Reflections Archives - Page 4 of 6

February 1: The Practice of Learning With Intention

Reading Time: 25 minutes

On Carrying Alonetude Into the Crowded Room, Hot Springs After Seawater, and the Question I Cannot Yet Answer

Winnicott (1958) observed that the genuine capacity to be alone, without anxiety or compulsive distraction, is a mark of emotional maturity, one that develops only under specific relational conditions and requires an inner security that cannot be forced.

Title: Holding Light – Just a Sign

Artist Statement

This image drew my attention because of its simplicity and its steadiness. A single sun, rendered in clean lines and bold contrast, rests within a diamond frame of deep blue. There is no landscape, no horizon, no surrounding context. Only light held in shape.

I found myself pausing with it longer than expected. The symbol felt less decorative and more grounding. The sun held back its blaze, asking nothing of attention. Instead, it radiated a quiet constancy. In a period of movement, reflection, and internal sorting, this form of contained brightness felt meaningful. Light arrives in many ways beyond revelation. Sometimes it appears as steadiness. As presence. As something that remains even when the surrounding environment feels uncertain.

The geometric framing also held significance for me. The diamond shape created both structure and protection, as though the light was being safeguarded rather than exposed. I experienced this visually as a reminder that illumination requires no expansion outward at all times. There are seasons where light is held inward, tended quietly, allowed to gather strength before it moves beyond its frame.

This photograph, for me, became less about a symbol on a wall and more about recognizing the ways light continues to exist within periods of transition. It is rarely dramatic. Often, it is simply there. Steady. Contained. Waiting to be noticed.

I am learning that intention is something I practise rather than declare once. It is something I practise, quietly, in the smallest choices of the day.

The Morning After

I have been home for less than twenty-four hours. The fragments from Loreto sit on the windowsill where I placed them last night: blue tile, amber stone, smoothed glass, each one catching the pale light of a Kamloops February morning. Outside, snow. Inside, the particular silence of a house that held itself while I was gone.

And already I am packing again.

Tomorrow I leave for Harrison Hot Springs. Two weeks of labour school. Hundreds of people. Workshops and lectures and shared meals and hallway conversations and the particular intensity of being in a room full of workers who have come to learn how to organize, how to resist, how to hold each other up against systems that would grind them down. It is important work. It is work I believe in.

But this morning, standing at the window with tea going cold in my hands, I feel the question settle into my chest like a stone: Can I carry what I learned in solitude into a room full of people? Can alonetude survive the crowd?

¿Puedo llevar esta quietud conmigo? Can I carry this quiet with me?

What I Learned Alone

Learning begins to change shape when I stop asking what I must produce and start asking what I am ready to understand.”

Title: Where Water Teaches the Land to Breathe

Artist Statement

This piece emerged slowly, through colour rather than intention. I began with the water. Layer upon layer of blue moved across the page in waves that felt less like representation and more like rhythm. The repetition became calming. Each line carried the sensation of breathing, of returning to the body through motion of the hand.

As the water settled, the land began to form almost instinctively. Mountains rose in the distance, edged in pink and earth tones, held gently beneath a wide sky. Their shape arrived without my planning. They appeared as memory does, familiar but softened. The tree line that followed felt like a boundary and a bridge at once, marking the meeting place between groundedness and movement.

What I notice most, looking back at the work, is the layering. Water. Land. Sky. Each occupies its own space yet remains in relationship with the others. The composition reflects an inner landscape more than a geographic one. There is calm in the horizontal lines, steadiness in the repetition, and reassurance in the way the elements hold one another without collapse.

Creating this drawing felt like returning to a quieter frequency. A reminder that reflection rarely requires language alone. Sometimes colour carries what words cannot. Sometimes the body understands balance before the mind is able to name it.

Thirty days beside the Sea of Cortez taught me how to be with myself. I learned slow attention, the discipline of looking at one thing long enough for it to reveal what it held. I learned that rest is recalibration rather than laziness, repair rather than withdrawal. I learned that my body carries wisdom my mind has spent decades trying to override. I learned to cry without apology, to dream without interpretation, to sit with difficulty and let it transform rather than destroy.

But I learned all of this alone. In a casita with no one watching. On a shoreline with no one waiting. In the spacious quiet of days with nothing demanded of me. The practice of alonetude grew in conditions of extraordinary gentleness, and I am deeply grateful for those conditions.

Now I am about to test the practice in its opposite environment. Beyond the quiet casita, the conference hotel. Beyond the empty shoreline, the crowded workshop room. Beyond the solitary walk, the shared meal table. Beyond the Sea of Cortez, the hot springs of Harrison Lake, on the traditional territory of the Sts’ailes people, whose name means “the beating heart.”

The beating heart. That meaning arrived unexpectedly, but it lands in me with force. After thirty days of learning to hear my own heartbeat in the quiet, I am going to a place named for the beat of collective life.

Title: Threshold Guardian: On Humour, Boundary, and the Wild Edges of Belonging

Artist Statement

Meeting him there was unexpected.

A small yellow sign, fixed to a chain-link gate, announcing Sasquatch Crossing with quiet certainty, as though the boundary between the domestic and the mythical required no explanation. Behind it, the ordinariness of human life: a raised garden bed, a porch, blinds drawn against the afternoon light. Nothing spectacular. Nothing staged. And yet the sign altered the entire landscape. It suggested that the familiar world was porous, that something ancient and unscripted might pass through at any moment.

What struck me most was the gentleness of the warning. No danger. No fear. Crossing. Movement. Passage. An invitation to imagine that wilderness lives far beyond distant forests but walks the edges of our constructed lives, occasionally stepping across the thresholds we build to contain ourselves. I stood there longer than I expected, smiling at the playfulness of it, but also aware that humour often guards something deeper: a recognition that we coexist with forces we cannot fully domesticate, including the wildness within ourselves.

The image became, for me, less about folklore and more about boundary. Who gets to cross? What parts of ourselves remain fenced out? What mythic selves linger just beyond the gate, waiting for permission we never quite grant?

I took this photograph while walking, simply open rather than searching, simply letting my attention move where it wished. This has become part of my practice since returning from Loreto, the discipline of slow looking, of allowing small encounters to surface meaning rather than forcing insight through analysis. The sign appeared suddenly along the path, its bright yellow interrupting the muted winter palette of wood, wire, and fallen leaves.

I felt an immediate recognition that surprised me. For years, my professional life required a careful containment of self. Competence performed. Emotions moderated. Exhaustion hidden behind productivity. There were parts of me that crossed freely into institutional spaces, and parts that remained outside the fence, watching, waiting, unacknowledged. Creativity. Vulnerability. Playfulness. Even rest. These were treated as indulgences rather than necessities, as though the wild interior life needed to be regulated before it could be allowed into the workplace or the classroom.

Standing in front of the sign, I found myself thinking about what it means to warn others of wild crossings while ignoring our own.

Sasquatch, in Pacific Northwest lore, is elusive, rarely seen, often doubted, yet persistently present in collective imagination. I began to see the figure as metaphor rather than creature: the uncontained self, the part that refuses domestication, the presence that leaves traces even when unseen. My own “crossings” had been subtle over the years. Moments when exhaustion broke through composure. Moments when grief surfaced unexpectedly. Moments when my scholarly voice refused neutrality and spoke instead from lived experience.

The fence in the photograph feels important.

Chain link: transparent but restrictive. You can see through it, but you cannot easily pass. It mirrors institutional boundaries that appear permeable yet hold firm. The gate is chained, though loosely, suggesting both security and improvisation, as though the barrier exists more from habit than necessity. The sign leaves the gate open; it simply acknowledges what might cross it.

In that way, the image mirrors my current threshold. After thirty days of intentional solitude, of meeting parts of myself long held at the margins, I am returning to communal and institutional spaces with a different awareness. I am less interested in perfect containment and more willing to acknowledge the crossings: emotion into scholarship, body into research, humour into theory, vulnerability into leadership.

The wild self is no longer something I wish to fence out. It is something I am learning to let pass through the gate, in recognition rather than chaos, as presence rather than threat. The sign, playful as it is, becomes a guardian of that truth: that what is wild will cross eventually, whether we name it or leave it unnamed.

Winnicott’s Paradox: Alone in the Presence of Others

To learn with intention is to move slowly enough to notice what is asking for my attention.

Donald Winnicott (1958) understood something about aloneness that I am only now beginning to grasp. In his paper “The Capacity to Be Alone,” published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst proposed what sounds like a contradiction: the capacity to be truly alone develops through the experience of being alone in the presence of another. Winnicott first observed this in infants and young children, who learn to play contentedly, absorbed in their own world, when a reliable caregiver is nearby. The child needs nothing from the caregiver in that moment. The caregiver simply stays. What matters is the experience of a quiet, non-intrusive, dependable presence that allows the child to settle into their own interior life.

Winnicott argued that this early experience forms the foundation for all later experiences of creative solitude. Without it, being alone feels threatening. With it, solitude becomes spacious, generative, even companionable. The mature adult who can sit in a café writing in a notebook, present to their own thoughts while surrounded by conversation, is drawing on this early developmental achievement.

Winnicott (1958) observed the paradoxical truth that a child learns to be alone through the secure presence of a trusted person who requires nothing from them; it is that quiet, undemanding companionship that first teaches the infant that solitude is safe.

I read this sentence now, on the morning before I leave for two weeks among hundreds, and it reframes everything. What if the thirty days in Loreto were the necessary foundation, but the real test, the mature expression, is what comes next? What if alonetude is more than the practice of being alone: it is the practice of being alone inside yourself, even when you are surrounded by others?

This is the inversion that arrived beyond my anticipation. I thought alonetude required physical solitude. Winnicott suggests the opposite: the deepest form of being alone happens in relationship. The practice holds firm in the presence of others. It is completed by it.

Title: Small Sun, Sidewalk Shrine

Artist Statement

I almost missed it.

Arranged quietly in the cracks of an ordinary sidewalk, a circle of stones held its shape with care. Dark shards extended outward like rays, forming a small sun pressed gently into the pavement. There was no signature. No explanation. Just the evidence of someone pausing long enough to make something temporary and whole.

What stayed with me was the tenderness of the gesture. A sun where winter still lingered. Warmth imagined into being. It felt less like decoration and more like offering, a reminder that light can be assembled even on the ground we walk past without noticing.

Since returning from solitude, I have been attentive to these small, unannounced interventions, moments where human hands leave quiet traces of meaning in public space. This piece felt participatory even before I touched it. I stood at its edge, aware of how easily it could be scattered, how intentional its balance was. It mirrored my own practice of reassembly.

After months of exhaustion, I have been gathering myself in similar ways, piece by piece, fragment by fragment, creating small circles of coherence where there had been only dispersal. The sun on the sidewalk reminded me that wholeness arrives in fragments, placed one at a time. Sometimes it is placed gently into the cracks of daily life, held together by attention, by care, by the simple act of choosing to arrange what remains into something that can still give light.

The Nervous System in the Crowded Room

I am no longer collecting knowledge. I am listening for what knowledge is trying to teach me about myself.

I will be honest about what I am afraid of. After thirty days of near-silence, the thought of a room full of voices makes my shoulders rise toward my ears. I can feel the bracing in my body even as I write this, the anticipatory tightening that Stephen Porges (2011) would recognize as a shift in autonomic state. Porges’ ” How the Nervous System Responds to Safety and Threat ” describes how the nervous system evaluates environmental cues, a process he calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety, and responds with one of three broad patterns: the ventral vagal state of safety and social engagement, the sympathetic state of mobilization and defence, or the dorsal vagal state of shutdown and withdrawal.

For thirty days in Loreto, my nervous system lived primarily in the ventral vagal state of genuine safety and connection. Warmth, quiet, rhythmic sound, consistent routine, the absence of institutional demand: all of these cues signalled safety, and the body responded by softening, opening, becoming available. Now I am about to walk into an environment of high stimulation: new people, loud dining halls, competing conversations, fluorescent-lit conference rooms, shared accommodations, the social labour of introductions and small talk.

Porges would recognize my anxiety. The transition from low stimulation to high stimulation requires autonomic adjustment. The nervous system needs time to recalibrate, to learn that this new environment, though louder and more populated, is also safe. He describes a process he calls how we steady one another: the way nervous systems influence one another through facial expressions, vocal tones, gestures, and timing. In a room full of people, the nervous system does more than regulate itself. It is in constant dialogue with the nervous systems of everyone present.

Here is what I notice as I think about this: the anxiety I feel concerns the energy rather than the people themselves. It is about the energy required to be in constant social dialogue after a month of quiet. It is the fear that the softness I gained in Loreto will be overwritten by the demands of social performance. Tengo miedo de perderme otra vez. I am afraid of losing myself again.

But Porges also describes something hopeful. He explains that a well-regulated nervous system, one that has had sufficient experience of safety, develops what he calls a broader window of tolerance. The range of stimulation the system can absorb without tipping into defence or shutdown expands. The thirty days in Loreto were far beyond merely pleasant. They were regulatory. They widened my window. The question is whether the window is wide enough to hold a labour school.

Title: Circle of Returning

Artist Statement

Inspired by the sunshine circle, I created my own version of sunshine. In my practice, circles often surface when I am trying to understand where I am in relation to what I have lived. This drawing came during a period of transition, when I was moving between solitude and re entry, between interior work and collective presence. The repeated forms felt like versions of the self, each shaped by different seasons yet held within a shared perimeter.

The open centre matters. It suggests that wholeness is spaciousness rather than density, balance rather than completion. I see in this piece an evolving understanding that returning to oneself is never a solitary act. It is relational, cyclical, and ongoing. Each iteration brings me closer to a steadier way of standing within my own life.

Table 1

Conditions of Practice: Alonetude in Solitude Versus Alonetude in Community

High stimulation; the nervous system is in constant how we steady one another with others	Loreto: Alonetude in Solitude	Harrison: Alonetude in Community
Social Environment	Near-total solitude; days without conversation; self as primary companion	Hundreds of people; constant interaction; shared meals, workshops, corridors
Autonomic Demand	High stimulation; the nervous system is constantly how we steady one another with others	Low stimulation; the nervous system is regulated by rhythm, warmth, and silence
The Sea of Cortez, salt water, tidal rhythm, walked beside each morning	Low stimulation; the nervous system is regulated by rhythm, warmth, and silence	Externally structured; workshops, lectures, meals at set times; time belonging to the group
Water	The Sea of Cortez, salt water; tidal rhythm, walked beside each morning	Harrison Lake and hot springs; mineral water; geothermal warmth; soaked in rather than walked beside
Practice Mode	The Sea of Cortez; salt water, tidal rhythm; walked beside each morning	The Sea of Cortez; salt water, tidal rhythm; walked beside each morning
Core Challenge	Befriending aloneness; staying with difficulty; allowing the body to soften	Maintaining interior quiet amid external demand; choosing presence over performance

Note. This table maps the shift from solitary alonetude to communal alonetude as a transition in conditions rather than a change in practice. The core intention remains the same: chosen, embodied, intentional presence with oneself. What changes is the environment in which that presence must be held. Winnicott (1958) would argue that the communal setting represents the maturation of the practice rather than a threat to it. The capacity to be alone develops in physical solitude; it is tested and deepened in the presence of others.

Each day of intentional learning becomes less about progress and more about presence.

Title: Holding Quiet Inside the Noise

Artist Statement

The world around me is loud.

Workshops unfolding. Chairs shifting. Papers moving. Conversations layering over one another in waves of sound. Labour school carries an important energy, collective, urgent, alive. But inside that vitality, I feel the volume rise in my body faster than it rises in the room.

So I draw. The colours come first. Bright, insistent, unapologetic. They create a boundary, a visual rhythm that steadies my breathing while everything around me moves quickly. The lines hold the colour in place. The repetition gives my hands something to do so my nervous system can soften rather than brace. This is my space.

Doodling, drawing, and colouring have become portable practices of alonetude for me, ways of staying present without becoming overwhelmed. In high-stimulation environments like labour school, where learning is collective and constant, the body sometimes needs a parallel activity to regulate attention. The movement of pen across paper becomes a form of grounding, adaptive focus rather than disengagement.

What I notice is that the louder the external world becomes, the more vivid my internal palette grows. Colour holds what words cannot in those moments. It absorbs excess noise, translates it into form, gives shape to what might otherwise feel like overwhelm. Through drawing, I remain in the room, listening, learning, participating, while also maintaining a quiet interior space that allows me to stay open rather than shut down.

I am still here.

Hot Springs After Seawater

There is something I cannot ignore: I am going from one body of water to another. From the Sea of Cortez to the hot springs that the Sts’ailes people have known as Kwals, meaning boiling water, a place revered as a site of healing since time immemorial. The hot springs at Harrison have been a place of care and restoration long before any settler named them, long before any resort was built around them. The Sts’ailes, a sovereign Coast Salish First Nation whose name means “the beating heart,” have lived on these traditional lands, including the entirety of Harrison Lake and the Harrison River, for thousands of years.

I sit with this knowledge carefully. I am a settler going to soak in waters that carry Indigenous stories of healing far older and deeper than my own. My practice of alonetude, my thirty days of personal recovery, my thesis about intentional solitude: all of this exists within a colonial context where land and water were taken, where Indigenous practices of healing were suppressed, where the very hot springs I will visit were “discovered” by settlers who capsized their boat in 1858 and were surprised to find the water warm. The Sts’ailes already knew. They had always known.

Any practice of presence I carry into that water must include awareness of whose healing place I am entering. This is far from a footnote. It is a condition of ethical practice.

And yet. The water. I feel its pull completely. After thirty days walking beside salt water, my body now understands something about what water offers: rhythm, buoyancy, the sensation of being held by something larger than yourself. Roger Ulrich (1983), in his foundational research on restorative environments, demonstrated that natural settings, and water in particular, facilitate physiological recovery from stress. The body already knows water is healing. The body already knows. El cuerpo ya sabe. El agua siempre sana.

Title: Steam Between Worlds

Artist Statement

The blue water held that familiar invitation I had come to recognize, warmth rising in soft spirals, dissolving the sharpness of the winter air. Steam hovered between surface and sky, blurring the boundary between forest and pool, between body and landscape. After weeks beside salt water, I found myself before mineral water, different in composition yet similar in promise: buoyancy, release, the possibility of being held.

What struck me most was the meeting of elements. Cold rain on my face. Heat on my skin. Evergreen stillness rising behind the pool like a wall of quiet witness. The mountains held their silence, yet their presence shaped the experience of immersion. This was an enclosed cradle rather than the open horizon of the sea of forest, a contained space of restoration. I entered slowly, aware that the body recognizes water as language long before the mind understands the setting.

Soaking here, I felt the transition I am living move through my nervous system in real time. From solitary retreat to collective learning. From the wide, tidal rhythm of the Sea of Cortez to the geothermal pulse of Harrison’s springs. Water, in both places, offered regulation, a sensory environment that softened vigilance and invited physiological repair. Environmental psychology has long documented water’s restorative capacity, yet what I felt was more than theory. It was embodied recognition.

In the steam, I realized that alonetude shifts form in community settings rather than disappearing. Even surrounded by others entering and leaving the pool, conversation rising and falling at the edges, I could feel a quiet interior basin remain intact. The practice I cultivated in solitude travelled with me, held by attention rather than geography. Immersion, in this sense, was both literal and methodological: the body soaking while the self observed how healing adapts across environments.

The Solidarity of Shared Space

Victor Turner (1969), the anthropologist of ritual and liminality, described a particular quality of human connection that emerges when people move through threshold experiences together. He called it communitas: a deep, unstructured, egalitarian bond that forms between individuals who share a liminal state. Communitas differs from ordinary social interaction. It strips away hierarchy, role, and performance. It creates what Turner described as a direct encounter between human beings, unmediated by the structures that normally organize social life.

Labour school, I think, is a site of communitas. Workers from different sectors, cities, and unions come together for two weeks to learn about their rights, their history, and their collective power. They leave behind the structures that normally separate them, the hierarchies of workplaces and institutions, and enter a liminal space where they are simply workers learning together. There is something tender about this. Something that echoes what I experienced in Loreto, though the form is entirely different.

In Loreto, I was liminal alone. Between identities, between chapters, between the person who was terminated and the person I was becoming. At Harrison, I will be liminal in the company. Surrounded by others who are also between: between frustration and hope, between isolation and solidarity, between the workplace they left and the understanding they will carry back.

Turner would recognize both as threshold spaces. The difference is that communitas generates bonds that solitude cannot. It produces what the labour movement has always known: that individual suffering becomes political understanding when it is shared. That the exhaustion I carried for nineteen years in precarious academic positions was never only mine. That structural harm is structural precisely because it happens to many.

Title: Holding Focus in Fracture

Artist Statement

Voices moved in overlapping waves, microphones cracking, chairs shifting, the constant hum of collective learning unfolding around me. The page became the one surface I could steady. Colour first, then line, then shape. Neither planned nor measured. Simply a quiet assembling of fragments that helped me stay present without becoming overwhelmed by the volume of the environment.

Deep focus. Deep flow.

Each shape holds its own boundary, thick black lines separating intensity so that colour can exist without bleeding into chaos. The composition mirrors the way I regulate myself in crowded spaces, creating interior compartments where sensation can settle. Drawing becomes a form of portable alonetude, a way of remaining engaged while protecting a small, necessary quiet within.

The world is louder, faster, more socially demanding than the solitary rhythm I had grown used to beside the sea. Rather than withdraw, I create visual anchors. The repetitive motion of marker on paper steadies my nervous system, offering tactile regulation amid cognitive overload. Arts-based methodologies recognize this gesture as embodied processing rather than distraction, a way of metabolizing environmental intensity through form and colour.

In this sense, the drawing documents adaptation. It shows how alonetude travels, reshaping itself to meet the conditions of collective space. I am still listening, still learning, still present to the shared purpose of the room. But I am also tending to the interior field that allows that presence to remain sustainable. The fractured geometry on the page reflects the fractured attention of crowded environments, yet it also reveals something hopeful: even in fragmentation, coherence can be created, one line, one colour, one breath at a time.

I am trying...

Five Intentions I Carry With Me

I will arrive at Harrison open to what emerges. I will arrive with intentions, held lightly, the way I learned to hold the painted stones in Loreto: with care rather than grip.

First: I will protect small moments of solitude within the collective schedule. A morning walk before the first session. Ten minutes alone with my journal over coffee. A breath at the doorway before entering the workshop room. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994) writes that mindfulness requires no meditation cushion or retreat centre. It requires the willingness to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment. These small pauses are alonetude in its most portable form.

Second: I will notice what my body tells me without overriding it. If my shoulders rise in a crowded room, I will acknowledge the signal rather than pushing through it. If I need to leave a conversation, I will leave. If I need silence, I will seek it. The practice of alonetude includes the practice of boundaries, and boundaries are acts of care rather than withdrawal.

Third: I will let the hot springs hold me the way the sea held me. Different water. Different temperature. Different territory. But the same invitation: to let the body be buoyed, to let the warmth work on what is still tight, to be held without holding on.

Fourth: I will listen more than I speak. Alonetude taught me the discipline of slow attention. In a room of workers sharing their experiences of precarity, exhaustion, and resistance, that attention becomes an offering. There is no need to demonstrate knowledge or present expertise. I need to be present. I need to hear.

Fifth: I will let people in without losing myself. This is the one that frightens me most. Nineteen years of precarious labour taught me that institutions take what they need and discard the rest. I learned to guard myself, to engage while protecting something small and essential within. Alonetude softened that guarding. Winnicott would say the practice gave me back the capacity to be alone even in a relationship, to hold my own interior life while remaining open to others. I want to trust that. I want to believe the practice is strong enough. Quiero confiar. Quiero creer que lo que encontré en mí es mío para siempre.

Title: Writing Beside the Fire

Artist Statement

How can I pretend I am invisible when everyone can see me?

At labour school, the days are dense with dialogue, learning, and collective analysis. The intellectual stimulation is rich, but it is also demanding. By evening, I find myself seeking spaces where reflection can unfold at a different pace. Sitting beside the fire with my traveller’s notebook becomes a transitional practice, a bridge between communal engagement and interior integration. The act of writing in this setting is methodological. It is deliberate. Within

This place matters. Environment shapes what is remembered, how it is processed, and what meaning emerges.

As I write, I am deepening into the collective experience of labour school. I am extending it inward, allowing the day’s conversations about justice, rights, and solidarity to move through personal narrative before they settle into intellectual analysis. In this way, the notebook becomes both archive and companion, holding the small, immediate truths that formal discourse often leaves behind.

Humans exhaust me.

The Question I Cannot Yet Answer

The question of whether alonetude can survive a crowded room stays open. I believe it can. The literature suggests it can. Winnicott says the mature form of aloneness is aloneness in the presence of another. Long and Averill (2003), in their exploration of the benefits of being alone, describe what they call inner solitude: the capacity to maintain a state of solitary awareness even amid social interaction, to be simultaneously connected to others and grounded in oneself. Anthony Storr (1988) argued that the capacity for solitude enriches, rather than diminishes, relational life; those who learn to be alone bring greater depth and less guardedness to their encounters with others.

But knowing something in theory and living it in the body are different things. My body learned to be soft in the quiet of Baja. Now it must learn to stay soft in the noise of collective life. My nervous system found its rhythm beside the sea. Now it must find rhythm in the dining hall, the workshop room, the late-night conversation, the shared bathroom, and the hallway encounter with a stranger.

I think of what I wrote yesterday: Llevo el mar en el pecho. I carry the sea in my chest. If that is true, truly true, then the sea comes with me to Harrison. The rhythm is internal now. The practice is mine. It travels with me.

But I am honest enough to admit that I am nervous. That the ball in my stomach is back, smaller than it was before Loreto, but present. That I am about to walk into a building full of people and find out whether thirty days of healing can hold against the oldest pattern I know: performing competence while slowly disappearing.

No voy a desaparecer esta vez. Llevo mi voz. La verdadera.

I carry myself forward this time. I carry my voice. The real one.

Table 2

Alonetude as Inner Practice: Theoretical Foundations for Solitude Within Community

Storr (1988): Solitude enriches relationships	Core Argument	Application to Alonetude in Community
Winnicott (1958): Capacity to be alone	The ability to be alone is a developmental achievement rooted in the experience of being alone in the reliable presence of another; it is a sign of emotional maturity rather than withdrawal	Labour school as the “reliable other” whose presence allows interior solitude; alonetude deepens in safe community rather than diminishing
The nervous system is shaped by social context; safety is communicated through how we steady one another; a state of genuine safety and connection supports both social engagement and calm self-presence	The nervous system is shaped by social context; safety is communicated through how we steady one another; the ventral vagal state of genuine safety and connection supports both social engagement and calm self-presence	The nervous system that learned safety in solitude must now learn to maintain that state amid the social signals of a crowded environment
Turner (1969): Communitas	Labour school as a liminal site where workers shed institutional roles; communitas may support rather than threaten alonetude	Labour school as liminal site where workers shed institutional roles; communitas may support rather than threaten alonetude
Long & Averill (2003): Inner solitude	Solitude includes an inner dimension: the capacity to maintain solitary awareness even in social settings; positive solitude requires choice, creativity, and self-connection	Alonetude in community as inner solitude: grounded self-awareness maintained while engaging with others
Storr (1988): Solitude enriches relationships	Those who develop rich inner lives through solitude bring greater depth and authenticity to their relationships; solitude and connection are complementary, mutually reinforcing	The depth gained in Loreto becomes a resource for genuine connection at labour school rather than a barrier
Kabat-Zinn (1994): Portable mindfulness	Mindfulness is available in every moment of daily life, beyond formal practice or retreat; attention is the practice, and attention goes wherever the person goes	Alonetude as portable attention: ten-minute pauses, doorway breaths, slow listening in the workshop room

Note. These six frameworks collectively support the argument that alonetude extends beyond physical isolation but represents an internal orientation that can be practised in any environment. Each framework contributes a distinct dimension: developmental (Winnicott), neurophysiological (Porges), anthropological (Turner), psychological (Long & Averill), biographical (Storr), and contemplative (Kabat-Zinn). Together, they suggest that the transition from solitary alonetude to communal alonetude represents a deepening rather than a loss of the practice.

Setting Out Again

Title: Layered Horizons

This piece emerged through colour before it emerged through form. I was working quickly, allowing the markers to move without overthinking the outcome. What surfaced was a landscape, though one that extends beyond any specific place. It feels more like an interior geography, layered with emotion, memory, and sensation.

The mountains hold warmth and tension at the same time. Their edges are uneven, alive, almost vibrating. Above them, the sky carries movement rather than stillness, while below, the water unfolds in bands of saturated colour. I notice how the repetition of lines creates rhythm, like breath or waves, steadying the intensity that sits in the upper half of the image.

This drawing reflects a state of processing rather than resolution. The colours sit beside one another without needing to blend or agree. They hold their differences. In that way, the work mirrors my own effort to let multiple emotional states exist at once without forcing coherence too quickly.

I see this piece as an exploration of emotional topography. Beyond destination, a mapping. Beyond clarity, expression. A reminder that landscapes, like inner lives, are built through layers that take time to understand.

The suitcase is packed. The journal is on top, where I can reach it. The amber stone stays on the windowsill beside the fragments from Loreto. It will be here when I come back.

I am going to Harrison Hot Springs to learn about labour rights and collective resistance. I am also going to learn whether alonetude can hold me in a room full of voices. Whether the third shore is truly portable. Whether the sea I carry in my chest can sustain its rhythm against the press of schedule and social demand.

I think of Winnicott’s infant, playing contentedly on the floor while the caregiver sits nearby. The caregiver does nothing. The child keeps playing. But the child knows the presence is there, and that knowing makes the solitude possible.

Perhaps I am going to Harrison to discover that the practice itself has become the caregiver. That is what I built in thirty days of solitude is now reliable enough to sit beside me in any room, any crowd, any workshop. That I can be alone inside myself while being fully present with others.

Perhaps. I will find out.

Title: Holding the Horizon: Harrison Hot Springs

Artist Statement

While sitting in the mineral warmth of Harrison Hot Springs, I found myself watching the horizon rather than the people around me. Steam moved across the water in slow veils. Mountains held their quiet line in the distance. The lake carried its steady, rhythmic breath. I wanted to capture that layered stillness, water, land, and sky, each resting within the other.

The bold lines and saturated colours reflect how the body remembers landscape when it is finally at ease. Beyond exactness, beyond the photographic, but felt. The drawing becomes less about geographic accuracy and more about emotional cartography, mapping where calm settles in the nervous system.

In the context of labour school, immersion in collective dialogue is in my thinking energizing yet in the body demanding. Spaces like Harrison Hot Springs offer a counterbalance, a site where the body can recalibrate after extended periods of cognitive and relational engagement.

As I moved between classroom intensity and mineral water stillness, I began to notice how landscape participates in learning. Reflection unfolded beyond note-taking or discussion; it unfolded through sensory grounding: heat on skin, mist in air, the visual continuity of mountain to water.

Creating this drawing became an extension of that integrative process. Through colour and line, I translated the embodied experience of rest into visual form. In this way, such artistic practices function as analytic tools, ways of processing experience that exceed text alone. The horizon line, repeated and reinforced across the page, mirrors the internal settling that occurs when the nervous system recognizes safety. In this way, the artwork is both memory and method, holding the quiet pedagogies of water, steam, and distance.

I am here.

Salgo otra vez. Pero esta vez, no me voy de mí misma. Me llevo conmigo.

I set out again. But this time, I carry myself forward. I take myself with me.

The research continues…

References

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.

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

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.

Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.

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

Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Behaviour and the natural environment (pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.

Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

ACADEMIC LENS

Winnicott’s (1958) observation that the genuine capacity to be alone is a developmental achievement grounds the inquiry of this post-return reflection: the question is whether alonetude, cultivated on the Third Shore, can survive reintroduction to “the crowded room.” Turner’s (1969) analysis of post-liminal reincorporation identifies this as the critical phase of transformation: the liminal change must be integrated into the social body’s demands or it will gradually erode. Van der Kolk (2014) describes the somatic equivalent: the newly regulated nervous system is vulnerable to re-traumatisation if the environment that originally generated dysregulation remains unchanged. The “practice of learning with intention” thus describes what Levine (2010) calls building somatic resources: the deliberate cultivation of experiences and practices that reinforce the nervous system’s capacity for regulation under social pressure. Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology suggests that this ongoing reflection, continuing beyond the formal research period, is itself part of the inquiry: the question of whether a different way of being is sustainable is a research question, and daily life is the research site.

Placed and Holding

Placed and holding, a short poem and photograph from Loreto, Baja California Sur. On what it means to belong to a place you have only just arrived in, and to feel, briefly, as though the ground remembers you.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Title: What Lies Beneath

Artist Statement

I took this photograph in a landscaped courtyard in Loreto, where volcanic rock had been arranged around the base of a cactus. The large red stone in the foreground drew my attention first. Its surface was rough and pitted, marked with white mineral deposits that traced the contours of its form like veins beneath skin. It rested on a bed of dark grey and black stones, smooth and rounded, clearly gathered and placed by human hands. Behind it, the green ridges of the cactus rose toward a doorway just beyond my view.

This is one of the photographs I have kept in colour. The red of the volcanic rock carries meaning that greyscale would flatten. The mineral white, the muted rose, the dark charcoal of the surrounding stones, these colours speak to origin and transformation. Volcanic rock remembers heat. It holds the shape of pressure and release, of matter that was once liquid and is now solid, porous, still.

I am drawn to stones that have been moved. Gathered from one place and set down in another, arranged to create order or beauty or simply to mark a boundary. These stones arrived here with intention. Someone chose them, carried them, positioned them around the cactus with intention. The red stone was placed to be seen. It holds its position like a body that knows it belongs, even if belonging required relocation.

In my scholarly and personal life, I think often about placement. Who decides where things go. Who arranges the landscape and for whom. The courtyard is designed, curated, maintained. The stones perform their role in a composition meant to welcome or impress. Yet the red rock carries its own history, its own memory of fire and cooling, its own slow accumulation of mineral and dust. It participates in the design without being reducible to it.

This image holds the tension between the natural and the arranged, between what the land offers and what human hands choose to do with it. The stone is both decoration and witness. It holds its ground amid the grey, asking nothing, offering only its texture and colour and the quiet fact of its presence.

The Long Way Home

Reading Time: 19 minutes

On Airports, Winter, and the Body’s Memory of Warmth

Title: Holding the Line

Artist Statement

I took this image for reasons beyond the pelicans being unusual. I took it because they felt immediately familiar.

They stood together on the dark rock at the edge of the water, each angled slightly differently, each absorbed in their own posture of rest or watchfulness. Some faced the sea. Some turned inward. All of them belonged to the moment they were in. As I watched, I felt a recognition settle in my body. This was a scene about presence rather than action.

What this moment stirred in me was an understanding I have been carrying for some time. Togetherness can exist without closeness, and connection can take shape without conversation. The pelicans shared space with ease. There was no tension in their spacing, no urgency in their stance. They seemed to know when stillness was enough.

Standing there, I felt accompanied without being required. That feeling matters to me. It reflects a way of being I am learning to honour in my own life and work, especially during periods of transition. There is care in remaining where you are. There is wisdom in pausing at the edge of things.

This reminds me that some forms of belonging are quiet. They rest on attentiveness, patience, and a shared horizon rather than exchange. The shoreline held us all, and for a while, that was sufficient.

Leaving in Full Light

The taxi arrived at 12:30 in the afternoon, and I was ready. Or I thought I was ready. I had spent the morning doing the things a body does when it is preparing to leave a place it has loved: walking the shoreline one last time, sitting on the bench behind the building with my journal, drinking coffee slowly in the small kitchen while the midday sun poured through the window and lay itself across the tile floor like an offering.

Loreto was wide awake around me. This was the difference I had never anticipated: leaving in full daylight, in the bright, unforgiving visibility of a Baja California afternoon. There was no cover of darkness, no pre-dawn mercy. Everything I was leaving was illuminated. The Sea of Cortez held the afternoon light in a thousand shifting planes of blue and silver. The Sierra de la Giganta stood sharp against a sky so clear it looked painted. The bougainvillea at the entrance of the casita blazed fuchsia, as if insisting I remember this colour, this exact shade, this intensity.

Me voy. I am leaving. And everything I am leaving is visible.

I had promised myself I would pause at the doorway. I did. I let my hand rest against the warm stucco of the casita doorframe and said thank you, silently, to the walls that had held me. To the small kitchen where I had made simple meals. To the bed where I had slept and woken and slept again, learning that rest could be trusted rather than feared. The stucco was warm under my palm, sun-heated, alive with the stored warmth of a January day in the desert. I held my hand there for a long moment, letting the warmth transfer. Then I lifted my hand. Then I turned away.

The driver loaded my bags into the trunk. I got into the car, and we pulled away from the casita, from the shoreline, from the thirty days that had changed everything about how I understood myself. The road to the airport wound through town, and I watched it all pass with the acute attention of someone who knows she is seeing something for the last time: the misión whose bells I had learned to anticipate, the malécon where I had walked each evening watching pelicans fold themselves into darkening water, the small tiendas with their hand-painted signs, the dogs sleeping in the shade.

The sea appeared and disappeared between buildings as we drove, a flash of blue, then gone, then blue again. Each glimpse felt like a small goodbye.

A warmth rose in my eyes as tears formed. It was time to say goodbye.

Title: Last Look at the Beach

Artist Statement

Memories of my final walk along the shoreline. The tide was retreating, leaving a mirrored gloss across the sand that blurred the boundary between land and sea. To the left, the rocky outcrop remains immovable, ancient, as the surf rolls in rhythm against it. The houses along the right edge of the frame glow in late morning sun, silent witnesses to thousands of arrivals and departures. This image captures the tension between permanence and passing, how the landscape stays while we move through it.

I was standing in the shallow surf when I framed this shot, already carrying the weight of leaving. The scene is too beautiful to take casually, and too bright to leave unnoticed. There is a particular cruelty to leaving in daylight, when everything is still illuminated, when the sea gleams and the sky is faultless, when no shadow shelters you from the ache of goodbye. The stillness of the scene is a kind of defiance. It says: you are going, and we stay.

As part of my visual inquiry, this photograph explores the aesthetics of impermanence. The tide will rise again. The footprints will fade. The mountains will remain. And in their quiet endurance, they remind us: we pass through, and remain in the places that held us.

There is a particular cruelty to leaving in daylight.

What I Take With Me

The inventory that matters is the one I carry in my body.

I want to name what I carry. I want to be precise about it, because precision is itself a practice, and because the things we carry deserve to be acknowledged rather than assumed.

In my luggage: fragments of blue tile gathered from construction sites and empty lots. Smoothed glass worn by the sea into something translucent and soft. An amber stone that caught the afternoon light in a field and made me stop walking and bend down. Painted rocks marked with colour during the quiet hours. Shells. A notebook filled with thirty days of writing. A camera full of images. These are the material artifacts, the physical evidence that I was here and that here changed me.

But the inventory that matters is the one I carry within me. This is what I take with me:

I practice slow attention. Thirty mornings of walking the same shoreline taught me that looking at the same thing again and again produces depth rather than boredom. I learned to see what the first glance misses: the shift in light between 7:15 and 7:45, the different textures of sand at different tides, the way a pelican adjusts its wings a fraction of a second before it dives. I carry this attention home. I will apply it to the Thompson River, to the winter light on snow, to the faces of people I have missed.

I take the capacity to rest without guilt. This was perhaps the hardest lesson. After nineteen years of precarious academic labour, my nervous system had been trained to associate rest with danger, stillness with failure, any moment of unproductivity with the threat of termination. In Loreto, I practised lying down in the middle of the afternoon, practised closing my eyes, practised doing nothing and letting nothing be enough. The guilt softened gradually. But it softened. And the softening is something I carry.

I take the knowledge that solitude can be chosen rather than only endured. Alonetude, the concept at the heart of this inquiry, names the labour of transforming imposed aloneness into intentional presence. What was structurally produced by institutional harm, by termination, by the sudden loss of professional identity, became, through daily practice, something generative. I learned to be with myself the way one learns any skill: through repetition, through patience, through the willingness to fail and begin again.

I take the sea inside me. This is harder to articulate, because it lives below language, in the body rather than the mind. Thirty days of waking to waves, of walking beside water, of falling asleep to the rhythm of the tide: all of this has inscribed itself into my nervous system. Stephen Porges (2011) would call it a recalibration of the autonomic baseline. I would call it the sea becoming a presence I carry, a felt sense of rhythm and constancy that lives in my chest even when the nearest water is the Thompson River, frozen and silent.

What fits in a bag is never everything. The rest I carry in my body.

I take my own voice. Beyond the performing voice, the one that learned to sound confident in meetings, competent in classrooms and grateful for every short-term contract. I take the voice that speaks in this blog, the one that thinks on the page, that allows itself uncertainty, that moves between English and Spanish because some truths require more than one language. Llevo mi voz. La verdadera.I carry my voice. The real one.

Title: What Fits in a Bag

Artist Statement

I am holding a sealed plastic bag filled with small, weathered fragments, ceramic tile, bone, glass, coral, and stone, collected over thirty days of walking. These are something beyond souvenirs in the traditional sense. They are artifacts of care: every object chosen, lifted, kept. Each one once discarded or forgotten by the world, now gathered in the palm as something worth holding.

This belongs to a larger inquiry into attention, memory, and material culture. The bag is light, yet carries the weight of presence, of showing up every day, of noticing what is overlooked, of witnessing small beauty in the ordinary. These fragments are records of practice rather than productivity. They resist metrics and outcomes. They say: someone was here, and they were paying attention.

As a counter-archive, this collection honours the slow, daily labour of healing. These objects hold no monetary value, but they testify to the worth of lived experience outside systems of valuation. I gathered them with the same hands that once typed reports, scrubbed dishes, comforted others. Now, they hold proof of my own return to self. What I could carry, I did. The rest remains, in the land, in the light, and in me.

The Anthropology of Transit

Perhaps non-places become places when we carry enough presence into them.

The flight to Calgary departed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and as the small plane lifted off, I pressed my face to the window. There it was below me: the water I had walked beside every morning, the shoreline I had photographed in all its moods, the town that had held me without asking anything in return. From above, Loreto looked so small. A scatter of white buildings between brown mountains and blue water. A place that barely registered on any map of significant things.

Adiós, Loreto. Gracias por todo.Goodbye, Loreto. Thank you for everything.

Marc Augé (1995), the French anthropologist, coined the term non-places to describe the spaces of transit that define contemporary life: airports, highways, hotel chains, and shopping centres. These are locations designed for movement rather than dwelling, for anonymity rather than relationship. Augé argues that non-places have proliferated in what he calls “supermodernity,” creating environments where individuals exist in solitary contractuality: bound by the same rules, sharing the same trajectory, yet fundamentally alone.

For Augé (1995), what distinguishes a place from a non-place is the presence of relational, historical, and identity-forming qualities. Where these are absent, the space remains anonymous and transient, a non-place.

I moved through the sequence of non-places that would carry me from Loreto to Los Cabos to Calgary, and I found myself attending to them differently than I might have before this month of practice. Alonetude had trained my attention. Even in spaces designed for anonymity, I noticed: the quality of light in the Loreto terminal, warmer than expected; the way strangers arranged themselves in waiting areas, maintaining careful distances, each person an island of private attention; the particular hum of airports, mechanical and constant, so different from the organic rhythms of the sea.

Something had shifted in me. Where I might once have experienced airport solitude as emptiness, I found myself settling into it as familiar territory. I knew how to be alone now. I knew how to let silence hold me rather than threaten me. The skills I had practised beside the sea were portable. They travelled with me into the non-place. Perhaps non-places become places when we carry enough presence into them.

Title: In Transit

Artist Statement

I took this photograph to mark the threshold. Beyond leaving or arriving, the suspended moment in between, where the place I have been is behind me, and the place I am going remains still ahead. Within this inquiry of self and place, this image holds a different kind of evidence: that transitions are worth documenting, that identity travels with us, stitched into our clothing, packed in carry-ons, held in our posture and our gaze.

The act of returning is never only about geography. It is also about re-entering stories, roles, and routines, with new insight quietly folded into the familiar. This is a quiet picture. But it is real. It says: I was in motion, I was between places, and I was awake to all of it.

Calgary: The Shock of Winter

The plane descended through grey cloud cover, and when it broke through, I saw snow. Miles of it, stretching to every horizon, white and pale grey and the dark lines of bare trees. The Rocky Mountains rose to the west, their peaks lost in cloud. The screen on the seatback told me the outside temperature was minus 18 degrees Celsius.

My body knew before my mind caught up. As the plane touched down, I felt a contraction in my shoulders, a tightening across my chest, a bracing I had forgotten I knew how to do. Stephen Porges (2011) describes this process as the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the nervous system’s capacity to evaluate risk and safety below the level of conscious awareness. Environmental cues, including temperature, light quality, and sensory familiarity, activate autonomic responses before thought can intervene. Cold is a cue the body reads as a potential threat: resources must be conserved, vigilance must increase, and the system must prepare.

I felt this reading happen in real time as I walked through the jetway into the Calgary terminal. The air was different. The light was different. Everything my body had learned to associate with safety over thirty days of warmth and sea air was suddenly absent.

Hace frío. Hace mucho frío.It is cold. It is so cold.

Yet there was recognition in the cold as well. Yi-Fu Tuan (1974), the geographer who coined the term topophilia, describes the deep, often unspoken bonds that form between humans and their environments through accumulated bodily experience. Topophilia is the affective tie between a person and a place: a love of place that lives in the muscles and the memory rather than in conscious thought. I had topophilia for Loreto now, new and tender, formed over thirty days of deliberate attention. But I also had topophilia for the Canadian winter, older and deeper, woven into my earliest memories of belonging. The cold that made me gasp was also the cold I had grown up in. My body remembered, even as it protested.

I stood in the customs line and reminded myself that I had skills now. I had practised holding difficult sensations. I had learned to breathe through discomfort rather than brace against it. I could meet this cold the way I had learned to meet loneliness: by acknowledging it, by staying present with it, by trusting that I could tolerate what was happening without being destroyed by it. The practice travelled. The practice was held.

Kamloops: The Final Descent

The connecting flight from Calgary to Kamloops took barely an hour, but it crossed a threshold more significant than distance. Kamloops is where I live. Kamloops is where integration happens, where the practice must prove itself portable, where everything I learned beside the sea meets the demands of ordinary life.

The plane descended over the Thompson River valley, and I pressed my face to the window. The landscape below was brown and white, sagebrush and snow, the particular semi-arid terrain of the British Columbia Interior that looks nothing like Baja California yet shares something essential: a spare beauty, a refusal of lushness, a landscape that asks you to look closely before it reveals what it offers.

Secwépemc Territory. I was returning to land that holds stories far older than my own, land that has been home to the Secwépemc people since time immemorial. The university where I worked and was terminated sits on this territory. My home sits on this territory. Any practice of presence I develop here must include awareness of whose land I am on, whose histories the ground holds, whose presence preceded and surrounds my own. The privilege of retreat, of choosing to leave and choosing to return, is itself a position that requires acknowledgment.

Estoy en casa. I am home. But “home” has become more complicated than it was thirty-one days ago.

The Threshold of Home

And then I was standing at my own front door, key in hand, luggage at my feet. The moment stretched. Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960) would have recognized this pause: the final threshold, the limen between journey and arrival, the last crossing before what he called incorporation is complete.

I had left this door thirty-one days ago, carrying exhaustion, grief, and the residue of nineteen years of precarious academic labour. I was returning through it now carrying fragments of blue tile, an amber stone, painted rocks, and something less visible but more important: the knowledge that I could hold myself. That I could sit with difficulty and let it transform rather than destroy. That I could choose solitude and find it generous.

Gaston Bachelard (1964) writes in The Poetics of Space that the house is our first universe, the original container of human beings. We carry our earliest houses inside us; they shape how we understand shelter and belonging forever after. The house protects the daydreamer, Bachelard argues. It allows us to dream in peace. I had spent thirty days in a temporary shelter, a casita that held me while I learned to dream again. Now I was returning to the permanent shelter, the one that holds my books and my art supplies and the accumulated objects of a life.

I turned the key. I pushed open the door. I stepped across.

Title: The Door I Return Through

Artist Statement

This photo marks the entrance to the Copper Room in Harrison Hot Springs, BC, where I began a two-week professional development retreat. The stone pillars and long corridor felt symbolic as I stood there on arrival. It was a passageway in every sense, architectural, emotional, and professional.

The towering trees framed the entry like quiet sentinels. I noticed how the stillness of the place contrasted with the nervous energy I carried. I had come here to stretch professionally, to learn new frameworks, to step into spaces of collaboration and growth. But I also brought with me questions about capacity, identity, and balance. What does it mean to keep learning while already carrying so much?

I often reflect on how informal experiences become sites of learning. This training retreat, though formally structured, also offered informal knowledge. Conversations over meals, silent walks between sessions, and the internal dialogue that surfaced while away from home all became part of the learning process.

This image reminds me that thresholds are everywhere. Sometimes they look like grand beginnings. Other times they appear as covered walkways leading toward something still ahead and uncharted. Here, I stepped forward again. I made the choice to enter, to participate, to allow professional learning to unfold alongside personal discovery. The path was both literal and metaphorical, and I walked it willingly.

What the House Holds

I came home for one day. Just long enough to open the windows, let fresh air move through the rooms, and wash the scent of sea salt and desert dust from my clothes. The house felt unfamiliar at first, like it had paused in my absence. The fridge was nearly empty. My bed, though familiar, felt heavy with winter blankets. Still, I moved through it with quiet purpose. I unpacked the pieces I had carried back, blue tiles, shells, and a single amber stone, and set them gently around the room, small anchors from another place. Then I turned to packing again.

This time, I prepared for something entirely different: a two-week professional development training at Harrison Hot Springs. I swapped beachwear for layers and packed my laptop, notebooks, and practical shoes. The shift from stillness to structure felt abrupt. I wondered if the clarity I had found walking the shoreline each morning could follow me into a hotel conference room. Would I still be able to hold space for reflection, for writing, for the quiet internal work that rarely fits inside a schedule?

The question that rose for me was this: Can I practice my alonetude here?

Alonetude, beyond loneliness, as a cultivated way of being, an intentional solitude shaped by curiosity and care. The kind of solitude that made me sit still in Loreto rather than rush. Will I find moments in Harrison to pause, to observe, to be present with myself? Or will the structure of professional training, the social expectations, the busy schedule, begin to blur those internal edges I worked so hard to sharpen?

I am curious how my learning will shift when placed in a new setting. Will the outer learning complement the inner? Can they sit side by side without one erasing the other? I pack these questions along with my belongings, unsure of the answers, but committed to paying attention. That, too, is part of the practice.

Estoy aquí. Estoy presente.I am here. I am present.

Title: Threshold, With Steam

Artist Statement

This image captures the thermal pools at Harrison Hot Springs, mist rising into cedar-scented air, soft steam blurring the line between water and sky. Twinkle lights wrap the bare branches of the tree in the foreground, glowing quietly against the grey. People soak, talk, float. The water is warm, the air cool, the mood liminal.

I took this photo from the edge, standing at the edge, watching. I wanted to notice what it means to arrive somewhere new with a body still adjusting to movement, with a mind that is used to solitude. I am in a shared space now, one designed for restoration but also for community. I wonder if there is room here for alonetude. Can solitude be practised within public space? Can I still observe without retreating, still hold the boundary between reflection and performance?

This photograph sits within a personal inquiry of movement, arrival, and inner continuity. It documents the tension I carry into this next phase: how to stay present in myself while stepping into structure and social expectation. I offer the image as a moment of threshold. The warmth invites me in. The mist allows me to remain a little hidden. For now.

The First Night Back

I woke at three in the morning, disoriented, reaching for the sound of the sea and finding silence. A silence so complete it felt physical. The waves that had accompanied every one of the thirty nights were gone, replaced by the hush of a Canadian winter night: the occasional creak of the house settling in cold, the distant rumble of a snowplough on a far street.

I reached for the amber stone beside my bed. Its smoothness in my palm was an anchor, a tangible link to everything I had learned. I held it and breathed, practising the attention I had cultivated, bringing myself into this present moment rather than grieving the moments that had passed.

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994), in Wherever You Go, There You Are, writes that mindfulness is available in every moment we choose to be present. It requires no particular location, no special equipment, no retreat from ordinary life. The breath is always here. The body is always now. I breathed in the Canadian winter air, dry and cold even inside the house, and let it pass through my lungs. I breathed out and felt my shoulders soften against the pillow.

I thought about Donald Winnicott’s (1958) concept of the capacity to be alone: the foundational psychological ability that develops, he argued, through the experience of being alone in the presence of a reliable other. A child learns to be with herself while a caregiver remains nearby, available without intruding. Gradually, the child internalizes this supportive presence and can tolerate aloneness without anxiety.

Something like this had happened in Loreto. The sea’s constancy, the practice of walking each morning, the permission to be with myself without performance: all of it had become a kind of inner presence, a reliable support I now carried within. I was alone in Kamloops at three in the morning, but I had company. The company was the practice itself, the capacity I had cultivated, the self that knew how to hold itself with tenderness rather than judgment.

Aquí estoy. Aquí sigo.Here I am. Here I continue.

Table 2

Bridges’ Transition Framework Applied to the Alonetude Return

Transition Phase	Description	Application to Day 31
Leaving the casita in full light, the hand on the warm doorframe; final glimpse of the sea between buildings; the taxi pulling away from the shoreline	Letting go of the old situation; acknowledging what is being lost; grieving the identity or structure that is ending	Leaving the casita in full light; the hand on the warm doorframe; final glimpse of the sea between buildings; the taxi pulling away from the shoreline
the in-between	The in-between time when the old is gone but the new has yet to fully arrive; disorientation; confusion; creative possibility	Leaving the casita in full light, the hand on the warm doorframe; final glimpse of the sea between buildings; the taxi pulling away from the shoreline
New Beginning	Integrating the new identity or situation; finding meaning in the changed reality; committing to moving forward	Crossing the threshold of home; placing Loreto fragments on the windowsill; practising presence at 3 a.m. in the cold; trusting that alonetude is portable and the third shore lives within

Note. Adapted from Bridges (2004). William Bridges distinguishes transitions from changes: change is situational (the new city, the new role, the end of the retreat), while transition is the psychological process of adapting to change. The in-between, often the most difficult phase, is where transformation actually occurs. Day 31 compresses all three phases into a single day of travel and arrival, requiring the body to move through ending, disorientation, and beginning in rapid succession. This compression may explain the particular exhaustion of return: the body is doing the work of three phases simultaneously.

Carrying the Practice Forward

The next morning, I walked to the window, the same way I had each morning in the casita, to see the sea. There was no sea. There was frost on glass, snow on trees, the particular quality of light that belongs to the Canadian Interior in February. I made tea, stood at the window, and practised presence. The same discipline of attention, applied to a different landscape. The same self, learning that the capacity for alonetude travels with her wherever she goes.

The third shore, I realized, had never been only about Loreto. The third shore is wherever we practise the intentional transformation of imposed aloneness into chosen solitude, wherever we attend to our own presence with care rather than judgment, wherever we resist the extractive demands of systems that would value us only for what we produce. The third shore is portable. I had carried it home with the fragments and the stone and the sea I now held inside my chest.

I will walk in Kamloops the way I walked in Loreto: with attention and without haste. I will protect time for alonetude within the press of obligations that will soon reassert themselves. I will remember what the retreat taught me: that I am more than what I produce. That rest is resistance. That slow attention is a discipline worth practising. That the body holds wisdom the mind cannot access alone. That solitude, chosen and inhabited with care, carries its own kind of company.

The fragments on the windowsill catch the morning light. The amber stone waits beside the bed. The practice continues.

Title: Amber, Carried

Artist Statement

I held this fragment in my hand, less for rarity or value than because it had weight and warmth. Found among scattered rocks near the sea, its honeyed glow caught the light like memory. This piece of amber, or perhaps just sea-worn glass, I never asked it to declare itself, became something I returned to again and again. Its edges are uneven. It fits nowhere perfectly. And yet, in the palm, it rests as if made to be held. I brought it home as proof rather than treasure. Of seeing. Of choosing. Of finding beauty in what washes loose. This shard was never fully mine, really. But for a time, I was the one who carried it.

The journey from Loreto to Calgary to Kamloops took hours, tracing a line across time zones, climates, and the subtle thresholds between who I was there and who I must be here.

But the journey home is longer. It will take the rest of my life.

La tercera orilla vive en mí ahora. Adondequiera que vaya, la llevo conmigo.

The third shore lives in me now. Wherever I go, I carry it with me.

References

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1992)

Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Orion Press. (Original work published 1958)

Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes(2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice-Hall.

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

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.

Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

ACADEMIC LENS

The airport as a site of somatic renegotiation marks this post as a direct continuation of the Day Two Clinical Layover entry: the same liminal non-place, but now occupied by a different nervous system. Van der Kolk’s (2014) central argument is that healing is measurable in the body’s changed response to environments that previously triggered dysregulation, and the comparison between the outbound and homebound airports provides exactly this somatic measurement. The “body’s memory of warmth” also engages what Bachelard (1969) calls the phenomenology of heat: the way warmth registers as both temperature and safety, nurturance, and welcome in the somatic imagination. Levine’s (2010) concept of the “felt sense” applies directly: the warmth of the Sea of Cortez has been encoded as a somatic resource, a memory the nervous system can access to orient toward safety even in unfamiliar or demanding environments. The pelicans holding the line together also perform what Porges (2011) calls co-regulation through proximity: the nervous systems of others, human or animal, can support one’s own regulation when genuine presence rather than performance characterizes the contact.

What I Gathered

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Artist Statement

I bent down to collect them. Three fragments of blue tile, scattered across the grey concrete where something had broken and no one had swept up. They were cool in my palm, smooth on one side and rough on the other where the adhesive had once held them to a surface I would never see. I gathered them without knowing why, only that they asked to be picked up.

This is one of the photographs I have kept in colour. The blue is too insistent to mute. Against the grey of the pavement and the pink of my open hand, the tile fragments glow like something rescued. They are small, irregular, each one shaped by the break that freed it from the whole. The largest is no bigger than my thumb. The smallest could disappear between my fingers. Together, they form a collection that makes sense only to me.

I am drawn to fragments. To what remains after something larger has come apart. These tiles were once part of a pattern, a wall or a floor or a decorative edge designed to hold together. Now they exist as pieces, separated from their original purpose, available for reinterpretation. I witnessed none of the breaking. I only arrived in time to gather what was left.

In my scholarly and personal life, I have come to understand that wholeness is rarely the goal. Sometimes what matters is the willingness to collect what has scattered, to hold the pieces in an open hand without demanding they reassemble into what they were. The tile fragments have no need to become a wall again. They are enough as they are: blue, broken, held.

The photograph situates my body in the encounter. My hand is visible, open, cradling rather than grasping. The lines of my palm map a different kind of history, one written in skin rather than clay. The fragments rest where I placed them, trusting the hand that gathered them. I kept them. I carried them home. They sit now on my desk, small witnesses to the practice of noticing what others leave behind.

Fallen Sweetness

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Artist Statement

I almost walked past it. An orange, vivid and whole, resting on the dry earth as if it had been placed there by intention rather than chance. The ground around it was grey and brown, scattered with stones, dried grass, and brittle leaves. The orange held its colour like a small act of defiance. It was unexpected here, and yet here it was.

How the orange arrived is a mystery to me. Perhaps it fell from a bag. Perhaps it rolled from a table and was never retrieved. Perhaps someone left it as an offering, though to whom or what I cannot say. The fruit showed no sign of decay. Its skin was smooth, its form intact. The slow return to earth had yet to begin. For now, it simply rested, bright and round, waiting for what would come next.

I am drawn to moments of incongruity. Objects that appear in the wrong place, disrupting the visual grammar of a place. The orange interrupts the palette of the desert floor the way unexpected kindness interrupts a difficult day. It simply arrives and asks to be noticed, without explaining itself.

In my broader practice, I attend to what the land holds and what passes through it. Most of what I photograph is grey, weathered, marked by time and use. This orange offered something else. A reminder that colour still exists even when I have chosen to look without it. A small brightness that insisted on its own terms. I photographed it because it held my eye, and I kept it in colour because some things ask to be seen exactly as they are.
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

I almost missed it.

A small sun
resting on the ground,
unapologetic in its brightness.

The earth around it
spoke in quieter tones
grey stone
dried grass
the brittle vocabulary of endings.

And then this
round insistence of colour.

An orange
whole
unbruised
holding its sweetness
as if it had been placed there
by a careful hand
rather than by accident.

I stood longer than I expected.
Long enough to feel
how disruption works.

How colour interrupts fatigue.
How kindness arrives
without introduction.

In a landscape, I have been rendering
in black and white
reducing the world
to shadow and structure
This fruit refused translation.

It stayed vivid.
It held its colour
against my preference for restraint.

It was asked to remain
exactly as it was.

How it came to rest there
is beyond my knowing.
Fallen from a bag
rolled from a table
left as an offering
to no one
and to everyone.

Its surface was unbroken.
No softening
no collapse
no return yet
to the soil that waited beneath it.

It was still
fully itself.

I photographed it
because it interrupted
the grammar of the ground.

Because it reminded me
that brightness persists
even where dust gathers.

Because sometimes
what arrives unexpected
saves the moment
from monotony.

I left it where I found it.
A small act of colour
resting in a field of restraint
holding sweetness
against the pull of time.

Title: What the Sweetness Leaves Behind

Photograph from “Fallen Sweetness”, image 2.

ACADEMIC LENS

The fallen orange as a site of phenomenological inquiry enacts what Moustakas (1961) describes as the heuristic researcher’s quality of attention: the capacity to pause before what has been overlooked and find, in the seemingly unremarkable, the grounds for genuine insight. Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of material imagination applies precisely: the orange’s colour, its wholeness against the grey and brown of the dry earth, its having-been-placed quality despite the absence of a deliberate placer, all constitute an encounter with material reality that invites the imagination into larger territories of meaning. The “vivid and whole” quality of the orange also resonates with Levine’s (2010) somatic concept of resilience: the capacity to remain intact, complete in one’s essential nature, despite having fallen from one’s context of origin. For the precarious academic who has spent nineteen years falling from contract to contract, the orange’s stubborn wholeness offers what van der Kolk (2014) calls a somatic corrective: a material image of survival that asks no compromise of the essential self. Tuan (1977) might note that this unremarkable stretch of dry earth has become, through this moment of attention, a genuine place: ordinary ground transformed by the act of pausing to look.

Allowing Space

Allowing space, what it looks like when a body begins to trust that rest is permitted. A reflective essay and photograph on the practice of giving yourself room to be without performance, without justification.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Title: The Walk

Photograph from “Allowing Space”, image 1.

Artist Statement

I took this photograph because it shows what allowing looks like. The crosswalk is structured, measured, painted in precise intervals, the way institutions measure time in semesters and syllabi and contract renewals.

But beyond it, the path becomes something else: stone fitted by hand, plants growing without permission, shade falling where it will. This is the crossing I am learning to make. From the arithmetic of productivity to the organic unfolding of creative time. From the lie that my worth equals my usefulness to the truth that my hours belong to me.

Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) writes that all transitions begin with an ending and move through a disorienting middle before arriving somewhere new. This photograph captures that middle space, the threshold where one way of being has ended and another has yet to fully form. I stand at the edge of the stripes, looking toward the garden, deciding to cross. The crossing is the allowing. The path beyond is what waits when I stop measuring and start living.

For nineteen years, I gave my hours away, parcelled them into syllabi and semesters, measured them in student emails answered past midnight, in committee meetings that stole Sunday afternoons, in the endless performance of being enough.

I had never been told my time belonged to me.

I thought it belonged to the institution, to the students who needed me, to the colleagues who counted on me, to the phantom promise of a contract renewed.

I thought rest was something I would earn later, after the grading was done, after the course was redesigned, after I had proven, finally and forever, that I deserved to stay.

Later never came.

Title: What the Ground Holds

Photograph from “Allowing Space”, image 2.

Artist Statement

I came across this mark without looking for it. A dark stain on pale gravel, irregular, almost bodily in its shape. It looked as though something had been set down and then lifted away, leaving evidence behind. I stopped because my body recognized it before my mind did.

What this image reminds me of is how much is carried quietly by the ground beneath us. Loss, spillover, residue. The moments that arrive without announcing their importance, yet remain. I thought about how often I have moved through days leaving parts of myself behind in small, unnoticed ways. Fatigue. Grief. Effort. Care. None of it dramatic. All of it real.

There is a tendency to tidy meaning, to clean up what feels uncomfortable or ambiguous. This mark resists that impulse. It is uneven. It resists easy resolution into a symbol. It simply exists. That matters to me. It mirrors the way experience often lands in the body and in memory, less as a story with a clear beginning and end than as something that seeps in and stays.

Standing there, I felt a quiet permission to acknowledge what lingers after long periods of giving, striving, and holding things together. The ground accepts without judgment what falls onto it. It absorbs. It remembers. It carries on. I find comfort in that. It suggests that presence leaves traces, even when there is no witness.

This image stays with me because it affirms a truth I am learning to trust. That what is left behind still counts. That marks of passage, effort, and release require no interpretation to be valid. Sometimes they only need to be seen.

Now I am learning a different arithmetic.

An hour spent painting stones is an hour spent fully. An afternoon watching light move across water is an afternoon found. A morning with no agenda, no output, no proof of productivity: a morning given, never stolen from something more important.

This is the hardest math I have ever done: subtracting the lie that my worth equals my usefulness, adding back the hours that belong to no one but me.

Title: Being Received

Photograph from “Allowing Space”, image 3.

Artist Statement

I remember arriving here without urgency. The body had already slowed before the mind caught up. Morning light moved through the trees and settled across the stones, touching everything gently, as if to say there was time.

What this place brought back to me was the feeling of being received rather than evaluated. The ground was uneven beneath my feet, rounded stones fitted together by hand, asking me to pay attention to how I walked. The light did the same. It filtered rather than flooded, offering warmth without demand. I felt myself soften in response.

I have spent many years arriving in spaces that asked me to explain myself quickly, to justify my presence, to prove my value. This moment asked for something different. It invited stillness. It invited noticing. It allowed me to arrive as a body first, before arriving as a role or a set of credentials.

Standing there, I felt the quiet relief of entering a place where time moved differently. Where welcome was expressed through shade, texture, and light rather than expectation. It reminded me that arrival can be gentle. That being present requires no performance. That some places meet us exactly where we are.

This image holds that memory for me. A reminder that arrival can feel like exhale. That there are spaces in the world where nothing is required beyond paying attention and letting oneself be held by the moment.

Creative space arrives only when allowed.

It must be protected from the voices that say you should be working, from the guilt that rises when the hands are still, from the old habit of filling every silence with effort, with striving, with the desperate attempt to outrun my own disposability.

Allowing is an act of will. Allowing is an act of faith. Allowing is an act of resistance against every system that taught me my time belonged to others.

I am learning to say: This hour is for colour. This hour is for stillness. This hour is for the part of me that wants to make something, simply for the making, beyond grading or publishing or praise, but because making is what humans do when they are allowed to be human.

I am learning to say: This needs no justification. I owe no explanation. Creativity requires no proof through outcomes, impacts, and metrics.

The counting was the problem. The measuring was the cage.

Creative space is full. It is full of everything I pushed aside while I was busy surviving: the colours I wanted to play with, the shapes I wanted to explore, the questions I wanted to follow without knowing where they led.

Creative space is necessary, rather than indulgent. It is medicine. It is the room where the soul remembers what it came here to do.

I am learning that allowing is wisdom, never laziness. I am learning that rest is strength, never weakness. I am learning that the hours I give to creativity belong here, taken from nothing more important.

They are the important things. They have always been important. I had simply been unable to see it through the fog of exhaustion, through the fear of inadequacy, through the relentless demand to produce, to prove, to perform.

Today I allow.

I allow the paintbrush in my hand. I allow the stone on the table. I allow the afternoon to unfold without a plan, without a product, without anything to show for it except a quiet body and a heart that remembers it is allowed to want what it wants.

This is everything. The scope is vast.

This is the revolution that happens when a woman who was taught to give herself away finally decides to keep a little something for herself.

Title: What Endures

Photograph from “Allowing Space”, image 4.

Artist Statement

I stopped here because the rock felt steady in a way I needed to witness. It rose from the ground with a quiet confidence, fractured yet held together, shaped by pressure, weather, and time. Shrubs and branches reached across it, adapting themselves to its presence rather than overcoming it. Nothing here appeared polished or resolved. Everything felt honest.

This place reminded me that endurance rarely looks graceful. It looks layered. It carries cracks, weight, and evidence of strain. I thought about how often strength is imagined as smoothness or clarity, when lived experience tells a different story. What lasts is usually shaped by friction, shaped by remaining when retreat would have been easier.

Standing before this formation, I felt my own history reflected back to me. Years of pressure. Years of holding. Years of adapting to structures that asked for more than they offered. And still, something essential remained. Grounded. Present. Capable of bearing weight without breaking.

I am drawn to the way the shrubs have grown around and alongside the rock, finding their own lines through what was already there. That relationship feels important to me, the way endurance and growth can coexist, each shaping the other over time. The rock holds its ground beside the plant. The plant finds its way around the rock. They persist together, finding whatever space allows itself to be found.

I return to this image as a reminder that persistence leaves a form. That survival reshapes the body and the land in similar ways. That remaining is itself a kind of quiet courage.

Title: Learning the Water’s Pace

Photograph from “Allowing Space”, image 5.

Artist Statement

I made this without knowing what it would become. I was following colour rather than outcome, letting blue settle where it wanted, allowing darker tones to drift and pool. The paper absorbed more slowly than I expected. Small fibres caught pigment and held it, creating marks that felt almost like rain or memory or breath moving through water.

What this work reminds me of is how different it feels to create without direction. There was no plan here, no sketch to guide my hand. I stayed with the movement instead. I watched how one layer changed the next. I waited for the surface to respond before adding anything more. Time stretched. My body softened. I felt myself listening rather than deciding.

I have spent years working in systems that reward speed, clarity, and completion. This piece lives outside that rhythm. It belongs to a slower register, one that allows uncertainty to remain present. The marks are uneven. The edges wander. Nothing is corrected. That feels important. It mirrors a way of being I am learning to trust, where meaning emerges through patience rather than force.

As I worked, I thought about water as teacher. Water rushes nowhere. It shapes through repetition, through staying, through contact. This piece holds that lesson for me. It reminds me that creativity requires no justification, and that stillness can be active, generative, and alive.

This is what it feels like to let the work arrive on its own terms. To remain with it. To allow.

References

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.

ACADEMIC LENS

The crosswalk as a visual metaphor for institutional measurement, measured, painted in precise intervals like “semesters and syllabi and contract renewals,” places this reflection within Nixon’s (2011) analysis of slow violence: the way institutional structures impose their temporal logic on the body, scheduling its attention, availability, and output according to institutional rather than biological or human need. The path beyond the crosswalk that “allows” without prescribing enacts what Levine (2010) calls somatic freedom: the experience of movement without predetermination that the institutionalised body has been denied. Van der Kolk (2014) argues that one of trauma’s most pervasive effects is the foreclosure of spontaneity: the hypervigilant nervous system is always already prepared for what comes next, leaving no space for genuine openness. Winnicott’s (1971) concept of potential space is also relevant: allowing space, both physical and psychological, is the precondition for play, creativity, and the discovery of genuine desire. The practice of “allowing” described here is actively counter-cultural rather than passive: it refuses the institutional demand for constant purposeful motion and insists on the right to open, undetermined movement as a form of human dignity.

Alonetude as Possibilism

Reading Time: 8 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work on alonetude: intentional, embodied solitude as a healing practice.

“The environment confines, and yet it leaves me room to act. That narrow room is where a life gets made.”

I am standing at the edge of the Sea of Cortez on my third morning in Loreto, ankle deep, watching the light come up pink over the Sierra de la Giganta. The water is colder than it looks. There is a wind from the north that I had no part in choosing, a tide that arrived on its own schedule, a stretch of rocky shore that decides where I can enter and where I cannot. I have come here alone for thirty days, and the sea in front of me is utterly indifferent to my plans. It will be what it is. The question I carried into the water that morning, the question that became this whole essay, was simple and very old: how much of what happens to me here will the sea decide, and how much will I?

That question has a long history in geography. For a discipline that spends its days studying the relationship between people and the earth, the oldest argument of all is about who holds the power in that relationship. Does the environment shape us, set our limits, write our fate? Or do we shape it, choosing our lives from within whatever the land offers? I want to tell you about that argument, because I have come to believe that the small, private practice I named alonetude (the intentional transformation of imposed aloneness into chosen solitude) is one quiet answer to it.

The Oldest Argument in Geography

For a long stretch of the discipline’s history, the dominant answer was that the environment decides. This view came to be called environmental determinism (the belief that climate and terrain directly govern human character, culture, and capacity). Judkins, Smith, and Keys (2008) trace its high point to roughly 1890 to 1920, when geographers asserted that environmental factors were the determinative cause of cultural practices, moral values, and the ultimate capabilities of any given population. It was, they show, a logic that ranked peoples by their climates and lent a scientific gloss to colonial hierarchy. Determinism was never merely a flawed idea. It was a tool that decided what land and its peoples were permitted to mean.

The reaction against it gave us a second answer. Judkins and colleagues (2008) describe the arrival, after 1920, of what they call cultural possibilism, a framework that reduced the environment from a dictate to a force of constraint and enablement, preserving only a muted sense of influence. Possibilism holds that the environment sets limits and offers materials, while human beings choose among the possibilities those materials allow. The founder of the view, Paul Vidal de la Blache, put it plainly in a line that Kriesel preserves: nature provides materials that have their limitations, and that “lend themselves to certain uses rather than to others. To this extent nature does make suggestions, and at times restrictions” (as cited in Kriesel, 1968, p. 562). The sea makes suggestions. The sea imposes restrictions. Within them, I act.

I love that Vidal de la Blache used the word suggestions. Standing in that cold water, I could feel the truth of it in my own body. The sea was suggesting. The wind was restricting. Neither was commanding. The space between suggestion and command is exactly the space where a self lives.

Confining, and Yet Not Determining

The phrase that has stayed closest to me through the writing of this piece comes from a presidential address that the geographer Risa Palm delivered to the Association of American Geographers in the mid-1980s. Human geographers, she argued, should understand the interactions between people and environment as “neither random nor law-given but rather the combination of historical circumstance of both long and short duration, confining and yet not determining human behavior” (Palm, 1986, p. 469). I have read that line more times than I can count. Confining, and yet not determining. Six words that hold the whole of what I went to Loreto to learn.

Palm reached this through a study of how Californians responded to the risk of earthquakes, a hazard that confines a life absolutely and yet leaves people with real and varied choices about how to live alongside it. Her insistence on holding agency (the human capacity to act and to produce effects in the world) together with structure (the durable conditions that constrain and enable that action) is what geographers call the structure and agency relationship. She refused to let either pole win. The earth confines us. We are far from helpless within the confinement. Both truths hold at once, and the honest work is to live inside their tension rather than collapsing it toward fate or toward fantasy.

This is the geography of my own history, and I want to be careful and truthful here. For nineteen years I have worked as a contract academic, semester to semester, never certain whether the next term would hold a place for me. Precarity is a confining structure. It is real, it is external, and it would be a lie to pretend that wanting my situation otherwise could dissolve it. The determinist temptation, in a precarious life, is to let the structure narrate everything, to conclude that the system has already decided my worth and my exhaustion. Palm’s six words are my refusal of that conclusion. The contract confines me. It has never fully determined me. Alonetude is the name I give to what I do in the room that confinement leaves open.

From Constraint to Possibility

If Palm taught me to hold confinement and freedom together, the sociologists Richard York and Jordan Fox Besek gave me a way to feel the difference between a condition and a sentence. Writing in Sociological Inquiry, they distinguish determinism from what they call potentiality. A determinist account looks for the single cause that dictates an outcome. A potentiality account, by contrast, “recognizes biology as intertwined with other factors, leading to alternatives and options as much as to constraints” (York & Besek, 2019, p. 326). Conditions, on this view, are “part of what makes human history, but they are not the master influence. They interact with many other forces, providing potential pathways for societies” (York & Besek, 2019, p. 327).

Potential pathways. When I read those words, I understood what my thirty days by the sea had been for. I had gone to Loreto carrying a determinist story about myself, the story that a childhood organized around fear and a working life organized around insecurity had simply fixed me as a certain kind of anxious, over-functioning person. York and Besek let me see that story for what it was: a monocausal explanation, the very thing potentiality refuses. My history was real. It was a condition rather than a master. It opened pathways as much as it closed them. The thirty days were a long walk down a pathway my conditions had left open all along, one I had been too depleted to see.

This is the heart of why I call alonetude a kind of possibilism. The sea imposed cold, wind, tide, and rock. Precarity imposed insecurity and a thinned-out sense of welcome in my own profession. My early life imposed a nervous system trained toward threat. These were my milieu, in Vidal de la Blache’s sense, the given conditions of my situation. And the daily practice of alonetude, the morning swim, the slow walk along the malecón, the writing done before the heat arrived, was the work of choosing a life from within them. I had no power to choose the sea. I could choose to turn it into a place that held me.

What the Water Gave Back

There is a danger in this kind of essay, and I want to name it so I avoid it. To celebrate human agency too loudly is to drift back toward the romantic illusion that we can conquer any circumstance through sheer will, an illusion that is just determinism wearing the opposite mask. Palm guards against this. So do York and Besek. Conditions are real. Some confinements stay confining no matter how I narrate them. A contract that ends still ends. A cold sea is still cold. The point of possibilism is never that constraint dissolves. The point is that constraint and choice arrive together, braided, and that a life is made in the braiding.

I think this is why open water has taught me more about possibilism than any book. When I swim out past where I can stand, I enter an environment that confines me utterly. The water sets the temperature, the swell, the limit of how far and how long. And yet within that confinement I am intensely, gloriously free: free in my stroke, my breath, my pace, my decision to turn back or to go on. The swimmer’s body knows what the geographers argued about for a century. The water suggests. The water restricts. Within the suggestion and the restriction, I am the one who swims.

On my last morning in Loreto I went into the Sea of Cortez one more time, into the same cold that had asked me the question on my third day. The sea had decided nothing about me in thirty days. It had only offered conditions, a milieu of salt and light and solitude, and left me to make of them what I could. What I made was a self a little more able to rest, a little more able to believe that being alone could be a chosen good rather than a sentence served. That is alonetude. That is possibilism, lived in the first person, at the edge of a sea that confined me and, in confining me, set me free to choose.

References

Judkins, G., Smith, M., & Keys, E. (2008). Determinism within human-environment research and the rediscovery of environmental causation. The Geographical Journal, 174(1), 17-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00265.x

Kriesel, K. M. (1968). Montesquieu: Possibilistic political geographer. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58(3), 557-574. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1968.tb01652.x

Palm, R. (1986). Coming home. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 76(4), 469-479. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1986.tb00130.x

York, R., & Besek, J. F. (2019). Social evolution and environmental context: Explanative pluralism and potentiality. Sociological Inquiry, 89(2), 317-338. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12267

Academic Lens

This post grounds the concept of alonetude in the classical determinism and possibilism debate within human geography, drawing on peer-reviewed journal scholarship rather than a survey textbook. Judkins, Smith, and Keys (2008) supply the historical arc from environmental determinism to cultural possibilism, while Kriesel (1968) preserves Vidal de la Blache’s founding articulation of possibilism in the geographer’s own translated words. The argumentative spine comes from two complementary sources. Palm’s (1986) presidential address models the structure and agency synthesis that refuses both environmental fate and voluntarist fantasy, captured in her phrase “confining and yet not determining.” York and Besek’s (2019) distinction between determinism and potentiality reframes conditions as opening “potential pathways” rather than dictating outcomes, which provides the conceptual hinge by which a personal history becomes a milieu rather than a sentence. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post enacts its own argument: the first-person account of a thirty-day retreat performs the possibilist claim that a self is made through chosen action within given constraint. The open-water swimming passages extend the argument into embodied, more-than-textual knowledge, positioning the swimmer’s negotiated relationship with water as possibilism felt in the body.

Taking My Body Back

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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

I am taking my body back
from systems that treat endurance as a virtue
and exhaustion as a personal flaw.

I gave years to work without limits,
to teaching, care, and constant availability,
to building futures while postponing my own.
I called this commitment.
My body called it extraction.

When my body withdrew consent,
It was information,
never weakness.
It was a boundary where dignity begins.

Burnout is structural evidence,
never individual failure.

I am taking my body back
from productivity as worth,
from unpaid labour dressed as passion,
from the idea that rest must be earned.

This is reclamation,
rather than withdrawal.

My body carries the record
that policies ignore.
It remembers what institutions forget.

Taking my body back
is a human rights practice.
The right to health.
The right to rest.
The right to work without erasure.

I move more slowly now.
I listen longer.
I stop when stopping is required.

This is alonetude.
This is consent.
This is a refusal.

My body is no longer extractable.

Image: When the Body Withdraws Consent

Photograph from “Taking My Body Back”, image 1.

Note. A single running shoe rests on volcanic sand, emptied of the body that once relied on it for endurance and escape. The shoe functions as an embodied artifact rather than a symbol, registering a moment of refusal. Its stillness marks the point at which movement ceased to be restorative and became extractive. In this inquiry, the object is treated as data within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, documenting how prolonged institutional demands inscribe themselves onto the body and how withdrawal becomes a protective, rights-bearing response. The absence of motion here is evidence, never failure.

Shoe as Witness

I had no plan to photograph meaning. I noticed the shoe because it felt familiar.

It was worn, emptied, left behind without ceremony. No drama. No collapse staged for recognition. Just an object that had reached the end of what it could give. Standing there, I felt a quiet recognition settle in my body. This is what it looks like when consent is withdrawn.

There is vulnerability in admitting that stopping arrived beyond my choosing. For years, I believed endurance was a moral good. I learned to equate commitment with overextension, capacity with worth. That belief was reinforced daily by academic life, where staying available, absorbing uncertainty, and carrying invisible labour were treated as evidence of professionalism. When my body finally refused, I read it as failure. I had yet to understand that collapse can be a form of protection.

With some distance, perspective begins to shift. Burnout is never solitary in its emergence. It accumulates. It settles into muscle, breath, and gait. What I once framed as personal weakness now appears as a predictable response to prolonged insecurity and unrelenting demand. The shoe holds this point without argument. It records stopping as fact, without apology.

The action, small as it seems, was noticed. Pausing long enough to see the shoe as more than debris. Photographing it. Allowing it to stand as data rather than decoration. This is how my research is unfolding now, through attention rather than acceleration. Objects speak when I stop trying to outrun them.

Scholarly engagement lives quietly inside this moment. Trauma-informed scholarship reminds us that the body remembers what environments require us to override. Labour research names how systems normalize depletion while individualizing its consequences. Human rights frameworks affirm the right to rest, to health, to work that requires no self-erasure. No summoning of those texts was needed while standing there. They were already present, carried in my body, waiting to be acknowledged.

This image belongs to the same counter-archive as the stones, the shadows, the painted surfaces, the early mornings by the water. Together, they document something institutions rarely record: the moment a body stops agreeing to conditions that diminish it. They track fatigue, refusal, and the slow work of recovery.

In this work, taking the body back is understood as a human rights practice.

I am no longer interested in proving resilience. I am interested in listening to what the body says when it is finally allowed to speak.

This shoe tells that story better than I ever could.

ACADEMIC LENS

The declarative act of “taking my body back” names what van der Kolk (2014) identifies as the central task of trauma recovery: re-establishing the embodied self’s sovereignty over its own experience, after prolonged periods in which institutional demands have overridden the body’s own signals of need, limit, and preference. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour provides the structural analysis: the body was instrumentalized rather than simply used, its endurance treated as a renewable resource rather than a finite one with real costs. Nixon’s (2011) framework of slow violence names the mechanism: each individual demand seemed reasonable in isolation, while their cumulative effect constituted a sustained violation of the right to bodily integrity and rest. Menakem (2017) argues that recovery requires the intellectual understanding of harm alongside but the somatic reclamation of the body’s authority: learning to listen to, trust, and act on the body’s signals rather than overriding them in service of institutional legibility. The statement “I am taking my body back” is thus both personal and political: it refuses the institutional definition of the body as a tool for productivity and insists on its dignity as a site of knowledge, feeling, and inherent worth.

Listening to Stone

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my doctoral and master’s work and on my thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez.

“The rock had been there for ten thousand years before me, and it knew how to wait.”

There was a rock in Loreto that became my friend. I am aware of how that sounds. It was a low shelf of pale stone near the water where I sat each evening of my thirty days alone, and somewhere in the second week I stopped thinking of it as scenery and started thinking of it as a presence. It held the day’s heat into the dark. It had a worn place that fit my body. When I left it each night I found myself saying a quiet goodbye, and when I returned each evening something in me settled, the way it settles when you reach a person you trust. The rock had been there for ten thousand years before me, and it knew how to wait. I felt, sitting on it, that it was teaching me something about waiting too.

For most of my life I would have dismissed this as a lonely woman projecting feeling onto an inert object. Then I found that geography takes the liveliness of matter seriously, stone included, and that a whole field has formed around the idea that the nonhuman world acts upon us in ways we have been trained to overlook. This post is about listening to stone, and about why that phrase names something real, demanding, and finally a matter of justice.

The Liveliness of Matter

The thinker who opened this door for many of us is the political theorist Jane Bennett, whose idea of vibrant matter (the proposal that physical matter is lively and active, with a capacity to affect the world, rather than being dead, passive stuff) reshaped how geographers regard the material world. Bennett (2010) argues that things we treat as inert, including metals and minerals, possess their own vitality and their own small powers, and that what we call agency arises from the interplay of many human and nonhuman forces rather than belonging to humans alone. Reading her, I understood that my rock was not a backdrop to my retreat. It was a participant in it.

Geographers took this conviction and tested it against the most stubbornly solid thing they could find, which is stone itself. Edensor (2011), studying the weathering and repair of a three-hundred-year-old church in Manchester, demonstrates that even building stone is mutable and continuously emergent, worked upon by water, frost, pollution, and time, so that the apparently fixed fabric of the church is forever changing through the agency of nonhuman forces (Edensor, 2011). His argument undid my assumption that solidity means stillness. The stone of that church, he shows, is an ongoing event rather than a finished fact, held in being only through constant relation and repair (Edensor, 2011). My rock, too, was an event in slow motion, not a thing.

Deep Time and the Constant Wobbling

What I felt on that warm shelf of stone, the sense of being in the presence of something vastly patient, has a name in this literature as well. Valtonen and Pullen (2021), writing about their bodily encounters with rocks across the world, describe stone as lively and agentic, holding the capacity to affect us, to stop us, to slow our hurried movements and invite us to sit and feel the ground (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021). They draw on the idea that what looks like permanence is really a constant wobbling, the slow, ceaseless geological movement that surpasses human perception because it unfolds across billions of years, so that the contrast between geological time and our own busy hours becomes almost unbearable to hold (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021).

Their most startling move reaches into the body, and it carries forward something I wrote in an earlier post in this series about the body as an ecosystem. Valtonen and Pullen (2021) remind us, through the deep history of mineralization that first made bone, that the human skeleton is itself a geological achievement, so that we might think of ourselves as creatures partly made of stone, with no clean separation of flesh from earth (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021). I sat on that rock in Loreto carrying a skeleton that was, in the longest view, kin to it. The geos was inside me as much as beneath me. Listening to stone, it turns out, is partly listening to myself.

What a Stone Can Do

The anthropologist Hugh Raffles offers the question that has stayed with me longest. Rather than asking what a stone is, he asks what a stone can do, and the asking changes everything. Raffles (2012) answers that a stone can endure and can change, can wound and can heal, can hold a person’s memories, and can serve, in its long silence, as a kind of teacher (Raffles, 2012). He found that swapping the nouns we pin on stones for verbs let the stones step out of their supposed deadness and into the light as active, protean things (Raffles, 2012).

This is exactly what my rock did. It endured, holding its place against the sea. It changed, warming and cooling with the day. It healed, in the plain sense that sitting on it each evening mended something in me. And it taught, without a word, the patience of a thing that measures time in epochs. Raffles gave me permission to take my own experience at face value. The rock was doing something. I was right to listen.

The Politics Underneath the Stone

I want to be careful here, because listening to stone can curdle into a gentle mysticism that ignores how the earth has been used as a weapon. Geographers have insisted on the harder edge. Griffiths (2025), writing on the colonisation of Palestine, develops the idea of the geos (the domain of the geological, the soil and rock and mineral, treated in Western thought as lifeless and therefore available for extraction). Drawing on the work of Kathryn Yusoff and others, he shows how the very category of nonlife has been used to render both land and certain human lives as inert, commodifiable, and expendable, so that geology and colonial violence have advanced together (Griffiths, 2025). Yusoff’s argument, which he builds upon, is that every account of a shared human geological age erases the Black and Indigenous death that extraction has always required (Griffiths, 2025).

This stops me, and it should. To treat stone as dead is not a metaphysical error alone. It has been a license for dispossession, the same logic that treats land as empty and peoples as obstacles. And I have to add a note of humility that my own position demands. The recognition that stone and land are alive and relational, which Western theory now presents as a discovery, is knowledge that Indigenous peoples have carried for millennia. As a settler scholar sitting on a rock by the Sea of Cortez, I am arriving late to something others have always known, and the honest posture is to listen rather than to claim. Listening to stone, done well, includes listening to who was already listening.

What the Rock Taught Me

So I have stopped apologizing for my friendship with a shelf of pale stone in Loreto. The geography gives me language for it, and more than language, a responsibility. Matter is lively. Stone acts, endures, and teaches. The earth is not the dead backdrop I was raised to see, and the habit of calling it dead has done real harm to land and to people alike. To listen to stone is to practise an attention that refuses the lie of inertness, the lie that anything, earthly or human, is mere material to be used and discarded.

On my last evening I sat on the rock for a long time and said goodbye properly. I pressed my hand to the worn place that fit my body and felt the day’s heat moving back out of the stone and into me, an exchange between two slow and patient things. The rock had waited ten thousand years and would wait ten thousand more, indifferent to my small visit and somehow generous within it. It taught me that I am not separate from the world, that my bones are its cousins, and that the practice of listening, to stone, to land, to one another, is the beginning of treating the living world as the living thing it has always been. I came home from the desert knowing how to wait a little better. A rock taught me that. I am still grateful.

References

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Edensor, T. (2011). Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 238–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00421.x

Griffiths, M. (2025). Geopower, geos and the colonisation of Palestine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 51(2), Article e70049. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70049

Raffles, H. (2012). Twenty-five years is a long time. Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 526–534. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01158.x

Valtonen, A., & Pullen, A. (2021). Writing with rocks. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(2), 506–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12579

What Happened to the Dreams?

Reading Time: 14 minutes

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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 1.

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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 2.

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 played 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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 3.

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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 4.

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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 5.

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 I wanted. 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 have 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 harder-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 he wanted to be as a child. 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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 6.

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

Photograph from “What Happened to the Dreams?”, image 7.

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.