Not the arrival, not the unpacking, not the practical business of a woman setting down her bags in a small room in a small town on the edge of the Sea of Cortez,
the first morning.
When she woke and lay still and realized that the first thing she felt was not the familiar tightening, not the immediate inventory of what was owed to the day, not the calculating of what needed to be performed before she could be a person again,
but something else.
Something so unfamiliar it took her several minutes to name it.
The morning.
Just the morning. Coming through the curtain. Landing on the wall. Belonging to no one. Requiring nothing.
She lay in it like it was water, and she had forgotten she knew how to float.
She had not meant it to be healing.
She had meant it to be research. She had the framework, the methodology, the ethical approval, the blog, the camera, and the scholarly vocabulary for what she was doing and why it mattered.
She was not running away. She was running toward. Toward the question. Toward the data. Toward the thing she needed to understand about rest and precarity and the body’s relationship to institutional time.
This is what she told herself.
But underneath the good answers was a woman who was so tired she had forgotten what she was tired of, who had been carrying the weight so long she had stopped noticing the weight and started noticing only that her hands hurt, that her back hurt, that something deep in the centre of her had gone very quiet in the way that things go quiet just before they stop.
She needed to find out if she still existed outside the performance of herself.
The sea was the first teacher.
She had not expected that. It did not care about her framework. It did not care about her research questions. It moved the way it moved on the schedule it kept since long before she had a contract to worry about, and it asked nothing of her except that she look at it,
which it turns out was everything.
She looked at it.
She sat on the shore in the early morning when the light was doing something she did not have words for, something that required the camera but also required her to put the camera down and simply be inside the moment rather than documenting it,
and she looked at the sea and the sea looked back with the absolute indifference of something ancient and enormous,
and she felt, for the first time in longer than she could name,
small in the right way.
Not small, the way the institution made her small. Small, the way you are small beside something majestic, small the way that reminds you that you are not responsible for holding everything up.
She sat in that smallness and felt something loosen in her chest.
Something that had been held for a very long time.
The days made their own rhythm.
She had not made a schedule. This was an act of rebellion so small it sounds trivial, but she had been living by the schedule for nineteen years,
and to wake up and let the day decide its own shape,
this was extraordinary.
She ate when she was hungry. This sounds so simple. She had not been hungry in years.
The body remembered. The body always remembered. It was the mind that had been convinced the body’s needs were negotiable.
She cried on the fourth day.
She had not understood that the crying she had done so far was the managed kind, the kind that releases the pressure without releasing the thing that is causing it.
On the fourth day, she sat on the shore in the late afternoon when the light was going gold and the pelicans were doing what pelicans do, that ancient, unbothered diving, that complete commitment to the one thing they are made for,
and something in her saw the pelicans and understood something she did not have words for yet,
and she cried the way she had needed to cry for a very long time.
Not for ten minutes. Not tidily. Not the kind that can be managed back into composure before anyone sees.
The real kind. The kind the body needed.
She cried until she was empty.
And then she sat in the empty and felt, underneath it,
something quiet and solid.
Herself.
She was still there. Under all of it, she was still there.
On the last morning, she went to the shore before the light fully arrived.
She sat with what she was taking back.
She was taking back the knowledge that her body existed outside of its usefulness.
She was taking back the memory of a morning that required nothing.
She was taking back the crying that had emptied her and what she had found in the emptiness.
She stood up.
She brushed the sand from her hands.
She looked at the sea one more time, the sea that had asked nothing of her and given her back herself,
and she said, quietly, in the language that carries the most truth when she speaks it,
Gracias.
Thank you for the thirty days. Thank you for the shore. Thank you for the morning that required nothing.
Thank you for showing me that I am still here, that I was always here, underneath the performance, underneath the fine, underneath the nineteen years of contracts and committees and raised bars,
I was always right here.
Aquí estoy. La orilla me devolvió a mí misma. Y me traje a casa.
Here I am. The shore gave me back to myself. And I brought myself home.
Artist Statement: Driftwood reassembled into shelter on the shore at Loreto, by hands I did not see.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
A gratitude practice at the threshold of 2025: a quiet reckoning with what has been carried, what has been set down, and what it means to enter a new year with more gentleness than the last.
Reading Time: 2minutes
I am grateful for the year that arrived without politeness. For the grief that pressed its full weight against my chest. For the darkness that stayed longer than comfort allows. For the depression that hollowed me out, for the loneliness that stripped away every performance, every borrowed certainty.
I am grateful for reaching the bottom and finding no floor, only myself, breathing, still here.
For the end of an era that refused to close gently, but demanded surrender. For the opening of a new chapter written without promise, only willingness.
For a body that carried trauma in silence until it could hold no more. For the slow, unglamorous work of healing. For learning that peace is a practice, chosen daily. For finding the Creator beyond answers, in endurance.
For forgiveness that burned on the way through. For forgiving others without excusing the harm. For asking forgiveness without protecting my ego. For learning that love requires truth, and truth costs something.
For walking away from the classroom, because I outgrew the shape It required me to hold. For choosing a life of writing and research, where listening is labour, And honesty is the measure.
For closing the door for a decade of becoming brave enough to say goodbye to what once kept me alive. For understanding that survival and belongingThey are entirely different things.
For my children, who taught me what love looks like when it is tested. For my parents, As time rearranged everything we knew. For my sisters, whose depth and courage reminded me I had company.
For finding love with Tom, steady, chosen, real, and for finding myself, without apology, without permission, at last.
And now, I give thanks for choosing life with my whole body. Committing to kindness after bitterness would have been easier. For continuing the work of healing when no one is watching.
I walk forward toward the highest spiritual vibration I can hold, aware that I will falter, aware that I will grieve again, and willing still.
This is my gratitude, fierce and honest, But because I survived it awake.
Title: Where the Sky Learns to Rest
Artist Statement
There are evenings when colour arrives with such fullness it quiets the mind before thought can form.
This was one of those evenings.
The palms bent slightly in the wind, their movement slow and unhurried, as though they too were participating in the closing of the day. The shoreline held a soft stillness. Even the water seemed to pause beneath the sky’s reflection.
I received this moment without spectacle. It felt more like permission.
Within my research on intentional solitude, I have come to understand that rest arrives through many forms beyond sleep or retreat. Sometimes rest occurs through witnessing. Through allowing the nervous system to soften in the presence of beauty that asks nothing in return.
The horizon asked nothing of me. It simply held colour, light, and the gentle evidence of transition.
I remained until the pink thinned into violet and the palms returned to silhouette.
A day completing itself. A body learning how to do the same.
A scouting note: what I found in December before I knew what January would become.
I had been to Loreto before.
The way I would return was different. Alone. Thirty days. A notebook and a research question I barely had the language for yet. The first time I arrived in Loreto, it was May, and I came with about thirty other people, and the purpose was simple and uncomplicated: to swim.
It was a masters swim camp. Open water. The Sea of Cortez. I had swum with this group before, and this trip was for fun, for the pleasure of moving through water with people who understood why that mattered. We swam in the mornings. We ate together. We watched the pelicans. I went to Loreto in May for the swimming, and only the swimming.
There is something about open-water swimming that bypasses the thinking mind entirely. You enter the water, and the water reorganizes you. The sound changes. The light changes. Your body, which on land carries its history in shoulders and jaw and the tight place between the shoulder blades, begins, for the duration of the swim, to release its grip.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014), whose work I would come to lean on heavily in the months ahead, describes how the body holds the accumulated evidence of what we have lived through. The nervous system, he argues, distinguishes poorly between past and present. It carries unresolved experience as physical tension, as breath that shallows, as vigilance that never fully stands down. What I know now, and only suspected then, is that I had been carrying nineteen years of precarious academic labour in my body, and the Sea of Cortez was the first environment in a very long time that asked nothing of that carrying.
None of this was conscious in May. I only noticed that I felt at ease in a way I had forgotten was available to me. I felt at ease in the water, in the town, in the unhurried rhythm of a place that knew nothing of my contracts, my committee work, or the endless institutional question of whether I would be renewed.
The seed was planted without my knowing it had been planted at all.
December: Burnt Out and Looking for Something I Could Not Yet Name
By the time I returned to Loreto on December 4th, everything had changed. My teaching had ended in April. My contract ended in June. My Master’s in Leadership, a creative expression project at Royal Roads University, was pressing toward completion. The defence was ahead of me. My doctoral ambitions were sitting alongside everything else, demanding attention I had long since depleted. I was trying, in the slow and often disorienting way of someone in the middle of a life transition, to determine what my post-institutional life would actually look like.
I turned sixty on December 12th, in the middle of that scouting trip. I had a quiet dinner alone by the water. There was no party, no ceremony, no milestone performance. Just the sea, and the fact of the number, and the strange calm of being somewhere that asked nothing of me on the day I crossed into a new decade. It felt right. It felt, in retrospect, like the first honest birthday I had given myself in years.
I was exhausted in a way that sleep alone cannot touch.
Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes this phase as the in-between: the disorienting space between an ending and a new beginning, when the old structure has dissolved, but the new one has yet to appear. It is the most generative phase of any transition, and also the most uncomfortable. Everything the old identity rested on has been removed. The person stands in the open, uncertain, without the familiar scaffolding of role and institution to tell them who they are.
The person stands in the open, uncertain, without the familiar scaffolding of role and institution to tell them who they are.
That was where I was in December. Standing in the open. I went back to Loreto because my body remembered something there that the rest of my life had stopped offering: the possibility of ease.
I called it a scouting trip, and it was that. But scouting is too practical a word for what December was. I was doing more than checking logistics. I was asking the place a question: “Can you hold me for 30 days?” Is this somewhere I can be safe enough to finally stop performing, and still enough to actually think?
The practical answers were important. I walked the malecón at night and in the early morning. I ate alone at local restaurants. I walked unfamiliar streets without a map. I assessed, as a woman travelling alone, whether the community felt safe. It did. Loreto is a small town. People are visible to one another. There is a particular quality to places where community is woven into the daily fabric of life, where the evening paseo is a real institution, where the dogs sleeping in doorways, the fishermen heading to their boats, and the families eating in the plaza all exist within an unhurried and readable world. I felt held by its ordinariness. Unknown, perhaps, but unobserved in the way that mattered. No one knew my institutional history. No one required anything of me. I could be simply a woman walking, and that was enough.
I found the casita I would return to in January. I walked through it slowly. I noted the light in the morning, the sound of the sea through the window at night, the small kitchen, and the balcony where the palms moved in the wind. I checked whether it had what I needed: little, but exactly enough. A desk. A bed. Space for stillness.
I had brought my notebook and camera with me, as I always do. But the book I was reading during those two weeks in December was the one that would change the frame of everything I thought I was doing.
Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014).
I had known the title for years. I had recommended it to students, cited it in passing, and been aware of its argument in the way we are aware of important things we keep at a careful distance. In December, sitting in a small restaurant on the malecón with the sea outside the window, I read it properly. I read it in the way you read something when you are ready for it, which is to say, I read it and recognized myself on nearly every page.
Van der Kolk (2014) argues that trauma is, at its core, a disruption of the body’s capacity to feel safe in the present, rather than a discrete event. The nervous system, shaped by overwhelming experience, remains in a state of chronic alert long after the original threat has passed. The body continues to respond as if the danger is ongoing, even when the conscious mind insists otherwise. The jaw clenches. The breath shallows. The shoulders stay locked. Sleep remains partial and vigilant. These are the body doing what it learned to do to survive, and nothing more.
I sat with this and let it account for things I had been explaining to myself in other ways for years.
The book changed what I thought January was for. It was no longer only a writing retreat, or a research project, or a recovery from burnout. It was something more specific: an experiment in creating the conditions under which my nervous system might, finally, learn to rest. Van der Kolk (2014) is clear that this requires environment, duration, and the consistent absence of demand. It cannot be rushed. It cannot be scheduled. It requires time and a place that asks nothing.
I looked up from the book and out at the Sea of Cortez, and I understood why I had come back.
By the end of December, something had begun to clarify. It was the outline of something, still unformed, still becoming. I began writing in my notebook in ways that felt different from anything I had written before. For no committee. For no course. Without the need to demonstrate competence or meet a deadline. Writing to find out what I thought. Writing as a way of listening to what my body already knew.
Writing as a way of listening to what my body already knew.
I made notes toward a plan. A loose daily structure: writing in the morning, swimming and walking in the afternoon, painting and reflection in the evenings. No targets. No word counts. No deliverables. A commitment to presence rather than productivity.
I sketched the outline of what would become this project. I wrote notes toward a book. I asked, for the first time in a disciplined way, what I had actually experienced in nineteen years of precarious academic labour, and what the body was carrying that the institutional record had never recorded. I wrote about rest as something that had been taken from me rather than something I had neglected. I wrote about the right to stillness. I wrote about what it would mean to recover: from exhaustion, but also from the deeper erosion of having been treated as disposable for nineteen years.
The concept I would eventually name alonetude had no name at the time. But I could feel its shape. The particular quality of solitude I was experiencing in Loreto, chosen, inhabited, generative rather than empty, was already doing something to me that I had no words for yet. I wrote around it in December, the way you write around something you know is there but can barely bring yourself to look at directly.
I left Loreto on December 17th with a booked casita, a notebook full of early thinking, and a body that had, for two weeks, been allowed to exist without institutional demand. I felt unhealed. Unready. More honestly, like someone who had confirmed that the thing she was looking for was real, even if she had no name for it yet.
The place was right. The sea was right. The unhurried community, the small town’s legible rhythms, the quality of the light in the early morning, the sound of waves through a window at night: all of it was right.
I would return on January 1st with one orange suitcase, a camera, a notebook, and a research question I was still learning to ask.
December had shown me where to look. January would begin the looking.
Note. This post is a retrospective account of a scouting trip taken December 4–17, 2025, prior to the thirty-day research retreat documented in the main body of this blog. It is situated before the formal inquiry begins, as context for the journey that follows.
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
ACADEMIC LENS
December was the ground before the inquiry. This scouting note does what pre-research always does: it records the conditions that made something possible before that something had a name. Van der Kolk’s (2014) central argument, that the body holds unresolved experience as ongoing physiological tension, provides the theoretical ground for understanding why a specific place, encountered first through embodied pleasure and only later through scholarly intention, could function as a restorative environment. Reading The Body Keeps the Score in December constitutes a threshold moment in Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative framework: the moment when lived experience and scholarly framework find one another, and inquiry becomes possible. Bridges’ (2019) concept of the in-between names the structural condition that made this scouting trip necessary: the researcher, displaced from her institutional identity, required a place that could hold her while she found a new way of understanding what had happened to her. Loreto, encountered first through the body in May and returned to in December through intention, functions as what Bachelard (1964) calls a poetic space: a container intimate enough to allow genuine reflection, and generous enough to hold what that reflection would uncover.
