How do I love myself when everyone else taught me to withhold it?
Title: Layered Histories
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The house remembers What no one else did.
The sharpness of screams caught in the drywall, the broomstick’s shadow stretching too long across the kitchen tile.
Glass breaking, again and again, until silence learned to brace itself.
inhale The closet lock clicked shut. hold The darkness welcomed me like routine. exhale Stillness was my only shield.
Words thrown harder than hands. Worthless. Useless. Piece of…
(I refuse to repeat them. I refuse to belong to them.)
I became so small I forgot I was still breathing. I folded myself behind chairs, beneath beds, inside my own skin.
inhale Is this love? hold Why does love feel like danger? exhale Why does kindness now make me flinch?
They taught me I was unlovable. That my body was wrong, my voice too loud, my being too much.
So tell me: How do I love myself when everyone else taught me to withhold it?
Still, I remember because my body does. Beyond revenge, returning to the girl who survived and wind in her lungs.
She breathed through fear. She whispered through fists. She lived when no one wanted her to.
She is still here. And maybe, just maybe, She is worthy of the love They never gave.
Title: Return to the Girl Who Survived
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Reading Time: < 1minuteA short poem: Who Knows, on uncertainty, the sea, and the particular freedom that comes from letting the question remain open. Written from a moment of stillness beside the water in Loreto.
Reading Time: < 1minute
“I am still here, even when my body expects me to disappear.”
I did not mean to exist so loudly.
You did Say I made it up, the way the floor creaked, The glass shattered, The night bent sideways.
Title: Fractured Evidence
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. Sea glass gathered from low tide: fragments shaped by impact, time, and dispute.
Who knows what happened when the truth Became optional?
I remembered. You rewrote. The story shifted, word by word, until even silence sounded suspicious.
Who knows which silence screamed first?
Title: The Shadow Wears My Shoes (I am still here)
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Notation: I included this image to remind myself that I am still here, even when my nervous system expects otherwise.
Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Title: On Randy Pausch, Childhood Play, and Learning to Remember at Sixty
Credit: Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, 2007
I brought Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture with me to Mexico. Someone gave it to me years ago, and I never had a chance to read it. Too busy. Too many other things are demanding attention. Too much work to do. I have watched and rewatched the video several times, it is one of my favourites to return to when I feel uncertain about my life.
But two weeks into this retreat, with time stretching out in ways that felt entirely unfamiliar, I picked it up. Started reading. And Randy asked a question that stopped me cold: What were your childhood dreams?
¿Cuáles eran tus sueños de infancia?
He wrote about his own experiences: being in zero gravity, playing in the NFL, authoring an article for the World Book Encyclopedia, being Captain Kirk, winning stuffed animals at amusement parks, and being a Disney Imagineer (Pausch & Zaslow, 2008). He could name them. List them. Tell the stories of how he pursued each one.
I closed the book and sat there for a long time, reluctant to answer. Because the honest answer was: I find myself drawing a blank. No me acuerdo. The memories feel distant, blurred at the edges.
I remember that I had them. I know there were things I wanted to be, do, and become. But somewhere between seven and sixty, those dreams got buried under layers of survival, responsibility, and the endless work of just getting through.
Enterrados. Buried. Pero no muertos. But still alive, buried beneath the surface.
And I realized: the same thing that suppressed my capacity for play also suppressed my ability to remember what I wanted before I learned what was realistic, achievable, and appropriate for someone with my background, resources, and limitations.
La misma cosa. The same thing. El juego y los sueños, ambos enterrados juntos. Play and dreams, both buried together.
I am sixty years old, and that question stops me completely. ¿Qué quería ser? What did I want to be?
Title: Senior Puppy
And yet it hurts more than I expected. But it does. Because it means I have spent decades living without reference to those early desires. Without even remembering they existed. Without asking: what did that seven-year-old want? And does she still want it? And if she does, what would it take to give it to her?
Randy Pausch had an engineering problem. He had months to live, children to teach, and dreams to pass on. My problem is different but somehow related. I have years left, hopefully decades. But I have lost contact with the person who knew how to dream without editing, who knew how to want without calculating the probability of success, who knew how to play without needing justification.
And I am trying to find her again.
I have been reading this book slowly. A few pages each morning on the patio. Letting it sit with me. Letting Randy’s urgency teach me something about my own squandered time. Letting his clarity about what matters help me see what I have been avoiding.
¿Qué pasó con los sueños? What happened to the dreams?
¿Dónde están ahora? Where are they now?
What Randy Knew that I Forgot
I keep coming back to this as I read: Randy Pausch’s lecture is about achieving childhood dreams. But underneath that is something more fundamental: he remembered what they were. He could name them. He could tell you which ones he achieved, which ones he enabled for others, and which ones he had to let go.
He stayed connected to that child self who wanted things before learning whether wanting them was wise, possible, or realistic.
Title: My Sweet Seniorita
I lost that connection.
Somewhere along the way, growing up in circumstances that required constant adaptation, resilience, and reinvention, I lost track of what I originally wanted. Or maybe I decided those wants were dangerous. Distracting. Luxuries that felt impossible to hold onto when survival required all my attention.
Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that childhood play deprivation creates deficits that persist into adulthood. But I had play as a child. I played. I had imagination. I had dreams. I had that glorious, unselfconscious absorption in make-believe, adventure, and creating worlds that answered to imagination alone.
But somewhere between childhood and adulthood, I put all of that away. And the strangest part is that the moment I decided to stop has vanished from memory. It happened quietly, without drama. Just a gradual fading. A slow erasure. Until one day I looked around and realized every want had become attached to a strategic purpose or an external expectation.
Randy kept his dreams. I lost mine. And sitting here at sixty, watching sea lions play, I am trying to understand: how do you find what you have lost when the memory itself has faded?
The Dream I Do Remember
El Sueño Que Sí Recuerdo
There is one dream I remember. Barely. Faintly. Like something seen through fog.
I wanted to be a writer.
Quería ser escritora.
A real storyteller. Someone who writes outside the academy, beyond peer review. Simply a writer. Una escritora de verdad. Someone who tells stories. Someone who makes meaning through words. Someone whose writing helps other people understand themselves better, feel less alone, find language for experiences that felt too big or too complicated or too shameful to name.
I remember sitting in my grandmother’s house as a child, reading books, thinking: I want to do this. I want to make people feel the way this book makes me feel. Connected. Understood. Less alone.
And then I grew up and learned all the reasons to be cautious. That serious people have backup plans. That you need security before you can afford creativity. That passion alone leaves you exposed.
So I became a scholar instead. Learned to write in ways that met academic standards. Learned to produce work that served institutional needs. Learned to measure success by publications, citations, and conference presentations.
And somewhere in all that learning, I stopped writing the kind of writing that made me want to write in the first place.
This retreat is me trying to find that again. This blog. These daily reflections. This attempt to write in ways that sound like thinking, that honour experience as data, that trust that someone reading this might feel less alone because I am willing to say: I lost my dreams. I forgot how to want. I put away play because I thought I had to in order to survive.
Nash (2004) calls this Scholarly Personal Narrative. A methodology that allows lived experience to count as data when properly theorized and critically examined. But underneath the methodology is something simpler: permission. Permission to write the way I wanted to write before I learned all the rules about how writing should sound.
Randy achieved his childhood dreams. I am trying to remember mine. And maybe that is okay. Maybe sixty is exactly the right time to ask: what did I want before I learned to want only achievable things? And what would it mean to give that to myself now, even if it looks different than it would have looked at seven?
Title: My Sweet Lady
Here is what I am learning: play and childhood dreams are connected in ways I am only beginning to understand.
Dreams are what you want. Los sueños son lo que quieres. Play is how you practice wanting. El juego es cómo practicas querer. Children play at being the things they dream about. Play astronaut. Play teacher. Play explorer. Play artist. The play is how the dream stays alive. How it gets rehearsed. How the child learns what that dream might feel like if it came true.
When you stop playing, you stop wanting to practice. Cuando dejas de jugar, dejas de practicar querer. And when you stop wanting to practice, the dreams fade. Gradually. Poco a poco. Until you can no longer remember what they were.
I stopped playing because survival required seriousness. And when I stopped playing, I stopped rehearsing the dreams. Stopped imagining what they would feel like. Stopped giving them shape, texture, and presence in my daily life.
And now, as I try to recover play, I am discovering: the dreams are still there. Buried. Waiting. They resist direct thinking, analysis, or strategic planning. I have to play my way back to them.
Winnicott (1971) writes about play as the location where we discover who we are and what we want. Through the spontaneous, creative, unselfconscious exploration that play allows, rather than through serious self-examination. Play is how we find out what brings us alive. What captures our attention. What we return to again and again, because it calls to something essential in us.
Watching sea lions yesterday, I felt something wake up. Algo despertó. A feeling rather than a specific dream. Simply the sense that dreaming is possible. Que soñar es posible. That wanting things just because I want them is allowed. That every desire deserves to exist without a justification, without strategic reasoning, probability analysis, or risk assessment.
Title: My Sweet Love
I came back to the cottage and read more of Randy’s book. Read about how he pursued his dreams because they called to him, regardless of whether they made sense. And I thought: the sea lions understand this instinctively. Randy understood it consciously. And I am somewhere in between, trying to learn what both of them already know.
The sea lions want to play. So they play. Quieren jugar. Entonces juegan. They want to ride waves. So they ride them. They want to leap. So they leap. Quieren saltar. Entonces saltan. There is no gap between wanting and doing. No hay brecha entre querer y hacer. No calculation about whether the want is realistic, appropriate, or likely to succeed.
And watching them, I thought: I used to be like that. Before I learned to edit my wants. Before I learned that some dreams are more acceptable than others. Before I learned that admitting you want something gives people the power to disappoint you, wanting something too much felt like exposure, like handing someone the power to hurt me.
The sea lions remain fully open to wanting. They want fully. They play fully. They risk disappointment by trying. And they seem… joyful. Alive. Present.
I want that back.
Title: Sea Puppies
Randy’s Time Limit, My Extension
El Tiempo de Randy y Mi Tiempo
Randy Pausch had months. Randy tenía meses. I have years, probably decades. Yo tengo años, probablemente décadas.
He used his limited time to pass on everything he wanted his children to know. To enable others’ dreams. To teach his final lessons about living well. Pausch described his lecture as an attempt to leave something lasting for his children, a way of being present for them in the future (Pausch & Zaslow, 2008). A way of being present even in his absence. A way of teaching everything he hoped to pass on, even beyond his living years.
I have the opposite problem: too much time. Demasiado tiempo. Enough time that I keep postponing. Keep thinking: I will do that later. Lo haré más tarde. I will write that book someday. Algún día. I will pursue that dream when I have more security, more time, more energy, and more certainty that it will work out.
But here is what Randy’s lecture teaches without saying it directly: time limits clarify. Los límites de tiempo aclaran. When you know time is short, you stop negotiating with yourself about what matters. You stop waiting for conditions to be perfect. You stop postponing joy until after you have finished all the serious work.
You do what matters. Now. Ahora. Because now is all you have. Porque ahora es todo lo que tienes.
His urgency is foreign to me. But I am learning to borrow some of it. Because sixty carries a particular kind of weight. Because the time I am squandering waiting for perfect conditions is time that passes regardless. Because every day I spend avoiding the writing I want to do, the play I once knew, the dreams I have yet to recover, is a day lived at partial capacity.
The urgency is real, even without a terminal diagnosis. Living fully asks only for honesty about what matters. It just requires recognizing that postponing joy is a choice. And it is a choice I have been making unconsciously for decades.
Randy made the conscious choice to live fully in his remaining months. I am trying to make the conscious choice to live fully in my remaining decades. Because time is precious even when there is plenty of it. Because I have one life and it is happening now, and I want to arrive at the end having asked, clearly and honestly: what did I want? Did I give it to myself? And if I delayed, why?
Lo Que El Juego Enseña Sobre Los Sueños
I have been playing for two weeks now. Small ways. Tentative ways. Humming. Swimming for pleasure. Skipping three steps. Following curiosity without needing it to be productive.
And something entirely unexpected is happening: wants are surfacing.
Los deseos están surgiendo. Wants. Deseos.
Small wants at first. I want to swim longer. Quiero nadar más tiempo. I want to sit and watch pelicans without checking the time. I want to write this blog post even though it falls outside my thesis word count. I want to buy this small carved turtle from the vendor on the beach, simply because looking at it makes me happy.
Small wants. Deseos pequeños. Silly wants, maybe. Wants that serve no strategic purpose and advance no career goal. Just wants. Solamente deseos.
And underneath the small wants, larger ones are stirring. Still foggy. Still too foggy to name precisely. But there. Waiting. Getting stronger as I practice the small wants, as I learn that wanting is allowed, as I remember that I am allowed to pursue things just because they call to me.
I think this is how you find lost dreams. Thinking about them directly leads nowhere. Analyzing what you should want, what you used to want, or what you ought to want now only takes you further from the answer. But by practicing wanting in small ways until the muscle memory comes back. Until wanting feels safe enough that bigger wants can surface. Until you trust yourself enough to say, “This is what I want.” And I am going to pursue it because it calls to something in me that has been silent for too long, regardless of whether it is realistic, appropriate, or likely to succeed.
Randy Pausch enabled others’ dreams. Taught his students to pursue theirs. Passed them on to his children. He understood that helping others achieve their childhood dreams was as important as achieving his own, maybe more important (Pausch & Zaslow, 2008). He called it the “head fake.” The real learning, the real gift, lived inside what pursuing it taught you about yourself and what you could become.
I am enabling my own dream. The one I forgot I had. The one that is still there, underneath all the layers of learned seriousness, strategic thinking, and a protective refusal to want.
The dream of writing. Really writing. The kind that helps people feel less alone. The kind that tells truths I was trained to suppress. The kind that sounds like me, the full me rather than the academic persona I learned to perform.
This blog is me practicing. This retreat is me creating conditions where that dream can breathe again. These 30 days are me trying to become the kind of person who can say, “I want this.” And then pursue it. Now. Today, while there is still time.
Key Takeaways: What Randy Taught Me
1. Dreams endure. They simply get buried.
Los sueños no mueren. Simplemente se entierran.
Randy stayed connected to his. I buried mine. But buried means recoverable. Enterrado no está muerto. Buried can be excavated. It just takes time, attention, and willingness to dig through all the layers that accumulated on top.
2. Play is how you practice wanting.
El juego es cómo practicas querer.
Children know this instinctively. Adults forget it. But the mechanism still works at sixty the same way it worked at seven. When you play, what surfaces? Cuando juegas, los deseos surgen. The trick is to allow them rather than to edit or dismiss them immediately.
3. Time limits clarified. But living fully asks only for clarity, which anyone can choose.
Los límites de tiempo aclaran. Pero no necesitas un diagnóstico terminal para vivir plenamente.
Randy had months. I have decades. But I can borrow his clarity without needing his urgency. Can ask: if time were short, what would matter? And then do that. Now. Ahora. While there is still time. Mientras aún hay tiempo.
4. Enabling your own dreams counts.
Habilitar tus propios sueños cuenta.
Randy enabled others’ dreams. That was his path. Mine is different. I am learning to enable my own. Learning that this is both essential and earned. No es egoísta sino necesario. Helping others find their dreams begins with tending to my own.
5. It is never too late to become who you wanted to be.
Nunca es demasiado tarde para convertirte en quien querías ser.
At seven, I wanted to be a writer who helps people feel less alone. At sixty, I am becoming that. A los sesenta, me estoy convirtiendo en eso. Slowly. Imperfectly. But really. Pero realmente. And the fact that it took fifty-three years to get here makes it more hard-won, more real. Just delayed. And delays can be recovered from.
The Dreams at Sixty Look Different Than the Dream at Seven
I need to say this clearly: My aim is to become the sixty-year-old who knows how to want the way that seven-year-old did. Fully. Completamente. Without apologizing. Sin disculparse. Without needing permission. Sin necesitar permiso.
The dream at sixty looks different from what it would have looked like at seven. It is complicated by everything I have learned, everything I have lived through, everything I know now about how the world works, how hard things are, and how much survival costs.
But it is also enriched by all of that. Pero también está enriquecido por todo eso. The writing I can do now is writing that a seven-year-old was incapable of doing. Because it is informed by sixty years of living. By loss and love and chronic stress and hard-won healing. Por pérdida y amor, por estrés crónico y por curación ganada con dificultad. By understanding that comes only from decades of paying attention.
Randy achieved his childhood dreams by becoming exactly who that child wanted to be. I am achieving mine by becoming who that child would have grown into if she had been allowed to keep wanting, keep dreaming, keep playing all along.
Different paths. Caminos diferentes. Same destination: living fully. Vivir plenamente. Wanting openly. Querer abiertamente. Pursuing dreams because they are real, because they are mine. Perseguir sueños no porque sean realistas, sino porque son reales.
Title: Photo of a Bumper Sticker
Gracias, Randy, por preguntar qué soñábamos. Thank you, Randy, for asking what we dreamed.
Por recordarme que tuve sueños. To remind me, I had dreams.
Por mostrarme que nunca es demasiado tarde. For showing me that it is never too late.
Por enseñarme que el juego y los sueños están conectados. For teaching me that play and dreams are connected.
Por vivir completamente hasta el final. For living fully until the end.
Por darme permiso para hacer lo mismo. For giving me permission to do the same.
Con décadas por delante, no meses. With decades ahead.
Pero con la misma urgencia de vivir bien. But with the same urgency to live well.
Ahora. Now.
Mientras aún hay tiempo. While there is still time.
Title: The Power of Play
Credit: NotebookLM, 2026
Thank you for the reminder, Randy.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Pausch, R., & Zaslow, J. (2008). The last lecture. Hyperion.
Pausch, R. (2007). Randy Pausch’s last lecture: Achieving your childhood dreams [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
ACADEMIC LENS
Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” serves here as an intertext that raises Winnicott’s (1971) foundational question: what becomes of childhood play when the child grows into an institutional adult? Winnicott argued that play is constitutive of development rather than merely developmental, the true self, the authentic inner life that institutional demands systematically suppress. The grief for unlived dreams that this post addresses is structural as well as biographical: Nixon’s (2011) slow violence names the accumulated cost of precarious labour conditions that foreclosed creativity over nineteen years, accruing a deficit that may only become fully visible from a position of safety. Van der Kolk (2014) documents how chronic stress impairs the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for imaginative projection, the neural substrate of dreaming itself. The question “what happened to the dreams?” is therefore also a clinical question about the neurological consequences of sustained threat. Moustakas’s (1961) existential framework suggests that the recovery of genuine aspiration requires precisely the kind of chosen solitude this project enacts: a withdrawal from the performing self in order to rediscover what the desiring self actually wants.
Actually, truly impossible. Beyond figure. The density of them. The brightness. The way they fill every inch of darkness between the horizon and directly overhead. I have been standing on the patio for twenty minutes, and I cannot get used to it. Cannot stop staring up. Cannot stop feeling small in the way that makes you feel more real, more present.
The Sea of Cortez is black at this hour. No moon tonight. Just stars reflected on the water, so the surface still looks like a second sky. I cannot tell where the ocean ends and the atmosphere begins. It is all just darkness held between points of light.
Estrellas sobre el mar. Stars over the sea.
What City Skies Hide
I grew up under city skies where you could see perhaps a dozen stars on a clear night. The Big Dipper, if you knew where to look. Maybe Orion in winter. The rest washed out by streetlights and shopping mall parking lots and the general glow of human activity that makes us forget the sky is actually full of light we cannot see until we get far enough away from our own brightness.
Here, there is no artificial light competing. The village has streetlights, but they are few and dim. Most houses are dark by nine. The ocean holds no light except what the stars give it. And the stars give everything.
I have been trying to count them and cannot. Have been trying to identify constellations and cannot find the patterns I know because there are too many stars, too much light, and the familiar shapes are lost in the density of what surrounds them. This is the Milky Way at its fullest. The galactic centre is visible as a bright band crossing the southern sky. Thousands upon thousands of stars. And behind them, thousands more.
The Scale That Holds Us
There is something humbling about this much sky.
Humbling beyond the degrading sense. Humbling in the way that reminds you that you are small and temporary and your concerns, however real they feel, are brief against the scale of what continues regardless of whether you are here to see it.
These stars have been shining for millions of years. Will continue shining for millions more. The light I am seeing left those stars before humans existed. Before mammals existed. Before anything I would recognize as life walked, swam, or flew on this planet. That light has been travelling through space for so long that the star that produced it might already be dead, its light still arriving, the ghost of something that no longer exists still visible because of the time it takes for distance to be crossed.
Luz antigua. Ancient light.
Witness and Significance
I am standing here, on the edge of land, looking at light older than memory, older than species, older than the oceans themselves. And it makes my life feel both infinitely small and strangely significant. Small because what am I against this scale? Significant because I am here to witness it. Because consciousness has emerged in this universe that can look up and feel awe. Because somewhere in the process of stars burning and planets forming and life evolving, something became aware enough to stand on a beach at night and feel moved by the impossibility of so much light.
What Weight Looks Like Against Stars
I think about the past six months. The past nineteen years. The exhaustion. The depletion. The way I have been carrying weight has felt unbearable.
And against this sky, it persists. The weight is still real. The suffering is still real. But it is held in a different frame. Held by something larger than my capacity to hold it. The stars hold no record of my struggles or my presence. But somehow their indifference is comforting rather than cold.
I am here. I am looking up. I am held by the same gravity that holds these stars, the same darkness that lets their light shine, the same universe that has been unfolding for billions of years and will continue to unfold long after I am gone.
Soy pequeña. I am small.
Soy temporal. I am temporary.
Y está bien. And that is okay.
The Relief of Accepting Scale
There is relief in accepting scale. In acknowledging that my life is brief, my concerns local, my influence limited. I can release the weight of everything. I can leave what cannot be fixed to its own time. I can simply be here, for this moment, under these stars, breathing this air, feeling this particular configuration of matter that is temporarily organized as me.
Sky Above, Sky Below
The water is so still tonight that it looks like glass. Dark glass. The stars reflecting on it in perfect points of light that hold perfectly still. Without my standing here, there would be only darkness and light, no visible water. Just darkness and light. Sky above. Sky below. And me between them, small and temporary and held.
Gracias, estrellas. Thank you, stars.
Por brillar sin necesitarme. For shining without needing me.
Por recordarme mi lugar. For reminding me of my place.
Por sostener la oscuridad. For holding the darkness.
Para que pueda ver la luz. So that I can see the light.
What Continues
Tomorrow the sun will rise, and I will no longer be able to see the stars. But they will still be there. Still burning. Still sending light across distances I cannot comprehend toward planets I will never see.
And I will still be here. Small. Temporary. Held by the same universe that holds everything.
Suficiente. Sufficient.
Just this. Just now. Just one small human standing under impossible stars, learning to accept the relief that comes from recognizing your own smallness in a universe so large it cannot even notice you are here.
And finding, in that recognition, something very close to peace.
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.
References
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
ACADEMIC LENS
The experience of awe described in this late-night star-gazing entry engages what Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt (2003) identify as the defining phenomenology of awe: the perception of vastness that exceeds existing conceptual frameworks, generating what they call “need for accommodation,” a revision of the self’s understanding of its place in the world. Ulrich’s (1983) restorative environment research suggests that the particular quality of night sky attention described here, effortful looking that gives way to absorption, represents a form of directed attentional rest. For the nervous system recovering from chronic vigilance, the experience of being small beneath an immense, indifferent sky also carries a paradoxical relief: Buber’s (1970) I-Thou encounter extended to the cosmos itself, where the self is released from the burden of its own centrality. The bilingual form of this entry, in which the Spanish “Una noche clara” carries a different emotional resonance than its English translation, enacts Anzaldúa’s (1987) insight that some experiences can only be approached from the borderlands between languages.
By one o’clock, the temperature has climbed into the mid-thirties, and the village has responded the way it responds every afternoon: by stopping. Shops close. Streets empty. Even the dogs find shade and cease their wandering.
Title: Fishing Boat
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I am learning this rhythm. Joining the collective surrender to the heat rather than fighting it. After lunch, I close the curtains against the sun, lie on the bed under the ceiling fan, and simply rest.
Rest, rather than sleep. The body horizontal, the mind quiet, time passing without purpose or productivity.
This is siesta. The practical wisdom of a place beyond romanticized tourism, a place that knows heat must be respected. You stop. You release the push-through. You rest. You wait for the world to become livable again.
For twelve days now, I have been learning to stop without guilt. To rest without justifying it. To simply be horizontal in the afternoon heat and let that be enough.
Today, it finally feels natural. Simply the appropriate response to what the day is asking.
El calor manda. The heat commands.
Y yo obedezco. And I obey.
Day’s of My Life
By three o’clock, the worst has passed. The temperature remains high, but the quality changes. Bearable. Moveable. I get up, drink water, and sit on the shaded patio watching the water.
A pelican flies past. Low and slow. Unhurried.
The village is beginning to wake again. A shop door opens. A car starts. Life resuming its rhythm, altered by the heat and still intact.
I think about the years I spent overriding my body’s signals. Tired but pushing through. Hot but staying at the desk. Needing rest but never quite allowing it because rest felt like failure, like giving up, like evidence that I lacked the strength others seemed to carry so easily.
Title: Afternoon Skies
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The wisdom here is different. Rest is a response. It is the appropriate accommodation to conditions that require it.
Twelve days of practising this, and something is shifting. The guilt that used to accompany rest is dissolving. Slowly. But dissolving.
Poco a poco. Little by little.
The body learning what the village already knows: some hours are for work. Some hours are for rest. And knowing which is which is its own kind of wisdom.
Title: Mission Church
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
ACADEMIC LENS
The siesta described here is more than a cultural curiosity; it is a somatic practice that enacts what Hersey (2022) calls “rest as resistance”: the refusal of a productivity ethic that treats the body as an instrument rather than a subject. The narrator’s observation that rest “felt like failure” for years names the internalized logic of what Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter (2001) identify as the burnout cycle, the compulsive override of the nervous system’s regulatory signals in service of institutional demands. Siesta, by contrast, offers what Levine (2010) describes as a completion cycle: the body allowed to move through activation and into genuine discharge, rather than being driven through exhaustion and back into performance.
The phrase el calor manda, the heat commands, carries epistemological weight beyond its simplicity. It articulates a form of environmental authority that precedes and exceeds human scheduling: what Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) would recognize as the primacy of the body’s dialogue with its world over the abstractions of clock-time and productivity. The village’s collective rhythm enacts this daily, modelling what van der Kolk (2014) argues trauma survivors must relearn: that the body’s signals are trustworthy guides rather than obstacles to be managed. The recovery described across this entry, from guilt-laden rest to rest that “finally feels natural”, tracks precisely the trajectory Levine (2010) maps as somatic healing: a gradual recalibration rather than a sudden shift,n of the nervous system toward safety.
“You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Mary Oliver, 1986
The dog stands at the table as though she has been invited. Beyond begging. Beyond servility. Simply present, front paws on the table’s edge, looking out at the Sea of Cortez with the same quality of attention a person might bring to a sunset. Behind her, the early morning light turns everything gold: the water, the sand, the palm fronds moving in whatever breeze comes off the ocean this time of day. A plate of food sits on the white tablecloth. A drink sweats condensation in the heat. The dog notices these things the way you notice things that are simply part of the landscape, neither wanting them nor turning away from them. Just acknowledging: yes, these are here too.
Title: Dog Enjoying the Sunrise
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I took this photograph this morning at a beachside restaurant where I enjoyed a cup of coffee. The dog appeared from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. She checked the table the way dogs check things: a quick assessment to see whether this moment held anything that required her attention. Then she placed her paws on the table’s edge and turned her gaze outward, toward the water. The owner is getting coffee.
What struck me then and strikes me still, looking at the image now, is her posture. There is no asking in it. No supplication. No performance of need is designed to elicit care. She works toward nothing. She is simply a dog standing at a table at the edge of the sea, and if that position happens to be where food and drink exist, well, that is where food and drink exist. It leaves unchanged the essential fact of her presence, which requires no justification beyond itself.
I sat there for perhaps twenty minutes watching her. Other tourists approached, took photos, and moved on. A waiter brought fresh coffee to the table. No reluctance. No hurry. This part is complete; the next follows, and both are equally fine.
The village dogs of Loreto have been teaching me something I had yet to discover I needed to learn.
I wrote about them briefly in the early days here: the brown dog with gentle eyes who appeared that first evening, who sniffed my hand and then simply stood beside me in the fading light, two beings with nowhere particular to be. I called her a companion then, though companion suggests a relationship more defined than what we actually share. She appears. She stays, or she leaves. She requires nothing. I offer nothing beyond my presence. And somehow this non-relationship has become one of the steadiest features of my days here.
She is far from the only one. There are perhaps a dozen dogs I see regularly in the village. Brindle and brown and black and that particular dusty tan that seems designed by evolution to blend with sand. Well-fed, free of ownership. Collared occasionally (someone’s gesture of care) but clearly belonging to no one, or perhaps more accurately, belonging to everyone and therefore to themselves.
They move through the village with an ease I recognize as what I am attempting to learn. No schedule. No destination that must be reached. No performance of purpose to justify their occupation of space. They simply are where they are; when they are somewhere else, they are there instead, and the transition requires no explanation, no apology, no account of why the first place stopped being right and the second place became necessary.
Title: My Lady Friend
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I have been watching them for twelve days now with increasing attention. The way they navigate public space without claiming it. The way they accept care without becoming obligated. The way they rest in the middle of sidewalks, streets, or restaurant patios without any apparent concern that they might be inconveniencing someone. And the remarkable thing (the thing I am still trying to fully understand) is that the village allows this. More than allows it. Holds it. Make space for it. Treats it as simply as it is.
In the city where I lived for twenty-five years, this would be impossible. Dogs in restaurants must be leashed, under control, and clearly attached to responsible humans. Dogs on public beaches require permits. Dogs that exist without visible owners raise concern: Who is responsible for this animal? Who will manage it? Who vouches for its right to occupy space?
The questions come automatically, reflexively, born from a culture that cannot imagine existence without ownership, without someone being accountable, without the clear assignment of responsibility and control.
But here, the dogs simply exist, and the village simply lets them be. Feeds them when they are hungry. Gives them water when they are thirsty. Tolerates their presence at tables, in shops, and on beaches. And the dogs, for their part, seem to understand the unspoken agreement: we are here together, you and we, and the terms of our togetherness require neither ownership nor abandonment, neither claim nor rejection, just this ongoing negotiation of shared space that somehow works without anyone having to articulate the rules.
I realized, walking back to the cottage in the heat, that I had seen six different dogs in the space of an hour, and each one had seemed perfectly at ease wherever it was. No anxiety. No performance. Just dogs being dogs in the various locations where dogs be.
This is remarkable when you think about it. These are beyond the category of pets that have learned to read human moods and respond to human needs. These are beyond the working dogs with assigned tasks. These are dogs who have somehow negotiated a way of existing alongside humans without becoming dependent on them, without losing whatever essential dog-ness makes them what they are.
They are, I realize, practising aloneness. Beyond the human version (the one that requires choosing, intending, and reflecting on whether you are doing it right), but alonetude nonetheless. Being with others without losing themselves. Accepting care without becoming obligated. Moving between community and solitude as each moment requires, without any of it needing to be a statement, a position, or a defended choice.
I have been thinking about what these dogs are teaching me about being in community without being consumed by it.
“Settling in asks surrender of nothing. It is choosing to stay with yourself.” Amy Tucker, 2026
For twenty-five years, I worked in an institution that demanded constant availability, constant responsiveness, and constant proof that I was committed, present, and performing my role adequately. Contract faculty hold far less authority to set boundaries than tenured faculty. You are available when needed. You adjust your schedule around theirs. You say yes even when yes costs you more than you can afford because saying no might mean being asked again.
This creates a particular relationship to community and to solitude. Community becomes something you perform. Solitude becomes something you seize in stolen moments, knowing you will be interrupted, knowing you need to stay alert for the email, the call, or the meeting that suddenly arises, requiring an immediate response.
The village dogs know nothing of this exhaustion. They exist in what I can only describe as a gift economy so old and so embedded that it has become invisible. The village feeds them because that is what the village does. The dogs provide companionship because that is what dogs provide. No contract. No performance evaluation. No calculation of whether the exchange balances.
Just: this is how we are together. These are the terms of our coexistence. It holds, or it falls away; if it stops holding, adjustments are made, but none of it requires the elaborate structure of obligation, debt, and credit that governed my professional relationships for all those years.
Watching them, I realize what I am trying to recover. Beyond isolation (I have never wanted that, and this month of intentional solitude has been about drawing near, never about fleeing human contact). What I want is what the dogs have: the capacity to be with others without losing myself. To accept care without becoming obligated. To offer presence without performing. To know when I need to be alone and when I want company, and to trust that both needs are legitimate and neither requires extensive justification.
The dogs are alone together. Present in the community, beyond being consumed by it. They rest in public space without apology. They approach when something interests them and walk away when it no longer does. And somehow the village holds this, makes room for it, allows dogs to be dogs even amid human activity.
This is the model I am learning to inhabit. Beyond the isolation of withdrawal: the freedom of undefended presence. Being here without bracing. Receiving care without owing. Offering attention without depleting myself.
The brown dog is here again. She has been here for perhaps forty minutes. I have been writing. Neither of us has required anything of the other. We are simply here together, she in her rest and I in my work, and the togetherness asks nothing beyond the acknowledgment that we both occupy this space.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The dog knows without any of this apparatus. She knows when to trust and when to be wary. She knows when to approach and when to hold distance. She knows when someone will feed her and when someone will pass by. She knows where shade is in the heat of the day and where the evening breeze comes first. She knows all of this immediately, without thought, without reflection, without the constant meta-commentary that humans call consciousness.
This is no less knowing. It is different knowing. And it might be the knowing I most need to recover: the capacity to respond to what is without the endless mediation of thought about response. To be hungry and eat. To be tired and rest. To want solitude and take it. To want company and seek it. Without justification. Without explanation. Without the entire apparatus of defence and rationalization that precarious employment built into me so deeply, I forgot it was anything other than natural.
Just: this is what the body knows. This is what the moment calls for. This is what I do.
The Freedom to Simply Be
“I am allowed to land. I am allowed to stay. I am allowed to soften.”
Amy Tucker, 2026
The dog has left now. I missed her leaving. I was focused on writing, and when I looked up, she was simply gone, off to wherever dogs go when they go. The light continues its shift toward darkness. Soon I will make dinner, following the rhythm that has become automatic. The evening will unfold as it has unfolded for eleven evenings before this one.
But something feels different tonight. Less effortful. Less monitored. As though I am finally beginning to inhabit the routine rather than performing it. Beginning to trust that my body knows what it needs and when, and that I can simply trust without constantly checking and verifying that I am resting correctly.
The dogs are teaching me this. How to be present without performance. How to accept care without obligation. How to exist in a community without losing the capacity for solitude. How to move between togetherness and apartness as the moment requires, without any of it being a statement or a defence or a position requiring elaborate justification.
Los perros del pueblo. The village dogs. Teachers with no awareness teach. Companions who require no relationship. Beings who practice alonetude so naturally they have no word for it because it is simply how they are.
I am learning from them. Slowly. With all the awkwardness of someone who forgot and is now remembering. But learning nonetheless. And tonight, this twelfth evening of intentional solitude, I feel closer to what they know. Closer to trusting my own knowing, the way they trust theirs. Closer to being what I am without the constant overlay of thought about whether I am being it correctly.
And I think again of Mary Oliver, the poet who reminded us to let the soft animal of the body love what it loves. Who asked, without urgency but with piercing clarity: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
For the first time in a long while, I feel like I have an answer, though beyond words, and beyond any plan. It is in the small things: in the way I sit without bracing, in the way I walk without explanation, in the way I trust the day to shape itself without my need to define it in advance.
I, too, find my front paws on the table’s edge, beyond asking, beyond waiting, just watching the water shift its shape, and feeling the sun arrive exactly as it is.
Beyond performance. Beyond striving.
Just this: the body knows. The moment knows. The dog knows. And that knowing, I am learning, is enough.
Thank you, my lady friend.
References
Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Oliver, M. (1986). Wild geese. In Dream work (pp. 14–15). Atlantic Monthly Press.
ACADEMIC LENS
Mary Oliver’s epigraph frames the entire village dogs reflection within a philosophical permission: that being requires no justification, that presence is sufficient. This resonates with Buber’s (1970) distinction between I-It and I-Thou relationships: the dog at the table occupies an I-Thou orientation, fully present without agenda, offering the kind of unconditional regard that Buber identifies as the ground of genuine encounter. The observation that the dog is “beyond begging, beyond servility, simply present” enacts what Moustakas (1961) calls the courage of loneliness: the willingness to be fully oneself without performing for others’ acceptance. For the precarious academic who has spent nineteen years performing compliance and availability, the dog’s unapologetic presence becomes a somatic lesson. Menakem (2017) describes this kind of encounter with non-human creatures as a form of co-regulation: the settled nervous system of an animal can, through proximity, help to entrain a dysregulated human nervous system toward greater calm. The bilingual dimension, the Spanish village, the dogs that belong to no one and to everyone, also invites Anzaldúa’s (1987) reading: the in-between creature as the embodiment of borderlands wisdom.
I have been watching them for twenty minutes now, their final flights to roosting sites marked by something I can only describe as completeness. Simply no hurry. No reluctance. Just the simple recognition that the fishing day is done, that rest is what comes next, that tomorrow will bring another cycle.
They raise no question about whether they have fished enough. They carry no worry about tomorrow’s needs. They simply finish when finishing is what the body, the light, and the day require.
Title: The Three Palms
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Discovering the Pattern
I am learning this. Estoy aprendiendo esto.
Eleven days of the same evening sequence, dinner as light begins to change, gentle movement, watching the sky transform, settling into darkness, and something in me is finally believing it. The rhythm is something beyond my imposing. It is something I am joining. Something that was here before I arrived and will continue after I leave.
The pelicans taught me this first. Nowadays, the days themselves are teaching it.
Title: My View
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Tonight, sitting on this balcony as stars appear one by one above the Sea of Cortez, the questions feel less urgent than they did this morning. Less like problems requiring a solution and more like… context. Background. The theoretical scaffolding that helps me understand the larger significance of what I am doing here, yet the thing itself remains just beyond language.
The thing itself is simpler.
Unlearning Vigilance
I came here exhausted. Sleep fragmented, thoughts scattered, body braced against threats that had become so constant I no longer noticed the bracing. Nineteen years of precarious employment had taught my nervous system a particular kind of vigilance, necessary for survival, corrosive to everything else.
My body was more than tired. It was thrown off balance.
I was beyond overworked. I had become wired for survival. Survival allows no room for rest. It requires vigilance, constant adaptation, and the refusal to soften.
Now, after days of consistency, the rhythm is beginning to offer a different experience. A quiet structure. A sense of what comes next. The return of a nervous system that no longer waits for disruption, but begins to anticipate calm.
It is subtle. Gentle. Emerging like light at the edge of morning.
What once felt like repetition now feels like relief. The pattern releases me from constraint. It holds me. It offers what the nervous system has long needed but could never request: predictability, softness, and something that resembles safety.
Eleven days of consistent rhythm, and the bracing is releasing. All at once? No. Dramatically? No. Just gradually, like ice melting so slowly you barely notice the transition from solid to liquid, you only notice one day that what was frozen is now flowing.
Reclaiming Routine
I have been thinking about routine.
For nineteen years, routine was what I resisted. Every semester brought different courses, different students, different schedules cobbled together from whatever the institution needed and was willing to pay for. I prided myself on adaptability. On being able to shift quickly. On moving without consistency.
But that pride was really a cover story for precarity. You cannot depend on routine when your employment is contingent. You learn instead to be endlessly flexible, endlessly available, ready to reconfigure your life around whatever work appears.
These eleven days have shown me what I lost in that flexibility.
The routine here is simple. Wake with the light. Swim in the morning. Read. Walk in the afternoon when the heat has softened. Watch pelicans. Make dinner as the sky transforms. Sit on the patio as stars appear. Sleep.
Title: Collected Beach Treasures
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The same pattern, day after day.
It is a healing ritual, organic rather than imposed, beyond the performative, emergent. A sequence the body now recognizes as kind. As sacred. As home.
And instead of feeling monotonous or constraining, it feels… liberating. My nervous system knows what comes next. My body can anticipate the rhythm. I can release the need to constantly recalibrate, constantly adjust, and constantly brace for the unexpected.
The routine holds me. And in being held, I can finally let go.
This is what I would call settledness. Or maybe: re-inhabiting the self. It is beyond transcendence. It is about being able to stay with myself, without bracing, without apology.
This is what I came here to discover, though I arrived without knowing it. Beyond dramatic transformation. Beyond sudden enlightenment. Just the quiet recognition that routine is the ally, never the enemy, of freedom. Precarity is. Routine, the kind you choose, the kind that serves your actual needs rather than someone else’s demands, is the structure that makes freedom possible.
Title: Afternoon Seista
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Evening Reflection: What the Day Held
Pelicans are completing their fishing day. Sky is transforming through its sequence. My own completion of the day’s work, reading done, walking done, body cared for, mind given what it needs.
The pattern repeats. And I am learning to trust the pattern.
Tomorrow I will read more deeply, Haraway on situated knowledges, more Ahmed on orientation and the work of reorientation. The theoretical scaffolding continues to grow, helping me grasp the broader significance of what I am documenting here.
But tonight the theory feels secondary to something simpler. To the recognition that my body has stopped bracing. That sleep comes without struggle. That I can sit on a balcony in the evening watching pelicans and feel… at peace. Simply at peace. Without needing to analyze it, justify it, or turn it into something useful.
Title: Good Night Loreto
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This is alonetude. Beyond concept. Beyond framework. Just this: being with yourself in a rhythm that your nervous system trusts, in a place that feels safe enough to finally stop performing, surrounded by the ordinary beauty of birds and water and light that asks nothing of you except that you notice.
I notice.
Lo noto.
And tonight, that is enough.
~
Tonight I will follow the familiar sequence.
Dinner already eaten, simple fish grilled with lime, rice, and vegetables that I no longer think about preparing, my hands knowing now what the routine requires. Cottage already tidied, the small acts of care that signal evening’s approach. Soon I will dim the lights, sit on the patio and watch the stars emerge, then shower and prepare for sleep.
Will I sleep through? Fifth night in a row? Or will tonight bring waking, the pattern interrupted, the nervous system deciding it needs to check, to assess, to maintain some vestige of vigilance?
The answer remains open. But tonight I notice something different in my open-wondering. No anxiety about whether I will sleep. Just… curiosity. The way you might wonder whether it will rain tomorrow. Information that will reveal itself when it reveals itself. Nothing to control. Nothing to fix in advance.
This, too, is letting go. Learning to hold the question without needing to force the answer.
The pelicans carry no worry about tomorrow’s fishing. They simply rest tonight, trusting that tomorrow will bring what it brings, that they will respond to what it requires, that the rhythm will continue, with or without their worry.
I am learning from them. Slowly. With the particular awkwardness that comes from unlearning decades of vigilance. But learning.
The day ends. Another day will begin. The rhythm continues.
And I am here, finally, learning how to join it rather than fight it.
No necesito entenderlo completamente. Understanding it completely can wait.
Solo necesito confiar en él. I only need to trust it.
Y esta noche, confío. And tonight, I trust.
El patrón sostiene. The pattern holds.
El cuerpo descansa. The body rests.
Y eso es suficiente. And that is enough.
When we are at last able to rest, we learn that effort was never the only way to belong.
Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.
Google. (2026). El Ritmo de los Días [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Translation Note
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
The pelicans’ unhurried return to roost offers a lesson in what Kaplan (1995) calls “soft fascination”: the quality of natural environments that hold attention without effortful engagement, allowing the directed attention system to rest and replenish. The observation that the pelicans “know when to stop” reflects the circadian intelligence that Satchin Panda (2019) has documented in chronobiology: the body’s deep temporal knowing, suppressed by artificial light and institutional demands, that governs the natural rhythm of effort and rest. Van der Kolk (2014) notes that one of the central injuries of chronic stress is the disruption of this internal rhythm, and that recovery involves re-synchronising with natural temporal patterns. The rhythm of days described in this post, structured by tide and light rather than calendar and contract, represents what Nixon (2011) might call a counter-temporality: a way of inhabiting time that resists the slow violence of productivised life. The Mary Oliver epigraph present in other entries on this blog extends here: permission to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves” includes permission to end the day when the day is done.
A field note from Day Ten. Sometimes the body understands something before the mind has words for it. This is an attempt to write it down before the understanding disappears.
Ten days to build a foundation. Perhaps small, you might think. Too brief, it seems, for anything significant.
But foundations are built to be solid, never showy. They are meant to hold. Hidden underground, bearing weight, making everything above them possible.
I came here exhausted. Sleep fragmented, thoughts scattered, body braced for threats that never came but whose approach I had learned to anticipate with the precision of an expert meteorologist reading the weather that only I could see.
Ten days to teach my nervous system: The emergency is over. The storm has passed. You can stop bracing now.
Ten days of the same evening sequence. Ten days of the same morning light. Ten days of pelican fishing at predictable times. Ten days of waves maintaining their patient rhythm. Ten days of data accumulating below conscious awareness.
And somewhere in those ten days, my body decided to believe it.
La fundación sostiene. The foundation holds.
Without forcing it. Without earning it. Without proving myself worthy.
Because I maintained conditions. Because I honoured rhythms. Because I stopped interfering with processes wiser than conscious thought.
Ten days. Diez días.
Title: The Sand Shadow
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
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.
References
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
My mother is 80 years old. She now lives alone in an old folks’ home in Lethbridge, Alberta. I am sitting on a terrace in Mexico, watching the Sea of Cortez turn from blue to silver in the fading light, and I am thinking about her hands.
She has always had capable hands. Hands that kneaded bread dough on Sunday mornings, the kitchen warm with yeast and CBC radio playing softly in the background. Hands that crotched quilts for babies born, each stitch a prayer, each pattern chosen with care. Hands that combed my hair before church, her fingers quick and certain. The spirit of God’s hands, I think, though I hold that comparison with uncertainty, standing outside her faith and the faith I was raised in. Perhaps they are simply mother hands, shaped by decades of service, of showing up, of being useful to everyone but herself.
Recuerdos de Su Cocina / Memories of Her Kitchen
I remember standing on a step stool beside her at the counter, learning to roll pierogi. “Not too much flour,” she would say, her hands guiding mine. “You want it tender, not tough.” I was seven, maybe eight. The kitchen smelled of potatoes and cheese, and outside, the wind was blowing snow against the windows. I felt safe in that kitchen, in the warmth of the oven, in the certainty of her presence beside me.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer, writes about topophilia, the affective bond between people and place. My mother’s kitchen was my first topophilic space, a location where I learned that love could be measured in teaspoons and rolling pins, in the quiet act of making something nourishing with your hands. I carry that kitchen with me still, even here, 2,800 kilometres away, watching a sea she has never seen.
She taught me to can plums in late summer, the kitchen steaming, jars lined up on the counter like soldiers. We would work for hours, cutting and slicing and packing fruit into hot glass, the syrup sweet and golden. “This will taste like sunshine in January,” she would say, and she was right. Those jars, lined up in the cold room, were promises against the long, cold winter. They were her way of saying, “I will take care of you.” I will make sure you have enough.
El amor de una madre vive en lo que prepara.
A mother’s love lives in what she prepares.
La Fe de Mi Madre / My Mother’s Faith
She raised me in the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a faith I no longer practice but whose rhythms still live somewhere deep in my body. I remember the scratch of my Sunday dress against my legs, the smell of the Kingdom Hall a mix of old hymnals and furniture polish and the faint sweetness of old lady sweat. I remember my mother’s voice beside me, singing hymns she knew by heart, her alto steady and sure.
She believed, and still believes, in something with certainty as she later switched to the Mormon Church. I never saw “her God” in the way she did. For her, the gospel is as real as the mountains outside my home in British Columbia, as solid as the bread she bakes, as certain as the sun rising over the prairie. She knows that families are eternal, that her late husband waits for her beyond the veil, that God has a plan, and she is part of it. I envy her this certainty sometimes, the way it holds her steady through grief and loss and the long silence of widowhood.
I left the Church in my teens, quietly, without announcement, the way one might slip out of a party before the host notices. It was quiet, undramatic. There was no single moment of rupture, no crisis of faith that announced itself with thunder. It was more like a slow loosening, a gradual recognition that I no longer believed what I had been taught to believe, that the structure that held my mother so securely felt to me like a house I had outgrown.
Sandra Bloom (2007) writes about ambiguous loss, defined as grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. I wonder sometimes if my mother grieves the daughter she thought she was raising, the one who would marry in the temple and bear children in the covenant and sit beside her in the celestial kingdom. I am still her daughter, but I am also a kind of ghost of the daughter she imagined. This is a loss we hold in silence, a room in our relationship we have agreed to keep closed.
Pequeñas Bondades / Small Kindnesses
And yet she loves me. This I know. I know it in the way she asks about my work, even when my work puzzles her, her questions sincere and slightly bewildered: “So you are still teaching at that university?” Yes, Mom. Still teaching. Her way of showing love is more in spirit than in words or deeds.
Gary Chapman (1992) popularized the concept of love languages, the idea that people express and receive love in different ways: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. My mother’s love language has always been acts of service, the doing of things, the making and mending and bringing of soup through snowstorms. She rarely says “I love you” directly, but she says it in every jar of peaches, every quilt, every four-hour drive through dangerous weather.
El amor no siempre tiene palabras. A veces tiene sopa de pollo.
Love finds other vessels. Sometimes it has chicken soup.
Viuda / Widow
Her husband died two years ago. They had been married for only a few years, long enough that she had learned the shape of his presence: the way he took his soda, the sound of his wheelchair in the hallway, the weight of his hand on her leg as he sat next to her.
I think about her alone in that apartment, moving through rooms that still hold his absence. The recliner where he sat to watch the news. The side of the bed that is still, somehow, his side, even though he will never lie there again. Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to rush through rather than honour. For Greenspan, grief is what happens to love when it encounters loss, it is connection rendered as sorrow, and it carries within it the very bond it mourns.
My mother’s faith offers her a framework for this sorrow: the belief that marriage is eternal, that she will see him again, that death is a temporary separation rather than a final goodbye. I hold a different view, but I am grateful she has it. It gives her something to hold in the long nights, something to reach for when the house feels too quiet, and the bed feels too empty, and the grief feels too heavy to bear alone.
When I call her on Sunday evenings, she tells me about the temple sessions and the neighbour who helped her with the puzzle. She tells me about the weather, about the cat who visits her backyard, and about the book she is reading from the church library. She keeps to herself the moments when she reaches for him in the night and finds only empty sheets. She keeps to herself the crying in the shower, where no one can hear. These things I imagine, because I am her daughter, because I know her, because some things carry their meaning without words.
Lo Que Más Recuerdo / What I Remember Most
I remember her hands in the garden, turning soil, planting seeds, pulling weeds with a determination that seemed almost fierce. She grew tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, and every summer we would spend long evenings in the backyard, the light golden and slanted, the smell of earth and green things all around us. “Everything needs tending,” she told me once, her fingers in the dirt, a tomato plant cupped gently in her palm. “Gardens, families, faith. You have to show up and do the work.”
After she left my dad in 1977, I remember her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, paying bills by the light of a single lamp, her forehead creased with worry she tried to hide from us children. I had no way to understand then what I understand now: how hard she worked, how much she sacrificed, how many of her own dreams she set aside so that we could have enough. I wonder what she wanted to be before she became a mother. I wonder if she remembers.
I remember the way she cried when she missed my grade eight graduation, her face wet with loss and somehow also sad, almost knowingly, that she had to choose to put food on the table over celebration. For years, I made her feel guilty about this, but as a parent, only I can now understand how challenging life can be as a single mother. Love and loss are always tangled together; mothers carry a grief their children cannot fully see.
Judith Herman (1992), in her landmark work on psychological trauma, writes about the importance of witnessing, the act of truly seeing another person’s experience and honouring it as real. I want to witness my mother. I want to see beyond the capable hands and the Sunday faith and the birthday cards that arrive on time, but also the woman beneath all that doing, the woman who had dreams before she had children, who carries losses she has never spoken aloud, who has spent eighty years being useful and may never have learned that she was allowed to simply be.
Detrás de cada madre hay una mujer que olvidamos ver.
Behind every mother is a woman we forget to see.
La Distancia Entre Nosotras / The Distance Between Us
There are 2,800 kilometres between Loreto and Lethbridge. I looked it up. It would take thirty hours to drive, if you could drive across the Sea of Cortez, which, of course, you cannot. The distance feels larger than kilometres can measure: the distance between faith and its absence, between the life she imagined for me and the life I have made, between who she raised me to be and who I have become.
Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s moral development, argued that women often define themselves through relationships, through connection, through care for others. She called this the ethic of care, a moral framework centred on responsibility and responsiveness rather than abstract principles of justice. My mother embodies this ethic. She has spent eighty years caring for her children, her husbands, her clients, anyone who needed a casserole, a listening ear, or a quilt stitched with prayers. I wonder if she knows how to care for herself. I wonder if anyone ever taught her that she was allowed.
I am here in Mexico learning to rest, learning to be still, learning to believe that I am enough without producing, without performing, without earning my place. And I wonder: did I learn my relentlessness from her? Did she learn it from her mother? How many generations of women have run themselves ragged in service to others, believing that rest was selfishness, that stillness was sin, that their worth depended on their usefulness?
Una Carta Que No Enviaré / A Letter Left Unsent
Querida Mamá,
I am sitting by the sea in Mexico, thinking about you. I am thinking about your hands and your faith and the way you have always shown love through doing. I am thinking about the perogies you taught me to roll, the plums we canned in the summer heat, the quilt you drove through a snowstorm to bring me.
I am thinking about how tired you must be. How tired you have always been. How you never learned to rest because no one ever told you that rest was allowed. I wish I could give you what I am learning here: the knowledge that you are enough, that you have always been enough, that your worth was never something you had to earn.
I am sorry I left the Church. I am sorry I cannot be the daughter you imagined. I am sorry for all the silences between us, the questions we leave unasked, the truths we keep hidden to protect each other. But I am grateful, too. Grateful that you loved me anyway. Grateful that you still call on Sundays. Grateful that your faith gives you comfort even though I cannot share it.
I see you, Mom. I see the woman behind the capable hands, behind the Sunday faith, behind the chicken soup and the quilts. I see how much you have given. I see how much it costs. I wish I had told you sooner. I am telling you now, even though you will never read this letter.
Te quiero, Mamá. Siempre.
This letter will stay here. James Pennebaker (1997), whose research on expressive writing demonstrated the healing power of putting painful experiences into words, found that writing about difficult emotions can improve both psychological and physical health, even if the writing is never shared. The writing itself is the medicine. I am writing my way toward understanding, toward compassion, toward a peace I am still learning to name.
Esta Noche / Tonight
The sun has set. The sea is dark now, just the sound of waves and the occasional cry of a seabird. In Lethbridge, it is already late. My mother is probably in bed, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the empty space beside her filled with faith and memory and the shape of a husband who is no longer there.
I will call her tomorrow. I will ask about the church, the neighbour and whether she has been sleeping well. I will keep this essay to myself, keep the memories I have been turning over like stones, about the letter I wrote and will never send. Some things are better held gently, privately, like a prayer offered in silence.
But tonight, across 2,800 kilometres of desert and mountain and sea, I am holding her in my heart. I am thanking her for the hands that shaped me, even as I am learning to shape myself differently. I am forgiving us both for the silences, for the distances, for the love that has always struggled to find its words. I am seeing her, finally, fully: as my mother and as a woman: tired and faithful and braver than I ever knew, standing in her kitchen, rolling out pie crust, teaching me without words that love is something you make with your hands.
Ella es mi madre.
She is my mother.
Y yo soy su hija.
And I am her daughter.
Eso es todo. Eso es suficiente.
That is everything. That is enough.
References
Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419-420.
Chapman, G. (1992). The five love languages: How to express heartfelt commitment to your mate. Northfield Publishing.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Google. (2026). Mi Madre, a la distancia [Audio podcast episode]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
Translation Note
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
This bilingual elegy for the complexity of maternal relationships engages what Menakem (2017) calls intergenerational somatic transmission: the ways that unresolved nervous system patterns pass between generations through attachment, modelling, and the implicit choreography of family life. The grief described here is what Boss (1999) extends beyond personal loss, terms ambiguous loss: mourning a relationship that remains physically present but emotionally unresolved, or that exists in a form different from what was needed or imagined. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour applies here in a particular way: the lifelong management of one’s own emotional responses within complex family systems, the careful calibration of need, disappointment, and love that caregiving dynamics require. The distance between continents that frames this reflection also enacts what Tuan (1977) calls topophilia in reverse: the way geographical separation from formative places and relationships illuminates their emotional weight precisely through their absence. Writing this reflection in both Spanish and English performs Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands methodology: moving between tongues to access the full complexity of a relationship that neither language alone can hold.
A Scholarly Personal Narrative of Attention, Inner Body Awareness, and Embodied Knowing
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Today, it rained in Loreto, and then the rain paused. In that pause, I carried my research materials to the poolside cabana, settling beneath the palapa’s thatched roof to continue the work that has become both intellectual inquiry and body-felt practice. The sky remained heavy with moisture, grey clouds pressing low over the date palms and bougainvillea that frame this small sanctuary. The air smelled of wet earth and salt from the nearby Sea of Cortez. Water droplets clung to palm fronds, occasionally dislodging to fall with a soft percussion onto the terracotta tiles surrounding the pool.
This moment, seemingly ordinary in its domestic simplicity, exemplifies the core dynamics of
alonetude, the intentional solitude practice I have been documenting throughout this retreat. The pause in the rain created conditions for what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) developed as
the quiet way nature restores us, wherein environments characterized by the gentle pull of the natural world, such as natural settings between weather events, allow directed attention to recover from the depletion caused by sustained cognitive effort. Kaplan’s (1995) subsequent theoretical framework formalized these insights into the quiet way nature restores us Theory. Yet what unfolded at the poolside extended beyond simple restoration. It involved the integration of contemplative presence with scholarly work, demonstrating how
embodied knowing, knowledge accessed through body-based awareness and sensory engagement with place, informs and enriches academic inquiry.
Theoretical Positioning
This narrative draws upon several intersecting theoretical frameworks that have shaped both my retreat experience and the scholarly methodology through which I examine it.
The Quiet Way Nature Restores Us Theory
The quiet way nature restores us Theory (ART), developed by environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989; Kaplan, 1995), proposes that natural environments promote psychological restoration through four key characteristics. Table 1 summarizes these foundational components.
Table 1
Four Components of the Quiet Way Nature Restores Us Theory
Component
Definition
Being Away
The sense of psychological distance from routine demands and mental fatigue. Physical distance helps, but conceptual distance (a shift in mental content) is essential.
The match between environmental affordances and personal purposes. The setting supports what the person is trying to accomplish and is inclined to do.
The coherence and scope of the environment. The setting must be rich enough to constitute a whole other world that engages the mind and offers opportunities for exploration.
Fascination
Engaging attention effortlessly through inherently interesting stimuli. ‘the gentle pull of the natural world’ (clouds, water, rustling leaves) is restorative, unlike ‘hard fascination’ (television, video games).
Compatibility
The match between environmental affordances and personal purposes. The setting supports what the person is trying to accomplish and inclined to do.
Note. Adapted from ‘The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective’ by R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan, 1989, Cambridge University Press, and ‘The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework’ by S. Kaplan, 1995, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), pp. 169–182.
The poolside setting during the rain pause embodied these qualities. I experienced being away through physical distance from daily obligations and the conceptual shift from routine to contemplation. The environment provided a sense of extent through the visual scope created by the intersection of built and natural elements: the cabana’s shelter, the pool’s reflective surface, the layered palm grove, and the distant sea. The gentle pull of the natural world emerged from water droplets falling rhythmically, cloud movements across the grey sky, and the gentle sway of palm fronds. Compatibility arose from the alignment between the environment’s quietness and my need for a reflective workspace where scholarly writing could unfold organically.
Inner Body Awareness and Embodied Knowing
Inner body awareness, defined as the perception of internal bodily sensations, represents another essential framework for understanding this experience (Craig, 2002; Farb et al., 2015). Inner body-sensing awareness encompasses multiple dimensions, as outlined in Table 2, which summarizes the Multidimensional Assessment of Inner Body-Sensing Awareness (MAIA) framework developed by Mehling et al. (2012).
Table 2
Six Dimensions of Inner Body-Sensing Awareness
Dimension
Description
Noticing
Awareness of bodily sensations such as heartbeat, breathing, temperature changes, and muscle tension.
Attention Regulation
The ability to sustain and control attention to bodily sensations during focused awareness.
Emotional Awareness
Recognition of connections between physical sensations and emotional states; the embodied dimension of affect.
finding our own calm
Using bodily signals to modulate distress and regulate emotional responses adaptively.
Body Listening
Actively attending to the body’s messages about needs, limits, and preferences with curiosity rather than judgment.
Trusting
Experiencing bodily signals as reliable and safe sources of information about one’s internal state.
Note. Adapted from ‘The Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA)’ by W. E. Mehling et al., 2012, PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230
During the pause in the rain, my practice involved precisely this kind of inner body-sensing attention. I noticed the cooling sensation of post-rain air against my skin, the subtle shift in breathing as humidity changed, the grounding quality of sitting in stillness while water sounds created ambient texture, and the alignment between my body’s need for contemplative pace and the environment’s invitation to settle. This embodied awareness did more than simply register physical sensations; it provided insight into what and how we know, access to knowledge that emerges through lived, sensory engagement with place.
Embodied Knowing and Feminist Ways of Knowing
Embodied knowing, as feminist epistemologists and lived-experience scholars describe it, refuses the Cartesian assumption that mind and body are separate (Alcoff & Potter, 2013; Grosz, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Knowledge emerges through the body’s interactions with material environments, sensory perception, movement and stillness, and the integration of affective and cognitive processes.
Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of Situated knowledge emphasizes that all knowledge is partial and positioned, emerging from particular embodied, historical, and geographical locations.
Sandra Harding’s (1991) standpoint ways of knowing further argues that those whose knowledge has been marginalized often possess knowledge-based advantages precisely because they must navigate both dominant and marginalized perspectives. Working beneath the cabana during the rain pause exemplified this embodied ways of knowing. The knowledge I generated about solitude, attention, and restorative practice emerged from integrating sensory awareness, environmental responsiveness, and intellectual inquiry.
The Lived Moment
I arrived at the pool carrying my laptop, notebook, and the now-familiar blue bag that has become a symbol of my mobile research practice. The thatched palapa roof overhead, traditional in this region of Baja California Sur, provided shelter while maintaining environmental porosity.
Unlike the enclosed rooms where I sometimes work, the cabana offered what I think of as a threshold space, simultaneously within and without, protected yet permeable. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) work on place and experience illuminates how such spaces shape emotional geography, how our affective responses emerge through the interplay of enclosure and exposure, intimacy and vastness. This liminality, this state of being between enclosed shelter and open exposure, created optimal conditions for the kind of contemplative work that has characterized this retreat.
The pool water, still and translucent in its turquoise containment, reflected the grey sky with perfect clarity. This mirroring created what I think of as visual resonance, wherein landscape features repeat and reinforce each other, generating aesthetic coherence. The concept draws on Anne Whiston Spirn’s (1998) work on landscape as language, particularly her insight that designed and natural environments communicate through legible patterns. The pool’s surface doubled the sky’s presence, making weather visible in two planes simultaneously. Behind the pool, date palms rose in irregular clusters, their shaggy trunks and feathered fronds creating layered textures against the weighted atmosphere. Some palms stood straight and tall, while others leaned at gentle angles, their shapes recording years of wind patterns and growth responses. Pink bougainvillea, vivid even under grey skies, cascaded over the stone wall that marked the property’s boundary, its colour intensified by the moisture-saturated light.
Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich (1983) demonstrated that visual exposure to nature, particularly environments featuring water and vegetation, produces affective responses that support psychological recovery. His research established that natural settings reduce stress and promote restorative experiences. Sitting beneath the palapa, I experienced this settling as a lived sensation, rather than an abstract theory. My shoulders, which had held tension from concentrated morning writing, gradually released. My breathing, which had been shallow during focused work, deepened and steadied. The environmental cues surrounding me, soft sounds, muted colours, and the rhythm of occasional water drops communicated safety and spaciousness.
Integration of Work and Presence
Opening my laptop to continue writing about intentional solitude while inhabiting that very state gave the experience a recursive quality. I was simultaneously livingalonetude and documenting it, simultaneously experiencing the present moment and reflecting upon the patterns I have observed across weeks of practice.
This integration exemplifies the methodological strength of Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), the approach that frames this entire project, as identified by Nash (2004). SPN honours lived experience as legitimate scholarly data while maintaining intellectual rigour through theoretical grounding and critical, honest self-reflection.
Unlike traditional research methodologies that position the researcher as a detached observer, SPN recognizes the researcher as an embodied participant whose personal experience, when properly contextualized within broader theoretical frameworks and social structures, generates valuable knowledge (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Richardson, 2003).
My work beneath the cabana involved this dual consciousness. I remained attentive to immediate sensory experience, observing the quality of light, the ambient sounds, and the feeling of air against the skin, while simultaneously engaging these observations through conceptual lenses provided by attention theory, neuroscience, and phenomenology.
The work itself flowed differently here than it does in enclosed spaces. Ideas emerged with less forcing, sentences formed more organically, and connections between concepts became visible through a process that felt closer to recognition than construction. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (1979) describes creative thinking as pattern recognition across disparate domains, the capacity to perceive structural similarities between seemingly unrelated phenomena. The poolside environment, with its combination of focused containment (the cabana’s defined space) and ambient stimulation (changing light, the sound of water, the movement of palm fronds), created conditions conducive to associative thinking.
The Neuroscience of Pause
Neuroscientific research illuminates what occurs during moments such as this pause between rains. The default mode network (DMN), a collection of brain regions that activate when attention shifts away from external tasks toward internal mental activity, becomes engaged during restful states characterized by environmental softness (Raichle et al., 2001; Buckner et al., 2008). The DMN supports autobiographical memory consolidation, future planning, perspective taking, and the integration of experiences into coherent narratives. Research by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and colleagues (2009) demonstrates that DMN activation correlates with ethical reasoning, identity formation, and sense-making processes, suggesting that these seemingly passive moments of mental wandering serve essential psychological functions.
Simultaneously, the salience network, which includes the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, maintains awareness of both internal bodily states and relevant environmental stimuli (Seeley et al., 2007; Menon & Uddin, 2010). This network acts as a switching mechanism, determining which information merits conscious attention and facilitating shifts between externally directed focus and internally oriented awareness. During the rain pause, my experience involved precisely this dynamic balancing. I intermittently attended to my writing, the poolside environment, internal physical sensations, and the flow of ideas, with attention moving fluidly across these domains without the fragmentation that characterizes forced multitasking.
The Nervous System and Felt Safety
how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011), offers another lens for understanding the embodied quality of this experience. Table 3 outlines the three hierarchical autonomic states identified by Porges.
Three Autonomic States in how the nervous system responds to safety and threat
Autonomic State
Characteristics and Functions
genuine safety (Social Engagement)
Associated with feelings of safety, calm, and social connection. Supports rest, digestion, face-to-face communication, and prosocial behaviour. The nervous system state that enables learning, creativity, and contemplative practice.
Sympathetic (Mobilisation)
Involves activation and arousal, preparing the body for action. Supports adaptive responses to challenge through fight-or-flight mechanisms. Becomes problematic when chronically activated without opportunities for recovery.
Dorsal Vagal (Immobilisation)
Associated with shutdown, conservation, and disconnection. In extreme cases, produces freeze responses, dissociation, or collapse. Can also support healthy rest and sleep when accessed from a place of safety.
Note. Adapted from ‘The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and finding our own calm’ by S. W. Porges, 2011, W. W. Norton & Company.
The poolside environment communicated safety through multiple channels. The shelter of the cabana, the visible boundaries of the space, the absence of threat-relevant stimuli, and the gentle, predictable quality of environmental changes all signalled to my nervous system that it could remain in a state of genuine safety and connection. This physiological settling enabled the quality of presence I experienced, the capacity to remain simultaneously relaxed and attentive, open yet focused. Porges emphasizes that felt safety, rather than actual safety alone, determines which autonomic state predominates. The poolside setting provided both objective safety (shelter, containment, predictability) and subjective safety cues (soft sounds, visual beauty, environmental coherence), creating conditions wherein my nervous system could downregulate defensive responses and support contemplative engagement.
Embodied Knowing in Practice
The knowledge I generated during this working session emerged through bodily engagement with the environment as much as through cognitive analysis. This exemplifies what feminist philosopher Sandra Harding (1991) calls standpoint ways of knowing, the recognition that all knowledge is situated, emerging from particular bodily, social, and historical locations. My standpoint during this retreat is grounded in specific intersecting positions. I am a white settler-Canadian woman in midlife, a precarious academic worker experiencing career displacement, a mother whose children have launched, a person exploring intentional solitude after years of collective disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and someone temporarily inhabiting a landscape markedly different from my northern home. Each of these positions shapes what I notice, what feels significant, and how I interpret experience.
The cooling sensation of post-rain air took on particular meaning in this situated context. For someone accustomed to Canadian winters, the idea of cooling being associated with comfort rather than discomfort, with relief rather than challenge, represents a sensory reversal. This what the body knows, the visceral understanding that cooling can signal respite, becomes metaphorically resonant when thinking about emotional regulation and the need for periods of reduced intensity following sustained activation.
Similarly, the sound of water, whether falling droplets or the distant murmur of pool filtration systems, activated associations shaped by my geographical origins. Water sounds in northern contexts often signal seasonal transition: the breakup of ice, the rush of spring melt, the first rain after winter’s snow. Here in Loreto, water sounds carry different meanings. They mark the rare gift of precipitation in an arid landscape, the maintenance of human-created oases, the intersection of scarcity and abundance. These layered meanings, emerging from the meeting of personal history with present place, constitute situated knowledge, knowledge that acknowledges rather than erases its specificity (Haraway, 1988).
The Pause as Practice
Pausing, the deliberate slowing or temporary halting of activity, represents a practice often devalued within cultures of productivity and constant engagement. Sociologist Judy Wajcman (2014) analyzes how temporal acceleration characterizes contemporary life, with technologies promising efficiency paradoxically generating experiences of time scarcity and rushed consciousness. Against this backdrop, the choice to pause, to sit at the poolside rather than push through the work in an enclosed room, constitutes a minor but meaningful resistance to the imperative toward continuous productivity.
The poet and essayist Mary Oliver (2008) writes that attention is the beginning of devotion, suggesting that how we direct awareness reflects what we value and shapes what becomes possible. During the rain pause, I devoted attention to integrating scholarly work with embodied presence, to the practice of remaining with complexity rather than rushing toward resolution, and to the capacity to hold multiple modes of awareness simultaneously. This practice of pause differs from complete cessation. I continued working, but the quality of that work changed within the poolside environment. Ideas emerged with less striving, prose flowed with greater ease, and the relationship between effort and ease was better balanced.
Contemplative scholar Pico Iyer (2014) observes that in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow, and in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. The rain pause created conditions for this luxurious attention, through environmental support for sustained awareness rather than forced focus. The threshold space of the cabana invited presence without demanding performance. The sensory richness of the setting engaged attention gently, providing sufficient stimulation to prevent mind-wandering into rumination while maintaining sufficient spaciousness to allow creative association.
Reflection and Integration
As the afternoon progressed, the rain finally paused. Moisture began falling again, first as sporadic drops, then as steady precipitation that pattered rhythmically against the palapa thatch. I remained at work beneath the shelter, the sound of rain creating an acoustic texture that enhanced rather than disrupted concentration. This transition from pause to rain illustrates what philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1964) describes as intimate immensity: the experience of feeling both enclosed and connected to vastness, protected within a small shelter while remaining in relationship with larger atmospheric forces.
The hours spent at the poolside cabana generated multiple forms of knowledge. There was the intellectual work captured in written prose, the development of arguments and the articulation of frameworks. There was the knowledge the body holds, gained through embodied presence, the visceral understanding of how the environment shapes consciousness and how intentional positioning within space influences the quality of attention. There was the methodological insight into how Scholarly Personal Narrative functions and how personal experience, when rigorously attended to and theoretically contextualized, contributes to scholarly discourse.
Perhaps most significantly, there was the experiential confirmation that alonetude, as I have been theorizing and practising it throughout this retreat, represents a learnable skill rather than an innate capacity. The ability to inhabit solitude with presence, to maintain attentiveness without anxiety, to hold steadiness amid transition (such as the shift from rain to pause to rain again), emerges through repeated practice within supportive environments. The poolside cabana offered such an environment. Its combination of shelter and openness, containment and permeability, created conditions wherein contemplative presence could deepen.
Pause
The pause between rains, seemingly a minor meteorological event, created a doorway into a deeper understanding of how attention, environment, and embodied presence interrelate. Working beneath the palapa during that pause allowed me to experience directly what I have been theorizing abstractly throughout this project. Alonetude, the intentional inhabiting of solitude, characterized by volition, presence, meaning, and felt safety, flourishes within environments that support rather than overwhelm attention, that invite rather than demand, that hold space for both focused work and wandering awareness.
This narrative represents one moment within a larger investigation, yet it captures the essence of what I have been learning. Knowledge emerges through the body as much as through the mind. Environment shapes consciousness in ways both subtle and profound. Pausing, rather than being seen as a weakness or waste, is a necessary practice for sustained creativity and well-being. And scholarly inquiry needs to diminish lived experience to generate insight. Instead, when personal narrative is properly grounded in theory and critically examined, it contributes meaningfully to academic discourse while remaining accessible to readers seeking practical guidance.
The rain eventually stopped completely, leaving the landscape refreshed and the air sweetened with ozone. I closed my laptop as the afternoon shifted toward evening, having produced both written work and experiential knowledge. The poolside cabana, with its threshold position between shelter and exposure, had held space for integration, for the meeting of intellectual inquiry and body-felt practice. Tomorrow it may rain again, and I will likely return to this same spot, continuing the practice of alonetude, continuing the work of paying attention, continuing to discover what becomes possible when we pause long enough to truly inhabit the present moment.
References
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ACADEMIC LENS
The “pause between rains” as a research site enacts what Moustakas (1961) calls the phenomenological bracketing of ordinary experience: finding, within the apparently unremarkable, the grounds for genuine inquiry. The rain pause functions as a version of what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call “being away”: a brief departure from habitual attentional patterns that creates the conditions for restorative experience. The inner body awareness that this post foregrounds is what Levine (2010) calls “interoception,” the body’s sensing of its own internal state, which van der Kolk (2014) identifies as one of the primary casualties of chronic stress: the overwhelmed nervous system progressively loses access to the subtle signals of its own needs and preferences. Attending to the body during a pause in external weather thus constitutes a double inquiry: observing both the outer pause and the inner one, the moment when the nervous system, like the sky between rains, momentarily suspends its habitual patterns and opens into something less defended. Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) argument that writing is a method of inquiry applies precisely here: the act of finding language for inner body states is itself a form of deepening somatic knowledge.
