Reading Time: 13minutesDay 26: Scattered Blue, a photographic meditation on the colour blue and what it means to find your whole palette scattered across the floor of a life. On creativity, alonetude, and the wonder of the Sea of Cortez.
Reading Time: 13minutes
Title: When I am Feeling Blue
Artist Statement
I looked down and laughed. My blue sandals, my blue toenails, and scattered across the concrete before me, droplets of blue paint that someone had spilled and never cleaned. The coincidence was too precise to ignore. This arrived without planning. I had simply stopped walking and noticed that the ground was echoing me back.
This is one of the photographs I have kept in colour. The blue demanded it. Against the grey and beige of the weathered concrete, the paint droplets appeared like a constellation, random yet patterned, evidence of movement and accident. My sandals anchored the frame at the bottom, situating my body within the encounter. I was fully within the encounter rather than observing from a distance. I was standing in the middle of what I found.
I am drawn to moments of unexpected correspondence. The times when what I carry meets what the world offers without intention or design. The blue paint was left for no one. It was residue from labour I had no way to witness, a task completed and moved on from, the spillage deemed too minor to address. Yet standing there, I became part of its composition. My feet completed a pattern that had been waiting, perhaps, for someone to notice.
In my broader practice, I think often about trace and residue. What remains after work is finished. What gets left behind when attention moves elsewhere. The paint droplets will fade eventually, worn away by foot traffic and weather. But for this moment, they held their blue against the grey, bright and unashamed, and I stood among them wearing the same colour, as if the ground and I had agreed on something without speaking.
The photograph holds play and presence in equal measure. It reaches beyond profundity. It simply records a moment when I looked down, saw myself reflected in what had been discarded, and smiled at the small magic of correspondence. Sometimes the land teaches through means other than solemnity. Sometimes it teaches through delight.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I have always been drawn to blue.
Beyond the way people speak of favourite colours, a casual preference is carried from childhood without much thought. This is something else. Something that lives in my body before my mind has time to name it. When I see a particular shade of blue, the soft turquoise of shallow water, the deep indigo of twilight, the bright cerulean of a painted door, something in me settles. My shoulders drop. My breath slows. The world becomes manageable for a moment.
“I have always been attracted to this colour. It reminds me of calm. Peace. Seas.”
Blue is my nervous system’s signal for safety.
Porges (2011) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, what he calls the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the body’s unconscious detection of safety or threat. Certain stimuli signal danger: loud noises, aggressive faces, signs of chaos. Others signal safety: soft voices, gentle rhythms, open spaces. I have come to understand that, for me, blue functions as a neuroceptive cue. It tells my body that the threat has passed. It tells my genuine safety system that it is safe to engage, to play, to rest.
Stopping to notice revealed this to me. Until I stood on grey concrete with blue scattered at my feet and laughed at the unexpected correspondence.
The day I took this photograph, I was walking without a destination.
This has become a practice during my retreat, caminar sin rumbo, walking without direction, letting my feet decide where to go. Kabat-Zinn (1994), in his foundational work on mindfulness, describes this quality of attention as “non-striving,” the willingness to let experience unfold without forcing it toward a predetermined goal. Walking without a destination is non-striving, made ambulatory. The body moves. The mind follows. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes everything does.
I had painted my toenails blue before I left Canada. A small aesthetic choice, barely conscious. I had packed the blue sandals because they were comfortable, suited the climate, and something in me wanted to carry that colour into this journey. Its significance had stayed quiet.
And then the ground answered.
Title: Constellation of Accident
Artist Statement
I crouched down to see them closer.
The paint droplets varied in weight and pattern. Some had fallen heavily, pooling into thick spots of saturated blue. Others were mere specks, barely visible, almost lost to the texture of the concrete. The pattern was random, no design, no intention, just the physics of liquid falling and landing where gravity placed it.
But randomness can look like pattern when you attend to it long enough. The droplets clustered in some areas, scattered in others, creating rhythms I could almost hear. This is what attention does: it finds meaning in what was never meant to mean anything. It makes constellations from scattered stars.
Someone painted something here. A wall, a sign, a piece of furniture they were refinishing. The work is finished now, moved elsewhere, forgotten. Only this residue remains, evidence of labour, trace of presence, blue marks on grey ground that no one thought to clean.
I am interested in residue. In what remains after the task is complete. In the unintended traces we leave behind.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I have been collecting broken blue things.
It started with the tiles I found in the empty field on Day 24, fragments of old Mexican ceramics in that particular turquoise-teal that appears on church domes and courtyard fountains throughout Baja California Sur. I picked them up without knowing why, only that their colour called to me, only that my hand reached for them before my mind could explain.
Since then, I have gathered more. Blue glass tumbled smooth by time. Blue pottery shards with half-erased patterns. Blue sea-worn fragments from the beach, their origins unidentifiable, their colour persistent. Each one caught my eye, and I bent down, and I carried it home, and now I have a small collection of blue facts waiting to be assembled.
The broken pieces are gathering. They will show me what they want to become.
This gathering is its own kind of practice. Leavy (2015), in her work on arts-based research, argues that creative processes generate knowledge that other methods cannot access. The hands learn differently from the mind. The act of selecting, collecting, and arranging is a knowledge-based activity, a way of knowing through doing. What the blue pieces will become stays open. I only know that gathering them feels important, feels like research, feels like my body telling me something my conscious mind has held rather than articulated.
Title: What I Have Gathered
Artist Statement
Becoming a collector of broken blue things arrived without a plan.
But here they are. Pieces of tile from the empty field. Sea glass from the beach. Pottery shards whose patterns are half-erased by time. Each one came to me separately, in its own moment, asking to be noticed. I said yes. I picked them up. I carried them back to this temporary home where they now rest together, learning each other’s company.
The blues vary. Some lean toward turquoise, some toward indigo, some toward the grey-blue of storm clouds over water. But they belong together. My body knew this before my mind understood. The hand reached; the eye approved; the collection grew.
What will I make with them? A mosaic, perhaps. An assemblage. A frame for something still forming. For now, I am letting them sit together. Letting them tell me what they need.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Mosaic, as an art form, is made from broken things.
The word derives from the Greek mouseion, a place sacred to the Muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences who bestow creative inspiration on humans. Mosaics were holy before they were decorative. They covered temple floors and church walls, transforming shattered stone and glass into images of the divine. The Byzantine masters of Ravenna understood this alchemy: that brokenness, properly arranged, becomes more luminous than wholeness ever was.
Pentcheva (2010), in her study of Byzantine aesthetics, describes how mosaic tiles catch light unevenly because each is set at a slightly different angle. The surface shimmers. The image breathes. What looks fixed is actually in constant subtle motion, alive with the unpredictability of its fragmented construction.
I think about my own fragments this way. The blue pieces I have gathered stay in motion. They carry light differently depending on how I hold them, how the sun enters the window, and how my attention moves across their surfaces. They are waiting to become something, but that something will shimmer. It will shift. It will be alive, the way broken things, reassembled, become alive.
There is another dimension to blue I must acknowledge.
Blue is also the colour of sadness. To “feel blue” is to feel low, melancholic, and touched by grief. The blues, as a musical tradition, emerged from the specific sorrows of Black American experience: oppression, loss, the particular ache of being human in a world that often makes no sense. When Robert Johnson sang “Hellhound on My Trail,” when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” they were singing the blues. They were giving voice to what lives in the blue frequency of emotion.
I carry this blue, too. The depression I have been writing about throughout this retreat. The sadness that followed me from Canada, that persists despite the warm light and the sound of waves. The grief of losing a career I loved. The fear of an uncertain future. The despair, Greenspan’s (2003) word for it, that arrives sometimes in the early morning and sits on my chest like weather.
Greenspan teaches that grief, fear, and despair are pathways through healing rather than obstacles. Greenspan (2003) insists that dark emotions are appropriate responses to a world t rather than illness,hat genuinely contains sorrow, fear, and loss. We are trained to bypass difficult feelings, to positive-think our way past them, to medicate them into silence. But Greenspan insists that befriending the dark emotions, sitting with them, listening to what they carry, transforms them into wisdom.
Blue holds both. The calm of the sea and the sadness of the spirit. The peace of shallow water and the grief of deep. I am learning that these are neighbours rather than opposites, sharing a colour, sharing a frequency, sharing space in my body as I walk through this month of alonetude.
Title: Blue at Rest
Artist Statement
The blue is resting.
I came to the pool in the late afternoon, when the light had softened and the other guests had gone inside. The water held still, that particular turquoise that exists only in certain latitudes, certain qualities of light. The palapa framed the scene like a theatre curtain, dried palm fronds hanging heavy overhead, creating a threshold between shade and brightness, between shelter and exposure.
A blue towel lies abandoned on the deck. Someone was here. Someone swam or sat or simply rested near the water, then moved on, leaving this soft evidence behind. The towel and the pool speak to each other in the same colour, different textures, different purposes, but belonging to the same family of blue.
I have been thinking about what it means to let things rest. The water simply rests. The towel simply rests. The palm trees sway slightly, at ease. Everything in this frame exists in a state of pause, of waiting, of being without becoming. This is what I came here to learn, how to be still without feeling that stillness is failure. The turquoise door of the casita echoes the water. Blue answering blue across the space. The world arranged it without my intervention. The world arranged it, and I was present enough to notice.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The art project will take shape when I return to Canada.
I imagine a mosaic, perhaps. Something that holds the blue pieces together while honouring the breaks between them. Something that catches light the way Pentcheva describes shimmering, shifting, alive. Something that carries both the calm of these seas and the sadness of these months. Something that transforms what was discarded into something beautiful, the way gleaning transforms forgotten abundance into sustenance.
But I hold it open rather than force it. I am practising what Chödrön (2000) calls “groundlessness,” the willingness to exist without knowing what comes next, to tolerate the uncertainty of being between. The fragments will tell me what they need. The blue will speak when it is ready.
For now, I gather. I notice. I let the colour find me where it will.
Title: Held in Blue
Artist Statement
This image emerged unintentionally. I had set out without abstraction as a goal. I had been walking, attentive to land, horizon, and form, when the frame filled instead with colour alone. No shoreline. No sky line. No identifiable object to anchor perception. Only blue, deep and immersive, layered in tonal variation.
At first, I considered discarding it. It held a different kind of witness than my other photographs. It resisted narrative. Yet the longer I sat with it, the more it began to speak in a different register. It moved beyond landscape into interiority.
The field of blue feels oceanic without depicting the ocean. It holds the same sense of suspension I experienced while floating in open water, where orientation dissolves and the body rests in something vast, buoyant, and indifferent to personal history. There is no horizon to measure against. No visual boundary to define scale. Only immersion.
In my reflective practice, this image becomes a study in containment without confinement. Blue often carries associations of depth, quiet, and emotional spaciousness. Here, those qualities feel intensified by the absence of distraction. Nothing interrupts the field. Nothing asks for interpretation. The photograph offers stillness rather than information.
I have come to understand it as a visual analogue for the psychological state cultivated through alonetude. A state in which identity softens, performance recedes, and the self is held rather than displayed. It mirrors the experience of resting within one’s own interior expanse without the need to articulate or explain.
The subtle shifts in tone across the frame suggest movement beneath apparent uniformity. Even in stillness, there is variation. Even in quiet, there is life. The image reminds me that healing rarely appears dramatic. Sometimes it looks like this: immersion in a colour that asks nothing and gives space in return.
I kept the photograph because it holds what cannot be easily represented. The feeling of being suspended between exhaustion and restoration. Between who I was and who I am becoming. Between surface and depth.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I stood on grey concrete with blue scattered at my feet, and I laughed.
This is what I want to remember from this retreat. More than the hard work of facing depression and grief. More than the theoretical frameworks and the scholarly engagement. More than the counter-archive of institutional harm. But also this: the laughter. The delight. The unexpected joy of finding myself echoed in a scattered patch of paint that someone had spilled and never cleaned.
Alonetude reaches beyond processing suffering. It is also about allowing pleasure. About noticing when the world offers a gift, a visual rhyme, a moment of correspondence, blue meeting blue on grey ground, and receiving it without demanding that it mean something profound.
Sometimes it just means: here is beauty. Here is a play. Here is a moment of delight in a month that has also held heaviness.
I am learning to receive both.
Sometimes the land teaches through means other than solemnity. Sometimes it teaches through delight.
Title: Blue Correspondence
Artist Statement
I return to this image because it holds something I need.
The correspondence arrived without planning. I painted my toenails blue with no knowledge of what I would find on the ground. I wore blue sandals simply as a choice. The meeting was accident, coincidence, grace, whatever word we use for moments when the world seems to be paying attention to us.
But I was paying attention too. That is the key. The paint had been there for weeks, maybe months. Others had walked over it without noticing. I noticed because I was looking down. I was practising the slow attention of alonetude, the willingness to let experience arrive without rushing past it.
The photograph records this meeting of attentions, mine and the world’s. It holds play and presence in equal measure. It resolves nothing outright. It simply says: here, for this moment, the ground and I agreed on something without speaking.
That agreement feels like the beginning of healing.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Azul. El colour de la calma. El colour de la paz. El colour del mar. El colour de la tristeza también. El colour de todo lo que siento.
Blue. The colour of calm. The colour of peace. The colour of the sea. The colour of sadness, too. The colour of everything I feel.
I am carrying it forward.
Title: The Quiet Field
Artist Statement
This image holds very little in the conventional sense of representation, yet it carries a surprising emotional density. In fact, it is a photo of my pocket.
The frame is filled by a single tonal field, dark blue shifting almost imperceptibly toward charcoal and indigo. There is texture, but it is subtle. There is gradation, but it refuses spectacle. The photograph holds its silence. It waits.
I have come to see this photograph as a meditation on interior quiet. It evokes the psychological state that emerges after prolonged solitude, when the nervous system begins to settle and stimulation no longer feels necessary. The darkness signals containment to me rather than heaviness. It signals containment. A held space where thought can soften.
The faint textural variations across the surface remind me that stillness is never empty. Beneath apparent uniformity, there is movement, grain, and subtle differentiation. Much like emotional healing, the changes are gradual and often invisible to others. Yet they are present, shaping experience from within.
There is also a relational quality to the image. It holds space rather than imposing meaning. It invites projection. Viewers bring their own associations to the field, their own histories with darkness, rest, and quiet. In this way, the photograph functions less as documentation and more as atmosphere.
Within my broader body of work on alonetude and liminal retreat, this image represents the deep interior phase of threshold experience. The stage where identity loosens, where language recedes, where one learns to remain present without needing clarity or resolution.
It is the visual equivalent of closing one’s eyes while awake. Of standing in a room before dawn. Of inhabiting the pause before re-entry into the world of roles and expectations.
The photograph holds that pause without interrupting it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.
Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Pentcheva, B. V. (2010). The sensual icon: Space, ritual, and the senses in Byzantium. The Art Bulletin, 92(4), 631–655.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.
ACADEMIC LENS
The pursuit of blue described in this post engages what Nichols (2014) documents as the neurological specificity of blue-space attention: the sea’s particular spectral quality generates measurable changes in brain activity, reducing stress hormones and increasing serotonin in ways that are distinct from other natural environments. Ulrich’s (1983) restorative environment research contextualizes this: blue water environments offer the soft fascination and complexity that allow the directed attention system to rest while the nervous system settles. The “scatteredness” named in this title is also methodologically significant: after weeks of sustained inquiry, the attention naturally disperses, which Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) identify as a sign that attentional fatigue is being healed rather than a failure of concentration. Bachelard (1969) wrote about the phenomenology of blue as the colour that most readily dissolves the boundary between self and world, and this post’s experience of losing oneself in blue resonates with that: the therapeutic dissolution of the vigilant, bounded self that precarious life has required. The scattered blue is a form of release rather than disorder, the nervous system’s version of Menakem’s (2017) “settling.”
I bent down to collect them. Three fragments of blue tile, scattered across the grey concrete where something had broken and no one had swept up. They were cool in my palm, smooth on one side and rough on the other where the adhesive had once held them to a surface I would never see. I gathered them without knowing why, only that they asked to be picked up.
This is one of the photographs I have kept in colour. The blue is too insistent to mute. Against the grey of the pavement and the pink of my open hand, the tile fragments glow like something rescued. They are small, irregular, each one shaped by the break that freed it from the whole. The largest is no bigger than my thumb. The smallest could disappear between my fingers. Together, they form a collection that makes sense only to me.
I am drawn to fragments. To what remains after something larger has come apart. These tiles were once part of a pattern, a wall or a floor or a decorative edge designed to hold together. Now they exist as pieces, separated from their original purpose, available for reinterpretation. I witnessed none of the breaking. I only arrived in time to gather what was left.
In my scholarly and personal life, I have come to understand that wholeness is rarely the goal. Sometimes what matters is the willingness to collect what has scattered, to hold the pieces in an open hand without demanding they reassemble into what they were. The tile fragments have no need to become a wall again. They are enough as they are: blue, broken, held.
The photograph situates my body in the encounter. My hand is visible, open, cradling rather than grasping. The lines of my palm map a different kind of history, one written in skin rather than clay. The fragments rest where I placed them, trusting the hand that gathered them. I kept them. I carried them home. They sit now on my desk, small witnesses to the practice of noticing what others leave behind.
I almost walked past it. An orange, vivid and whole, resting on the dry earth as if it had been placed there by intention rather than chance. The ground around it was grey and brown, scattered with stones, dried grass, and brittle leaves. The orange held its colour like a small act of defiance. It was unexpected here, and yet here it was.
How the orange arrived is a mystery to me. Perhaps it fell from a bag. Perhaps it rolled from a table and was never retrieved. Perhaps someone left it as an offering, though to whom or what I cannot say. The fruit showed no sign of decay. Its skin was smooth, its form intact. The slow return to earth had yet to begin. For now, it simply rested, bright and round, waiting for what would come next.
I am drawn to moments of incongruity. Objects that appear in the wrong place, disrupting the visual grammar of a place. The orange interrupts the palette of the desert floor the way unexpected kindness interrupts a difficult day. It simply arrives and asks to be noticed, without explaining itself.
In my broader practice, I attend to what the land holds and what passes through it. Most of what I photograph is grey, weathered, marked by time and use. This orange offered something else. A reminder that colour still exists even when I have chosen to look without it. A small brightness that insisted on its own terms. I photographed it because it held my eye, and I kept it in colour because some things ask to be seen exactly as they are. Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I almost missed it.
A small sun resting on the ground, unapologetic in its brightness.
The earth around it spoke in quieter tones grey stone dried grass the brittle vocabulary of endings.
And then this round insistence of colour.
An orange whole unbruised holding its sweetness as if it had been placed there by a careful hand rather than by accident.
I stood longer than I expected. Long enough to feel how disruption works.
How colour interrupts fatigue. How kindness arrives without introduction.
In a landscape, I have been rendering in black and white reducing the world to shadow and structure This fruit refused translation.
It stayed vivid. It held its colour against my preference for restraint.
It asked to remain exactly as it was.
How it came to rest there is beyond my knowing. Fallen from a bag rolled from a table left as offering to no one and to everyone.
Its surface was unbroken. No softening no collapse no return yet to the soil that waited beneath it.
It was still fully itself.
I photographed it because it interrupted the grammar of the ground.
Because it reminded me that brightness persists even where dust gathers.
Because sometimes what arrives unexpected saves the moment from monotony.
I left it where I found it. A small act of colour resting in a field of restraint holding sweetness against the pull of time.
Title: What the Sweetness Leaves Behind
ACADEMIC LENS
The fallen orange as a site of phenomenological inquiry enacts what Moustakas (1961) describes as the heuristic researcher’s quality of attention: the capacity to pause before what has been overlooked and find, in the seemingly unremarkable, the grounds for genuine insight. Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of material imagination applies precisely: the orange’s colour, its wholeness against the grey and brown of the dry earth, its having-been-placed quality despite the absence of a deliberate placer, all constitute an encounter with material reality that invites the imagination into larger territories of meaning. The “vivid and whole” quality of the orange also resonates with Levine’s (2010) somatic concept of resilience: the capacity to remain intact, complete in one’s essential nature, despite having fallen from one’s context of origin. For the precarious academic who has spent nineteen years falling from contract to contract, the orange’s stubborn wholeness offers what van der Kolk (2014) calls a somatic corrective: a material image of survival that asks no compromise of the essential self. Tuan (1977) might note that this unremarkable stretch of dry earth has become, through this moment of attention, a genuine place: ordinary ground transformed by the act of pausing to look.
Bringing Back My Creativity, Imperfectly and on My Own
Title: Blue Sea, Held by the Blue Sky
Artist Statement
This painting emerged as a gesture of return. After weeks of walking the shoreline, collecting fragments, and listening to land and water, I needed to place the sea onto a surface I could hold. The layered blues follow the rhythm of tide and breath, moving from deep saturation to lighter wash. Each stroke records a moment of presence, a quiet settling of the body into colour and movement. This work reflects alonetude as practice, where the sea becomes both subject and teacher, and painting becomes a form of embodied listening. It will be a background in a future painting.
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
For a long time, I believed my creativity belonged to institutions. To students who needed me. To colleagues who relied on me. To the fragile promise of a contract renewed.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped making anything beyond what served a syllabus, a publication target, or an institutional metric. My creative life narrowed into productivity. Art became output. Curiosity became compliance.
And then, quietly, I stopped creating.
Title: What Moves When I Stop Directing
Artist Statement
I made this by staying with the movement rather than correcting it. Line followed line. Colour arrived before meaning. I skipped the sketching. I skipped the planning. I let the markers travel until they decided where to pause and where to press harder.
What this piece reminds me of is how much information lives in rhythm. The bands of colour feel like layers of time rather than landscape. Some are steady. Some break and rejoin. Some thicken where attention lingered. Others thin where the hand grew lighter. Nothing here is accidental, but nothing is controlled either. It emerged through staying present.
As I worked, I noticed how my body settled into repetition. The act became almost meditative. My breathing slowed. My thinking quieted. The colours began to speak to one another without my intervention. This feels important to name. I am learning to trust processes that unfold without explanation, to allow form to emerge through persistence rather than intention.
I have spent many years being rewarded for clarity, structure, and outcomes. This work lives outside that logic. It values continuity over completion. It holds variation without resolving it. The layered lines remind me that experience rarely moves in straight trajectories. It accumulates. It overlaps. It leaves traces.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of allowing. Allowing colour to lead. Allowing time to stretch. Allowing myself to make something without translating it into purpose or proof. What moves here is what happens when I stop directing and start listening.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This month by the sea, something shifted. Beyond drama. Beyond heroics. Imperfectly. Slowly. In fragments.
I began picking up broken tiles from an empty field. Photographing shadows. Washing stones. Holding a small crystal in my palm, noticing how geological time had softened my urgency. These were beyond grand projects. They were gestures. Small acts of attention. But they felt like the return of something that had been taken from me.
Title: Morning Memories
Artist Statement
This painting emerged as a memory of light rather than a literal horizon. The layered oranges, reds, and soft purples trace the moment when day releases itself into evening, and the body follows. The low sun and mirrored water create a quiet symmetry that feels both external and internal, a horizon held in the mind as much as on the page.
This work reflects alonetude as a temporal practice, where colour becomes a way of marking time, emotion, and transition. Painting this scene was an act of slowing, of staying with a moment that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creativity research tells us that creative processes often emerge through incubation, wandering attention, and unconscious processing rather than deliberate effort (Dijksterhuis & Meurs, 2006; Sio & Ormerod, 2009). In other words, creativity returns when we stop forcing it. It returns when we walk, when we notice, when we allow the body to lead.
Title: Learning Where to Stand
Artist Statement
I began this piece without knowing where it would settle. Colour arrived first, then shape, then a sense of ground. The mountains emerged gradually, as forms that hold rather than landmarks to be conquered, their place quietly. Below them, layers of colour gathered and curved, suggesting movement, water, and time passing without urgency.
What this work brings forward for me is the question of position. Where I place myself in relation to what feels vast. The mountains leave the page undominated. They sit within it, held by the same field of colour that moves around and beneath them. This feels important. I have spent years orienting myself upward, toward peaks of achievement and recognition. This piece asks me to notice what happens when I attend instead to the layers that carry me forward.
As I worked, I felt a steadying in my body. The repetition of lines became grounding. The colours shifted from sharp to blended, from separate to relational. Nothing here is fixed. Everything is in conversation. The land, the water, the sky, and the unseen movements between them coexist without hierarchy.
This drawing belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and listening for where I am held rather than where I am headed. It reflects a growing trust in process and in place. I am learning that orientation rarely comes from striving upward. Sometimes it comes from noticing the ground beneath my feet and allowing the landscape, internal and external, to shape how I stand.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Trauma research echoes this. Arts-based practices are widely recognized as therapeutic pathways for emotional regulation, sense-making, and recovery (Leavy, 2020; van der Kolk, 2014). Creativity is beyond decoration. It is a regulation. It is restoration. It is a way back to ourselves.
I am learning that my creativity has no requirement to be polished, productive, or legible to anyone else. Peer review is no requirement for validity. Grant language is no requirement for justification. It can be quiet. It can be messy. It can be mine.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described creativity as a state of flow, where attention is absorbed and time dissolves (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). I am finding glimpses of that flow again, through drawing and noticing rather than in writing articles or designing courses, through noticing light on glass, arranging fragments on a table, walking slowly across a field that once looked empty.
Title: Layers I Can Live Inside
Artist Statement
This piece arrived through accumulation rather than decision. I worked from the top down and the bottom up at the same time, letting bands of colour stack, interrupt, and settle into one another. The lines are deliberate yet fluid. They move because my hand moved, because my body needed rhythm more than precision.
What this work reflects back to me is a growing comfort with complexity. Nothing here resolves into a single horizon. The mountains press forward, the water holds steady, the fields pulse with texture, and the sky refuses to remain quiet. Each layer insists on its own presence while making room for the others. That feels true to how I am living right now.
I notice how the black outlines both contain and release the colour. They mark edges without closing things off completely. This matters to me. I have spent a long time inside structures that demanded clarity, hierarchy, and singular direction. This drawing allows for overlap. It allows for coexistence. It allows for a landscape that can hold many tempos at once.
As I worked, my body stayed engaged. The repetition of horizontal movement grounded me. The brighter colours emerged where energy rose. The cooler tones settled where I needed rest. I let the unevenness stand. I let it speak. The drawing became a record of attention rather than a depiction of place.
This piece belongs to my inquiry into how layers form a life. Experience accumulates. It layers rather than replaces itself cleanly. Old patterns remain visible beneath new ones. What matters is whether the layers can be lived inside without strain.
Here, they can.
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This feels like a small rebellion against academic capitalism, against the extraction of time, against the idea that creativity must always be monetised, published, or measured. It feels like choosing to create for no audience except myself and the land that is teaching me how to look again.
I am imperfectly bringing back my creativity on my own. And that feels like freedom.
Title: Fragments, Returning
Artist Statement
This image marks my return to creative practice in fragments rather than finished forms. I gathered these objects, glass, tile, stone, and crystal, while walking through places I once passed without stopping. Each piece carries traces of use, weather, and abandonment, yet also holds colour, texture, and presence. Collecting them was intuitive, guided by the body before the mind could explain why.
For many years, my creativity was shaped by institutional demands, productivity metrics, and the precarious rhythms of contract academic labour. This work emerges from stepping outside those structures. The fragments are both material and metaphor. They reflect how creative life returns imperfectly, in partial gestures, slow noticing, and unplanned encounters with place.
This photograph is part of my arts-based inquiry into trauma, recovery, and relational ways of knowing. Handling these fragments grounded me in the present moment and offered a tactile form of mindfulness. Creativity here is beyond outcomes. It is a practice of attention, a refusal to walk past what appears empty, and a quiet reclaiming of making as personal, relational, and ethical work.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Reference
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.
Dijksterhuis, A., & Meurs, T. (2006). Where creativity resides: The generative power of unconscious thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(1), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2005.03.007
Leavy, P. (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014212
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
ACADEMIC LENS
The “gesture of return” that this post names in relation to painting describes what Winnicott (1971) called the recovery of the capacity for play that institutional life suppresses. The decision to paint imperfectly, and explicitly on one’s own terms, is a methodological as well as an artistic statement: it enacts what Brown (2009) identifies as the essential quality of genuine play, that it is intrinsically motivated rather than performed for an audience. Bachelard (1969) argued that creative work with material substances, paint, water, the physical resistance of the canvas, engages the imagination at a pre-linguistic level, allowing the body’s knowing to find form before conceptual thought can intervene and redirect it. Van der Kolk (2014) identifies creative expression as one of the primary pathways through which trauma recovery occurs: the nervous system’s frozen energy, held in bodily tension, releases through the rhythmic, sensory engagement of making. The Sea of Cortez placed on canvas is also a form of what Tuan (1977) calls topophilic attachment made visible: the love of place taking on permanent form through the hand’s repeated, intimate encounter with its colours and shapes.
I am learning that treasure is what the world overlooks rather than what it values. Treasure is what the world has overlooked, discarded, and left behind for someone patient enough to notice.
Title: Blue Enough to Stop
Artist Statement
I noticed this because the blue refused to disappear.
At first glance, it was just dust and gravel, the kind of ground you walk over without registering it. Then the colour began to surface. Small shards scattered unevenly, catching light in brief, insistent flashes. They were beyond arrangement. Beyond intention. Simply there, insisting on being seen.
This moment reminded me how attention changes the world. What appears monochrome at a distance reveals complexity when approached slowly. The blue fragments felt like remnants of care, traces of something once whole that still carried beauty despite being broken. I thought about how easily colour is erased by speed, by habit, by the assumption that nothing important lies underfoot.
There is something tender in stopping for what is small and sharp-edged. These fragments asked for no fixing and no story beyond their presence. They held their colour against dust and time. That felt instructive. It suggested that value requires no coherence, no completion. It can exist in scattered form, waiting for someone willing to look closely enough to notice.
This image stays with me because it affirms a practice I am learning to trust. To walk slowly. To look down. To allow myself to be interrupted by what glints quietly at the margins. The blue was enough to stop me. That feels like a lesson worth keeping.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Empty Field
There is an empty field just beyond the edge of town, where the paved road gives way to dust and the last buildings surrender to open land. I have been walking past it for weeks without stopping. It looked like nothing. Scrub brush. Rubble. The kind of place you glance at and dismiss.
Yesterday, I stopped.
Something beyond naming made me turn off the path and walk into that emptiness. Perhaps I was tired of the routes I already knew. Perhaps my body was leading me somewhere my mind had yet to consent to go. I have been learning, throughout this time by the sea, to follow impulses that resist explanation. This is part of what Scholarly Personal Narrative makes possible: trusting that the body knows things the conscious mind has yet to articulate.
The field was full of treasure.
Title:One Person’s Treasure
Artist Statement
This work began when I stopped walking past what I had assumed was empty. Turning into the field felt intuitive, guided by the body rather than the mind. What appeared as absence revealed fragments of glass and tile, small residues of domestic life and quiet abandonment.
I approach these materials as witnesses, holding traces of memory, use, and erasure. Through Scholarly Personal Narrative and land-based inquiry, this field becomes both site and method, a place where brokenness speaks and presence persists. This work is an act of ethical noticing, listening to what remains.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Practice of Gleaning
What I was doing in that field has a name. It is called gleaning.
Gleaning is an ancient practice. In agricultural societies, gleaners were people who followed behind the harvesters, collecting the grain that had been left behind in the fields. Gleaning was how the poor survived. It was sanctioned in biblical law: landowners were instructed to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that widows, orphans, and strangers could gather what they needed.
Filmmaker Agnès Varda (2000), in her documentary The Gleaners and I, explored how gleaning persists in contemporary life. Varda filmed people who collect discarded food from markets, artists who work with found materials, and herself, gathering images and stories that others have overlooked. Varda understood gleaning as both a practical survival practice and a creative practice. She called herself a gleaner of images.
I am a gleaner too. I walk through empty fields and collect what has been left behind. Tiles that once covered floors. Pottery that once held food. Glass that once contained something someone needed. These objects have been discarded, but they retain their beauty. Weathered, but intact.
There is something in this practice that speaks to my own experience. I, too, have felt discarded. I, too, have been treated as though my value ended when my utility to an institution was no longer convenient. Walking through that field, picking up fragments that others have dismissed, I am practising a different way of understanding worth.
Title: What Can I Make With These?
Artist Statement
I picked these up without a plan in mind. I noticed them because they had opened themselves. Split husks resting on concrete, their inner fibres exposed, their protective work already done. They were no longer attached to the tree, no longer enclosing anything, and yet they remained present. That mattered to me.
What drew me in was their honesty. These forms show what happens after holding, after covering, after protection has reached its limit. They make no pretence of wholeness. They try nothing like returning to what they were. They rest exactly as they are, shaped by weather, pressure, and time. I recognized something of myself in that posture.
My practice at this stage is grounded in attention rather than transformation. I am interested in what materials teach when they are allowed to remain close to how they were found. These husks speak about shedding, about release, about the quiet dignity of structures that step aside once their purpose has been fulfilled. They carry evidence of labour without demanding recognition for it.
Placing them together is a way of listening. I let them go beyond resolving into a single form. I let them sit in relation, curved toward and away from one another, holding space without enclosure. They become companions rather than components. The work lives in that relational field.
This piece belongs to my broader inquiry into value, endurance, and recovery. I am learning to recognize worth in what has been cast aside and to trust forms that have no need to seek completion. These husks remind me that protection can be temporary, that opening can be a form of wisdom, and that what remains after release still carries meaning.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Gleaning is how the discarded find their way back to meaning.
Objects as Co-Researchers
Within arts-based research, found objects can serve as what scholars call co-researchers. This means they move beyond the merely decorative or illustrative. They participate in the inquiry. They carry knowledge. They teach.
Material culture theorist Jane Bennett (2010), in her book Vibrant Matter, argues for what she calls “thing-power”-the capacity of objects to act, to affect, to make things happen. Bennett challenges the assumption that only humans have agency. Objects, she suggests, are active agents. They exert influence. They shape what becomes possible.
I have felt this thing-power in the field. A flash of colour catches my eye. I bend down. My hand reaches before my mind decides. The object has called me. It has exercised a kind of agency, drawing my attention, inviting me to pick it up, to carry it home, to consider what it means.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013) writes about making as a process of correspondence between maker and material. The maker imposes no form on passive matter. Instead, maker and material enter into dialogue. Each responds to the other. Each shapes what emerges.
My relationship with these found objects is a form of correspondence. I decided nothing in advance about what I was looking for. I let the field show me what was there. I let the objects announce themselves. I followed their lead.
Title: Washing the Findings
Artist Statement
I photographed the washing because it is part of the practice. These objects came from the earth, carrying dust, salt, and the residue of years of exposure to weather. Washing them is an act of attention. It is slow, deliberate work. I handle each piece individually, feeling its weight, noticing its texture, watching colours emerge as the dirt lifts away.
This is a contemplative practice in material form. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994) describes mindfulness as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgment. Washing these fragments becomes mindfulness with my hands. It grounds me in the present and connects me to something beyond my circling thoughts.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
What the Fragments Teach
Each fragment has a history I will never fully know. But I can read what is written on their surfaces.
I believe the coloured tiles came from buildings that once stood in this area. Loreto is an old town, founded in 1697 as the first Spanish colonial settlement on the Baja California Peninsula. These tiles may have covered floors in homes, churches, or municipal buildings. They may be decades old. They may be older. The colours, reds and blues, yellows and whites, were chosen by someone. They were arranged in patterns. They were walked upon, cleaned, and lived with. Now they are fragments in a field, and I am holding them in my palm.
The pottery shards tell similar stories. I found a piece with a blue floral pattern, clearly part of a decorated plate or bowl. Someone painted those flowers. Someone purchased that dish. It held food that nourished someone. Now it is broken, but the pattern remains visible, still beautiful, still evidence of care.
The glass pieces, amber, brown, and translucent, have been tumbled smooth by time. They have the quality of sea glass, though I found them in a dry field. Perhaps they were once bottles that held medicine, wine, or oil. Perhaps they were broken and their fragments scattered, and the wind and sand did the work that waves do on beaches.
Title:Crystal Fragment
Artist Statement: This crystal stopped my breath when I found it. Finding something like this in a scrubby field. It lay half-buried in the dust, catching a slant of afternoon light, and I knew immediately that I had to pick it up. Crystals form over thousands of years, molecules arranging themselves into geometric patterns through processes of heat and pressure and time. This fragment holds geological time in a form I can hold in my hand. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1964) wrote about the intimate immensity of certain objects, their capacity to hold vastness within small forms. This crystal is immensely intimate. It is a small thing that opens onto enormous scales of time. Holding it, I feel my own urgency soften. My nineteen years of precarious labour, my exhaustion, my grief: these are real, but they are also brief against the timescale this crystal represents. Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Amber Stone
And then there was the amber stone.
I almost missed it. It was the colour of the dust around it, a warm honey-brown that blended with the earth. But something about the way it caught the light made me pause. I bent down. I brushed away the dirt. And there it was: a piece of what I believe is carnelian, or perhaps a form of agate, translucent and glowing like something alive.
I have been carrying it in my pocket ever since. I take it out and hold it to the light. I feel its smooth weight in my palm. It has become a kind of talisman, a physical reminder that beauty exists in overlooked places, that value requires no certification by recognition.
Title:Amber Light
Artist Statement: I photographed this stone because it represents everything I am learning about value. This stone has no market value. No one would pay money for it. By commercial standards, it holds no gemstone status. And yet it is beautiful. It catches light in ways that make me catch my breath. It has weight and warmth and presence. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) analyzed how systems of cultural capital determine what is valued and what is dismissed. The art world, the academy, the marketplace: all of these systems decide what counts. But here, in my hand, is something that counts to me regardless of what any system says. This is what recovery looks like: learning to trust my own perception of value, learning to recognize beauty beyond external certification of authority. Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
“Beauty exists in overlooked places. Value requires no certification by recognition.”
Amy Tucker, Day 24: Finding Treasure in Empty Fields (January 24, 2026)
A Counter-Archive of the Overlooked
I have written about the concept of a counter-archive in earlier posts. This term describes a collection of evidence that documents what official records refuse to acknowledge. Institutions keep archives of what they consider important: contracts, budgets, meeting minutes, and performance metrics. They keep no archives of exhaustion, of grief, of the slow accumulation of harm that precarious labour produces.
My collection of found objects is becoming a counter-archive of a different kind. It is an archive of the overlooked. It gathers what has been discarded, dismissed, or left behind. It insists that these fragments have value, that they are worth preserving, that they carry knowledge.
Cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2003) argues in her book An Archive of Feelings that trauma leaves traces that official archives cannot capture. Cvetkovich proposes alternative archives: collections of ephemera, personal objects, and creative works that document emotional and bodily experiences excluded from institutional memory.
My cup of tiles, stones, and glass is such an archive. It holds evidence of presence, of care, of the persistence of beauty in conditions of neglect. It documents my own practice of attention during this time by the sea. It will travel home with me, a material record of what I learned in this empty field.
Title:The Full Collection
Artist Statement
I arranged these objects on the table to see them all at once, to understand what I had gathered. The arrangement was intuitive, beyond any plan. I simply placed each piece and let the composition emerge. What I see now is a kind of mosaic, a tessellation of fragments that fit together imperfectly yet create something whole nonetheless.
This feels like a metaphor for my life right now. I am made of fragments: the teacher, the mother, the athlete, the advocate, the person who was discarded by an institution she served for nineteen years. These pieces resist fitting together neatly. They have rough edges. They come from different sources. But here they are, arranged on a surface, making a pattern beyond prediction. Artist and writer Anne Truitt (1982) believed that art is inseparable from the artist as a whole person, a product of everything rather than skill alone, one is. This collection is the product of who I was during these thirty days. It is art made through attention rather than intention.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Mosaic as Methodology
Looking at these fragments spread across the table, I think about mosaics.
A mosaic is an art form made from broken pieces. Tiles, glass, stone, pottery: all are shattered or cut into fragments, and then those fragments are arranged into patterns and images. The beauty of a mosaic depends on brokenness. Without the breaking, there would be no small pieces to arrange. Without the fragments, there would be no whole.
Art historian Bissera Pentcheva (2010) writes about Byzantine mosaics and their capacity to transform light. The irregular surfaces of mosaic tiles catch and scatter light in ways that flat surfaces cannot replicate. Mosaics shimmer. They seem alive. Their beauty lies precisely in their fragmentation.
I am thinking about this in relation to my own experience. I have been broken by precarious labour. My sense of professional identity has shattered. My body has carried the weight of chronic stress until it could carry no more. I arrived at this time by the sea in fragments.
But fragments can be arranged. Fragments can become mosaics. The breaking may be the beginning of a different kind of wholeness, one that acknowledges rupture rather than pretending it never happened.
The breaking may be the beginning of a different kind of wholeness.
The Human Right to Beauty
Title: What Was Bound
Artist Statement:
I noticed this because something had already been tied.
A length of frayed fibre lay on the ground, knotted at its centre, holding itself together even as its edges unraveled. It looked used, weathered, and finished with its original task. Nearby, a small ring rested in the dust, separate yet clearly related, as if it had once played a role in keeping something contained.
What this image brings forward for me is the quiet after function. The moment when binding has done its work and is no longer required. I have been thinking a great deal about what it means to hold things together for long periods of time. Roles, responsibilities, expectations. The fibres here show the cost of that work. They are worn thin at the ends, softened by exposure, altered by effort.
There is care embedded in this object. Someone tied it for a reason. Someone relied on it to secure, to fasten, to keep order. And yet it now rests on the ground, released from usefulness, still intact, still present. That feels important. It mirrors an experience I know well. Being valued for what I could hold together, and then set aside once that labour was no longer needed.
I am drawn to the knot at the centre. It is firm, deliberate, almost tender. It suggests intention rather than accident. Around it, the fibres loosen and spread, no longer contained by the same demands. The object has shifted from function to witness. It carries memory in its structure.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of noticing what remains after systems of use move on. I am interested in materials that show wear honestly, that hold evidence of service without apology. What was bound here has been released. What remains still carries meaning.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I want to connect this practice to the human rights framework that grounds this entire project.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This right includes the right to make art, to appreciate beauty, and to engage in creative practice.
But there is something more fundamental here, something about the right to perceive value in what has been devalued.
Philosopher Elaine Scarry (1999) argues in her book On Beauty and Being Just that the experience of beauty is bound up with justice. When we perceive something as beautiful, Scarry suggests, we recognize its right to exist, its claim on our attention, and its worthiness. Beauty, in this sense, is far from frivolous. It is ethical. It trains us to see the value in things and, by extension, in people.
Walking through that empty field, bending down to pick up discarded tiles, I was practising a form of justice. I was recognizing the value in what had been thrown away. I was refusing the logic that says broken things are worthless.
This matters because I, too, have been treated as though my value ended when I was no longer useful to an institution. I, too, have been discarded. Finding beauty in these fragments is a way of insisting that discarded carries no implication of worthlessness. It is a way of practising, in material form, the belief that every being has inherent dignity regardless of what systems of power decide.
What Remains
Title: What the Sea Returned
Artist Statement
I gathered these pieces slowly, without a plan, letting my hands decide before my mind intervened. Shells smoothed thin by water. Glass softened into quiet colour. Wood hollowed and shaped by time rather than tools. Each object arrived through patience rather than searching, offered up by tide, weather, and repetition.
What this collection reminds me of is how the sea practices care. It breaks things down, yes, but it also rounds edges, tempers sharpness, and leaves behind what can endure touch. The glass no longer cuts. The shells carry the echo of shelter. The wood holds openings where something once moved through it, leaving pathways rather than damage. These materials speak of transformation through persistence rather than force.
As I arranged them together, I became aware of how little I needed to decide. Balance emerged on its own. Colour found companionship. Texture created conversation. This feels aligned with how I am learning to live right now. Less directing. More listening. Allowing relationships to form without insisting on outcome.
There is a quiet ethics in keeping what has been weathered rather than perfected. These objects have lived alongside loss, erosion, and change. They remain beautiful because of that history rather than despite it. Holding them, I am reminded that what survives carries knowledge. What returns has something to teach.
This collection functions as a personal archive of attention. Each piece marks a moment when I slowed down enough to receive rather than pass by. Together they form a record of time spent listening to what the sea was willing to share.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I will carry these fragments home with me. They will sit on a shelf or a windowsill, catching light, reminding me of this field, this practice, this moment in my recovery.
They will remind me that the world overlooks treasure rather than what it values. Treasure is what the world has overlooked. Treasure is what remains beautiful despite being broken. Treasure lies in empty fields, waiting for someone patient enough to notice.
I am learning to be that patient person. I am learning to walk slowly, to look carefully, to bend down and pick up what catches my eye. I am learning that this practice of attention is itself a form of healing.
van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma recovery requires the restoration of the capacity for pleasure, for play, for engagement with beauty. Feeling less bad falls short of what we need. We must learn again to feel good, to be moved by what is beautiful, to experience joy without guilt.
These fragments bring me joy. Holding the amber stone up to the light brings me joy. Arranging the tiles on the table and seeing the pattern emerge brings me joy. This joy is medicine, far from frivolous. It is evidence that I am healing.
I am learning that the practice of attention is itself a form of healing.
Estoy encontrando tesoros. Estoy aprendiendo a ver.
I am finding treasure. I am learning to see.
Title: Carried, Then Set Down
Artist Statement
I placed these objects together because they felt as though they had already found one another.
A seed pod, opened and emptied of what it once carried. A feather, shed without injury, its work in the air complete. Two small stones, held briefly in the hand and then released. None of these were taken by force. Each was encountered at a moment when it was ready to be found.
What this arrangement reminds me of is how much of life is held temporarily. Protection, lift, nourishment, weight. These materials speak quietly about function that has ended without failure. The seed pod has released. The feather has fallen. The stones remain exactly as they are. There is no urgency here, no demand to return to usefulness.
I have spent many years believing that value was tied to carrying, to lifting, to producing. This grouping asks something different of me. It invites attention to what happens after effort, after release, after the body no longer needs to hold everything together. There is dignity in that moment. There is relief.
The space between these objects matters as much as the objects themselves. They are arranged with care, yet allowed distance. They share a surface without being bound to one another. That feels instructive. It mirrors a way of being I am learning to trust, one where connection requires no containment.
This work belongs to my inquiry into attention, recovery, and the ethics of noticing. These materials teach me that carrying is only one phase of existence. Setting down is another. Both are necessary. Both leave traces.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Orion Press. (Original work published 1958)
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Duke University Press.
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.
Pentcheva, B. V. (2010). The sensual icon: Space, ritual, and the senses in Byzantium. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Scarry, E. (1999). On beauty and being just. Princeton University Press.
Truitt, A. (1982). Daybook: The journal of an artist. Pantheon Books.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Varda, A. (Director). (2000). Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [The gleaners and I] [Film]. Ciné Tamaris.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
The epistemology of discarded treasure articulated in this post resonates with what Moustakas (1961) calls the phenomenological turn: attending to what is present rather than what is supposed to be there, which often means recovering what has been overlooked or devalued by dominant frameworks. The insight that “treasure is what the world overlooks” carries a political dimension that Nixon (2011) would recognize: slow violence renders certain things, and certain people, invisible precisely by failing to register them as valuable. For the precarious academic who has spent nineteen years on the margins of institutional belonging, the practice of finding beauty in what has been discarded is autobiographical as much as aesthetic: it is the application of a new valuing logic to the self. Tuan’s (1977) concept of topophilia extends to include small objects: attachment to place includes attachment to the particular material gifts that place offers, and the shoreline’s discards become intimate through the attention paid to them. The “Blue Enough to Stop” artwork described here enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call creative analytic practice: making meaning through form rather than argument, letting the image do the epistemic work.
Reading Time: 8minutesAllowing space, what it looks like when a body begins to trust that rest is permitted. A reflective essay and photograph on the practice of giving yourself room to be without performance, without justification.
Reading Time: 8minutes
Title: The Walk
Artist Statement
I took this photograph because it shows what allowing looks like. The crosswalk is structured, measured, painted in precise intervals, the way institutions measure time in semesters and syllabi and contract renewals.
But beyond it, the path becomes something else: stone fitted by hand, plants growing without permission, shade falling where it will. This is the crossing I am learning to make. From the arithmetic of productivity to the organic unfolding of creative time. From the lie that my worth equals my usefulness to the truth that my hours belong to me.
Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) writes that all transitions begin with an ending and move through a disorienting middle before arriving somewhere new. This photograph captures that middle space, the threshold where one way of being has ended and another has yet to fully form. I stand at the edge of the stripes, looking toward the garden, deciding to cross. The crossing is the allowing. The path beyond is what waits when I stop measuring and start living.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
For nineteen years, I gave my hours away, parcelled them into syllabi and semesters, measured them in student emails answered past midnight, in committee meetings that stole Sunday afternoons, in the endless performance of being enough.
I had never been told my time belonged to me.
I thought it belonged to the institution, to the students who needed me, to the colleagues who counted on me, to the phantom promise of a contract renewed.
I thought rest was something I would earn later, after the grading was done, after the course was redesigned, after I had proven, finally and forever, that I deserved to stay.
Later never came.
Title: What the Ground Holds
Artist Statement
I came across this mark without looking for it. A dark stain on pale gravel, irregular, almost bodily in its shape. It looked as though something had been set down and then lifted away, leaving evidence behind. I stopped because my body recognized it before my mind did.
What this image reminds me of is how much is carried quietly by the ground beneath us. Loss, spillover, residue. The moments that arrive without announcing their importance, yet remain. I thought about how often I have moved through days leaving parts of myself behind in small, unnoticed ways. Fatigue. Grief. Effort. Care. None of it dramatic. All of it real.
There is a tendency to tidy meaning, to clean up what feels uncomfortable or ambiguous. This mark resists that impulse. It is uneven. It resists easy resolution into a symbol. It simply exists. That matters to me. It mirrors the way experience often lands in the body and in memory, less as a story with a clear beginning and end than as something that seeps in and stays.
Standing there, I felt a quiet permission to acknowledge what lingers after long periods of giving, striving, and holding things together. The ground accepts without judgment what falls onto it. It absorbs. It remembers. It carries on. I find comfort in that. It suggests that presence leaves traces, even when there is no witness.
This image stays with me because it affirms a truth I am learning to trust. That what is left behind still counts. That marks of passage, effort, and release require no interpretation to be valid. Sometimes they only need to be seen.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Now I am learning a different arithmetic.
An hour spent painting stones is an hour spent fully. An afternoon watching light move across water is an afternoon found. A morning with no agenda, no output, no proof of productivity: a morning given, never stolen from something more important.
This is the hardest math I have ever done: subtracting the lie that my worth equals my usefulness, adding back the hours that belong to no one but me.
Title: Being Received
Artist Statement
I remember arriving here without urgency. The body had already slowed before the mind caught up. Morning light moved through the trees and settled across the stones, touching everything gently, as if to say there was time.
What this place brought back to me was the feeling of being received rather than evaluated. The ground was uneven beneath my feet, rounded stones fitted together by hand, asking me to pay attention to how I walked. The light did the same. It filtered rather than flooded, offering warmth without demand. I felt myself soften in response.
I have spent many years arriving in spaces that asked me to explain myself quickly, to justify my presence, to prove my value. This moment asked for something different. It invited stillness. It invited noticing. It allowed me to arrive as a body first, before arriving as a role or a set of credentials.
Standing there, I felt the quiet relief of entering a place where time moved differently. Where welcome was expressed through shade, texture, and light rather than expectation. It reminded me that arrival can be gentle. That being present requires no performance. That some places meet us exactly where we are.
This image holds that memory for me. A reminder that arrival can feel like exhale. That there are spaces in the world where nothing is required beyond paying attention and letting oneself be held by the moment.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creative space arrives only when allowed.
It must be protected from the voices that say you should be working, from the guilt that rises when the hands are still, from the old habit of filling every silence with effort, with striving, with the desperate attempt to outrun my own disposability.
Allowing is an act of will. Allowing is an act of faith. Allowing is an act of resistance against every system that taught me my time belonged to others.
I am learning to say: This hour is for colour. This hour is for stillness. This hour is for the part of me that wants to make something, simply for the making, beyond grading or publishing or praise, but because making is what humans do when they are allowed to be human.
I am learning to say: This needs no justification. I owe no explanation. Creativity requires no proof through outcomes, impacts, and metrics.
The counting was the problem. The measuring was the cage.
Creative space is full. It is full of everything I pushed aside while I was busy surviving: the colours I wanted to play with, the shapes I wanted to explore, the questions I wanted to follow without knowing where they led.
Creative space is necessary, rather than indulgent. It is medicine. It is the room where the soul remembers what it came here to do.
I am learning that allowing is wisdom, never laziness. I am learning that rest is strength, never weakness. I am learning that the hours I give to creativity belong here, taken from nothing more important.
They are the important things. They have always been important. I had simply been unable to see it through the fog of exhaustion, through the fear of inadequacy, through the relentless demand to produce, to prove, to perform.
Today I allow.
I allow the paintbrush in my hand. I allow the stone on the table. I allow the afternoon to unfold without a plan, without a product, without anything to show for it except a quiet body and a heart that remembers it is allowed to want what it wants.
This is everything. The scope is vast.
This is the revolution that happens when a woman who was taught to give herself away finally decides to keep a little something for herself.
Title: What Endures
Artist Statement
I stopped here because the rock felt steady in a way I needed to witness. It rose from the ground with a quiet confidence, fractured yet held together, shaped by pressure, weather, and time. Shrubs and branches reached across it, adapting themselves to its presence rather than overcoming it. Nothing here appeared polished or resolved. Everything felt honest.
This place reminded me that endurance rarely looks graceful. It looks layered. It carries cracks, weight, and evidence of strain. I thought about how often strength is imagined as smoothness or clarity, when lived experience tells a different story. What lasts is usually shaped by friction, shaped by remaining when retreat would have been easier.
Standing before this formation, I felt my own history reflected back to me. Years of pressure. Years of holding. Years of adapting to structures that asked for more than they offered. And still, something essential remained. Grounded. Present. Capable of bearing weight without breaking.
I am drawn to the way the shrubs have grown around and alongside the rock, finding their own lines through what was already there. That relationship feels important to me, the way endurance and growth can coexist, each shaping the other over time. The rock holds its ground beside the plant. The plant finds its way around the rock. They persist together, finding whatever space allows itself to be found.
I return to this image as a reminder that persistence leaves a form. That survival reshapes the body and the land in similar ways. That remaining is itself a kind of quiet courage.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Title: Learning the Water’s Pace
Artist Statement
I made this without knowing what it would become. I was following colour rather than outcome, letting blue settle where it wanted, allowing darker tones to drift and pool. The paper absorbed more slowly than I expected. Small fibres caught pigment and held it, creating marks that felt almost like rain or memory or breath moving through water.
What this work reminds me of is how different it feels to create without direction. There was no plan here, no sketch to guide my hand. I stayed with the movement instead. I watched how one layer changed the next. I waited for the surface to respond before adding anything more. Time stretched. My body softened. I felt myself listening rather than deciding.
I have spent years working in systems that reward speed, clarity, and completion. This piece lives outside that rhythm. It belongs to a slower register, one that allows uncertainty to remain present. The marks are uneven. The edges wander. Nothing is corrected. That feels important. It mirrors a way of being I am learning to trust, where meaning emerges through patience rather than force.
As I worked, I thought about water as teacher. Water rushes nowhere. It shapes through repetition, through staying, through contact. This piece holds that lesson for me. It reminds me that creativity requires no justification, and that stillness can be active, generative, and alive.
This is what it feels like to let the work arrive on its own terms. To remain with it. To allow.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
References
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.
ACADEMIC LENS
The crosswalk as a visual metaphor for institutional measurement, measured, painted in precise intervals like “semesters and syllabi and contract renewals,” places this reflection within Nixon’s (2011) analysis of slow violence: the way institutional structures impose their temporal logic on the body, scheduling its attention, availability, and output according to institutional rather than biological or human need. The path beyond the crosswalk that “allows” without prescribing enacts what Levine (2010) calls somatic freedom: the experience of movement without predetermination that the institutionalised body has been denied. Van der Kolk (2014) argues that one of trauma’s most pervasive effects is the foreclosure of spontaneity: the hypervigilant nervous system is always already prepared for what comes next, leaving no space for genuine openness. Winnicott’s (1971) concept of potential space is also relevant: allowing space, both physical and psychological, is the precondition for play, creativity, and the discovery of genuine desire. The practice of “allowing” described here is actively counter-cultural rather than passive: it refuses the institutional demand for constant purposeful motion and insists on the right to open, undetermined movement as a form of human dignity.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on difficult childhood memories and family pain. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Title: The Spruce Tree
Artist Statement:
This drawing emerges from an early memory of solitude, belonging, and attention. At eight years old, I wandered alone into the winter woods of northwestern Ontario and found shelter beneath a low spruce tree, its branches heavy with snow. Beneath that canopy, time softened. The forest became a room, a witness, a presence that required nothing of me except that I be there.
The repeated spruce forms in this work are remembered gestures far more than botanical studies. Each branch carries the imprint of slow looking and quiet recall. Drawn decades later, they are shaped by the body's memory rather than by precision, by sensation rather than replication. The marks hold the weight of snow, the hush of winter, and the feeling of being held by something larger than oneself.
This work reflects an early knowing that solitude differs entirely from loneliness, and that belonging can be relational without being human-centred. The spruce tree was literal then, entirely real: a companion, a shelter, a teacher. Returning to this memory now, I recognize it as foundational to my understanding of presence, aloneness, and listening.
Created while residing beside the Sea of Cortez, far from spruce forests and snow, this drawing bridges landscapes and lifetimes. It acknowledges that while places change, the body remembers what it once knew: how to be still, how to belong, and how to listen when the world speaks without words.
Created by Amy Tucker, January 2026
I was eight years old, and the forest was mine.
We lived on several acres outside of town, the kind of place where you could walk in any direction without hitting a fence or a neighbour for a long time. The house sat at the edge of the woods, and the woods stretched out behind us like an invitation, like a promise, like something waiting to be discovered.
It was winter in northwestern Ontario, the kind of winter that turns the world into something else entirely. The snow had fallen for days, and when it finally stopped, everything was buried and quiet. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe, but I welcomed it. I liked the way it felt in my lungs, sharp and clean, like drinking something pure.
I walked into the woods alone. I simply went without asking, without telling. Permission never crossed my mind. I went the way children go, following something that called without words.
I knew these woods. I knew the path to the beaver dam, about a ten-minute walk if you walked straight through, longer if you wandered. In winter, the pond the beavers had made froze thick and clear, and we would skate there, my siblings and I, our blades scratching lines into ice that had waited all winter for us. The beaver lodge rose from the frozen surface like a small mountain, sticks and mud frozen solid, and sometimes I wondered if the beavers inside could hear us laughing and calling to each other above their heads.
But that day, the pond was beside the point. That day, I was just walking, just being in the woods, letting my feet decide where to go.
The snow came up past my knees in places. I had to lift my legs high with each step, like a deer, like something wild. My breath made clouds in front of my face. The only sound was the crunch of my boots and the occasional soft thump of snow sliding from a branch.
I found the spruce tree partway along the path, before the land sloped down toward the beaver dam. It was unremarkable in size, ordinary in beauty, yet something about it drew me in completely. The lower branches swept down and touched the snow, creating a space underneath, a room, a secret place entirely my own.
I crawled under.
Inside, the world changed. The branches above me were dark green, almost black, heavy with snow. The ground beneath me was soft with fallen needles, dry and fragrant, protected from the white that covered everything else. I lay on my back and looked up through the lattice of branches at the sky beyond.
The snow on the branches was so white it seemed to glow, luminous beyond ordinary brightness, as though it held light inside itself and let it out slowly. I watched a few flakes drift down through the gaps in the branches, lazy and unhurried, taking their time to land on my jacket, my mittens, my face.
How long I stayed there, I am unable to say. Time worked differently under that tree. Time was entirely mine. The day stretched open, unscheduled, unhurried. There was only the soft green dark of the branches, the impossible white of the snow, and my own breathing, slow and steady, matching something beyond naming.
The forest was speaking to me. I know how that sounds. I knew even then that this was beyond explaining to anyone, that adults would smile and nod and miss the point entirely. But it was true. The forest was saying something, beyond words, in the way the cold felt on my cheeks, in the way the branches creaked when the wind moved through them, in the way the silence was full, so full of presence that I felt held.
Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the creek that fed the beaver pond, the part that never quite froze, water moving under ice, a soft murmur beneath the silence. The beavers were asleep in their lodge, or doing whatever beavers do in winter, living their secret lives beneath the frozen surface. The chickadees were calling somewhere nearby, that two-note song that sounds like they are saying hey, sweetie, over and over, untroubled by the cold.
I was free of loneliness. That is what I remember most. I was alone, completely alone, a ten-minute walk from home, hidden under a tree in my own secret world, and I was entirely free of loneliness. I was exactly where I was supposed to be, held by something larger than myself, known by something that accepted me entirely as I was.
I was eight years old, lying under a spruce tree in the snow, and I was perfectly, completely happy.
What I could never have imagined then was how thoroughly I would spend decades forgetting this feeling. I would grow up and learn to fill silence with noise, to fill solitude with productivity, to convince myself that the forest had never really spoken to me at all. The acres would be sold. The beaver dam would become a memory. The path I knew by heart would fade into someone else’s property.
But my body remembered, even when my mind forgot. My body remembered the smell of spruce needles, the cold air in my lungs, the soft give of snow beneath my back. My body remembered what it felt like to be held by something that asked nothing in return.
Here, by the Sea of Cortez, fifty-some years later, I am remembering.
The landscape is different. There are no spruce trees here, no snow, no cold that hurts to breathe. No beaver dam, no frozen pond, no chickadees calling hey, sweetie in the winter air. But the feeling is the same. The feeling of being alone and free of loneliness. The feeling of being spoken to by something that speaks beyond words. The feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be.
The eight-year-old girl who lay under that tree knew something. She knew that the world was alive. She knew that solitude was fullness. She knew that belonging asked nothing of other people, that you could belong to a forest, to a winter, to a moment of snow falling through spruce branches.
She knew what I am only now remembering.
I was eight years old, and the forest was mine.
I am in my early sixties, and the world is still speaking.
I am finally learning, again, to listen.
I was alone, completely alone, a ten-minute walk from home, hidden under a tree in my own secret world, and I was entirely free of loneliness. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
ACADEMIC LENS
The childhood spruce tree as a site of chosen solitude enacts what Moustakas (1961) identifies as the earliest form of alonetude: the child’s discovery, often in the presence of nature, of a capacity for self-companionship that precedes and exceeds the social world. Winnicott (1971) argued that the capacity to be alone first develops paradoxically in the presence of a reliable other, but for children whose home environments were unreliable, nature often performs this function: the tree, the shore, the hiding place that holds without demanding. Van der Kolk (2014) documents how natural environments serve as early nervous system regulators precisely through their consistency and indifference to human performance: the spruce tree offers the child freedom from evaluation. Bachelard (1969) wrote extensively on the phenomenology of childhood nests and corners, the small, enclosed spaces that give the child’s imagination permission to expand precisely because they define a safe boundary. The drawing that accompanies this reflection enacts Bachelard’s insight: the material imagination works through the hand before it works through the mind, and the act of drawing the spruce tree is itself a form of returning to its shelter.
Black and White Experiments and the Serious Work of Being Silly
What surprised me was how natural all of this felt. None of it required effort, productivity, or justification. It simply required remembering that curiosity, play, and wonder were never meant to be outgrown.
What I Did Today
Today, I tried to remember what it felt like to be a child. I tried to do, without explanation or permission, the things I once imagined adulthood would allow.
When I was young, I thought being a grown-up meant freedom. I thought it meant staying up as late as I wanted, eating what I wanted, and going where I wanted. I thought adulthood was permission. I had yet to understand that adulthood, particularly adulthood shaped by precarious labour and chronic responsibility, would become its own kind of cage. I had no way of knowing that the freedoms I imagined would be traded for obligations I never explicitly agreed to.
Today, I took some of those freedoms back.
Here is what I did:
I danced with my shadow, curious about how it moved when I moved.
I ordered dessert for dinner, because pleasure requires no earning first.
I painted seashells slowly, letting colour decide where it wanted to land.
I hunted for treasure simply to practise looking.
I drew in the sand, knowing the tide would erase it and trusting that was part of the point.
My room went uncleaned, and nothing terrible happened.
I made funny poses for photographs, laughing at myself instead of correcting myself.
I experimented with black-and-white photography, noticing how light and absence speak to one another.
I snuck onto the golf course after dark to walk across the elegant bridges, feeling both brave and gentle at the same time.
And I talked to dogs, which, if I am honest, has always felt like the most sensible thing to do.
Title: Shadow Dance
Artist Statement
I photographed my shadow because shadows are honest. They perform nothing. They simply follow, stretching and shrinking with the angle of the light, revealing the body's position in space. Dancing with my shadow felt ridiculous at first. I am sixty years old. I am a scholar.
What am I doing, waving my arms at the ground? But that voice, the one that says act your age, the one that says someone might see, is the voice of a culture that has forgotten what play is for. Play researcher Stuart Brown (2009) argues that play stands opposite depression, never work. It is the opposite of depression. Play is how mammals learn, bond, and regulate their nervous systems. My shadow cares nothing about my credentials. It just wants to dance.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Science of Play
I want to take play seriously, which is perhaps a contradiction, but stay with me.
Play is far from frivolous. Far from a waste of time. Far from something we are supposed to outgrow as adults. Play is a biological necessity. It is wired into our nervous systems. It is how we learn, how we connect, how we heal.
Psychiatrist Stuart Brown (2009), founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades studying play across species. Brown argues that play is essential for brain development, emotional regulation, and social bonding. In his research with everyone from Nobel laureates to murderers, Brown found a consistent pattern: those who had been deprived of play in childhood showed significant deficits in empathy, problem-solving, and emotional resilience. Play, Brown concludes, is necessary for healthy human development and remains so throughout life.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (1998), who studied the neuroscience of emotion, identified play as one of the seven primary emotional systems in the mammalian brain. Panksepp discovered that rats laugh when they play, emitting ultrasonic chirps that function like human giggles. Play, Panksepp argued, is hardwired from the start, beyond learned behaviour. It emerges spontaneously when safety conditions are met.
This connects to Stephen Porges’s (2011) how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, which I have been sitting with for weeks now. Porges emphasizes that play requires a sense of felt safety. The social engagement system, which enables play and connection, only comes online when the nervous system perceives safety. When we are in survival mode, when we are anxious or always on guard, scanning for the next threat or exhausted, play becomes impossible. The body shuts down the play circuits and redirects resources toward defence.
For years, my nervous system has been in survival mode. Play has been inaccessible to me. I have been too tired, too worried, too busy bracing for the next threat. Today, doing these small, silly things, I felt something shift. My body remembered what play feels like. My nervous system, sensing the absence of threat, allowed the play circuits to come back online.
Brown (2009) challenges the assumption that play is a trivial or childish activity by arguing that its true opposite is depression rather than work, positioning play as a fundamental condition of psychological vitality rather than a reward for productivity.
Black and White Experiments
Among today’s plays, the black-and-white photography stood out.
I have been photographing in colour throughout this time by the sea, drawn to the vivid blues of the sea, the warm ochres of the desert, and the bright tiles I found in the empty field. Colour has felt like medicine, like my eyes were starved for saturation after years of grey institutional spaces.
But today I wanted to see differently. I wanted to strip away colour and notice what remained. I wanted to understand how light and shadow speak to one another when hue is removed from the conversation.
Black-and-white photography has a long history as a medium for seeing the essential. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952), who helped establish photography as an art form, worked almost exclusively in black and white. He spoke of the decisive moment, the instant when form, gesture, and meaning align. Black and white, Cartier-Bresson believed, revealed the bones of an image, the underlying structure that colour sometimes obscured.
Photographer Minor White (1969) wrote about photography as a contemplative practice. White encouraged photographers to approach their subjects with what he called camera vision, a state of heightened awareness in which the photographer becomes fully present to what is before them. White’s black-and-white images have a meditative quality, inviting slow looking rather than quick consumption.
Today, I tried to approach my playful subjects with a camera’s eye. I photographed my shadow, my sandy drawings, and the bridges on the golf course. I photographed without worrying about whether the images were good. I was experimenting, which is another word for playing.
Title:Witnessing
Artist Statement
I took this photograph while walking on the shore, attentive to how the ground carries memory. The pattern in the sand felt like a living diagram, a temporary archive of movement, water, and touch. The central circle drew my attention as a small void, a receptive space where something had been and where something else could form. The branching lines reminded me of roots, veins, and pathways, evoking how land and body mirror one another in their capacity to hold experience.
Including my shoes in the frame was a deliberate choice. My presence is partial, grounded, and relational rather than dominant. I stand with the land rather than over it. This image becomes a record of encounter, where my body meets the earth in a moment of pause. In trauma-informed and arts-based research, such moments matter. They mark when attention shifts from analysis to embodied witnessing.
This photograph extends my inquiry into how land teaches through traces. The sand speaks beyond words, yet offers patterns, marks, and impressions that invite interpretation. In Photovoice and Scholarly Personal Narrative, images function as prompts for reflection, memory, and relational sense-making. Here, the land becomes both collaborator and teacher, offering a visual metaphor for connection, healing, and continuity.
I understand this image as a quiet mapping of relationality. The centre suggests a gathering place, while the lines reaching outward suggest connection across time, body, and place. Standing there, I felt both held and called outward. The photograph is an invitation to notice what remains after movement, after presence, after touch. It is a small practice of ethical witnessing, where attention becomes a form of care.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
What Play Requires
Play requires specific conditions. It cannot be forced. It cannot be scheduled. It cannot be made productive. The moment we try to instrumentalize play, to make it serve some other purpose, it stops being play.
Philosopher Johan Huizinga (1971), in his foundational work Homo Ludens (which translates to “playing human”), argued that play is a primary category of life, as fundamental as reasoning or making. Huizinga defined play as a voluntary activity that takes place within certain limits of time and space, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding. Play, Huizinga insisted, is a stepping outside of ordinary life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own.
This helps me understand why play has been so difficult during my years of precarious labour. Precarity erodes the conditions that play requires. When you are constantly uncertain about your employment, when you are always on guard, scanning for the next threat about institutional politics, when your nervous system is stuck in chronic activation, you cannot step outside ordinary life. Ordinary life is too threatening. The temporary sphere of play cannot form.
Today, I had what play requires: safety, time, and permission.
Safety: no one was watching, no one was judging, no one needed anything from me.
Time: the day stretched out with nothing scheduled, nothing required, nothing pressing against its edges.
Permission: I gave myself permission to be silly, to be unproductive, to do things that served no purpose except the pleasure of doing them.
These conditions are necessities, never luxuries. And they have been systematically denied to me by the conditions of precarious academic labour.
Precarity erodes the conditions play requires. When your nervous system is stuck in chronic activation, the temporary sphere of play cannot form.
Dessert for Dinner
I want to say something about dessert for dinner, because it was such a small thing yet felt so large.
For years, I have eaten responsibly. I have eaten in ways that fuelled productivity, that supported training, that kept my body functioning as a machine that could work and work and work. I have thought of food as fuel, as an obligation, as something to manage rather than enjoy.
Today, I went to a small restaurant by the water and ordered only dessert. Flan. A cup of coffee. Nothing else.
The waiter looked at me with mild confusion. I smiled and said, Solo postre, por favour. Just dessert, please.
It arrived: creamy, caramel-topped, beautiful. I ate it slowly, savouring each bite. The sweetness was almost overwhelming. Allowing myself sweetness without first earning it.
This is what food researcher and therapist Ellyn Satter (2007) calls eating competence: the ability to eat with joy, flexibility, and deep listening to one’s own body. Eating competence is the opposite of rigid dietary rules. It involves trusting the body to know what it needs, allowing pleasure without guilt, and approaching food with curiosity rather than control.
Dessert for dinner was a small act of eating competence. It was me saying to my body: your pleasure matters. What you want matters. Sweetness requires no earning through suffering first.
Title: Dessert for Dinner
Artist Statement
I photographed my dessert to document this small rebellion. The black-and-white treatment makes it feel timeless, like a memory, like something that could have happened yesterday or decades ago. Pleasure is often the first thing we sacrifice when we are in survival mode. We tell ourselves we will enjoy things later, after the work is done and we have earned them. But later keeps receding. The work is never done. Pleasure deferred indefinitely becomes pleasure denied. This photograph says: today I held nothing back. Today I allowed myself sweetness in the middle of everything, as a statement of worth rather than reward.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Golf Course Bridges
After dark, I walked to the golf course at the edge of town. The gates were closed, but a gap in the fence remained. I slipped through.
This is the kind of thing I used to do as a teenager. Sneaking into places I was told were off-limits. The thrill of mild transgression. The feeling of getting away with something.
The golf course was beautiful in the dark. The grass was soft under my feet. The stars were bright overhead. And there were bridges, elegant wooden bridges crossing over water features and sand traps. During the day, these bridges are for golfers. At night, they were for me.
I walked across each bridge slowly, feeling the wood beneath my feet, looking up at the sky. I was trespassing, technically. But the trespass felt gentle, victimless. I damaged nothing. I was just walking across beautiful bridges because I wanted to.
Philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984), in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, writes about the ways ordinary people subvert the structures of power through small acts of resistance. De Certeau calls these acts tactics, as opposed to the strategies employed by those in power. Walking across the golf course bridges at night is a tactic. It is a small refusal of the rules that say certain beautiful spaces are only for certain people at certain times.
Title:Night Bridge
Artist Statement
I nearly let this photograph pass untaken, nervous about being caught. But that nervousness was part of the play. Risk, within safe limits, is part of what makes play exhilarating. Brian Sutton-Smith (1997), a leading play theorist, argues that play always involves some element of uncertainty and a negotiation between order and chaos. Walking across this bridge in the dark, I was negotiating. I was playing with boundaries. I was remembering what it felt like to be young and bold and willing to break small rules for the sake of beauty.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Right to Play
I want to connect today’s activities to the human rights framework that grounds this project.
Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. Article 27 affirms the right to participate in cultural life and to enjoy the arts. These rights extend beyond children. They belong to adults, too. They are part of a group of 60-year-old women recovering from burnout. They are precarious workers denied the conditions the play requires.
Play researcher René Proyer (2017) has studied playfulness in adults and found that it correlates with psychological well-being, creativity, and life satisfaction. Playful adults, Proyer found, are flexible, curious, and resilient, free of immaturity or irresponsibility. Playfulness is something to cultivate throughout life rather than simply outgrow.
But the conditions of contemporary work make adult play difficult. The expectation of constant availability, the erosion of boundaries between work and leisure, the chronic stress of economic precarity: all of these work against the conditions that play requires. Play becomes something we schedule, optimize, and do for its health benefits rather than for its own sake. And when play becomes instrumental, it stops being play.
Today, I played without instrumentalizing it. I danced with my shadow because of joy, never because it would reduce my cortisol levels. I ordered dessert for dinner purely because I wanted it. I snuck onto the golf course purely for the thrill, never because trespassing builds character. I did these things because I wanted to. Because they were fun. Because my body, finally sensing safety, remembered what it felt like to play.
Playfulness is something to cultivate throughout life, beyond outgrowing.
Talking to Dogs
I should say something about talking to dogs.
This behaviour is entirely familiar to me. I have always talked to dogs. I greet them on the street. I ask them about their days. I tell them they are beautiful and good. Their owners can think what they like.
Dogs understand something that adult humans often forget. They live in the present moment. They experience joy without complication. They defer no pleasure. They earn no treats through suffering first. When a dog sees someone it loves, it refuses to pretend to be cool. It wags its entire body.
I aspire to be more like a dog.
Today, I met a small brown dog on the beach. It was digging in the sand with complete focus, searching for something only it could smell. I sat down nearby and watched. The dog glanced at me, decided I was acceptable, and returned to its digging.
“Hola, perrito,” I said. “¿Qué buscas?” Hello, little dog. What are you looking for?
The dog offered a wagging tail as an answer. That was answer enough.
Animal studies scholar Donna Haraway (2008) writes in her book When Species Meet about the relationships between humans and companion animals. Haraway argues that we become who we are through our interactions with other species. Dogs are far more than pets. They are companion species, beings with whom we share our lives and who shape us as much as we shape them.
My conversation with the beach dog was a moment of interspecies play. Neither of us needed anything from the other. We were just sharing space, sharing curiosity, sharing the pleasure of being alive on a warm evening by the sea.
Title:Playmate
Artist Statement
Dogs remain entirely unaware they are being photographed. They perform nothing. They simply are. This is what I am trying to learn from them: how to be without performing, how to experience joy without complicating it, how to greet each moment with full-body enthusiasm. The black-and-white treatment of this image strips away distractions and lets me focus on the dog's essential dog-ness: the alert ears, the curious eyes, the readiness for whatever comes next. If I could bottle what dogs have and sell it, I would be rich. But it cannot be bottled. It can only be practised, moment by moment, in the company of beings who have never forgotten how to play.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
What Play Teaches
Today taught me several things.
First: play is still available to me. I thought precarity and burnout had broken something essential, had severed my connection to joy, silliness, and spontaneity. But that connection was buried, never broken. Under exhaustion. Under obligation. Under the weight of nineteen years of chronic stress. Today, with safety, time, and permission, it emerged.
Second: play requires no expensive equipment or exotic locations. It requires only willingness. A shadow to dance with. A piece of flan. A dog to talk to. A golf course bridge to walk across in the dark. Play is available everywhere, all the time, to anyone willing to receive it.
Third: play requires no earning. This was the hardest lesson. I have been trained to believe that pleasure must be earned, that rest must be earned, that fun is a reward for productivity rather than a right of existence. Today I practised a different logic: play first, simply because I am alive, and play is part of being alive.
Fourth: black-and-white photography is its own kind of play. Removing colour changes how I see. It invites experimentation, curiosity, willingness to fail. The images I made today are experiments, far from masterpieces. Some are blurry. Some are badly composed. All of them are evidence that I was playing, trying something new, and willing to look silly in the name of learning.
Curiosity, play, and wonder were never meant to be outgrown. They were meant to be carried forward, quietly, into a life that knows when to loosen its grip.
What Remains
The day is ending. My room remains a glorious mess. I have sand in my shoes, caramel on my shirt, and images of shadows and bridges stored on my camera.
I feel lighter than I have felt in a very long time.
Tomorrow I will likely do something responsible. I will write, or walk, or continue the quieter practices of this time by the sea. But today I played. Today I remembered what my body knew before precarity taught it to forget. Today I was a child in a sixty-year-old body, and it was exactly right.
van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma recovery requires the restoration of play and imagination. Processing difficult experiences through talk alone falls short. We must also rebuild our capacity for joy, for spontaneity, for uncomplicated pleasure. Play is medicine. It is as necessary for healing as rest and reflection.
Today I took my medicine. I danced, ate dessert, talked to dogs, and snuck across bridges in the dark. I experimented with my camera, laughed at my own shadow, and refused to clean my room because someone once told me that adults have to keep things tidy.
No one is grading this. No one is watching. No one needs me to justify how I spent my day.
I played. That is enough.
An Invitation
If you have forgotten how to play, I would like to extend a small invitation.
Think of something you wanted to do when you were a child, something that seemed like it would be possible when you were finally a grown-up.
Now do it.
Dance with your shadow. Order dessert for dinner. Talk to a dog. Walk across something beautiful in the dark. Make funny faces. Draw something that will be erased. Experiment with something unfamiliar.
Permission is yours already. No earning required. No justification needed.
You just need to remember that you were once a child who knew how to play, and that child is still in there, waiting for you to remember.
Hoy jugué. Hoy recordé.
Today I played. Today I remembered.
References
Brown, S. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.
Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952). The decisive moment. Simon & Schuster.
de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press.
Huizinga, J. (1971). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Beacon Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Proyer, R. T. (2017). A new structural model for the study of adult playfulness: Assessment and exploration of an understudied individual differences variable. Personality and Individual Differences, 108, 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.011
Satter, E. (2007). Eating competence: Nutrition education with the Satter eating competence model. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour, 39(5), S142–S153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneb.2007.01.006
Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
White, M. (1969). Mirrors messages manifestations. Aperture.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
Play as recovery is what Winnicott (1971) names as far more than recreation, identified as the primary developmental context of authentic selfhood: the space where the true self, rather than the compliant or performed self, discovers what it actually wants and enjoys. The observation that play “required remembering” rather than learning frames it as a recovery of existing capacity rather than the acquisition of a new skill, precisely what Brown (2009) found in his research on play deprivation: the playful self is never fully extinguished, only suppressed. The black-and-white photography experiment as a vehicle for play engages what Bachelard (1969) calls the imagination of matter: approaching the visual world through a different tonal grammar, one that strips colour’s emotional shorthand and asks the eye to find new relationships. Van der Kolk (2014) argues that creative engagement activates the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for exploration and novelty, directly countering the narrowing of attention that chronic stress and trauma produce. Curiosity, wonder, and silliness are experiential signatures rather than trivial: they are the signatures of a nervous system that has moved out of survival mode and into what Porges (2011) calls the ventral vagal state of safe engagement.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body shame, institutional harm, and the experience of exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
I am taking my body back from systems that treat endurance as a virtue and exhaustion as a personal flaw.
I gave years to work without limits, to teaching, care, and constant availability, to building futures while postponing my own. I called this commitment. My body called it extraction.
When my body withdrew consent, It was information, never weakness. It was a boundary where dignity begins.
Burnout is structural evidence, never individual failure.
I am taking my body back from productivity as worth, from unpaid labour dressed as passion, from the idea that rest must be earned.
This is reclamation, rather than withdrawal.
My body carries the record that policies ignore. It remembers what institutions forget.
Taking my body back is a human rights practice. The right to health. The right to rest. The right to work without erasure.
I move more slowly now. I listen longer. I stop when stopping is required.
This is alonetude. This is consent. This is a refusal.
My body is no longer extractable.
Image: When the Body Withdraws Consent
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. A single running shoe rests on volcanic sand, emptied of the body that once relied on it for endurance and escape. The shoe functions as an embodied artifact rather than a symbol, registering a moment of refusal. Its stillness marks the point at which movement ceased to be restorative and became extractive. In this inquiry, the object is treated as data within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, documenting how prolonged institutional demands inscribe themselves onto the body and how withdrawal becomes a protective, rights-bearing response. The absence of motion here is evidence, never failure.
Shoe as Witness
I had no plan to photograph meaning. I noticed the shoe because it felt familiar.
It was worn, emptied, left behind without ceremony. No drama. No collapse staged for recognition. Just an object that had reached the end of what it could give. Standing there, I felt a quiet recognition settle in my body. This is what it looks like when consent is withdrawn.
There is vulnerability in admitting that stopping arrived beyond my choosing. For years, I believed endurance was a moral good. I learned to equate commitment with overextension, capacity with worth. That belief was reinforced daily by academic life, where staying available, absorbing uncertainty, and carrying invisible labour were treated as evidence of professionalism. When my body finally refused, I read it as failure. I had yet to understand that collapse can be a form of protection.
With some distance, perspective begins to shift. Burnout is never solitary in its emergence. It accumulates. It settles into muscle, breath, gait. What I once framed as personal weakness now appears as a predictable response to prolonged insecurity and unrelenting demand. The shoe holds this point without argument. It records stopping as fact, without apology.
The action, small as it seems, was noticing. Pausing long enough to see the shoe as more than debris. Photographing it. Allowing it to stand as data rather than decoration. This is how my research is unfolding now, through attention rather than acceleration. Objects speak when I stop trying to outrun them.
Scholarly engagement lives quietly inside this moment. Trauma-informed scholarship reminds us that the body remembers what environments require us to override. Labour research names how systems normalize depletion while individualizing its consequences. Human rights frameworks affirm the right to rest, to health, to work that requires no self-erasure. No summoning of those texts was needed while standing there. They were already present, carried in my body, waiting to be acknowledged.
This image belongs to the same counter-archive as the stones, the shadows, the painted surfaces, the early mornings by the water. Together, they document something institutions rarely record: the moment a body stops agreeing to conditions that diminish it. They track fatigue, refusal, and the slow work of recovery.
In this work, taking the body back is understood as a human rights practice.
I am no longer interested in proving resilience. I am interested in listening to what the body says when it is finally allowed to speak.
This shoe tells that story better than I ever could.
ACADEMIC LENS
The declarative act of “taking my body back” names what van der Kolk (2014) identifies as the central task of trauma recovery: re-establishing the embodied self’s sovereignty over its own experience, after prolonged periods in which institutional demands have overridden the body’s own signals of need, limit, and preference. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour provides the structural analysis: the body was instrumentalized rather than simply used, its endurance treated as a renewable resource rather than a finite one with real costs. Nixon’s (2011) framework of slow violence names the mechanism: each individual demand seemed reasonable in isolation, while their cumulative effect constituted a sustained violation of the right to bodily integrity and rest. Menakem (2017) argues that recovery requires the intellectual understanding of harm alongside but the somatic reclamation of the body’s authority: learning to listen to, trust, and act on the body’s signals rather than overriding them in service of institutional legibility. The statement “I am taking my body back” is thus both personal and political: it refuses the institutional definition of the body as a tool for productivity and insists on its dignity as a site of knowledge, feeling, and inherent worth.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body abandonment, trauma, and the nervous system’s response to harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity.
Title: Please Honour This Boundary
Artist Statement
I stopped because the request was gentle.
The sign carries no threat. It carries no scolding. It asks. Please. It marks a boundary in soft language, inviting care rather than compliance. Behind it, the dunes rise slowly, grasses holding sand in place, doing the quiet work of restoration. Beyond that, the water moves, and the mountains remain steady, indifferent to whether I step forward or hold still.
This image brought my relationship with boundaries to the forefront. For a long time, I understood boundaries as exclusion or denial, something imposed from outside. Here, the boundary exists in service of recovery. It protects what is fragile and still becoming. It honours a process that cannot be rushed.
I stood there longer than necessary, noticing how restraint can be an act of respect. Remaining outside is a form of presence. It is participation through care. The land is witnessed without requiring my footsteps. It needs space. It needs time. It needs people willing to stop at the edge and let healing happen without interruption.
This sign speaks to a lesson I am learning in my own life. Restored spaces require protection. Emerging strength requires limits. There is dignity in stepping back when something is growing.
I took this photograph as a reminder that care often looks like a pause. That listening sometimes means remaining at the threshold. That asking permission of land, of body, of self, is a way of staying in right relationship.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The running shoes sat in the corner of my room for three weeks before I touched them. I had packed them with intention, tucked between journals and watercolours, believing that here, in this place of alonetude beside the Sea of Cortez, I might find my way back to my body. This morning, I finally laced them on.
Alonetude operates as far more than a personal retreat; it is a refusal of extractive temporalities that demand constant productivity. In this sense, solitude becomes a micro-practice of justice, reclaiming time, body, and attention from institutional regimes that normalize depletion.
The soles felt strange against my feet. Foreign. As if they belonged to someone I used to know.
Where universities track contracts, outputs, and enrolments, these artifacts track fatigue, healing, consent, and refusal.
Image: Waiting to Move
Artist Statement
These running shoes exist for return, never speed.
They have carried me through early mornings and late afternoons, through streets that asked nothing of me and paths that asked me to pay attention. They hold the imprint of repetition, of breath finding rhythm, of the body remembering that it knows how to move without explanation.
What these shoes remind me of is how care can be practical. They absorb impact quietly. They meet the ground again and again without complaint. They do the work they were made to do, and in doing so, they allow me to keep going. There is something deeply grounding in that kind of reliability.
Running, for me, has become a practice of listening rather than pushing. I notice how my feet land. I notice when my stride shortens, when my body asks for gentleness rather than distance. These shoes have learned my pace. They hold evidence of effort and rest equally.
I have spent many years moving through systems that rewarded endurance without regard for wear. These shoes offer a different lesson. Support matters. Cushioning matters. Fit matters. Progress happens when the body feels held rather than driven.
This image belongs to my inquiry into recovery, embodiment, and the ethics of care. Forward motion asks for presence over urgency. Sometimes it simply requires something steady beneath you and the willingness to take the next step.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a body-based assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold the right to safe and secure work. Precarious academic labour extends far beyond an employment condition; it is a human rights issue. International frameworks recognize the right to decent work, rest, and health, yet contingent academic systems routinely undermine these rights through chronic insecurity, unpaid labour, and performance surveillance.
For years, running functioned as infrastructure, a way to metabolize contract uncertainty, wildfire seasons, pandemic isolation, and the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. My body was both coping and complying. The shoes, therefore, archive institutional extraction, marking how academic capitalism extends into muscle, breath, and gait.
Title: Move
Artist Statement
I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.
What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.
As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Vulnerability: A Body Returns to Motion
I stopped running last August. The word stopped implies a decision, a deliberate cessation. That framing feels too clean. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue. I attempted to start running in October, then in November, and, well, today.
For years, running had been my anchor. Through the relentless cycles of precarious academic labour (contract after contract, never knowing if the next semester would bring employment), my morning runs held the chaos at bay. I ran through smoke seasons when Kamloops air turned orange with wildfire haze. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and uncertainty. I ran through the accumulating weight of what Han (2010/2015) calls the burnout society: that particular form of exhaustion that emerges when self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-improvement.
Until I could run no more.
Title: Discarded Shelter: A Small Artifact of Passage
Artist Statement
This photograph captures a worn cap resting on dry soil and creeping groundcover, an object displaced yet held by the landscape. As a personal artifact, the cap signals exposure and release, something once worn for protection, now relinquished to the elements. It functions as a micro archive of movement and passage, marking a moment where containment gives way to vulnerability.
The surrounding textures of dust, stone, and persistent vegetation speak to resilience within aridity. These materials carry their own histories of endurance and adaptation. Placed together, they form a quiet record of how presence fades without disappearing entirely.
Positioned at the threshold between human trace and ecological continuity, the cap holds tension between what is left behind and what endures. As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents departure, rest, and the ethics of letting go through material evidence rather than narrative explanation.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Running on Empty
The language of “stopping” is too orderly for what actually happened. It suggests a managerial decision, a tidy life choice, a rational pivot. Bodies rarely follow rational life plans, and exhaustion rarely arrives that way. What happened was more like surrender: the moment when a body simply refuses to continue performing a capacity it no longer possesses.
For fifteen years, running was far more than a hobby. It was infrastructure. It was how I metabolized stress, uncertainty, grief, ambition, and institutional precarity. I ran through contract cycles, through wildfire smoke, through pandemic isolation, through the quiet violence of academic self-exploitation. Running functioned as a regulator, a refuge, and an identity. It was both a coping mechanism and a performance of resilience.
That framing feels too clean, almost managerial. What happened was more like a surrender: the moment a body simply refuses to keep pretending it has anything left to give. I chose to stop only in the sense that my body made the choice for me, and I had no capacity left to argue.
Running has been a huge part of my life. It structured my mornings and offered a sense of coherence in a life shaped by academic precarity, seasonal contracts, and the constant uncertainty of whether the next semester would bring work. I ran through wildfire seasons when Kamloops air turned orange and thick with ash. I ran through pandemic isolation when the world contracted to screens and anxiety. I ran through the accumulation of what Han (2010/2015) describes as the burnout society, where self-exploitation becomes indistinguishable from self-care, and productivity masquerades as virtue.
My body withdrew consent, choosing for me what I lacked the capacity to choose for myself. After fifteen years of marathons and morning miles, it reached a threshold where endurance ceased to be virtuous and became extractive. This withdrawal can be read as a rights-bearing refusal, a body-based assertion of dignity when institutional structures failed to uphold it.
Title: Vulnerability: A Body Returns to Motion
Artist Statement
This photograph depicts a single running shoe resting on volcanic sand, functioning as a quiet ethnographic artifact. It holds the quiet rather than staging crisis or spectacle. Instead, it holds the ordinary materiality of stopping.
The shoe operates as an extension of the body, a prosthetic of movement shaped by repetition, impact, and endurance. Set down on the ground, it marks a pause rather than a failure. It bears witness to exhaustion as an embodied state and to the moment when motion, once necessary for survival, is interrupted.
What emerges here is a material trace of rupture in an identity long organized around forward movement. The shoe records effort without explanation. It carries the imprint of kilometres travelled and the weight of what it has absorbed. In resting, it shifts function from propulsion to evidence.
As with other artifacts in this inquiry, the object functions as embodied data. It documents the ethics of stopping, the legitimacy of rest, and the quiet knowledge held by materials once devoted to endurance.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
In qualitative terms, this image functions as data. It documents a threshold moment in which the body asserted its limits against institutional, psychological, and cultural demands. The shoe, half-buried, speaks to sedimentation, the layering of fatigue, trauma, ambition, and discipline that eventually accumulates into refusal. In this sense, stopping is a form of information rather than failure.
There is vulnerability in this artifact, but also a possibility. The shoe holds both cessation and return. It sits on the edge of movement, implying that motion may re-emerge on different terms. Returning to running now feels less like reclaiming a former self and more like negotiating a new relationship with embodiment, one that privileges consent, slowness, and care over endurance and performance.
If loneliness is the pain of being alone, solitude is its glory. Similarly, if exhaustion is the pain of productivity, rest may be its quiet counterpart. The body’s refusal becomes a form of wisdom, a boundary that resists the neoliberal logic of infinite capacity.
Title: Shadow at the Threshold
Artist Statement
This image records my shadow elongated across water and shore, a body doubled by reflection and light. I am present twice here and fully in neither place. The shadow stretches into the lake while my feet remain on land, marking a quiet division between where the body stands and where the self extends.
What this moment holds for me is a sense of suspension. The water is still enough to reflect sky and mountain, yet shallow enough to reveal the ground beneath. The shadow moves across both states at once. It belongs to surface and depth simultaneously. I held still. I resisted pulling back. I stayed exactly where I was and let the image form around that decision.
The length of the shadow speaks to timing rather than identity. It records the angle of the sun, the hour of the day, the season of light. My form is stretched thin by circumstance, shaped by forces beyond my control. This feels honest. It mirrors a period in my life where identity is extended, reworked, and softened by context rather than fixed by definition.
As visual data, the photograph captures an embodied moment of orientation. The shoreline becomes a site where body, environment, and time co-produce meaning. The self appears as trace rather than subject, relational and temporary. The shadow is evidence of presence. It is evidence of standing still long enough to be shaped by what surrounds me.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The shadow also gestures toward institutional surveillance, in which the academic self is often experienced as an object observed and measured rather than as a sovereign subject. Such surveillance practices implicate academic freedom and the right to dignity at work, where bodies become sites of audit and governance rather than care.
This section demonstrates vulnerability as knowledge-based data, revealing how institutional precarity inscribes itself on the nervous system and how embodied refusal constitutes knowledge.
Scholarly Engagement: The Archive of Exhaustion
Understanding what happens when a body collapses from prolonged occupational stress requires theoretical frameworks that honour what the body knows. The polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges (2011), offers essential language for what I experienced. Porges describes three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal state (social engagement, safety, connection), the sympathetic state (fight-or-flight, mobilization), and the dorsal vagal state (shutdown, collapse, conservation).
Title: Learning to Shuffle: Safety as Relational Practice
Artist Statement
This photo centres on a warning sign for manta rays that instructs walkers to shuffle their feet as they enter the sea. The directive is practical, grounded in ecological care and mutual vulnerability. Shuffling helps alert manta rays to human presence, reducing the risk of harm to both. Yet the instruction also operates symbolically, asking the human body to slow down, to signal itself, and to move with awareness rather than entitlement.
What interests me here is how movement becomes ethical practice. The body is asked to alter its habitual patterns in recognition of another being’s habitat and dignity. Shuffling becomes a pedagogy of relational care, a way of learning through the feet that the shoreline is shared space. This is an ecosystem beyond empty leisure where human and more-than-human lives intersect continuously.
The manta ray remains unseen beneath the surface, yet it is central to the instruction. Its invisibility matters. Ethical movement depends on attention to what cannot always be perceived directly. The sign makes visible an obligation to those who are present without being immediately legible, reminding the walker that care often begins before encounter.
As visual data, this artifact extends my inquiry into alonetude and embodied ethics. Movement here is framed neither as conquest nor extraction, but as negotiated presence. The directive to shuffle offers a quiet counterpoint to productivity culture. Slow down. Sense the ground. Acknowledge others. Move in ways that minimize harm. In this sense, the sign functions as both ecological instruction and philosophical metaphor for ethical being-in-place.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The sign offers a counter-ways of knowing to academic capitalism: a movement guided by relational accountability rather than speed, competition, and extraction.
For years, my nervous system oscillated between the body’s alert state and desperate attempts to reach genuine safety safety. The constant a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger of precarious employment (Will there be a contract next term? Am I performing well enough to be renewed? What happens if I speak too honestly about institutional failures?) kept my body in a state of chronic threat, what Porges (2011) calls neuroception: the nervous system’s unconscious scanning for danger. My nervous system read danger everywhere, even when my conscious mind insisted everything was fine.
By August, my body had shifted into dorsal vagal shutdown. This is the state of last resort: what happens when fight-or-flight fails, when mobilization depletes beyond recovery. The system conserves by collapsing. Energy withdraws. Movement becomes effortful. The world flattens into grey.
Running became impossible because running requires mobilization energy. When the tank is truly empty, even self-care becomes another demand the body simply cannot meet.
Table 1
nervous system States and Physical Activity: A Personal Cartography
nervous system State
Physical Activity Capacity
Workplace Conditions
Body-based Markers
Ventral Vagal (Safety/Connection)
Full capacity; movement feels enjoyable and restorative
Note. This table integrates Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory with personal experience during the transition from occupational burnout to healing retreat. The nervous system states are mapped to physical activity capacity, workplace conditions, and body-based markers, as documented over the research period. Adapted for SPN methodology where lived experience constitutes primary data.
Perspective: This Morning’s Run
I walked to the waterfront before dawn. The air held that particular softness that exists only in the hours before the desert sun asserts its dominance. My body felt tentative, as if asking permission to inhabit space differently than it has for months.
Image Before the Sun
Artist Statement
The pre-dawn hour offers what Porges (2011) describes as environmental safety cues: low stimulation, softened light, and the absence of social demand. This temporal threshold between night and day mirrors a physiological transition, as the body begins to move from dorsal vagal shutdown toward genuine safety engagement.
In this moment, the environment participates actively in regulation. Still water reflects rather than interrupts. Sound is muted. Movement is minimal. Nothing asks for response. The scene supports a gradual return to relational capacity without forcing alertness or productivity. Safety is communicated through quiet continuity rather than reassurance.
What draws my attention here is how regulation emerges through context rather than effort. The body requires no instruction to calm itself. It responds to cues offered by light, temperature, and space. The landscape becomes co-regulator, holding the nervous system in a state of readiness without demand.
As visual data, this image documents a condition of becoming. The water gestures toward possibility rather than outcome. Regulation is present as potential rather than performance. This pre-dawn interval holds the ethics of alonetude, a chosen presence that allows the body to re-enter connection on its own terms.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Pace of Care
I began slowly. Pace itself became a form of care. My feet found rhythm on the packed sand near the water’s edge, where the surface offered just enough cushion to absorb impact.
For the first few minutes, my body resisted. Muscles complained. The lungs protested the unfamiliar demand for deeper oxygen exchange. This is what Levine (1997) describes in Waking the Tiger: the body’s natural protective response to resuming activities associated with periods of distress. My nervous system remembered that running used to accompany exhaustion, anxiety, and the desperate attempt to outpace institutional harm.
I kept moving anyway. I let the complaints arise without trying to silence them. I noticed the tightness in my shoulders, the guarding in my jaw, the way my breath wanted to stay shallow.
Title: Sands of Time
Artist Statement
Faint footprints along the shoreline mark movement, presence, and impermanence. They are body-based traces of a body in motion, briefly impressed into wet sand and already in the process of being taken back by the tide. The marks exist within a narrow window of visibility, held only until water returns.
What this image holds for me is the relationship between embodiment and erasure. Presence here is real, yet provisional. The body leaves evidence, but it releases any insistence on permanence. The shoreline registers contact and then releases it, responding through its own rhythm rather than human intention.
The tide functions as collaborator rather than force. It participates in making and unmaking the trace, reminding me that movement always occurs within relational systems. No step exists in isolation. Each imprint is shaped by timing, pressure, moisture, and return.
As visual data, the photograph documents how presence is enacted and dissolved through the shared rhythms of body and sea. The footprints carry no intention of enduring. They mark a moment of passage, offering a quiet lesson in how to move through the world while allowing what follows to take its course.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Shift
And then something shifted.
Porges (2011) describes this shift as the nervous system receiving cues of safety from the environment. The rhythm of waves. The cool air on my skin. The absence of screens, notifications, and institutional surveillance. The steadiness of my own footfalls established a new relationship with this body, this moment, this place.
My shoulders dropped. My jaw softened. My breath deepened of its own accord, without instruction or force. A state of genuine safety and connection emerged. For the first time in months, I felt my body organizing itself around presence rather than threat.
Here I am.
That moment asked for a theory: to understand how, rather than to explain it away, something so structural could feel so intimate.
Theory: Bodies as Archives of Structural Harm
The exhaustion that brought my running practice to a halt was never merely personal. Academic capitalism, the systematic transformation of higher education into a market-driven enterprise prioritising revenue generation, productivity metrics, and competitive positioning (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), creates bodies like mine with systematic precision. The precarious labour conditions that define contemporary university employment produce specific physiological consequences: chronic stress activation, disrupted sleep architecture, inflammatory cascades, and metabolic the nervous system thrown off balance.
Al Serhan and Houjeir (2020) found significant correlations between the intensification of academic capitalism and faculty burnout, documenting how market-driven educational environments create unsustainable demands that erode well-being and professional capacity. Their research validates what my body already knew: this exhaustion is structural, produced by systems designed to extract maximum labour from minimally compensated workers.
Precarious academic labour extends beyond a labour-market condition; it is also a human rights concern. These rights are articulated in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966), which affirms the right to just and favourable conditions of work, including rest and reasonable limitation of working hours.
The right to decent work, security of employment, and safe working conditions is recognized in international human rights frameworks, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. My body’s collapse thus reflects more than personal vulnerability; it indexes institutional arrangements that systematically violate the right to dignified, secure, and health-sustaining work.
My body’s collapse is thus beyond the simply anecdotal; it is indicative of systemic rights erosion in contemporary higher education.
Title: Strata of the Third Shore: Sea as Memory, Land as Archive
Artist Statement
This painted stone renders the sea as layered strata, with bands of blue, rust, green, and sand-toned pigment evoking shoreline, sediment, and water in dialogue. The rock functions as both canvas and collaborator, carrying its own geological history while receiving contemporary marks of experience. In this sense, the piece becomes a micro archive where land and memory meet.
The horizontal bands suggest temporal and emotional layers. Surface calm gives way to deeper currents, sedimented grief, and emergent healing. The luminous blue at the base gestures toward movement and continuity, while warmer earth tones recall land-based memory and embodied history. The stone resists smoothness, insisting on texture and unevenness. This resistance mirrors the non linear nature of recovery and becoming.
As an arts-based research artifact, this work operates as multimodal data within Scholarly Personal Narrative and humanities inquiry. Painting the sea onto land material enacts a relational methodology in which body, pigment, stone, and place co-produce knowledge. The object becomes a tactile record of alonetude, presence, and the ethics of witnessing landscape as teacher.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Labour That Depletes
Hochschild (1983) named this phenomenon emotional labour, the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. For contingent academics, emotional labour extends beyond classroom performance to include the constant performance of enthusiasm, the manufactured gratitude for unstable employment, and the suppression of legitimate grievances. This labour is invisible, uncompensated, and ultimately depleting.
My body stopped running because it had nothing left. The collapse was honest. The collapse was necessary.
Title: Bleached Architecture: Coral as Witness and Afterlife
Artist Statement
A bleached coral fragment rests on volcanic sand, marking presence, loss, and ecological time. Its porous structure carries traces of former life, openings where relation once flowed. The surface records exposure. What remains is delicate, weight-bearing, and altered by conditions beyond its control.
This fragment brings my attention to fragility as a shared condition. Coral lives through interdependence, relying on temperature, chemistry, and rhythm held in balance. When that balance shifts, the body changes. What appears inert is, in fact, a record of relation strained beyond capacity.
Encountering this piece, I felt my own exhaustion placed within a wider field of precarity. The fragment situates bodily depletion alongside ecological harm, linking labour extraction and environmental degradation as intersecting justice concerns. Both operate through systems that normalize overuse, accelerate demand, and treat depletion as acceptable cost.
Here, coral functions as ecological witness and material archive. It indexes how patterns of strain reverberate across bodies, institutions, and environments, leaving evidence that is quiet yet enduring. The fragment holds no accusation. It remains. In doing so, it asks for attention, care, and a recalibration of how value, labour, and life are held.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Table 2
Theoretical Integration: Physical Activity Cessation and Return
Theoretical Framework
Key Concept
Application to Day 21 Experience
Alonetude (Author Framework)
Chosen solitude as relational and ethical practice
Removal of performance gaze enables embodied truth-telling and healing
Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011)
Neuroception: the body’s unconscious detection of safety or threat through environmental cues
Nervous system receives safety cues from the Loreto environment; shift from dorsal vagal shutdown toward ventral engagement
Body-based Trauma Theory (van der Kolk, 2014)
The body keeps the score: trauma is stored in the body and must be addressed through body-based approaches
Movement becomes both evidence of stored harm (initial resistance) and a pathway to healing (emerging ease)
Burnout Society (Han, 2010/2015)
Self-exploitation through achievement discourse; exhaustion as structural outcome of neoliberal subjectivity
Previous running was self-exploitation; current running is reclamation, movement without achievement metrics
Emotional Labour (Hochschild, 1983)
Management of feeling to create publicly observable display; invisible labour that depletes
Alonetude eliminates audience for performance; body can express authentic states without management
Academic Capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004)
Exhaustion is structural, produced by systems; individual recovery must be understood within systemic critique
Healing requires completing interrupted defensive responses; movement releases trapped survival energy
Body-led pacing allows completion of protective responses; running becomes discharge rather than demand
Note. This table synthesises trauma theory, organizational psychology, and embodiment scholarship to contextualize the cessation and resumption of physical activity following occupational burnout. Sources verified through institutional databases. Framework aligned with Nash’s (2004) SPN requirement that personal narrative engage substantively with scholarly literature.
Action: Movement as Reclamation
I ran for perhaps fifteen minutes this morning. By any previous standard of mine (when I could cover ten kilometres before breakfast, when running was discipline and distance and doing), fifteen minutes would have felt inadequate. A failure.
This morning, those fifteen minutes felt like a revolution.
Title: Daybreak at the Cliff
Artist Statement
Pelicans rest on volcanic rock as dawn light opens the horizon, holding stillness, tide, and geological time in quiet relation. The birds are present without urgency, bodies folded into rest as the ocean continues its steady rhythm. The rock beneath them carries a deeper temporality, shaped by forces that long predate both tide and wing.
What this scene brings into focus is co-presence across scales. Avian life, ocean movement, and volcanic strata occupy the same frame without hierarchy. Dawn holds each rhythm without favouring one over another. It simply reveals them together. The pelicans remain part of the landscape rather than interrupting it. They belong to it, momentarily aligned with processes that exceed any single lifespan.
The image situates time as layered rather than linear. The immediate softness of morning light sits alongside the slow pulse of the sea and the vast duration held in stone. This convergence invites attention to continuity rather than event, to relationship rather than action.
As visual data, the photograph documents a moment where species, elements, and temporalities meet without demand. It foregrounds an ethics of shared presence, reminding me that rest, movement, and endurance can coexist within the same horizon, each holding space for the others.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
With the Body, In Relationship
The difference lies in how I returned. Previously, my running was extraction, demanding performance from a body that had already given everything. The running that happened this morning was related. I moved with my body rather than at it.
Sunderland et al. (2022) describe how trauma-informed movement practices differ fundamentally from conventional exercise frameworks. Rather than imposing external goals on the body, trauma-informed movement invites the body to lead, to set pace, to determine duration, to signal completion. The practitioner’s role shifts from taskmaster to listener.
This morning, I listened. When my body asked to slow down, I slowed down. When it wanted to stop and watch pelicans dive for fish, I stopped. When it asked to walk the final stretch, I walked. Each choice was a conversation rather than a command.
Title: The Pause That Teaches
Artist Statement
The pelicans offered an unplanned lesson in embodied presence. Their hunting unfolds through complete attentiveness to the moment. Hovering. Assessing. Committing fully to the dive. There is no excess movement, no rehearsal. Each action arises from readiness rather than force.
Watching them, I felt my own body slow. The run paused without ending. Breath settled. Attention sharpened. The act of observing became a parallel practice, one that allowed stillness to exist inside motion rather than in opposition to it. The pelicans approached the water without rushing. They waited until the moment was right, and then they moved without hesitation.
This experience reframed how I understand interruption. Within trauma-informed movement, pauses are often misread as failure or loss of discipline. Here, the pause functioned as information. It carried data about safety, timing, and deep listening. The body knew when to stop watching and when to move again.
As visual and body-based data, this moment documents a shift in relationship to movement. Attention becomes a form of care. Stillness becomes part of momentum. The pelicans model a way of being that honours precision over speed and presence over persistence, offering permission to pause without abandoning forward motion.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Without Witnesses
Alonetude made this possible. In solitude, there is no audience for performance. No fitness tracker is demanding improvement. No institutional gaze measuring productivity. There is only the body, the breath, the sea, the slowly brightening sky.
Without witnesses, the body can tell the truth.
Title: Step into the Tide
Artist Statement
A bare foot meets the shoreline, marking contact, return, and the body’s quiet consent to re-enter the sea. The gesture is small, almost unremarkable, yet it carries weight. Skin touches water without armour or urgency. The body chooses proximity rather than distance.
What this moment holds for me is the ethics of consent in movement. The foot pauses before fully entering, allowing sensation to arrive first. Temperature, texture, resistance. The sea is met slowly, on equal terms. This is a return that requires no immersion. It honours readiness.
The shoreline becomes a threshold where the body negotiates trust. Years of holding tension and bracing against impact have taught my body to hesitate. Here, hesitation is attentiveness. It is listening. The foot lowers when the nervous system agrees. Contact becomes collaboration rather than conquest.
As visual data, this image documents an embodied decision point. Re-entry is framed as relational, shaped by timing, sensation, and choice. The body resists rushing to belong. It waits until belonging feels possible.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Reflection: What the Body Knows
van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body keeps the score, that our tissues, organs, and nervous systems hold the memory of what we have survived. If this is true, then my body has been keeping meticulous records of nineteen years of precarious labour. The chronic tension. The interrupted sleep. The constant calibration of self-presentation to meet institutional expectations. The grief of contracts that ended, relationships that frayed under unsustainable demands, and dreams deferred and deferred again.
Yet if the body keeps the score of harm, perhaps it can also keep the score of healing. Perhaps these fifteen minutes by the sea, this small, trembling, imperfect return to movement, registers in my tissues as evidence that safety is possible. That rest can be trusted. That the body, given sufficient care and time and solitude, remembers how to feel alive.
Little by Little
This is what alonetude offers: the space to let the body lead. To stop performing wellness and actually experience it. To run slowly along a shoreline at dawn, asking nothing of the moment except presence, and to feel something inside slowly, tentatively, begin to heal.
Little by little, the body finds its way back.
Image: Shadow Self
Artist Statement
This image captures my self-shadow at the water’s edge, marking a liminal encounter between body and sea, presence and erasure. Rendered only as a silhouette, the figure allows for self-observation without the self-consciousness of direct gaze. The body appears indirectly, shaped by light rather than asserted through form.
The advancing foam operates as both boundary and invitation. It traces a shifting line where land, body, and ocean negotiate contact. In this moment, the tide functions as a temporal and relational force, advancing and retreating without urgency. I stand at the threshold, neither immersed nor withdrawn, embodying what I understand as alonetude, a chosen presence within a larger ecological field.
The shadow stretches and softens across wet sand, signalling a body in transition. It reflects a state that has moved beyond contraction and exhaustion, yet is still reassembling itself into certainty. The image holds that in-between condition with care.
As visual data, this photograph documents an what the body knows-based moment. The shoreline becomes a research site where identity, nervous system state, and environment co-produce experience. The self emerges here as relational rather than fixed, a silhouette shaped by water, light, and ground rather than by narrative or performance.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Visual Element
Title: Watercolour Study: The Return to Movement
Artist Statement
I made this in layers, letting colour arrive slowly and remain where it landed. Blue first, wide and enclosing. Then darker forms that suggested land without insisting on it. Beneath that, a band of violet and indigo where things began to blur, where certainty softened into atmosphere. Nothing here was outlined. Nothing was corrected.
What this image holds for me is the feeling that comes after effort has passed. The time when the body exhales and the landscape, internal and external, returns to itself. The colours move into one another without resistance. Boundaries exist, but they are permeable. This feels true to how I am learning to live right now, allowing edges to be present without hardening them.
As I worked, my attention stayed low and steady. My aim was to respond rather than describe. I was attending to a state. The surface carries the evidence of pauses, of hands lifting and returning, of pigment settling as it chose. The darker shapes hold their place without dominating the lighter ones. They coexist, layered rather than resolved.
This piece belongs to my ongoing practice of slowing down and letting meaning emerge through accumulation rather than declaration. It reflects a trust in process and in rest, in what becomes visible when nothing is being demanded. What settles here is a condition, held open. One that feels inhabitable.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Closing the Day
Tonight, as the sun sets over the Sierra de la Giganta, I feel the pleasant ache of muscles reawakening. It is a different ache than the chronic tension I carried for months. This one speaks of use rather than depletion, of a body asked to participate in its own life rather than merely endure.
Tomorrow I may run again or walk. Or I may simply sit by the water and breathe. The point is no longer the activity itself but the relationship, the ongoing conversation between intention and capacity, between what the mind desires and what the body can sustain.
The body knows. And finally, I am learning to listen.
Title: Day’s End
Artist Statement
Carmen emerges as a dark silhouette across the Sea of Cortez, anchoring the horizon and holding the quiet of distance, water, and sky. The landmass withholds assertion through detail or texture. It remains intact through outline alone, a steady presence shaped by light rather than proximity.
What this image offers me is a sense of orientation without demand. Carmen holds the horizon gently, giving the eye a place to rest while allowing the surrounding space to remain open. Water and sky expand around it, and time seems to slow in response. The distance matters. It preserves separation while sustaining relationship.
As visual data, the silhouette functions as a stabilising reference point within a wide field of stillness. It reflects how grounding can occur without closeness, how connection can be maintained through recognition rather than arrival. Carmen remains where it is, and that is enough to hold the scene together.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Methodological Reflection: SPN as Healing Practice
I understand Scholarly Personal Narrative as both a method and a practice. Nash and Bradley (2011) describe SPN as a way of transforming lived experience into scholarly knowledge through theory-informed reflection and an honest engagement with vulnerability. In writing this entry, This entry reaches beyond reporting on experience; it inhabits the methodology. My morning run becomes data. The subtle shift in my nervous system becomes evident. My body’s responses become a legitimate site of knowledge production.
The VPAS framework helps me organize this inquiry. Vulnerability appears in my account of collapse, in the moment my body withdrew consent to continue running. Perspective emerges as I trace the movement from depletion toward tentative return, noticing how hope arrives quietly, almost imperceptibly. Action is present in the fifteen minutes of running, but also in the choices to slow down, to stop, to breathe, and to listen. Scholarly engagement threads through this narrative as I situate my embodied experience within Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory, trauma scholarship, and critiques of academic capitalism.
I extend Scholarly Personal Narrative through multimodal, artifact-based inquiry. The shoes, stones, shadows, and watercolours serve as more than decoration. They are co-researchers. They hold memory, affect, and institutional inscription. By treating these objects as data, I am expanding what counts as evidence in organizational, educational, and human rights research. Framing embodied exhaustion as a human rights issue allows me to move beyond personal narrative and into structural critique, linking my body to policy, labour conditions, and institutional design.
I no longer understand chronic dorsal vagal shutdown as a personal pathology. I understand it as an institutional outcome. My nervous system collapsed beyond isolationtion. It was shaped by contingent contracts, constant performance evaluation, and the quiet pressure to be endlessly available. In this sense, my body becomes diagnostic. It registers what policy documents and strategic plans cannot: the physiological cost of precarious academic labour.
Alonetude has become a methodological condition for this work. In solitude, I hear my body more clearly. Without students, emails, metrics, or surveillance, my body speaks in sensation, breath, and fatigue. Here, data emerges in the body rather than performatively. I am practising scholarship from the inside out, allowing embodiment to guide analysis rather than treating it as an object to be analyzed.
Learning to listen to my body feels both intimate and political. It is a healing practice and also a refusal. It interrupts the logic of extraction that shaped my academic life. It challenges the primacy of productivity as a measure of worth. It insists that limits are forms of knowledge, but forms of knowledge and ethical boundaries.
I believe that if higher education institutions are serious about equity, inclusion, and well-being, they must confront the embodied consequences of precarious labour. Secure employment, reasonable workloads, and psychological safety are human rights obligations rather than luxuriesgations. Without structural change, universities will continue to produce bodies calibrated for collapse and then misrecognize that collapse as individual weakness rather than as a failure of institutional design.
Writing this section is therefore both research and resistance. It is an act of counter-archiving, inserting the body back into institutional memory and insisting that embodied experience counts as knowledge.
References
Al Serhan, O., & Houjeir, R. (2020). Academic capitalism and faculty burnout: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 15(5), 1368–1393. https://doi.org/10.18844/cjes.v15i5.5350
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
International Labour Organization. (1999). Decent work. International Labour Office. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/decent-work/lang–en/index.htm
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sunderland, N., Graham, P., & Lorenz, D. (2022). Trauma-informed dance/movement therapy: Considerations for practice. In S. L. Brooke & C. E. Myers (Eds.), The use of creative arts therapies in trauma and recovery (pp. 15–32). Charles C Thomas Publisher.
United Nations. (1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. United Nations Treaty Series, 993, 3.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Translation note. Spanish language passages in this post were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning and are intended as guides to meaning rather than certified linguistic interpretations.
ACADEMIC LENS
The concept of bodily abandonment named in this title engages van der Kolk’s (2014) clinical argument that the most pervasive injury of chronic trauma is what the body carries from inside out, rather than what happened from outside but what the person learned to do to the body from inside: to leave it, to override its signals, to treat it as a vehicle for performance rather than a subject of care. Menakem (2017) calls this “self-abandonment,” distinguishing it from the harm inflicted by others: it is the secondary layer of injury, the person’s own learned disconnection from somatic experience, that must be addressed for healing to be sustained. The photographic journal format of Day 22, with its many images and artist statements, enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) call arts-based inquiry: using visual documentation to explore rather than illustrate pre-formed conclusions, to surface knowledge that verbal reflection alone cannot reach. Levine’s (2010) concept of the “somatic narrative,” the story the body tells through sensation, posture, and movement, is what these artworks attempt to read. The body that remembers its own abandonment also, in remembering, begins to undo it: the act of witnessing, even through art, constitutes what Levine calls a “corrective somatic experience.”
