, that walking alone is pure presence.

I am finding myself, precisely here.

Caminar Como Pensar / Walking as Thinking

Title: Standing with Myself

Artist Statement

I saw the shadow before I saw the photograph. Cast long across the sand, shaped by a sun beyond my direct view, my body appeared as outline rather than detail. No expression. No colour. Just form held briefly on the surface of the earth. I stood still for a moment, noticing how unfamiliar it felt to look at myself without the usual identifiers. No face. No eyes. Only presence. What stayed with me was the clarity of the silhouette.

There is honesty in shadow. It removes performance. Removes the small adjustments we make when we know we are being seen. What remains is posture. Weight distribution. The simple fact of occupying space. I realised I was looking at evidence of being there rather than proof of who I am. A quieter form of documentation. The sand held me without resistance.

Wind-shaped ridges moving outward in soft repetition, my shadow resting across them without altering their pattern. Temporary. Already shifting as the sun moved. I stood there aware that this is what much of life feels like, moments of presence held briefly on landscapes that existed long before us and will continue long after. I let the shadow remain a while.

I let the shadow remain intact a little longer, recognising it as companion rather than absence. Beyond loneliness. Beyond solitude. Just the simple act of standing with myself, visible in outline, grounded in light.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The philosophers understood what neuroscience is only beginning to confirm: that walking changes how we think. Aristotle taught while walking, his students strolling beside him through the Lyceum’s colonnades. Rousseau claimed that he could compose only while walking. Nietzsche declared that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” (as cited in Gros, 2014, p. 18). Wordsworth walked an estimated 180,000 miles in his lifetime, composing poems with each step.

Contemporary research supports these intuitions. Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014), in a series of experiments at Stanford University, found that walking significantly increases creative divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple solutions to open-ended problems. Participants who walked, whether on a treadmill or outdoors, produced more creative responses than those who sat. The effect persisted even after walking ended, suggesting that movement primes the mind for creative thought in ways that outlast the activity itself.

This morning, as I walked, thoughts arose that had been inaccessible during the first three days of sitting and settling. Ideas for writing. Insights about patterns in my life. Connections between things I had read and things I had experienced. It was as if the movement of my body had loosened something in my mind, allowing thoughts that had been stuck, dammed up behind the exhaustion, vigilance, and accumulated tension of years to flow. Walking, I began to think again. Walking, I began to find the thoughts that had been waiting for space to emerge.

Title: A Small Signal

Artist Statement

The self-portrait arrived without intention. I was watching the shoreline, the way the stones gathered where the tide had last reached, when my shadow entered the frame. Familiar now, this outline of myself appearing unannounced. My hand lifted without planning, two fingers raised in a quiet gesture. For no audience at all. Just a small signal that I was here, standing between water and land, present in the light of that moment.

What stayed with me was how brief it was. The sea kept moving. The sand kept holding its patterns. My shadow shifted as the sun moved, the gesture dissolving almost as soon as it formed. And yet it felt enough. A soft reassurance offered inward rather than outward. I am here. I am steady. Still arriving, even now.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

El Cuerpo Recuerda Cómo Moverse / The Body Remembers How to Move

I have been a swimmer, a triathlete, a woman who pushed her body through marathons and triathlons. Movement has always been part of who I am. But somewhere in the last few months, I stopped. The demands of work, the weight of caregiving, the creeping exhaustion that made even small exertions feel impossible: these accumulated until I no longer recognised myself as someone who moved. I became sedentary. I became still in all the wrong ways.

Walking the malecón this morning, I felt my body remember. The swing of arms, the push of feet against pavement, the rhythm of breath deepening with exertion. It was gentle, nothing like the intensity of training, but it was movement. It was my body doing what bodies are designed to do: carrying us through the world, encountering terrain, responding to the demands of gravity, distance, and time.

Researchers in embodied cognition argue that thinking extends beyond the brain, distributed throughout the body and its interactions with the environment (Shapiro, 2019). We think through the world rather than about it from a position of detachment; we think through our bodies, with our bodies, as our bodies. Walking is a form of thinking. Movement is a form of knowing. When I walk, I am doing something beyond transporting my mind from place to place. I am engaging in a fundamentally different mode of cognition, one that integrates body and world in ways that sitting cannot replicate.

Encuentros / Encounters

Near the end of the malecón, where the pavement gives way to sand, and the tourist hotels yield to fishing shacks, I stopped to rest on a bench. An elderly woman sat at the other end, her face weathered by sun and time, her hands folded in her lap. We nodded at each other, the universal greeting of strangers sharing space.

“Bonita mañana,” she said after a moment. Beautiful morning.

“Sí,” I agreed. “Muy bonita.”

We sat in companionable silence, watching the water. I knew nothing of her name, her story, nothing about the life that had brought her to this bench on this morning. She knew nothing of mine. And yet there was a connection, brief and wordless, the kind of connection that can only happen between strangers who have no agenda, no history, no expectation of each other. Just two women, sharing a bench, watching the sea.

The sociologist Georg Simmel (1908/1971), writing about urban life, described the paradox of proximity and distance that characterises encounters with strangers. We are physically close, often closer than we would be with intimates, yet socially distant, protected by conventions of anonymity. This distance, Simmel argued, can be liberating. It allows us to be seen without being known, to exist in public without the weight of personal history.

The woman rose to leave, gathering a small bag I had missed until that moment. “Que le vaya bien,” she said. May it go well for you. “Igualmente,” I replied. Same to you. She walked away, and I stayed on the bench, holding the small gift of that encounter, that moment of human connection that asked nothing and gave everything.

Encontrándome / Finding Myself

Title: Where the Water Waits

Artist Statement

I found it tucked into the wall as though it had always been there, water gathering quietly beneath the carved lion’s face. The stream was gentle, almost ceremonial, falling into the basin without urgency. I stood there longer than I expected, listening to the soft repetition of water meeting stone. There was something grounding in its rhythm, a steadiness that asked nothing of me and yet held the space all the same.

What struck me most was the feeling of offering. The fountain asked nothing of thirst. It simply waited, holding water for whoever might arrive needing pause, reflection, or refreshment. I felt that invitation without having to drink. Just standing near it was enough, reminded that restoration often lives in small, quiet places, flowing patiently until we are ready to receive it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

What does it mean to find yourself? The phrase is so common that it has become cliché, the stuff of self-help books, wellness retreats and midlife crisis narratives. And yet, walking back along the malecón this morning, I understood something about what it might actually mean.

Finding yourself is encountering something in motion, beyond any unchanging core that has been there all along, hidden beneath roles and responsibilities. The self is no buried treasure. Instead, as the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) argues, the self is something we construct through our choices, our relationships, our engagements with the world. “We are selves,” he writes, “only in that certain issues matter for us” (p. 34). We find ourselves by discovering what matters, by choosing what to attend to, by moving toward what calls us.

Walking matters to me. I had forgotten, but this morning I remembered. Movement matters. The body in space, encountering the world at the speed of feet, matters. Solitude in public, the freedom to be alone among others, matters. The malecón is teaching me what matters. Each step is a small declaration: this is who I am. This is who I am becoming.

Dan McAdams (2001), the narrative psychologist, suggests that identity is fundamentally a story we tell about ourselves, a personal myth that integrates past, present, and anticipated future into a coherent sense of who we are. Finding yourself, in this framework, means revising the story. It means writing new chapters. It means recognising that the self is fluid, authored, made.

I am making myself on this malecón. Step by step, I am writing a new chapter in which I am a woman who walks alone, who claims space, who moves through the world at the speed of thought, who finds herself through solitude, because of it.

Paso a paso, me estoy convirtiendo en quien siempre fui.

Step by step, I am becoming who I always was.

Reflexión de la tarde / Evening Reflection

Title: Daybreak Crossing

Artist Statement

I arrived before the sun cleared the mountains, when the sea was still holding night in its depths. The horizon glowed slowly, a thin line of gold widening by the minute, as though the day were being poured carefully into the world. Birds crossed the sky in loose formation, their wings catching the first light. I stood still, aware of how quietly morning begins when no one is rushing it forward.

What I felt most was permission. The water moved without urgency. The light unfolded at its own pace. Nothing demanded that I be anything other than present to the crossing from dark to day. In that moment, I understood arrival differently, as something ongoing, something that happens gradually, like sunrise, asking only that I remain long enough to witness it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I walked again this evening, as the sun dropped toward the mountains and the light turned golden. The malecón was different at this hour: more crowded, more festive, families out for their evening paseo, that lovely Latin custom of strolling together as the day cools. I was alone among the couples and the families, and I felt held by that rhythm, I felt held by the rhythm of the walk, the beauty of the light, the simple pleasure of a body in motion.

Tomorrow I will walk again. And the day after that. Walking has become my practice here, my daily discipline, my way of being in this place and in this body. Each walk is different: different light, other encounters, different thoughts arising from the rhythm of feet. And each walk is the same: the same path, the same sea, the same self, meeting the world one step at a time.

Solnit (2001) writes that “the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness” (p. 10). Here in Loreto, I am slowing down to the speed of thought. I am letting my mind keep pace with my feet. I am finding myself in the ordinary miracle of movement, of breath, of a body carrying me through a world that reveals itself slowly, step by step, along a malecón I am learning to call my own.

El camino me enseña quién soy.

The path teaches me who I am.

Un paso a la vez.

One step at a time.

My Dirty Shoes

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

References

Elkin, L. (2017). Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Goffman, E. (1963). Behaviour in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press.

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

Gros, F. (2014). A philosophy of walking (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Maitland, S. (2009). A book of silence. Granta.

McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577

Shapiro, L. (2019). Embodied cognition (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Simmel, G. (1971). The stranger. In D. N. Levine (Ed.), Georg Simmel: On individuality and social forms (pp. 143–149). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908)

Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

Academic Lens

Walking the malecon as daily ritual embodies what Pink (2013) calls sensory ethnography: knowledge gathered through the moving, attentive body in a specific place. The body adapting to a new rhythm — new smells, sounds, temperatures — signals the early stages of somatic regulation that Levine (2010) describes as the nervous system's capacity to "track" safety. The bilingual form of this entry reflects the way the Spanish-speaking environment was generating a different kind of cognitive and embodied presence.

Cruzando

Crossing

Two flights.
Six plus hours.
The particular exhaustion
of leaving everything.

Taxi window.
Dust road.
Mountains I have never seen
turning pink in the distance.

¿Primera vez en Loreto?
First time?
Sí.
Yes.

Estoy cansada.
I am tired.

The driver nods.
Sí, se ve.
Yes. It shows.

Key in the lock.
Door swinging open.
A room that belongs
to no one yet.

Bag on the floor.
Zipped shut.
The quiet discipline
of leaving it unpacked.

Salt air.
Open window.
The sea
I came to meet.

Sixty years old.
Alone.
The radical act
of arriving for myself.

No one waiting.
No one expecting.
No one asking
what took so long.

Shoulders dropping.
The body knowing
before the mind
admits.

Threshold.
Umbral.
The space between
who I was
and who I am becoming.

Light fading.
Sea darkening.
The first night
of thirty beginning.

Mañana será otro día.
Tomorrow will be another day.

But tonight
just this
arriving.

He llegado.
I have arrived.

For now
that is enough.

Title: Weathered Open

Artist Statement

I almost walked past it.

It lay half-set in the sand, unannounced, the colour of something that had spent years under sun and water. What drew me back was the opening. Small. Quiet. A hollow worn clean through the stone as if time itself had needed passage.

I picked it up and felt its weight.

Solid everywhere except for that one opening. The hole held no weakness in it. If anything, it revealed its endurance. Pressure had shaped it instead. It had shaped it. Wind, salt, movement, persistence. Forces working slowly enough that transformation appeared gentle even when the forces were fierce.

Standing there, I thought about what it means to be marked without being broken.

How life wears through us in places. How absence forms where certainty once lived. How openings appear beyond damage, as evidence of having stayed long enough for change to move through.

I placed it back where I found it.

Some objects feel less like discoveries and more like acknowledgements. A quiet recognition of what survives shaping. Of what remains strong even with light moving through it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

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

El Umbral

The Threshold

Title: Morning Held in a Cup

Title: Morning Held in a Cup

The coffee cooled faster than I expected.

I had carried it outside before the day fully formed, before voices rose from the pathways below, before the shoreline began its quiet negotiations with footsteps and movement. The mug sat heavy in my hands, ceramic warmed by what it held, painted with colours that felt brighter than the hour itself. Loreto written across it, as place, briefly touching my palms, without declaration. I realised I was holding geography in a way maps never allow. Heat. Weight. Stillness.

What struck me was the pause.

I let it sit first. I let the steam lift, let the horizon remain slightly out of focus beyond the wooden railing. There was comfort in the blur, in allowing the world to stay softened while I woke into it slowly. No urgency to begin the day. No performance required. Just breath, warmth, and the steady presence of water beyond sight but within reach. It felt like a continuation of something I had been learning here, that mornings can be received rather than seized. They can be received.

I thought about how many cups of coffee I have held in my life.

Behind counters. At kitchen tables. In classrooms before students arrived. Each one marking a threshold between effort and endurance, between showing up and staying anyway. This cup felt different. It had everything to do with how I was sitting with it. Unhurried. Unguarded. Simply present to the small ritual of warmth against my hands, aware that sometimes the most profound forms of steadiness arrive quietly, asking nothing more than that we hold them long enough to feel their heat.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Arrival rarely looks the way we imagine it will.

There is the physical act of stepping into a room, setting a bag down, and closing a door behind you. And then there is the quieter arrival that unfolds beneath the surface, the one that takes longer, the one the body negotiates in its own time. I landed in Loreto yesterday, somewhere between waking and dreaming, my sense of time dissolved by two flights and several hours of transit. The body arrives first. The breath follows. The mind lingers behind, still scanning, still carrying the vigilance of the life I have temporarily left.

Estoy cansada. I am tired. The phrase surfaced unbidden as the taxi wound through the quiet streets of this small town on the Sea of Cortez. I said it aloud, testing how Spanish felt in my mouth after so many years. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded. Sí, se ve, he said gently. Yes, it shows.

Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

Cruzando / Crossing

I came here alone. That sentence still feels radical, even as I write it. At 60, after twenty-five years navigating the relentless demands of academic life, I booked a solo retreat to a place where I know no one, where no one expects anything of me, where the only schedule is the one I choose to keep. The decision carried both relief and a strange tenderness, as if I were doing something slightly forbidden.

Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), the anthropologist who coined the term liminality, described thresholds as spaces of transition, neither fully one thing nor another. The word itself comes from the Latin limen, meaning “boundary” or “doorstep”. To stand on a threshold is to occupy the space between what was and what might be, to hover in the doorway before stepping through. That is where I find myself tonight: on the threshold between the life I have been living and something I cannot yet name.

Victor Turner (1969), building on van Gennep’s work, described liminal spaces as places where ordinary structures dissolve, where the usual rules loosen their grip. He called this betwixt and between, a phrase that captures the particular disorientation of transition. I feel that disorientation now, sitting on a terrace overlooking water I have never seen before, in a country where I speak the language imperfectly, in a solitude I have chosen but am only beginning to inhabit.

El umbral es el lugar donde todo puede cambiar.

The threshold is the point at which everything can change.

Después de Años de Disrupción / After Years of Disruption

Title: Where Sound Holds Time

I arrived before the bells moved.

The tower rose out of the morning sky with a kind of quiet authority that asked nothing and yet remained undeniable. Stone layered upon stone, holding heat from centuries of sun, holding prayer, grief, celebration, confession, all sedimented into the structure itself. I stood at its base looking upward, aware of my own smallness against its vertical reach. Contextualised rather than diminished. Placed within a timeline far longer than my own.

What struck me most was the anticipation of sound.

The bells hung still, suspended in that brief space before motion. I found myself listening for something still ahead, aware that when they did ring, the vibration would move through air, through wall, through body. There is something about churches that organises silence differently. Even emptiness feels structured. Held. As though quiet itself has been practiced here long before anyone enters.

I stayed outside first.

I stayed at the threshold, aware that entry is never only architectural. It is emotional. Spiritual. Historical. To cross from sunlight into that interior dimness would be to step into accumulated presence. So I remained outside a while longer, letting the bells remain still, letting the stone hold its stories without requiring mine to be added. Some places ask for reverence through participation. Others offer it simply through standing close enough to feel time moving slowly around you.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

This arrival carries history. After the pandemic, many people learned how to be alone in ways they never intended. Isolation arrived suddenly, unevenly, and without consent. Homes became offices. Screens replaced faces. Silence grew louder, then exhausting. Loneliness took many forms, some quiet, some crowded, some invisible even to those experiencing them.

Coming into solitude by choice feels different. And yet the body remembers. It holds traces of vigilance, of separation, of longing for connection that went unmet during those long months. Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in his landmark work on trauma, reminds us that the body keeps the score, storing experience in tissue and nervous system long after the mind has moved on. My body carried the pandemic here, tucked into my luggage alongside my journal and my watercolours. Arrival asks me to acknowledge that history rather than rush past it.

Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes that rest is resistance, a refusal to participate in systems that reduce human worth to productivity. For those of us who survived the pandemic by working harder, by performing wellness while quietly falling apart, rest can feel transgressive. Choosing solitude after years of forced isolation requires a different kind of courage: the willingness to be alone on purpose, to trust that this time the aloneness will heal rather than harm.

La Primera Noche / The First Evening

At first, habit took over. I considered unpacking everything immediately. I thought about schedules, routes, and productivity. My mind offered a list of things I could accomplish before bed: organise the kitchen, plan tomorrow’s meals, and respond to the emails still waiting on my phone. This reflex runs deep, an inherited habit shaped by a world that rewards motion and punishes stillness.

So I sat.

I let the room remain unfinished. I left the bag zipped. I noticed how my shoulders softened when there was nowhere else to be. Outside, light shifted almost imperceptibly, the desert mountains turning pink and then purple as the sun dropped toward the sea. Inside, something settled.

The Kaplans (1989), environmental psychologists who developed attention restoration theory, describe specific environments as offering soft fascination, a gentle hold on attention that allows the mind to rest while remaining engaged. Natural settings, they argue, restore depleted cognitive resources by providing stimulation that requires effort to ignore but minimal effort to attend to. The sea outside my window offers exactly this: something to watch without watching, something to hear without listening, something to receive without reaching.

I opened the windows and let the evening in. Salt air. The distant sound of waves. A dog barking somewhere in town. These sounds asked nothing of me. They existed, and I lived alongside them, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, that felt like enough.

El Acto Radical / The Radical Act

Title: Night Fire, Inner Quiet

Artist Statement

I found this place after most people had gone in.

The courtyard held that particular kind of night silence that is never empty, only softened. Chairs pushed back. Glass tables catching reflections of low light. The ocean somewhere beyond the dark, present but unseen. And in the centre, the fire already burning, as if it had been waiting for someone willing to sit without conversation.

I stood at the edge first, feeling the heat reach outward in small waves. Fire reorganises space differently than daylight does. It draws the body inward. Invites stillness without demanding it. I noticed how the flames moved, steadily consuming what had already been offered. There was something reassuring in that rhythm. Transformation happening without spectacle.

Eventually, I sat.

To accompany the burning. To watch what happens when wood becomes ember, when form gives way to glow. I thought about how many versions of myself had been shaped in similar fires, slow, unseen processes of change that only reveal themselves in hindsight. The courtyard remained quiet. The flames continued their patient work. And for a while, I let the night hold me there, lit just enough to feel present, but held within it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Arriving alone carries a particular tenderness. There is no one to absorb the moment for you, no one to narrate the experience to, no one whose presence dilutes the intensity of meeting yourself in an unfamiliar place. You stand at the threshold, and you stand there alone, and whatever comes next is yours to receive without mediation.

For women, especially women at midlife, this can feel revolutionary. Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s psychological development, described how women often define themselves through relationships, through care for others, through responsiveness to needs that are rarely their own. To step away from those relationships, even temporarily, can feel like abandonment, like selfishness, like a betrayal of everything we were taught to value.

I think about my mother in Lethbridge, 80 years old, navigating widowhood in the house that still holds her husband’s absence. I think about the colleagues who will cover my responsibilities while I am away. I think about all the ways I have been trained to feel guilty for taking up space, claiming time, and prioritising my own restoration. And then I think about what Audre Lorde (1988) wrote, that caring for myself is an act of political warfare, a refusal to participate in my own depletion.

Tonight, I am practising that refusal. I am letting the bag stay zipped. I am letting the emails wait. I am allowing myself to be tired without apologising for it, without performing recovery before recovery has had a chance to begin.

Descansar es un acto de valentía.

To rest is an act of courage.

Title: Between Palms and Water

Artist Statement

I sat down without planning to stay long.

The chair faced the water, but my body settled first into the pause rather than the view. Two palms stood directly in front of me, their trunks close enough to feel companionable, their fronds catching the last light of the day. Beyond them, the Sea of Cortez moved in its steady, untroubled rhythm. Undramatic. Unclaiming. Just continuing.

What I noticed most was the layering of distance.

My feet resting in the foreground, grounded and still. Sand stretching outward in soft, wind-marked patterns. Trees spaced across the shoreline like quiet sentinels. And then the horizon line, holding everything without urgency. I felt held within those layers, neither separate from the landscape nor fully absorbed by it. Present, but gently so.

There is a particular quality to sitting alone at the edge of day.

The body softens. Breath lengthens. Thought loosens its grip. Nothing is being asked. Nothing needs to be solved. In that moment, I was beyond researching, teaching, producing, or proving. I was simply occupying space, allowing the environment to meet me without expectation.

I stayed longer than I thought I would.

Long enough for the light to shift. Long enough to feel that familiar return to myself that happens when stillness is given time rather than rushed through. The palms remained. The water continued. And I sat there, suspended briefly between land and horizon, aware that presence sometimes arrives quietly, asking only that I remain.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Lo que enseña el agotamiento / What exhaustion teaches

Jet lag is a strange teacher. It strips away the usual defences, the ability to perform wellness even when wellness is absent. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered research on burnout, defines the syndrome as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I recognise myself in that definition more than I would like to admit. I have been running on empty for longer than I knew, and the running itself became invisible, just the way things were, just what the job required.

Tonight, stopped at last, I can feel how tired I actually am. It lives in my bones, in the heaviness of my limbs, in the way my eyes want to close even as my mind keeps scanning for the next thing to do. Stephen Porges (2011), the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, explains that our autonomic nervous system evaluates safety and danger through a process he calls neuroception. The assessment below consciousness shapes our physiological state. My neuroception has been calibrated for threat for so long that even here, in this quiet room by the sea, my body remains on alert, still scanning for turbulence that is no longer present.

It will take more than one evening to convince my nervous system that it is safe. But this evening is where that convincing begins.

Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep

The night has deepened. The sea is audible but invisible now, just the rhythm of waves and the occasional cry of a night bird. In Kamloops, it is late. In Lethbridge, my mother is probably already asleep, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the space beside her filled with faith and memory. I am connected to her across the distance, connected to everyone I love, even as I sit here alone.

This is what I am beginning to understand: solitude is a relational state, shaped by the connections we carry with us even when those we love are far away. Netta Weinstein and colleagues (2021) found, in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, that our sense of connection to others profoundly shapes the experience of being alone. Solitude becomes restorative when it is chosen, when it is bounded, when it exists within a larger web of relationships rather than as exile from connection.

I chose this. I bound it with return tickets and phone calls home, and the knowledge that thirty days will end. I carry my people with me, held in my heart rather than in my hand. And from that holding, I can begin to rest.

Mañana será otro día. Tomorrow will be another day. For now, I am letting this one be enough. I am letting exhaustion teach me what it knows: that I have been carrying too much, that the carrying has cost me, that setting the weight down, even for a moment, is the first step toward remembering what it feels like to be whole.

He llegado.

I have arrived.

Por ahora, eso es todo lo que necesito hacer.

For now, that is all I need to do.

Title: Elegance in Impermanence

Artist Statement

She was already standing there when I walked by.

Umbrella lifted. Dress falling neatly to the ground. There was something composed about her posture, as if she had paused rather than been placed. I noticed the pink first. Soft. Careful. Almost celebratory against the stone behind her.

What stayed with me was the contrast.

Bone and colour. Stillness and personality. The small details, the hat, the purse, the way she seemed dressed for presence rather than disappearance. Honest, rather than morbid. A quiet reminder that identity and expression persist past the finite edges of a life.

I stood there longer than I expected.

Simply noticing. The humour, the dignity, the gentleness within the figure. A simple moment of being reminded that impermanence and beauty can exist in the same space.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

References

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

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

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.

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

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

Weinstein, N., Nguyen, T.-V., & Hansen, H. (2021). What time alone offers: Narratives of solitude from adolescence to older adulthood. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 714518. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714518

I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.

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.

Day Two: Puesta de sol

Puesta de sol, sunset on Day Two in Loreto. A bilingual reflection on the particular quality of light at the end of a first full day by the sea, and what the body begins to release when the world turns gold.

Sunset at the horizon.

This was something else entirely: a quality of presence, of being genuinely with myself rather than merely by myself.

Title: The Gathering

Artist Statement

They gathered where the land gives way to water.

Perched along the rocks, they faced different directions, yet remained part of the same quiet formation. No urgency. No competition for space. Just bodies arranged along the shoreline, each holding its own stillness while sharing the same horizon.

I stood at a distance watching them.

What struck me was their patience. The way they waited without signalling waiting. The way they scanned the water without appearing restless. There was a rhythm to their presence that felt familiar to me, a kind of learned stillness that comes from spending long periods observing rather than intervening.

In that moment, I recognised something of my own practice reflected back.

This work of standing at edges. Of watching what moves beneath the surface. Of trusting that some moments ask only to be witnessed. Some moments ask only for attention. For steadiness. For remaining long enough that the landscape forgets you are there.

The mountains behind them held their own quiet authority, grounding the scene in time beyond the immediate. Water, rock, wing, distance. Each element coexisting without demand.

I kept my distance.

I allowed the distance to remain intact, understanding that proximity rarely determines connection. Sometimes respect lives in observation alone.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

References

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

The evening I arrived in Loreto, Mexico, I stood on the malecón watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez, and I felt something without a name.

Some moments ask only for attention.

It was something beyond loneliness, though I was profoundly alone, 3,000 kilometres from home, knowing no one, with thirty days of solitude stretching before me. Neither was it the comfortable solitude I had glimpsed in rare moments throughout my life, those brief pauses between obligations when I might read undisturbed or walk without destination.

I had no words for this experience. During Covid, I learned to call this place alonetude.

For decades, psychological research has approached solitude primarily through a deficit lens, and rightly so. Social isolation carries mortality risks equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily. Loneliness predicts cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and depression. The public health imperative to address what former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called an “epidemic of loneliness” has produced essential knowledge and helped countless people.

But this focus created a gap. By treating solitude primarily as the absence of connection, we overlooked solitude as presence: the presence of self, meaning, and restoration that becomes available when social demands recede.

Alonetude requires four elements working together like legs of a table:

Intentional choice: Solitude must be chosen, never imposed. Research shows that autonomous motivation predicts positive outcomes regardless of introversion.

Felt safety: The nervous system must register it as safe. You cannot think your way into alonetude while your body scans for threat.

Present-moment awareness: Beyond rumination or distraction, genuine presence, what emerges when attention settles.

Meaning integration: Connection to values, purpose, or something larger than the passing moment.

Remove any one element, and the table collapses. Strength in one cannot compensate for the absence of another. This is the threshold model at the heart of the framework.

The Sea of Cortez cares nothing about whether humans theorise about solitude. The pelicans dive and surface following rhythms older than language. The mountains turn rose and gold at sunset regardless of who watches. But for those willing to participate, genuinely, patiently, with bodies regulated and hearts open, something becomes available. Presence to life, rather than escape from it. Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

Beyond loneliness and beyond mere solitude, something for which I needed a new word.

That word is alonetude. I offer it now as an invitation.

Presence to life, rather than escape from it.

Title: Welcome to Loreto

Artist Statement

My arrival was anything but quiet.

The letters announced it before I could. Large, textured, impossible to ignore. Covered in stickers layered over time, each one evidence that others had stood here too, marking their presence in colour and adhesive and memory. I stepped into the frame, aware that this was a different kind of shoreline moment than the solitary ones.

This was a public threshold.

Behind me, the Sea of Cortez stretched wide and steady, holding its own depth regardless of the spectacle in front of it. Mountains sat low along the horizon, grounding the scene in geological time while the foreground pulsed with tourism, movement, and human imprint. The contrast was immediate. Vastness behind. Declaration in front.

Traveller. Researcher. Body in place. Name unspoken yet presence visible. Unlike the quieter images, this one carries performance within it. Beyond the institutional sense of performance, simply acknowledging that sometimes presence is witnessed, documented, shared. That being in a place can hold both interior meaning and outward expression.

I left soon after the photograph.

I stepped away from the letters and back toward the waterline, where scale shifts again and the body becomes smaller against land and sea. Yet the image remains important because it marks arrival in a way solitude cannot do alone.

A pause between anonymity and recognition.
Between landscape and inscription.
Between being there and being seen.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

I am still here.

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

Day Two: Llegada: Arrival

Llegada, Arrival. Day Two in Loreto, Baja California Sur: the body touches down at last. A bilingual reflection on what it means to arrive somewhere alone, and to let the sea be the first thing you say hello to.

Arrival is the doorway through which everything else enters.

Artist Statement

This one came through quickly.

Unplanned. Unscripted. I drew it the way thoughts sometimes arrive when the body is tired but the mind is still moving. Lines first. Meaning later.

At first glance, it looks almost childlike. Loose marks. Unsteady figures. A pathway that curves without precision. Mountains on one side. Water on the other. Small symbols scattered across the space as if they surfaced faster than I could organise them.

But when I sat with it longer, I realised it was mapping something internal rather than geographical.

The road runs down the centre. Winding. Circuitous. It bends, loops, redirects. There are arrows that suggest movement but without certainty. It is a path that is being negotiated rather than followed.

On one side, there are figures and shapes that feel relational. Animals. Faces. Presences that suggest companionship, memory, or watchfulness. On the other side, sharper lines. Mountains. Edges. Terrain that feels more solitary, more effortful to cross.

There is even a small structure near the end of the path. Almost like a village, or a place of arrival. Yet it carries no detail. It sits lightly on the page, more suggestion than destination.

What strikes me most is the openness of the centre space. So much white. So much unfilled terrain.

It feels honest.

This drawing makes no claim to the whole route. It records movement in progress. The way journeys are often held internally before they become visible externally.

It reminds me that mapping is rarely about accuracy. Sometimes it is about witnessing where you are in the moment you draw the line.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

The plane descended over mountains I had only imagined. Below, the Sea of Cortez stretched turquoise and still, the body of water that Jacques Cousteau famously called the world’s aquarium (Pulitzer Centre, 2023). The desert rose glowed golden behind it, ancient and patient. I had come alone, deliberately, to a place where silence would be allowed to remain.

The flight attendant announced our arrival in two languages, but I barely heard her. My body had already begun the quieter work of landing. I noticed my shoulders softening, my breath slowing, the steady thrum of anticipation giving way to something gentler. Arrival, I would learn, begins before the wheels touch ground.

Where Desert Meets Sea

Loreto sits at the edge of two worlds. To the east, the Sea of Cortez stretches toward the Mexican mainland, its waters teeming with nearly 900 species of fish and 32 types of marine mammals (PanAmerican World, 2018). To the west, the Sierra de la Giganta rises abruptly from the desert floor, granite and volcanic rock shaped by millennia, holding canyons and ancient springs in its folds. This is a landscape of stark beauty, where the desert’s dry heat meets the sea’s salt-laden air.

This place carries layers of history that I was only beginning to understand on arrival. On October 25, 1697, the Jesuit missionary Juan María de Salvatierra founded the Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó at an Indigenous settlement called Conchó, home to the Monquí people (Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó, 2025). It became the first permanent Spanish mission on the Baja California peninsula. It served as the administrative capital of both Baja and Alta California for more than a century. The town’s motto still reads: “Loreto: Cabeza y Madre de las Misiones de las Californias,” which translates to “Head and Mother of the Missions of the Californias.”

Before the missions arrived, Indigenous peoples had inhabited this peninsula for thousands of years. The Cochimí lived in the central regions to the north, their rock art still visible in the Sierra de San Francisco, with paintings carbon-dated to over seven thousand years before present (Kuyimá Ecotourism, 2025). These were semi-nomadic peoples who moved with the rhythms of the desert and sea, living in small family bands that travelled seasonally in search of water, edible plants, and game (Cochimí, 2025). To the south lived the Guaycura and the Pericú. European diseases and colonial disruption would decimate these populations within a few generations, and by the nineteenth century, the Cochimí language had become extinct (Laylander, 2000; Indigenous Mexico, 2024). Their memory endures in archaeological sites and oral history, a reminder that the land I walked upon held stories far older than my own.

I arrived without consciously carrying this history. It was only later, walking the malecón, the seafront promenade, in the evening light, that I began to understand why this place felt layered. Silence here seemed to hold more than absence. It held memory.

Title: The History of Time

Artist Statement

I almost missed it.

It sat quietly among the other stones, indistinguishable at first glance. Just another fragment in a shoreline made of fragments. It was only when I bent down, slowed my gaze, that the spiral revealed itself.

Perfectly held inside the rock.

A fossil. A record of life that once moved through water long before my own footsteps ever reached this shore. What struck me was its patience, more than its age. The way it had remained intact while everything around it had eroded, shifted, broken down into smaller pieces.

Time was visible here.

As compression. As density. As felt weight. Layers folded inward. Motion turned into memory. The spiral itself felt symbolic, but I resisted making it symbolic too quickly. Instead, I stayed with its material presence. Its texture. Its quiet persistence.

Holding this image, I thought about how many histories live beneath our feet without announcement. How much survives without spectacle. The fossil requires no demand. It waits for recognition.

There is humility in that.

It reminded me that archives take many forms beyond the written. Some are geological. Somatic. Embedded in landscapes that remember what human timelines often forget.

I left it there.

It felt important that it remain where it was found. Still held by the shoreline. Still in conversation with water, weather, and time.

Sometimes witnessing is enough.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

Why I Came Alone

Before I left, people asked whether I was nervous about travelling alone. Whether I was running from something or toward it. Whether thirty days was too long or too short. I had no clean answers.

What I knew was simpler: I was tired in ways that sleep alone could never reach. After years of institutional pressure, caregiving across generations, and the collective exhaustion that followed the pandemic, my nervous system had forgotten how to settle. Stillness felt dangerous. Silence felt loud. Being alone had become entangled with being abandoned, and I had lost the ability to tell the difference.

I came to Loreto to learn how to be with myself again. To practise what I have come to call alonetude, a term I use to describe the intentional, generative space between solitude and loneliness. I define alonetude as an enduring contemplative orientation toward chosen solitude, characterised by intentionality, presence, meaning, and a sense of safety. It is a posture of chosen presence with oneself, distinct from both the pain of loneliness and the mere fact of being physically alone.

Researchers have long distinguished between solitude and loneliness. Loneliness, understood as the painful gap between desired and actual social connection, persists even in crowds (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010). As Nguyen (2024) describes, it is an experience of perceived isolation characterised by unmet expectations in social relationships. Solitude, by contrast, can be volitional, meaning chosen or self-determined, and restorative, meaning it supports recovery and wellbeing. Research shows that when individuals autonomously decide how to spend their solitary time, they experience more positive emotions and lower stress (Nguyen et al., 2018). The key distinction lies in motivation: self-determined solitude occurs when a person spends time alone to gain emotional benefits or engage in meaningful activities, whereas non-self-determined solitude happens when aloneness is imposed by circumstance or social exclusion (Nguyen et al., 2024).

Somewhere between those poles lies the quieter possibility I was seeking: the decision to remain present with oneself, without urgency or escape. And so I chose a place where the sea would be my witness and the mountains my backdrop. A place with enough history to remind me I was small, and enough stillness to let that smallness feel like relief.

Title: My Space

Artist Statement

It was the stillness that met me first.

Quiet, contained, that only temporary rooms seem to hold. The bed was made with precision. Pillows aligned. A folded throw placed carefully across the centre as if anticipating arrival before I had even stepped inside.

I remember standing in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary.

There is always something disorienting about entering a space that is prepared for you, a stranger to itself. A room that offers comfort without history. Function without attachment. It asks nothing, but it also holds nothing of you yet.

My suitcase rested against the wall. Half-unpacked. A visible reminder that I was both arriving and already preparing, in some distant way, to leave.

The mirror reflected me back into the frame of the room. Researcher. Traveller. Body in transition. The image felt less like documentation and more like evidence of in-betweenness. Neither fully settled nor unsettled. Simply passing through.

What drew me most was the order.

Clean lines. Neutral tones. A controlled environment that contrasted with the emotional complexity I had carried with me. In that contrast, I felt a subtle recalibration begin. The nervous system recognising safety through predictability. Through the ordinary rituals of placing belongings, arranging clothing, setting a journal on the bedside table.

Temporary spaces can be profoundly instructive.

They remind us how little is required to begin again each day. A bed. A window. A place to write. A place to rest the body between movements.

Nothing extravagant. Just enough.

I let the room be what it was. I let it remain neutral. Let the relationship form slowly. Presence before imprint.

It was never meant to be mine.

Only to hold me for a while.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

The First Hours

At the small airport, the air hit me first. Dry and warm, carrying salt and something mineral. January in British Columbia had been grey and wet; here, the sky stretched blue without apology. I collected my bag and stepped outside. No one was waiting.

That fact landed differently than I expected. There was relief in it. No negotiation, no performance, no need to translate my fatigue into something legible for others. I hailed a taxi and watched the desert roll past the window. Cardon cacti stood like sentinels along the road, their arms raised to the sky. Smaller plants hugged the ground, adapted to scarcity.

When I arrived at my small casa, I sat with my bags still packed. I sat on the edge of the bed. I noticed the texture of the light coming through the shutters. I noticed my shoulders drop. I saw the impulse to fill the silence, to check messages, to plan, to narrate the moment to someone far away, and I let the impulse pass.

This is the work of arrival: resisting the urge to fill the space you have just entered immediately. Allowing the body to land before the mind begins its commentary. Trusting that orientation will come without forcing it.

I opened the windows. Outside, I could hear unfamiliar birds. The sea was close and visible from where I sat. I drank water slowly. I let the room remain unfinished around me.

Title: Morning Views

Artist Statement

I kept returning to this balcony without meaning to. It became a quiet threshold in my days, a place suspended between inside and outside, between the life I carried with me and the landscape that asked nothing in return.

In the mornings, I would step onto the cool tiles barefoot, still half inside sleep. The body would register the air, the light, the slow movement of the palms before my mind began its usual work of organising and anticipating. I came to value that order. Sensation first. Thought later.

There was no spectacle here. Just rhythm. Wind moving through the trees. The horizon holding steady. Light arriving gradually across sand and railing. Nothing hurried me. Nothing required interpretation. I could stand at the edge of the day without performing readiness for it.

Over time, this space became orienting. Internally, rather than geographically. I stood here without writing or planning. I stood, breathed, and allowed myself to arrive slowly. The thatched roof overhead offered shelter, while the open railing kept me connected to the wider world. Protected, yet open.

It reminded me that solitude often lives in these in-between spaces. Places where one can look outward while staying grounded inward. Places where presence is enough.

This balcony was never dramatic. That is why it mattered. It held me quietly as each day began.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

Listening to the Body

That evening, I walked to the water. The malecón curved along the shore, lined with benches and the quiet activity of a small town at dusk. Pelicans floated in loose formations offshore. The light turned gold, then amber, then something closer to rose.

Title: All in a Line

Artist Statement

They were already gathered when I arrived.

A line of pelicans along the shoreline, facing the water as if the horizon had called them into formation. I stood back and watched. What held me was the pace of it, more than the scene itself. No urgency. No competition. Just bodies resting in proximity, each one holding its place without needing to claim it.

I noticed how easily they occupied stillness.

Waiting, unhurried. Together, without entanglement. The sea moved behind them in long, steady breaths, and I felt my own body begin to match that rhythm. In that moment, I was witnessing something, I was witnessing a posture. A way of being that measured nothing.

I stayed back.

Distance felt right. I stayed where I was, letting the scene remain intact. Watching them, I felt reminded that presence rarely requires action. Sometimes it is enough to stand at the edge of things, attentive, unhurried, and willing to belong to the pause.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

I found a bench and sat. I had no book, no phone in hand, no task. Just the sound of water lapping against stone and the slow parade of families walking after dinner. A child ran past laughing. A couple held hands. An older man fished from the rocks nearby, patient and unhurried.

The body knows arrival before the mind catches up. It registers safety in the loosening of the jaw, the deepening of breath, the release of tension held so long it had become invisible. Stephen Porges (2011), in his foundational work on polyvagal theory, explains that the autonomic nervous system continuously scans for cues of safety or danger through a process he calls neuroception. This term refers to the neural evaluation of risk and safety that occurs below conscious awareness, reflexively triggering shifts in physiological state (Porges, 2022). Unlike perception, which involves mindful awareness, neuroception operates automatically, distinguishing environmental features that are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening.

When the nervous system detects sufficient cues of safety, what Porges (2022) describes as a neuroception of safety, the body shifts from states of protection into states of restoration. The ventral vagal complex, a branch of the vagus nerve associated with calm, connection, and social engagement, becomes activated. This shift arrives below conscious choice. It is something we allow by creating conditions where safety can emerge.

Sitting there on that bench, watching the pelicans dive and the light change, I felt something unclench. Quietly, almost imperceptibly. The vigilance I had carried for years began, very slowly, to set itself down.

Arrival creates conditions for this shift. By slowing down. By resisting the impulse to perform or produce. By letting the first hours remain unstructured. When nothing is demanded, the nervous system begins to trust the moment.

An Invitation

Arrival, I learned that first evening, is a threshold. It marks the movement from one way of being into another. Thresholds resist rushing. When crossed too quickly, they close before anything has time to change.

You can practise arriving anywhere. It can happen in a parked car before going inside. In a quiet kitchen after everyone has gone to bed. In the first moments of waking, before you reach for your phone. These small arrivals matter. Research suggests that even brief periods of self-selected solitude can foster relaxation and reduce stress (Nguyen et al., 2018).

Wherever you are reading these words, I offer this as an invitation. Let yourself arrive here. Notice the surface beneath you. Notice your breath. Let the moment widen without needing it to mean something yet.

Arrival offers orientation before transformation. It offers orientation. The chance to acknowledge where you are, physically, emotionally, internally, before asking yourself to be anywhere else.

That first night in Loreto, I fell asleep to the sound of distant waves. The room was still unpacked. The days ahead were unplanned. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, that openness felt like permission rather than a threat.

Llegada. Arrival. The doorway through which everything else enters.

The Sea of Cortez, Loreto, Mexico

Artist Statement

The light arrived before I was ready for it.

I stepped outside and the sky was already holding colour, soft pinks moving slowly across the horizon, settling into the edges of the clouds as if the day were being introduced rather than announced. The palms moved in the wind, with weathered resilience, gently,. They bent without breaking. They have done this many times before.

I stood there longer than I planned to.

Watching the movement of the trees, the stillness of the sand, the quiet line where water meets land. What held me was the atmosphere of endurance, alongside the beauty. Nothing here was rushing. Even the wind felt patient. I noticed how my body responded, how my breathing slowed without instruction.

In that moment, I felt accompanied without needing company.

The landscape asked nothing of me. It simply allowed me to arrive as I was, tired, reflective, present. Standing there, I understood that rest arrives in many forms beyond full stopping. Sometimes it comes from witnessing something that knows how to keep standing, even in constant wind.

Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026

References

Cochimí. (2025, November 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochimí

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

Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness matters: A theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Annals of Behavioural Medicine, 40(2), 218–227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-010-9210-8

Indigenous Mexico. (2024, September 4). Indigenous Baja California: The rarest of the rare. https://www.indigenousmexico.org/articles/indigenous-baja-california-the-rarest-of-the-rare

Kuyimá Ecotourism. (2025, August 24). The Cochimí: Indigenous tribe of Baja California Sur. https://www.kuyima.com/cochimi-indigenous-tribe/

Laylander, D. (2000). The linguistic prehistory of Baja California. In D. Laylander & J. D. Moore (Eds.), The prehistory of Baja California: Advances in the archaeology of the forgotten peninsula (pp. 1–94). University Press of Florida.

Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó. (2025, February 7). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misión_de_Nuestra_Señora_de_Loreto_Conchó

Nguyen, T.-V. T. (2024). Deconstructing solitude and its links to well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(11), Article e70020. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.70020

Nguyen, T.-V. T., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Solitude as an approach to affective self-regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 92–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733073

PanAmerican World. (2018, November 21). Sea of Cortez: The world’s aquarium. https://panamericanworld.com/en/magazine/travel-and-culture/sea-of-cortez-the-worlds-aquarium/

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227

Pulitzer Centre. (2023). Mexico: Emptying the world’s aquarium. https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/sea-of-cortez-aquaculture-ocean-fish-farming-global-market

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

Academic Lens

Arrival at Loreto enacts what van Gennep (1960) calls the threshold crossing of a rite of passage: the moment of separation from the previous structure is complete, and the liminal phase begins. The wonder recorded here — the shock of a different sensory world — corresponds to what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) term restorative experience: environments that require involuntary attention and allow directed attention to recover. Writing bilingually at this moment is itself a methodological choice: language as a site of embodied knowledge.