By one o’clock, the temperature has climbed into the mid-thirties, and the village has responded the way it responds every afternoon: by stopping. Shops close. Streets empty. Even the dogs find shade and cease their wandering.
Fishing Boat
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I am learning this rhythm. Not fighting the heat but joining the collective surrender to it. After lunch, I close the curtains against the sun, lie on the bed under the ceiling fan, and simply rest.
Not sleep. Just rest. The body horizontal, the mind quiet, time passing without purpose or productivity.
This is siesta. Not the romanticized version tourists imagine, but the practical wisdom of a place that knows heat must be respected. You do not work through it. You do not push through it. You stop. You rest. You wait for the world to become livable again.
For twelve days now, I have been learning to stop without guilt. To rest without justifying it. To simply be horizontal in the afternoon heat and let that be enough.
Today, it finally feels natural. Not indulgence. Not laziness. Just the appropriate response to what the day is asking.
El calor manda. The heat commands.
Y yo obedezco. And I obey.
Day’s of My Life
By three o’clock, the worst has passed. The temperature remains high, but the quality changes. Bearable. Moveable. I get up, drink water, and sit on the shaded patio watching the water.
A pelican flies past. Low and slow. Unhurried.
The village is beginning to wake again. A shop door opens. A car starts. Life resuming its rhythm, altered by the heat but not defeated by it.
I think about the years I spent overriding my body’s signals. Tired but pushing through. Hot but staying at the desk. Needing rest but never quite allowing it because rest felt like failure, like giving up, like evidence that I was not strong enough to handle what others seemed to handle fine.
Afternoon Skies
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The wisdom here is different. Rest is not failure. It is a response. The appropriate accommodation to conditions that require it.
Twelve days of practicing this, and something is shifting. The guilt that used to accompany rest is dissolving. Slowly. But dissolving.
Poco a poco. Little by little.
The body learning what the village already knows: some hours are for work. Some hours are for rest. And knowing which is which is its own kind of wisdom.
Mission Church
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
May 2, 2025. Friday morning. My kitchen table at home.
The notification sound chimed while I was grading papers, the familiar tone I had conditioned myself to respond to instantly after seventeen years of contract teaching. I reached for my phone expecting routine correspondence, perhaps a student question or a committee meeting notice. Instead, the subject line read: “Employment Status Update.”
My contract position for the fall of 2025 and 2026 was uncertain.
The email was brief, professional, and efficient. It explained enrolment shifts, budget realities, and difficult decisions. It thanked me for my service. It wished me well in future endeavours. It arrived without conversation, without the relational check-in that twenty-five years at Thompson Rivers University might have warranted. It arrived as data, a notification, a conclusion reached somewhere in a spreadsheet I would never see.
I sat at my kitchen table, the same surface scarred by coffee rings from decades of grading student papers, and stared at the screen. Seventeen years as contract faculty. Twenty-five years total at the institution. Course materials I had developed, teaching awards I had won, students I had mentored, committees I had served. Excellence that had earned institutional recognition but never security, never permanence, never the guarantee that May would arrive without this particular notification.
The plaques were arranged on my shelf, forming a timeline of institutional validation: the TRU Student Empowerment Award (2021), the TRU Interculturalisation Award (2023), and the Faculty Council Service Award (2024). Each one represented students who had written nomination letters, colleagues who had advocated, and committees who had deliberated. Each one testified to work that the institution deemed exemplary. Yet on May 2, 2025, none of that mattered against the budget’s arithmetic.
Thirty days later, another notification arrived. This time, the subject line read: “Congratulations.” I had won the Faculty Council Teaching Award for 2025. The irony possessed a weight that was almost architectural. The institution that had deemed me expendable simultaneously declared I was exemplary. The same system that processed my termination processed my commendation. Two documents, two logics, two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that never spoke to each other.
I understood something sitting at that kitchen table, something I had been circling around for years without language to name it: I had forgotten how to simply be. I could perform brilliantly. I could show up on time, deliver lectures, grade papers, serve on committees, support colleagues, and mentor students. I could produce evidence of my value constantly, compulsively, because survival demanded it. But when the institution finally severed that demand, when performance could no longer protect me, I discovered I had no idea who I was underneath all that doing.
The months between May and December 2025 felt like slow-motion drowning. I woke at 3 AM with panic attacks, my heart racing, convinced I had forgotten something critical, only to remember I had nothing to forget because I had no employment requiring vigilance.
I checked my email compulsively, even though I had no employer to email. I filled every hour with tasks, projects, obligations, anything to avoid the emptiness that waited when I stopped moving. The relief I expected from no longer needing to perform never arrived. Instead, what came was a vast, disorienting blankness, an inability to rest even when rest was finally possible.
Thompson Rivers University – Faculty Teaching Award 2026
“You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” — Mary Oliver, 1986
The dog stands at the table as though she has been invited. Not begging. Not servile. Simply present, front paws on the table’s edge, looking out at the Sea of Cortez with the same quality of attention a person might bring to a sunset. Behind her, the early morning light turns everything gold: the water, the sand, the palm fronds moving in whatever breeze comes off the ocean this time of day. A plate of food sits on the white tablecloth. A drink sweats condensation in the heat. The dog notices these things the way you notice things that are simply part of the landscape, neither wanting them nor turning away from them. Just acknowledging: yes, these are here too.
Dog Enjoying the Sunrise
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I took this photograph this morning at a beachside restaurant where I enjoyed a cup of coffee. The dog appeared from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. She checked the table the way dogs check things: a quick assessment to see whether this moment held anything that required her attention. Then she placed her paws on the table’s edge and turned her gaze outward, toward the water. The owner is getting coffee.
What struck me then and strikes me still looking at the image now is her posture. There is no asking in it. No supplication. No performance of need is designed to elicit care. She is not working for anything. She is simply a dog standing at a table at the edge of the sea, and if that position happens to be where food and drink exist, well, that is where food and drink exist. It does not change the essential fact of her presence, which requires no justification beyond itself.
I sat there for perhaps twenty minutes watching her. Other tourists approached, took photos, and moved on. A waiter brought fresh coffee to the table. No reluctance. Not hurry. This part is complete; the next follows, and both are equally fine.
The village dogs of Loreto have been teaching me something I did not know I needed to learn.
I wrote about them briefly in the early days here: the brown dog with gentle eyes who appeared that first evening, who sniffed my hand and then simply stood beside me in the fading light, two beings with nowhere particular to be. I called her a companion then, though companion suggests a relationship more defined than what we actually share. She appears. She stays, or she does not. She requires nothing. I offer nothing beyond my presence. And somehow this non-relationship has become one of the steadiest features of my days here.
She is not the only one. There are perhaps a dozen dogs I see regularly in the village. Brindle and brown and black and that particular dusty tan that seems designed by evolution to blend with sand. Well-fed but not owned. Collared occasionally (someone’s gesture of care) but clearly belonging to no one, or perhaps more accurately, belonging to everyone and therefore to themselves.
They move through the village with an ease I recognize as what I am attempting to learn. No schedule. No destination that must be reached. No performance of purpose to justify their occupation of space. They simply are where they are; when they are somewhere else, they are there instead, and the transition requires no explanation, no apology, no account of why the first place stopped being right and the second place became necessary.
My Lady Friend
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I have been watching them for twelve days now with increasing attention. The way they navigate public space without claiming it. The way they accept care without becoming obligated. The way they rest in the middle of sidewalks, streets, or restaurant patios without any apparent concern that they might be inconveniencing someone. And the remarkable thing (the thing I am still trying to fully understand) is that the village allows this. More than allows it. Holds it. Make space for it. Treats it as simply as it is.
In the city where I lived for twenty-five years, this would be impossible. Dogs in restaurants must be on leashes, controlled, and clearly attached to responsible humans. Dogs on public beaches require permits. Dogs that exist without visible owners raise concern: Who is responsible for this animal? Who will manage it? Who vouches for its right to occupy space?
The questions come automatically, reflexively, born from a culture that cannot imagine existence without ownership, without someone being accountable, without the clear assignment of responsibility and control.
But here, the dogs simply exist, and the village simply lets them be. Feeds them when they are hungry. Gives them water when they are thirsty. Tolerates their presence at tables, in shops, and on beaches. And the dogs, for their part, seem to understand the unspoken agreement: we are here together, you and we, and the terms of our togetherness require neither ownership nor abandonment, neither claim nor rejection, just this ongoing negotiation of shared space that somehow works without anyone having to articulate the rules.
I realized, walking back to the cottage in the heat, that I had seen six different dogs in the space of an hour, and each one had seemed perfectly at ease wherever it was. No anxiety. No performance. Just dogs being dogs in the various locations where dogs be.
This is remarkable when you think about it. These are not pets who have learned to read human moods and respond to human needs. These are not working dogs with assigned tasks. These are dogs who have somehow negotiated a way of existing alongside humans without becoming dependent on them, without losing whatever essential dog-ness makes them what they are.
They are, I realize, practicing aloneness. Not the human version (not the one that requires choosing, intending, and reflecting on whether you are doing it right), but alonetude nonetheless. Being with others without losing themselves. Accepting care without becoming obligated. Moving between community and solitude as each moment requires, without any of it needing to be a statement, a position, or a defended choice.
I have been thinking about what these dogs are teaching me about being in community without being consumed by it.
“Settling in is not surrender. It’s choosing to stay with yourself.” Amy Tucker, 2026
For twenty-five years, I worked in an institution that demanded constant availability, constant responsiveness, and constant proof that I was committed, present, and performing my role adequately. Contract faculty do not have the same authority to set boundaries as tenured faculty. You are available when needed. You adjust your schedule around theirs. You say yes even when yes costs you more than you can afford because saying no might mean being asked again.
This creates a particular relationship to community and to solitude. Community becomes something you perform. Solitude becomes something you seize in stolen moments, knowing you will be interrupted, knowing you need to stay alert for the email, the call, or the meeting that suddenly arises, requiring an immediate response.
The village dogs know nothing of this exhaustion. They exist in what I can only describe as a gift economy so old and so embedded that it has become invisible. The village feeds them because that is what the village does. The dogs provide companionship because that is what dogs provide. No contract. No performance evaluation. No calculation of whether the exchange balances.
Just: this is how we are together. These are the terms of our coexistence. It works, or it does not; if it stops working, adjustments are made, but none of it requires the elaborate structure of obligation, debt, and credit that governed my professional relationships for all those years.
Watching them, I realize what I am trying to recover. Not isolation (I have never wanted that, and this month of intentional solitude has not been about fleeing human contact). What I want is what the dogs have: the capacity to be with others without losing myself. To accept care without becoming obligated. To offer presence without performing. To know when I need to be alone and when I want company, and to trust that both needs are legitimate and neither requires extensive justification.
The dogs are alone together. Present in the community but not consumed by it. They rest in public space without apology. They approach when something interests them, and they walk away when it loses its interest. And somehow the village holds this, makes room for it, allows dogs to be dogs even amid human activity.
This is the model I am learning to inhabit. Not the isolation of withdrawal but the freedom of undefended presence. Being here without bracing. Receiving care without owing. Offering attention without depleting myself.
The brown dog is here again. She has been here for perhaps forty minutes. I have been writing. Neither of us has required anything of the other. We are simply here together, she in her rest and I in my work, and the togetherness asks nothing beyond the acknowledgment that we both occupy this space.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The dog knows without any of this apparatus. She knows when to trust and when to be wary. She knows when to approach and when to hold distance. She knows when someone will feed her and when someone will not. She knows where shade is in the heat of the day and where the evening breeze comes first. She knows all of this immediately, without thought, without reflection, without the constant meta-commentary that humans call consciousness.
This is no less knowing. It is different knowing. And it might be the knowing I most need to recover: the capacity to respond to what is without the endless mediation of thought about response. To be hungry and eat. To be tired and rest. To want solitude and take it. To want company and seek it. Without justification. Without explanation. Without the entire apparatus of defence and rationalization that precarious employment built into me so deeply, I forgot it was not natural.
Just: this is what the body knows. This is what the moment calls for. This is what I do.
The Freedom to Simply Be
“I am allowed to land. I am allowed to stay. I am allowed to soften.”
Amy Tucker, 2026
The dog has left now. I did not see her go. I was focused on writing, and when I looked up, she was simply gone, off to wherever dogs go when they go. The light continues its shift toward darkness. Soon I will make dinner, following the rhythm that has become automatic. The evening will unfold as it has unfolded for eleven evenings before this one.
But something feels different tonight. Less effortful. Less monitored. As though I am finally beginning to inhabit the routine rather than performing it. Beginning to trust that my body knows what it needs and when, and that I do not have to constantly check and verify that I am resting correctly.
The dogs are teaching me this. How to be present without performance. How to accept care without obligation. How to exist in a community without losing the capacity for solitude. How to move between togetherness and apartness as the moment requires, without any of it being a statement or a defence or a position requiring elaborate justification.
Los perros del pueblo. The village dogs. Teachers who do not know they teach. Companions who do not require a relationship. Beings who practice alonetude so naturally they have no word for it because it is simply how they are.
I am learning from them. Slowly. With all the awkwardness of someone who forgot and is now remembering. But learning nonetheless. And tonight, this twelfth evening of intentional solitude, I feel closer to what they know. Closer to trusting my own knowing, the way they trust theirs. Closer to being what I am without the constant overlay of thought about whether I am being it correctly.
And I think again of Mary Oliver, the poet who reminded us that we do not have to be good, only to let the soft animal of the body love what it loves. Who asked, without urgency but with piercing clarity: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
For the first time in a long while, I feel like I have an answer—though not in words, and not as a plan. It is in the small things: in the way I sit without bracing, in the way I walk without explanation, in the way I trust the day to shape itself without my need to define it in advance.
I, too, find my front paws on the table’s edge, not asking, not waiting, just watching the water shift its shape, and feeling the sun arrive exactly as it is.
Not a performance. Not striving.
Just this: the body knows. The moment knows. The dog knows. And that knowing, I am learning, is enough.
Thank you, my lady friend.
References
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Oliver, M. (1986). Wild geese. In Dream work (pp. 14–15). Atlantic Monthly Press.
Serpell, J. (1995). The domestic dog: Its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people. Cambridge University Press.
I have been watching them for twenty minutes now, their final flights to roosting sites marked by something I can only describe as completeness. Not hurry. Not reluctance. Just the simple recognition that the fishing day is done, that rest is what comes next, that tomorrow will bring another cycle.
They do not question whether they have fished enough. They do not worry about tomorrow’s needs. They simply finish when finishing is what the body, the light, and the day require.
The Three Palms
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Discovering the Pattern
I am learning this. Estoy aprendiendo esto.
Eleven days of the same evening sequence, dinner as light begins to change, gentle movement, watching sky transform, settling into darkness—and something in me is finally believing it. The rhythm is not something I am imposing. It is something I am joining. Something that was here before I arrived and will continue after I leave.
The pelicans taught me this first. Nowadays, the days themselves are teaching it.
My View
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Tonight, sitting on this balcony as stars appear one by one above the Sea of Cortez, the questions feel less urgent than they did this morning. Less like problems requiring a solution and more like… context. Background. The theoretical scaffolding that helps me understand the larger significance of what I am doing here, but not the thing itself.
The thing itself is simpler.
Unlearning Vigilance
I came here exhausted. Sleep fragmented, thoughts scattered, body braced against threats that had become so constant I no longer noticed the bracing. Twenty-five years of precarious employment had taught my nervous system a particular kind of vigilance—necessary for survival, corrosive to everything else.
My body was more than tired. It was dysregulated.
I was not simply overworked. I had become wired for survival. Survival allows no room for rest. It requires vigilance, constant adaptation, and the refusal to soften.
Now, after days of consistency, the rhythm is beginning to offer a different experience. A quiet structure. A sense of what comes next. The return of a nervous system that no longer waits for disruption, but begins to anticipate calm.
It is subtle. Gentle. Emerging like light at the edge of morning.
What once felt like repetition now feels like relief. The pattern does not constrain me. It holds me. It offers what the nervous system has long needed but could never request: predictability, softness, and something that resembles safety.
Eleven days of consistent rhythm, and the bracing is releasing. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just gradually, like ice melting so slowly you do not notice the transition from solid to liquid, you only notice one day that what was frozen is now flowing.
Reclaiming Routine
I have been thinking about routine.
For twenty-five years, routine was what I resisted. Every semester brought different courses, different students, different schedules cobbled together from whatever the institution needed and was willing to pay for. I prided myself on adaptability. On being able to shift quickly. On not needing consistency.
But that pride was really a cover story for precarity. You cannot depend on routine when your employment is contingent. You learn instead to be endlessly flexible, endlessly available, ready to reconfigure your life around whatever work appears.
These eleven days have shown me what I lost in that flexibility.
The routine here is simple. Wake with the light. Swim in the morning. Read. Walk in the afternoon when the heat has softened. Watch pelicans. Make dinner as the sky transforms. Sit on the patio as stars appear. Sleep.
Collected Beach Treasures
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The same pattern, day after day.
It is a healing ritual, not imposed or performative, but emergent. A sequence the body now recognizes as kind. As sacred. As home.
And instead of feeling monotonous or constraining, it feels… liberating. My nervous system knows what comes next. My body can anticipate the rhythm. I do not have to constantly recalibrate, constantly adjust, constantly brace for the unexpected.
The routine holds me. And in being held, I can finally let go.
This is what I would call settledness. Or maybe: re-inhabiting the self. It’s not about transcendence. It’s about being able to stay with myself, without bracing, without apology.
This is what I came here to discover, though I did not know it when I arrived. Not some dramatic transformation. Not sudden enlightenment. Just the quiet recognition that routine is not the enemy of freedom. Precarity is. Routine—the kind you choose, the kind that serves your actual needs rather than someone else’s demands—is the structure that makes freedom possible.
Afternoon Seista
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Evening Reflection: What the Day Held
Pelicans are completing their fishing day. Sky is transforming through its sequence. My own completion of the day’s work, reading done, walking done, body cared for, mind given what it needs.
The pattern repeats. And I am learning to trust the pattern.
Tomorrow I will read more deeply, Haraway on situated knowledges, more Ahmed on orientation and the work of reorientation. The theoretical scaffolding continues to grow, helping me grasp the broader significance of what I am documenting here.
But tonight the theory feels secondary to something simpler. To the recognition that my body has stopped bracing. That sleep comes without struggle. That I can sit on a balcony in the evening watching pelicans and feel… at peace. Simply at peace. Without needing to analyze it, justify it, or turn it into something useful.
Good Night Loreto
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This is alonetude. Not a concept. Not a framework. Just this: being with yourself in a rhythm that your nervous system trusts, in a place that feels safe enough to finally stop performing, surrounded by the ordinary beauty of birds and water and light that asks nothing of you except that you notice.
I notice.
Lo noto.
And tonight, that is enough.
~
Tonight I will follow the familiar sequence.
Dinner already eaten, simple fish grilled with lime, rice, and vegetables that I no longer think about preparing, my hands knowing now what the routine requires. Cottage already tidied—the small acts of care that signal evening’s approach. Soon I will dim the lights, sit on the patio and watch the final emergence of the stars, then shower and prepare for sleep.
Will I sleep through? Fifth night in a row? Or will tonight bring waking, the pattern interrupted, the nervous system deciding it needs to check, to assess, to maintain some vestige of vigilance?
I do not know. But tonight I notice something different in my not-knowing. Not anxiety about whether I will sleep. Just… curiosity. The way you might wonder whether it will rain tomorrow. Information that will reveal itself when it reveals itself. Nothing to control. Nothing to fix in advance.
This, too, is letting go. Learning to hold the question without needing to force the answer.
The pelicans do not worry about tomorrow’s fishing. They simply rest tonight, trusting that tomorrow will bring what it brings, that they will respond to what it requires, that the rhythm will continue whether they worry about it or not.
I am learning from them. Slowly. With the particular awkwardness that comes from unlearning decades of vigilance. But learning.
The day ends. Another day will begin. The rhythm continues.
And I am here, finally, learning how to join it rather than fight it.
Ten days to build a foundation. Not much, you might think. Not enough time to accomplish anything significant.
But foundations are not meant to be impressive. They are meant to be solid. Hidden underground, bearing weight, making everything above them possible.
I came here exhausted. Sleep fragmented, thoughts scattered, body braced for threats that never came but whose approach I had learned to anticipate with the precision of an expert meteorologist reading the weather that only I could see.
Ten days to teach my nervous system: The emergency is over. The storm has passed. You can stop bracing now.
Ten days of the same evening sequence. Ten days of the same morning light. Ten days of pelican fishing at predictable times. Ten days of waves maintaining their patient rhythm. Ten days of data accumulating below conscious awareness.
And somewhere in those ten days, my body decided to believe it.
La fundación sostiene. The foundation holds.
Not because I forced it. Not because I earned it. Not because I proved myself worthy.
Because I maintained conditions. Because I honoured rhythms. Because I stopped interfering with processes wiser than conscious thought.
Blue dissolving into gold, gold bleeding into rose, rose deepening into violet. Del azul al oro, al rosa y al violeta. I have watched this transformation from this balcony for ten evenings now, and it has never been the same twice. The colour shifts with cloud cover, humidity, and the presence or absence of wind. Each sunset is singular. Unrepeatable. A gift offered once and then gone.
I am learning to receive it without trying to hold it.
This is harder than it sounds. My instinct, trained by decades of academic work, is to document, to analyze, to pin down. To turn experience into data that can be preserved, referenced, and cited. But sunsets do not submit to this treatment. They happen, they transform, they vanish. All you can do is be present while they occur.
Shadows that Haunt Me
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Ten days. Diez días.
It feels both longer and shorter than that. Longer because so much has shifted, the sleep that consolidates, the thoughts that clarify, the nervous system that learns to trust. Shorter because time here moves differently from time in my old life. The days do not accumulate into weeks that must be gotten through. They simply unfold, each one complete in itself.
This morning I wrote about being ready for deeper work.
This afternoon, I discovered whether that was true.
Three hours reading Kaplan and Kaplan’s The Experience of Nature. Dense academic writing. Multiple theoretical frameworks were synthesized. Complex arguments are built across chapters. The kind of scholarship that, a month ago, would have required multiple passes, extensive notes, and constant backtracking to passages I could not quite grasp.
Today, it made sense on first reading.
Rock Art
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Not all of it, some concepts I will need to return to, to sit with, to let marinate. But the basic structure of their argument, the way they build their case for nature experience as psychologically restorative, the relationship they trace between environmental qualities and cognitive restoration: clear. Accessible. My mind is following along without forcing it.
This is what full cognitive capacity feels like. Not just the ability to decode words on a page but to think with them. To follow sustained arguments. To hold multiple ideas in relationship. To synthesize.
The relief of this is enormous.
I had begun to wonder whether the cognitive impairment was permanent. Whether months of sleep fragmentation and chronic stress had done lasting damage. Whether I would ever again be able to engage with complex theory the way I once had.
The answer, apparently, is yes. Given sufficient rest, given release from chronic threat, given time for the nervous system to recalibrate, the capacity returns.
Arnsten’s research on stress and prefrontal function helps me understand why. When the nervous system operates in a defensive state for extended periods, blood flow and glucose are redirected away from the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking, toward more primitive structures involved in survival. This is adaptive in the short term. You do not need a nuanced analysis when facing immediate danger. You need fast, automatic responses.
But when the threat becomes chronic, when the nervous system never gets the signal that it is safe to stand down, those executive functions simply go offline. Not diminished—offline. The biological infrastructure that supports complex thought is taken out of commission to conserve resources for survival.
These ten days have convinced my nervous system that the emergency is over. Those resources can be redirected back toward thinking, toward curiosity, toward engagement with ideas.
The prefrontal cortex is online again.
Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you for this restoration.
The Skies Above Me
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
After reading, I stopped.
This might sound unremarkable. It is not.
For years, I have operated with a productivity logic that says: if you can still function, you should keep working. Rest is what you do when you literally cannot continue. Until then, push.
This afternoon I was tired. Not exhausted. Not depleted. Just tired in that natural way that comes after sustained intellectual engagement. My body said enough for now. And I listened.
I made lunch. Sat on the patio. Ate without reading, without working, without multitasking. Simply ate. Tasted the food. Felt the sun.
Lunch
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Then I lay in the hammock for an hour.
Not sleeping. Not even reading. Just being in a hammock in the afternoon with the sound of waves, the movement of air, and the warmth of the sun filtered through palm fronds.
This is what Nash means when he writes about Scholarly Personal Narrative as a practice of presence. Not just documenting your experience but being fully in it. Allowing yourself to notice what is actually happening rather than constantly narrating it, analyzing it, and turning it into something useful.
Sometimes you just lie in a hammock.
That is the whole story.
Rocks!
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Late afternoon, I walked.
Not to accomplish fitness goals, track steps, or burn calories. Not even with a destination in mind. Just walking because my body wanted to move, and the beach was there, and the light was beginning to change.
I walked north until I reached the tide pools. Sat on a rock. Watched small crabs scuttle between crevices, tiny fish dart through shallow water, sea anemones open and close their delicate tentacles.
Sea Life
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
An entire world in a depression carved into stone by centuries of waves.
Time felt different there. Expansive. Unhurried. As though the afternoon had all the space it needed, and there was no rush to get to the evening. Merleau-Ponty writes about lived time, time as experienced rather than measured. Time expands when you are fully present and contracts when you are anxious about what comes next.
When I finally stood to walk back, my legs were stiff from sitting, but my mind was quiet in a way it had not been in months. The constant low-level hum of anxiety, the voice that is always calculating, planning, worrying about what needs doing next, had simply stopped.
This is what Kaplan calls “soft fascination.” The quality of engagement that holds your attention gently, without effort, without demanding anything. Natural environments provide this. The movement of water. The scuttling of crabs. The opening and closing of anemones. Your attention is engaged but not strained. And in that gentle engagement, something in the nervous system settles.
Attention Restoration Theory argues that modern life depletes what they call “directed attention,” the capacity to focus on tasks that require effort, to inhibit distraction, and to sustain concentration. We exhaust this capacity constantly: driving in traffic, responding to emails, sitting through meetings, forcing ourselves to concentrate on work that does not naturally interest us.
Nature restores directed attention not by stimulating us more but by allowing us to rest. By providing what Kaplan calls “being away,” a break from the demands that deplete us. By offering soft fascination, engagement without effort. By creating compatibility between what the environment offers and what we need in that moment.
Sitting on that rock watching tide pools, I was away. I was softly fascinated. The environment was perfectly suited to what I needed.
And something that had been tightly wound for months finally loosened.
Sea Gulls Fishing
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Evening now.
I made dinner as the light began its transformation. Simple food: canned fish with lime, rice, and vegetables. Ate on the patio. Watched the birds complete their final fishing runs before settling for the night.
Dinner Time
The pattern is so familiar now that I could set a clock by it. Morning fishing. The midday rest. The late afternoon fishing. The evening returns to roosting sites. Day after day, the same rhythm.
But not monotonous. Each day holds its own variations. Weather. Wind. The presence or absence of baitfish near the surface. Sometimes the pelicans fish alone. Sometimes in groups. Sometimes they dive from great heights. Sometimes they simply skim the surface, plucking small fish without submerging.
The rhythm allows for variation. The variation occurs within rhythm. Neither negates the other.
I am learning this. Estoy aprendiendo esto.
Slowly.
What has ten days built?
I have been asking myself this as the light fades and the first stars appear. What is different now from ten days ago when I arrived at this cottage, suitcase still packed, uncertain whether I knew how to stay?
Sleep: Three nights of sleeping through. The pattern is consolidating. My nervous system, learning that night, means rest: that darkness is safe, that vigilance can be released for seven hours without catastrophe.
Cognition: Prefrontal cortex restored. Can read complex theory. Follow sustained arguments. Synthesize across frameworks. Think without forcing each thought into existence through sheer will.
Embodiment: Being in my body rather than trying to manage it from outside. Can feel sensations without them being threatening. Can notice needs before they escalate into emergencies.
Rhythm: Evening sequence established. Morning patterns are consolidating. The body learning to read time through environmental cues, light quality, temperature, the pelicans’ flight patterns, rather than the external demands that structured my old life.
Trust: the foundation beneath everything else. My nervous system is beginning to trust. Trust that this environment is safe. Trust that rest will come. Trust that I do not need to stay braced for the next crisis, the next email that changes everything, the next announcement that requires scrambling, repositioning, and proof of worth.
The foundation holds.
Tomorrow I will build on it. More reading. More theoretical engagement. Days eleven through twenty moving toward integration—bringing embodied experience into conversation with scholarly frameworks. Seeing how research illuminates what the body already knows. Contributing, eventually, to conversations about solitude and healing and the conditions that support nervous system regulation.
But tonight I simply rest in what ten days have created. In the capacity that has been restored. In the trust built brick by brick, through consistent rhythms and environmental cues, my conscious mind barely registered, but my nervous system tracked with precision.
Sea of Cortez
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Long enough to begin.
In an hour, I will begin the evening sequence. The rituals my nervous system has learned to recognize as the approach of rest.
Dinner already eaten. Dishes washed. Cottage tidy. All the small acts of care that signal: evening is here, night is coming, you can begin to let go.
Will I sleep through tonight? Fourth night in a row would confirm the pattern even more strongly. It would give my system even more evidence that this is real, sustainable, and trustworthy.
But even if I wake, even if tonight fragments again, I know more now than I did ten days ago. I know what supports sleep. I know what environmental cues signal safety. I know how to maintain conditions even when the immediate results are not what I hoped for.
Healing is not about controlling outcomes. It is about maintaining conditions and trusting the system to respond.
I cannot force my nervous system to trust. But I can keep creating the circumstances that make trust possible. Keep following rhythms. Keep honouring the body’s signals. Keep providing the environmental conditions required for safety.
The actual sleeping, the actual healing, the actual transformation—these happen in their own time. Beyond conscious control. According to processes more ancient and wiser than anything my conscious mind can manage.
All I can do is maintain the conditions and step aside.
El umbral. The threshold.
I stand on it tonight. Looking back at the ten days that built a foundation. Looking forward to twenty more that will build on it.
Not rushing to leave what was behind. Not anxious to arrive at what comes next. Just here. On this threshold. Noticing what is.
The foundation holds. My body knows this. My nervous system has learned it through accumulated evidence that conscious thought played almost no role in gathering. Tomorrow I build upward from here.
But tonight—esta noche—I rest.
The pelicans have settled for the evening, wherever it is they go when light fails, and the sea turns dark. The stars are beginning to appear, one by one, then a handful, then too many to count. The waves continue their patient rhythm, the same rhythm they have maintained for millions of years, the same rhythm they will maintain long after I have left this place and returned to whatever life awaits me back home.
And I sit on the balcony on the tenth evening, holding the question that all thresholds hold:
What becomes possible when the foundation is sound?
Tomorrow I begin finding out.
La fundación sostiene. The foundation holds.
Mañana construimos hacia arriba. Tomorrow we build upward.
Pero esta noche, solo esto. But tonight, just this.
El mar. Las estrellas. El ritmo constante. The sea. The stars. The constant rhythm.
Y un cuerpo que finalmente descansa. And a body that finally rests.
From Burnout to Breakthrough
Credit: NotebookLM, 2026
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
The sky is doing that thing again. Blue becomes gold, becomes rose, becomes violet, and if you blink, you miss the exact moment one colour surrenders to the next. Del azul al oro, al rosa y al violeta. (For the record, I have to look up every word in Spanish in my translator.) I have been sitting here on the balcony watching it happen, trying to find words for what today felt like, and I keep circling back to the same inadequate word: different.
Not better. Though it was better.
Coffee by the Sea
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Different in a way that makes me realize how long I have been living in that other place. The one where everything costs. Where even simple things, getting out of bed, making coffee, being present in my own life, require negotiation and force and that particular grinding willpower that is really just exhausted determination wearing a productivity costume.
Today I did not have to force anything. No tuve que forzar nada.
I did not wake up already calculating whether I had enough in the tank to make it through. Did not have to override my body with caffeine or stubbornness. Did not spend the day carefully rationing attention, like it might run out before sunset.
Things just… happened. Todo fluyó. Thoughts connected. Words came. My body moved through space without requiring constant management. Natural. Like breathing. Like the way I imagine other people—rested people—move through their days without even noticing how easy it is.
Three hours
This morning I wrote for three hours. Tres horas. The kind of writing where you look up and realize time passed, and you were not watching it pass, were not counting down until you could stop, were not forcing each sentence into existence through sheer will.
I wrote about what happened last night. About sleep architecture and nervous system states, and why my body finally trusted enough to sleep through. I wove together material from Walker (2017) on sleep cycles and Porges (2011) on the polyvagal system, along with what actually happened in my own body between 11 PM and 6 AM. Complex theoretical frameworks are talking to each other through my experience. All of it makes sense. All of it flowing.
Sleep Cycle
Created: Gemini AI, 2o26
Three months ago, this would have been impossible.
Not hard. Impossible.
And I need to be precise about that distinction because it matters.
There is this thing that happens when you have been stressed and sleep-deprived for long enough. People talk about it like you are just a little foggy, a little slower, like turning down the volume on a radio. That is not what it feels like from inside. From inside, it feels like parts of your brain just… stop. Go dark. Offline (Arnsten, 2009).
The prefrontal cortex, the part that does complex thinking, that holds multiple ideas at once, that synthesizes and integrates and makes connections, needs massive resources to run. Blood flow. Glucose. Energy. And when your body thinks it is in danger, when your nervous system has been reading the environment as threatening for weeks or months, those resources get redirected. Away from thinking, toward surviving. The amygdala scans for threats. The brainstem is ready to react. Ancient survival systems running the show while the thinking parts go quiet (Arnsten, 2009; Goldstein & Walker, 2014).
Which makes perfect evolutionary sense if you are running from a predator. You do not need a nuanced analysis when you need to run. You need fast, automatic, proven responses.
The problem is that economic precarity—precariedad económica—is not a predator. Contract uncertainty cannot be outrun. But try telling that to a nervous system running million-year-old software that says: sustained threat equals redirect all resources to survival.
So the thinking parts go offline. Executive functions dim. And you tell yourself you are just tired, that you need to try harder, that you need more coffee.
Untitled
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Except that trying harder doesn’t work when the biological structures that underpin complex thinking have been taken offline to conserve resources for mere survival.
This morning, those structures were back. I could feel it. Not metaphorically—somáticamente, in my actual body. I read something from Walker’s work, and I could hold the concept while simultaneously connecting it to Porges and to what happened in my own sleep last night. Three frameworks, held together, talking to each other in my mind.
A month ago, reading that same passage, I would have had to stop. Reread. Make notes. Force comprehension through sheer determination. Today it just… made sense. La comprensión fluyó. Understanding flowed.
The Dissertation
After lunch, I did something I have been avoiding. I opened my dissertation files. The pages I wrote months ago when sleep was breaking every night, when my nervous system was in constant alert, when exhaustion had become so normal I had stopped recognizing it as a state separate from just being me. Yes, in addition to pursuing a Master’s in Human Rights and Social Justice, I am also completing a doctorate.
I was bracing for it to be bad. Full of gaps. Incoherent in places. The kind of work you produce when your prefrontal cortex is running on fumes, and you are just trying to get through.
It was not bad. It was good. Actually, genuinely good. The arguments held. The theory was solid. The thinking was clear.
And I sat there staring at these pages I wrote while barely functional and felt this complicated tangle of relief and grief. Una especie de duelo. Because if I could do that work while exhausted—if I could produce something sound while my body was in survival mode, while parts of my brain were literally offline—what might I have been capable of if I had been rested?
What did I lose to those months of pushing through?
I watched the pelican outside my window for a long time. Dive. Rest. Zambullirse y descansar. Dive. Rest. Over and over. That simple rhythm. And something shifted in how I was thinking about the question.
The assumption underneath my grief was that exhausted-me and rested-me are the same person in different states. But that is not quite right. The work I produced while exhausted was shaped by that exhaustion. The questions I asked, the frameworks I reached for, the way I approached the material—all of it came from living inside chronic activation and precarity.
That work has value because it was written from within the very thing it seeks to understand. Nash (2004) argues that lived experience—experiencia vivida—is legitimate scholarly data when you examine it rigorously. My exhaustion was not contaminating the work. It was part of the data.
What restoration gives me is not the chance to redo that work “properly.” It is the chance to add another layer. To examine chronic activation from the perspective of someone who has lived both states and can now see the relationship between them.
Both matter. Both are real. Both contribute.
I have been writing down what I notice in my body at different points today. Not for any formal reason. Just because the consistency seemed worth documenting.
Morning: Waking without an alarm. The body knows what time it is from some internal clock that fragmented sleep had disrupted. That feeling of being actually rested sinks all the way into my bones. Quiet joy mixing with disbelief, mixing with gratitude. High energy but organic—not forced, not chemical, just available. First conscious thought: I slept through.
Mid-morning: Three hours of writing behind me. Shoulders loose. Jaw soft. Hands steady. That focused clarity without the edge of strain I am so used to. Still high energy, sustained without effort. No fatigue. Apparently, complex intellectual work does not require defensive nervous system states. Who knew.
Afternoon: After lunch. Gentle hunger satisfied. Digestion easy. Muscles relaxed. Just… contentment. Being in my body instead of trying to manage it from somewhere outside. Energy is moderate now, appropriate to midday. Body speaking up clearly about needs—thirst, hunger, time to move—instead of waiting until an emergency before getting my attention.
Later afternoon: Reading dissertation. Sitting comfortably without conscious effort. No tension accumulating in neck and shoulders. Emotions complex—that relief-grief tangle—but not overwhelming. Holding contradictory feelings without my nervous system reading emotional complexity as a threat. Energy is holding steady.
Evening: Sunset. Cooling air. Breath synchronized with waves. Body at ease. Deep peace. That gentle anticipation of evening unfolding. Energy naturally declines as the day winds down. Not crashed. Not depleted. Just responsive to circadian rhythms, to what is actually needed now.
Night: Preparing for sleep. The body is already beginning the transition. Muscles releasing. Calm. Trust that sleep will come, that my body knows how to do this. Very low energy, sleep-ready. And here is what strikes me: no anxiety about whether tonight will repeat last night. Just readiness.
Looking at this pattern—the way energy moved across the day—I can see how it is supposed to work. La naturalidad. The naturalness of it. High when needed for writing. Moderate for reading. Naturally declining toward rest. Responsive. Appropriate. Not forced, not crashed.
For months, my energy looked nothing like this. Low despite caffeine. Forced into function through will. Brief spikes when adrenaline kicked in. Complete crashes. Forced back up. Anxious and activated at night when I needed sleep.
That is not a responsive system. That is dysregulation. That is what happens when the nervous system cannot access the state that allows for appropriate energy modulation.
Today, my energy followed the pattern research says is healthy (Kaplan, 1995; Ryan & Deci, 2000). And I know that sounds abstract—”research says”—but from inside it feels like my body finally remembering how to be a body. How to respond to actual needs instead of just surviving threat after threat after threat.
The Pelican’s Teaching
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
My hands wanted charcoal this afternoon. Not for any reason except they wanted it. So I drew the pelican. El pelícano. The one I have been watching all week. Not trying for accuracy. Trying to capture the quality of movement. The dive. The pause. The rest. El ritmo. That rhythm.
And here is what I am seeing: effort and ease are not opposites. El esfuerzo y la facilidad no son opuestos. They are partners.
The dive takes everything. Wings folding, body plummeting, that violent entry into water, struggling with a fish. Real effort. Then the rest is complete. Body still on the surface, conserving, digesting. Real rest.
Neither negates the other. The effort is not a failure; it simply requires rest. The rest is not laziness, because it follows effort. They are both necessary. Both are part of the natural rhythm.
I have been living like they are in competition. Like rest is something I have to earn through sufficient effort. Like, I can only access it once I have accomplished enough to justify it. Like needing rest means I am weak, inefficient, or not trying hard enough.
El pelícano no piensa así. The pelican does not think this way. The pelican dives when hungry. Rests because the body needs to conserve energy between dives. Neither requires justification. Both are what the body needs.
I am learning this. Despacio. Slowly. Con dificultad. With difficulty. But learning.
What I am afraid of
It is almost time for bed, and there is a question I have been avoiding all day. What if last night was a fluke? What if tonight I wake at 2 AM with thoughts racing? What if my nervous system’s trust was temporary, contingent, fragile?
I can feel anxiety activating around this. Shoulders tensing. Breathe shallow. Hypervigilance creeping back—scanning, trying to control, attempting to guarantee through worry that last night repeats.
But here is what I learned this morning, what the research showed me: nervous systems do not respond to conscious decisions about safety. They respond to environmental cues. Señales ambientales. To patterns repeated across time. To accumulate data (Porges, 2011).
Nine nights now. Same evening sequence. Same environmental cues. That is data my nervous system has been gathering.
One night of unbroken sleep does not erase that pattern. It confirms it. The conditions that supported last night’s rest remain. Evening rhythm is stable. The acoustic environment provides low-frequency, rhythmic patterns that signal safety. Darkness is complete yet not threatening. Predictability that allowed my system to trust enough to release vigilance.
I cannot control whether I sleep through tonight. But I can maintain the conditions that supported last night. Follow the same sequence. Honrar el ritmo. Honour the rhythm. Trust my nervous system is doing what nervous systems do—gathering data, testing predictions, updating assessments.
And if I wake tonight? That is also data. Not failure. Not regression. Just information about how healing actually proceeds when you get close enough to see it.
Nine days
Nueve días. Nine cycles of morning and evening. Nine progressions dark to light to dark. The pattern repeats but is never exactly the same. Each day is similar in structure, unique in texture, in quality, in what it shows me.
Today showed capacity. Hoy reveló capacidad. The capacity to think clearly. Write with rigour and creativity. Hold complexity without overwhelm. Feel contradictory emotions without dysregulation. Notice what the body needs and respond appropriately.
I had begun to think these capacities were gone. Diminished permanently by months of stress and fragmentation. But they were not diminished. They were offline. Estaban desconectadas. Waiting for conditions that would let them function.
Last night’s unbroken sleep provided those conditions. Seven hours of sustained regulation. Seven hours of complete sleep cycles. Seven hours of trust.
And today, the harvest. La cosecha de ese descanso. Clear thinking. Sustained energy. Natural rhythms.
Tomorrow night will bring its own data. Sleep through or wake—either contributes to understanding. The nervous system is learning what safety feels like. El sistema nervioso está aprendiendo cómo se siente la seguridad. Learning to recognize it. Trust it. That learning does not happen in straight lines. Some nights, complete rest, some partial waking. Both teaching the system about regulation, about what supports healing, about the gradual recalibration from threat to safety.
What Direction?
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
What I know tonight, sitting here as the last light fades and first stars appear above the sea—mientras se desvanece la última luz del cielo y aparecen las primeras estrellas sobre el mar—is that healing is not abstract hope. It is a concrete, lived, measurable reality.
My body slept through last night. First time in months.
My mind engaged in complex theoretical work today. First time in weeks.
My energy modulated appropriately across the day. First time I can remember.
Facts. Data points. The larger pattern of regulation and recovery is becoming visible.
El ritmo continúa. The rhythm continues. The pattern repeats. The body learns. And I, finally, am learning to trust this.
Figure 2: From Survival Mode to Flow State
Credit: NotebookLM, 2026
Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you, body.
Por este día de claridad. For this day of clarity.
Por mostrarme lo que es posible cuando descansas. For showing me what is possible when you rest.
Por enseñarme que el esfuerzo y la facilidad son socios, no enemigos. For teaching me that effort and ease are partners, not enemies.
Por el ritmo. For the rhythm.
The Lion’s Breath
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Ahmed, S. (2020). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Code, L. (2013). Rhetorical spaces: Essays on gendered locations. Routledge.
Goldstein, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2014). The role of sleep in emotional brain function. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 10, 679–708. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032813-153716
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
There is a particular kind of recognition that happens when you encounter a book that seems to have been written for you, even though the author has never heard your name.
Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (2008) arrived in my hands on Day Four of my thirty-day retreat in Loreto, Mexico, and I felt, for the first time since arriving, that I was not entirely alone in what I was attempting. Maitland came to silence in her late forties, after her marriage dissolved and her children grew into their own lives. I came to solitude at sixty, after decades of caregiving, teaching, committee work, and the relentless noise of being needed.
She walked into the moors of Scotland and the deserts of Sinai seeking something she could not name. I stepped onto a malecón in Baja California Sur, watching pelicans dive into water the colour of jade, trying to understand who I might become if I stopped performing the person everyone expected me to be. We are separated by continents, by decades, by the particular textures of our lives. And yet, reading her words, I felt the shock of kinship that comes when someone articulates what you have only half-known about yourself.
What draws me most powerfully to Maitland’s work is her insistence that chosen silence differs fundamentally from imposed silence (Maitland, 2008). This distinction sits at the heart of what I am calling alonetude, an intentional, contemplative orientation toward solitude characterized by volition, presence, meaning, and felt safety. Maitland (2008) argues that the quality of silence depends entirely on whether one has entered it freely or been forced into it against one’s will. Solitary confinement destroys the psyche; a hermitage can heal it. The difference is not in the absence of sound or company but in the presence of choice.
I think of my mother, now eighty, widowed and living alone in Lethbridge, her solitude not chosen but arrived at through loss. I think of the years I spent in relationships where I was technically accompanied but profoundly unseen. And I think of these thirty days in Loreto, where every morning I wake in a casita that holds only my breath, my books, my slowly settling self, and I know that I am here because I chose to be here. That choice, Maitland helps me understand, is everything. It transforms absence into presence, emptiness into fullness, aloneness into something that, with patience and courage, might become its own kind of home.
Maitland (2008) also names something I have struggled to articulate: the cultural suspicion that attaches to women who choose solitude. She observes that female aloneness has historically been constructed as dangerous, improper, or indicative of failure. A man alone on a mountain is a philosopher.
A woman alone in a cottage is a witch, a madwoman, or a woman whom no one wanted. When I told friends I was taking thirty days in Mexico by myself, I watched their faces cycle through concern, confusion, and something that looked uncomfortably like pity. “Won’t you be lonely?” they asked, as though loneliness were the inevitable destination of any woman who steps outside the orbit of others’ needs.
Maitland’s work gives me language to push back against this assumption. She demonstrates, through both scholarly analysis and lived experience, that a woman can choose solitude not because she has failed at connection but because she has succeeded at knowing herself well enough to understand what she requires. What I need, it turns out, is this: mornings on the malecón, the soft fascination of waves against stone, the slow unravelling of decades of noise, and the quiet company of a book written by a woman who walked this path before me and left breadcrumbs I am only now learning to follow.
I have been staring at the sea for two hours. Maybe three. Time has become slippery here, something I can no longer hold in my hands. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (1989) wrote about fascination, the effortless attention that natural environments invite, a quality of engagement that restores rather than depletes. The sea fascinates without demanding. It holds my gaze without asking anything in return.
Today I permitted myself to do nothing. I said it out loud this morning, standing in the kitchen of the casita with coffee warming my palms: Hoy, nada. Today, nothing. The words felt dangerous, like a confession. Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes that rest is a form of resistance, a refusal to participate in systems that reduce human worth to productivity. “We will rest,” she insists, “and from that space, we will resist” (p. 12). I am trying to believe her.
El Mar y Sus Preguntas / The Sea and Its Questions
The Sea of Cortez is a particular blue I have never seen before. It shifts throughout the day, turquoise in the morning light, deeper sapphire by noon, silver-grey as evening approaches. This is what the Kaplans (1989) call soft fascination, a gentle hold on attention that leaves space for reflection, distinct from the hard fascination of screens and urgent notifications that dominate modern life. I watch the water change, and my thoughts change with it, drifting from one thing to another with no clear direction.
I think about my mother, who died eleven years ago and whom I still miss in ways that surprise me. Grief, writes Miriam Greenspan (2003), is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to suppress or transcend rather than honour. She argues that grief carries wisdom if we can bear to feel it fully, that “the way out is through” (p. 8). Here, with nothing to distract me, grief surfaces like sea glass, worn smooth by time but still present, still catching light.
I think about the students I have taught over twenty-five years, wondering where they are now, whether they are happy. I think about the papers I should be grading, the emails I should be answering, and then I remember: I am here to stop shoulding myself.
Debería. I should. The word haunts me even in Spanish. Ryan and Deci (2017), in their foundational work on self-determination theory, distinguish between autonomous motivation, acting from genuine interest and valued choice, and controlled motivation, acting from internal or external pressure. The voice of should is the voice of controlled motivation, and I have let it run my life for decades.
El mar no juzga. Solo recibe.
The sea does not judge. It only receives.
Pensamientos Sueltos / Loose Thoughts
My mind wanders. This is what minds do when you stop giving them tasks. Neuroscientists call this the default mode network, the brain regions that activate when we are not focused on external demands (Buckner et al., 2008). Far from idle, this network supports self-reflection, autobiographical memory, and the imagining of the future. The wandering mind is working, just on different problems than our productivity culture recognizes.
I think about the word retirement and how it sounds like something is being put away, stored in a closet, made invisible. I am 60. I am approaching the end of one kind of life and the beginning of another. Dan McAdams (2001), the narrative psychologist, writes that identity is an ongoing story we tell ourselves, a personal myth that integrates past and present into a coherent sense of self. Sitting here watching the waves, I wonder who I will be when I am no longer someone who works. The question has no answer yet. Perhaps that is why I keep asking it.
I think about all the women I know who are tired. Tired in their bones, exhausted in their souls, tired in ways that sleep alone cannot remedy. Sharon Blackie (2019) writes about the “long soul” of women at midlife, the accumulated weight of decades spent tending to others, and the fierce necessity of reclaiming time for oneself. We carry so much. We have been carrying for so long. I wonder if any of them are sitting somewhere right now, staring at water, permitting themselves to rest.
I think about the word enough to determine whether I have done enough. Whether I am enough. Brené Brown (2010) names this the voice of scarcity, the cultural message that we are never sufficient, that worthiness must be earned through endless striving. “Wholehearted living,” she writes, “is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness” (p. 1). I am 60 years old and still learning that I do not have to earn the right to exist.
The sea offers no answers. It just keeps moving, wave after wave, patient and indifferent and somehow, because of that, kind.
El Cuerpo Descansa / The Body Rests
I have done almost nothing today, and my body is grateful. I can feel it in the way my shoulders have dropped, the way my jaw has unclenched. Stephen Porges (2011) calls this the shift from sympathetic activation, the mobilized state of fight or flight, to ventral vagal engagement, the calm alertness that emerges when the nervous system perceives safety. Small surrenders. The body knows how to rest if we let it. The problem is the letting.
I ate breakfast slowly this morning. Papaya, yogurt, and strong coffee. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994), who brought mindfulness practice to Western medicine, writes about mindful eating, the simple act of being fully present with food. I tasted each bite instead of eating while scrolling, eating while working, eating while planning what comes next. Just eating. Just tasting. Just being a body receiving nourishment.
Qué lujo, I thought. What a luxury. And then I felt sad, because eating slowly should be ordinary, should be the baseline of a human life, and instead it feels like an extravagance I have to travel thousands of kilometres to access. This is what Hersey (2022) means when she writes that rest has become a privilege rather than a right, a commodity rather than a necessity.
Lo Que Emerge / What Surfaces
When you stop moving, things rise. Memories. Feelings. The sediment you have been outrunning for years. Greenspan (2003) writes that the dark emotions, including grief, fear, and despair, are messengers carrying information we need: “They tell us something about ourselves and our world that we need to know” (p. 5). Solitude creates the conditions for these messages to be received.
Today, I remembered a conversation with a colleague from years ago. She told me I worked too hard, that I would burn out if I kept going at that pace. I smiled and thanked her, and changed nothing. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered burnout research, defines burnout as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I wore my exhaustion like a badge, proof of my dedication, evidence of my worth. I did not know then that worth is birthright, that I did not have to earn the right to exist.
I am learning this now, at 60, staring at the sea. Better late than never, I suppose. Better here than nowhere at all. Weinstein et al. (2021), in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, found that older adults often experience solitude as more restorative than younger people, having learned, perhaps through accumulated wisdom, how to be at peace in their own company.
A pelican dove into the water while I was writing that last sentence. It emerged with a fish in its beak, shook the water from its feathers, and flew on. Life continuing. The ordinary miracle of survival.
Estoy aquí. Eso es suficiente.
I am here. That is enough.
Al Atardecer / Toward Evening
The light is changing now. Golden hour, photographers call it. The mountains across the bay have turned pink and purple, colours I would dismiss as exaggerated if I saw them in a painting. But here they are, real and impossible, demanding to be witnessed. This witnessing, this full presence to beauty, is what Abraham Maslow (1964) called a peak experience, a moment of heightened awareness that transcends ordinary consciousness.
I walked to the malecón this afternoon, to move my body, just to feel my feet on solid ground. An old man was fishing from the seawall. He nodded at me, and I nodded back. No words necessary. Just two people sharing space at the edge of the water, each lost in our own thoughts. Nguyen et al. (2018) found that self-chosen solitude supports affective self-regulation, the capacity to modulate emotional states from within rather than seeking external distraction. The old fisherman seemed to understand this intuitively.
¿Qué busca? I wanted to ask him. What are you looking for? But I suspect he would have turned the question back to me, and I am still working on my answer.
Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep
I accomplished nothing today. I produced nothing. I checked nothing off any list.
And yet.
I breathed. I watched. I let my mind wander without yanking it back to productivity. I sat with myself, which is harder than it sounds when you have spent decades avoiding that very thing. Long and Averill (2003) argue that the capacity for solitude is a skill, something that can be cultivated through practice. Today was practice. Tomorrow will be practice too.
Mañana, quizás, haré más. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will do more. Or perhaps I will do precisely this again. Maybe this is the work I came here to do: the slow, invisible labour of learning to be still what Robert Nash (2004) calls me-search, the deep dive into personal experience that precedes scholarly understanding. I am doing the me-search now, though it looks like nothing at all.
El mar sigue respirando.
The sea keeps breathing.
Yo también.
So do I.
Con cariño,
Amy
Loreto, Day Three
References
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