30 Days by the Sea – Page 5 – A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore

Day 15: La Edad y El Juego

Age and Play

Playing in the Sand

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Sea Lions Know Something I Forgot

I am sixty years old, and I am learning to play.

This morning, I caught myself humming. No song. Just sound making itself because it wanted to. I stopped mid-hum and thought: when did I stop doing this? When did humming become something I had to notice rather than something that just happened?

And then yesterday. The sea lions.

Lions Playing on the Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Hundreds of them off the coast of Loreto, leaping and spinning and riding waves with what looked like pure, uncomplicated joy. And here is what struck me: they were older. Many had grey muzzles. Scarred bodies. The marks of decades in the ocean. These were old sea lions. Experienced sea lions. Sea lions who had survived sharks and storms and whatever else the ocean throws at bodies over time.

And they were playing.

No different from young sea lions in their abandon. No careful moderation, no appropriate dignity. Just playing. Leaping. Spinning. Riding waves because riding waves feels good. Their age seemed irrelevant to the equation entirely.

I sat in the boat watching them, and something in my chest cracked open. Cracked, yes, but opened. Like a window that had been sealed shut for so long, I forgot windows could open, and suddenly there was air and light and the possibility of something beyond naming, but my body recognised immediately.

Star Sunshine

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Alegría. Joy.

Joy unattached to happiness, contentment, or satisfaction with accomplishments. Joy. The kind that bubbles up from somewhere that has nothing to do with achievement, productivity, or being a responsible adult who takes life seriously.
The kind the sea lions have. The kind I seem to have misplaced somewhere between twenty and sixty. The kind I am just now realising I want back.

What I Learned About Growing Up

Somewhere along the way, I learned that growing up means growing serious.
I cannot point to the exact moment this lesson took hold. There was no single conversation or event. It was more like osmosis. The gradual absorption of cultural messages about what mature adults do and avoid. Adults work. Adults are responsible. Adults plan, achieve, and contribute. Adults avoid wasting time. Adults avoid play.

Or if they play, it is scheduled, optimised, and turned into another form of productivity. Exercise that counts as play. Hobbies that produce results. Social games that serve networking functions. Play with purpose. Play with outcomes. Play that justifies itself.

But what the sea lions were doing yesterday required no justification. It served no purpose I could identify. Exercise was incidental (though movement was involved). Socialising was incidental (though they played near each other). Skill practice was incidental (though the skills were evident). They were just… playing. For its own sake. Because it felt good. Because they were alive and the ocean was there, and their bodies knew how to move through it joyfully.

I watched them and thought, “I used to know how to do this.” I did. I remember childhood summers when entire afternoons disappeared into invented games that had no point beyond playing them. I remember the absorption. The timelessness. The way my body knew what to do without my mind directing it.
And then I grew up. And growing up meant putting that away. Meant learning that time is currency, that activities should have purpose, that joy without justification is frivolous, immature, something you outgrow.

Except the sea lions seem to have skipped entirely. The grey-muzzled, scarred, elderly sea lions seem to have missed any memo about dignity, seriousness, and age-appropriate behaviour. They are still playing. Still joyful. Still leaping.
And I am sitting here at sixty, realising: I got it wrong. The sea lions were right all along.

What the Research Says (And Why It Matters That I Am Reading It)

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I am reading research on play and aging because that is what I do when I am trying to understand something. I read. I find frameworks. I look for explanations. This is probably part of why I lost play in the first place: I cannot just experience things. I have to understand them. Analyze them. Fit them into existing knowledge structures.

But the research is helping, so I am allowing it.

Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that play is a lifelong human need, no mere developmental stage we pass through. They studied adults across the lifespan and found that people who maintain a capacity for play show better physical health, stronger social bonds, greater creativity, and more resilience when life gets difficult. The absence of play in adulthood belongs to suppression rather than natural maturation. It is suppression.

This word stopped me: suppression.

Something different from absence. From outgrowing. Suppression. Which implies something was there and was pushed down. Which implies it might still be there. Which implies it could be recovered.

I sat with this for a long time yesterday evening after the boat returned. Suppression. What suppressed my play? And the answer came quickly, almost too quickly, as though it had been waiting to be asked:

Everything. Work suppressed it. Poverty suppressed it. Precarity suppressed it. Chronic stress suppressed it. Cultural messages about what serious academics do suppressed it. Twenty-five years of contract work, where every moment had to be productive because any moment could be your last, suppressed it.
My play was buried alive under layers of survival necessity, cultural expectation, and internalised messages about what maturity demands.

But suppression is different from death. Suppression means it is still there. Somewhere. Under all those layers. Waiting.

The sea lions confirmed this. They looked nothing like they were working to play. They looked like playing was the most natural thing in the world. Which suggests that play is natural. Which suggests that the unnatural thing is the absence of play. Which suggests I have been living unnaturally for a very long time.
Qué alivio. What relief. To know it endures. Just suppressed. Just waiting.

Sea Lions Playing

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Neuroscience of Joy (Or: Why Play Eluded Me Even When I Wanted It)
Here is something I learned from Porges (2011) that changed how I understand the last five months, the last five years, possibly the last twenty-five years:
Play requires safety.

Something beyond cognitive understanding of safety. Beyond intellectual knowledge that you are probably fine. Physiological safety. The kind that the nervous system detects below conscious awareness through what Porges calls neuroception. The body is constantly scanning the environment, asking: Am I safe? Can I rest? Can I play?

And if the answer is no, the social engagement system goes offline. This is the neural pathway that supports play, connection, and spontaneous joy. When the nervous system is in threat mode (preparing to fight, to flee, to freeze), the social engagement system shuts down. You cannot access Play. Cannot feel lightness. Cannot allow the vulnerability that playfulness requires.

This is autonomic regulation, beyond choice. The body makes decisions about resource allocation below the level where consciousness operates.
For five months before I came here, my nervous system never registered safety long enough for play to become possible. I was in constant crisis mode. Waiting for calls. Waiting for bad news. Waiting for the next emergency. My body had no resources for playfulness, for vulnerability, for the energy expenditure that play requires when every resource must go toward threat management.

My nervous system chose for me. The choice to avoid play was never mine.

And reading this, understanding this, I felt something unexpected: compassion. For myself. For my body. For the twenty-five years before that, when contract work meant my nervous system never fully relaxed because security was always provisional, always temporary, always one crisis away from disappearing.

Of course play was unavailable to me. Of course, joy became impossible. Because my body was doing something very right rather than anything wrong: keeping me alive under conditions that offered no support for flourishing.

But here is what the research also says: nervous systems remain plastic across the lifespan. The capacity for play can be restored at any age if conditions support it. If safety can be established. If the threat can be interrupted. If the social engagement system can come back online.

I am sixty years old, and my nervous system is learning safety. And as it learns safety, play is beginning to return. Quietly, incrementally. In small signals: humming. Swimming for pleasure. Watching pelicans without needing to make it productive.

Small. But real. And growing.

Pequeños milagros. Small miracles. Pero milagros de todos modos. But miracles nonetheless.

What Play Looks Like When It First Returns

This morning, I walked in the water along the seashore.

This is a small thing. Maybe it seems like nothing. But for someone who has spent decades organising every activity around productivity, purpose, and outcomes, swimming because the water looks inviting feels revolutionary.
I got in. The cold shocked me like it does every morning. But instead of swimming laps, instead of counting strokes, instead of trying to improve my form, I just… moved. Followed curiosity about underwater rocks. Let my body do what feels good. Floated when floating felt right. Dove when diving felt right.

No plan. No goal. No timer.

And I realised: this is play. Unlike what I remember from childhood. Unlike what the sea lions do. My version. Sixty-year-old-woman-in-the-Sea-of-Cortez version. Modified. Tentative. Still learning. But real.

Guitard et al. (2005) studied play in older adults and found that play often looks different from childhood play but serves similar functions: engagement with novelty, absorption in the process rather than the outcome, pleasure for its own sake, and temporary suspension of everyday concerns. Older adults play through gardening, cooking, music, crafts, and exploration.

I am playing through swimming. Through humming. Through letting myself be curious about things without turning curiosity into research questions. Through allowing time to be unstructured. Through following impulses that have no justification beyond: this sounds good right now.

Small things. But they add up. Each one teaches my nervous system: it is safe to be spontaneous. Safe to follow pleasure. Safe to let go of control slightly and see what happens.

Each one is a tiny rebellion against the internalised voice that says: You are sixty years old, what are you doing? You should be serious. You should be productive. You should be concerned about declining capacities, limited time, and making every moment count.

Each one is a tiny agreement with the sea lions who say: no. Play. Leap. Spin. Your age is beside the point. Your joy is the point.

Estoy aprendiendo. I am learning.

Lentamente. Slowly.

Lero aprendiendo. But learning.

The Paradox That Makes Me Laugh

Here is something that makes me laugh now that I can laugh about it:
I am conducting research on rest and recovery and nervous system regulation. I am documenting how environmental conditions affect play capacity. I am reading literature on playfulness, aging, and successful life transitions.

I am turning the recovery of play into academic work.

This is very me. Very on-brand. Cannot just play. Have to study play. Have to document play. Have to theorise play. Have to turn play into scholarship because scholarship is how I make meaning, and scholarship carries legitimacy that pure experience often lacks in my mind.

But here is what I noticed yesterday watching the sea lions: they were documenting nothing. Reading no literature on play theory. Conducting no comparative analysis of their play behaviours across developmental stages. They were just playing.

And I thought: yes. That is the point. The point is to do it, first and foremost, with understanding secondary.

But I also thought: maybe both are okay. Maybe I can study, play, and also play.

Maybe the studying helps me trust that play is legitimate enough to allow.

Maybe the research gives me permission that my body needs before it can relax into playfulness.

Maybe there is no single right way to recover and play at sixty. Maybe scholarly-personal-narrative-researcher-trying-to-learn-to-be-playful-again is a valid way to do it.

The sea lions need no research to justify their play. But I might. At least for now. At least until my nervous system trusts playfulness enough to allow it without justification.

And maybe that is okay. Maybe that is my version. Nerdy. Academic. Needing frameworks before I can allow experience. But still moving toward the same place the sea lions are already inhabiting: joy. Lightness. Permission to leap.

Me río de mí misma. I laugh at myself.

What Sixty Knows That Twenty Could Barely Imagine

There is something sixty understands that twenty lacked the ground to know:

Nothing is permanent. Nothing is as high-stakes as it seems. Most of what feels catastrophic becomes a foundation. Failures leave you standing. Mistakes are survivable. The things you think will last forever dissolve. The things you think will destroy you become stories you tell.

At twenty, play was impossible because everything felt too important. Every choice felt permanent. Every failure felt existential. The stakes were always maximum.

At sixty I know better. I know that very little is as important as it seems. That most catastrophes become footnotes. That reputation is less fragile than fear suggests. That dignity survives embarrassment. That making mistakes carries no verdict on your worth.

This knowledge could support play. Could create psychological space where experimentation feels safe, where outcomes matter less than process, where I can be silly without it threatening my sense of self.
But knowledge alone falls short. The nervous system has to believe it. Has to feel safe enough to trust that playfulness leads somewhere other than catastrophe.

This is the work I am doing. Teaching my sixty-year-old body what my sixty-year-old mind already knows: it is safe enough to play.
And here is what is helping: the sea lions.

When I skip for three steps, I am completely here. Future thoughts quiet. Past replays absent. Just: body moving, sun warm, this feels good.
That presence is what I lost. What chronic stress took from me. What I am reclaiming now, three steps at a time.

Volcanic Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026

And here is what surprises me: it feels good. Beyond the skipping. The reclaiming. The gradual return of lightness. The sense that my body is becoming a place where joy is possible again.

For years, my body was a site of vigilance. Of tension. Of preparing for a threat. Now it is becoming something else. Something softer. Something more playful.
Mi cuerpo se está curando. My body is healing.

No sólo descansando. More than resting.

Curando. Healing.

Y parte de la curación es recordar cómo jugar. And part of healing is remembering how to play.

What the Sea Lions Teach About Successful Aging

Traditional models of successful aging emphasise maintaining function. Physical health. Cognitive capacity. Productivity. Contribution. (Rowe & Kahn, 1997).

But the sea lions suggest a different model.

Successful aging might be: maintaining the capacity for joy. For curiosity. For absorption in the present moment. For play.

Their bodies are older. Scarred. Slower now, less agile than young bodies. But they play anyway, through aging rather than despite it. Their play is a present-moment engagement, no effort to recapture youth. It is present-moment engagement with being alive in the body they have now.

This feels important.

Twenty again holds no appeal for me. No idealised version of youth calls to me. I want to be sixty and playful. Sixty and joyful. Sixty and capable of skipping for three steps when skipping feels right.

I want what the sea lions have: age that leaves joy intact. Experience that carries lightness alongside wisdom. Wisdom that includes lightness.

Henricks (2015) argues that play in later life serves a generative function: modelling joyful engagement for younger generations, resisting cultural narratives that equate aging with decline, and demonstrating that vitality persists across the lifespan.

If this is true, then learning to play at sixty is a contribution, no form of regression. It is resistance. It is saying: this is what aging can look like. Alive. Present. Joyful. Still learning. Still curious. Still capable of surprise. No grimness, no resignation, no decline toward inevitable loss.

The sea lions model this every day. I am trying to learn from them.
Slowly. With academic footnotes and self-consciousness they never carry. But learning.

And occasionally, when I forget to monitor myself, when I am absorbed in water or surprised by pelicans or simply here, I play.
Just for a moment. Just for three steps. Just for one spontaneous laugh.
But it is there. Real. Growing.

New Directions

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

Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Guitard, P., Ferland, F., & Dutil, É. (2005). Toward a better understanding of playfulness in adults. OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health, 25(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/153944920502500103

Henricks, T. S. (2015). Play and the human condition. University of Illinois Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Rowe, J. W., & Kahn, R. L. (1997). Successful aging. The Gerontologist, 37(4), 433–440. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/37.4.433

Academic Lens

Age and play in the same frame raises the question of what Brown (2010) calls the permission to be imperfect: the cultural prohibition on adult play is internalised most deeply in those whose worth has been contingent on productivity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) identifies play as the purest form of autotelic experience — activity valuable in itself, not for any outcome. The bodily joy described in this entry is also a somatic signal of the nervous system's continued decompression: Porges (2011) notes that playfulness is a marker of ventral vagal engagement, a physiological state unavailable under chronic threat.

Day 14: Ballenas y Piedra

Ballenas y Piedra / Whales and Stone

The Sea of Cortez

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I had no plan to see whales.

The boat tour was about the island, about Coronado with its ancient volcanic stone rising from the sea like something too dramatic to be real. I wanted to see the geology. Wanted to understand how fire becomes stone, how destruction becomes foundation, how violence cooled into something that now holds life.

The whales were absent from the itinerary. They were passing through. We were lucky, the captain said. Muy afortunados.

Grey Whale

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I felt anything but lucky at first. I felt unprepared. As though I should have known this was possible, should have researched grey whale migration patterns, should have brought a better camera, should have been ready for this moment rather than sitting in a small boat with no idea where to look or what I was about to see.

Then the water broke, and there was a back. Grey. Massive. Longer than our boat. The whale surfaced, breathed (a sound I cannot describe except to say it sounded like the ocean exhaling), and disappeared again into water that closed over it as though nothing that large had just been there.

I forgot about being prepared. Forgot about cameras. Just watched the space where the whale had been, waiting, holding my breath, aware suddenly of my own breathing in a way I had forgotten since the panic attacks that brought me here began to ease. The whale breathes air like I breathe air. We are both mammals. Both carry our ancestors’ decision to leave the ocean and then (in the whale’s case) the decision to return. Both are shaped by evolutionary pressures I can name but struggle to fully comprehend.

The whale surfaced again. Fifty metres ahead this time. I could see barnacles clustered on its head, the mottled grey of skin that looked like stone worn smooth by water. Another breath. Another dive. And I realised I was crying. Quietly, undramatically. Just tears on my face that I left alone because they felt like the right response to whatever was happening.

van der Kolk (2014) writes that trauma resolution occurs less through understanding than through the body’s learning to feel safe again. I have been here two weeks learning that lesson: letting my body remember what safety feels like. But something about the whale’s presence intensified it. The whale’s breath synchronised my own breathing in ways beyond my control. My nervous system responded to the whale’s presence before my mind registered what I was seeing. This is what Porges (2011) calls neuroception, the body’s capacity to detect safety or danger below conscious awareness through environmental cues, including, apparently, the respiratory patterns of other mammals.

Learning Scale Through Bodies

I have been thinking about scale.

Egypt Gods

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

For two weeks, I have been learning to feel small in ways that leave me whole. Small against the stars. Small against the sea. Small against geologic time. But the whale is different. The whale is something other than cosmic distance or abstract deep time. The whale is right here, breathing the same air I am breathing, made of the same carbon and oxygen and complexity. And it is so much larger than me that my body cannot quite process it.

Fifteen metres long, the guide said. Up to forty tonnes. These are numbers. They mean nothing until you are in a six-metre boat and a whale surfaces close enough that you understand: I am the size of the whale’s eye. Maybe smaller. The whale could overturn this boat without meaning to, just by surfacing in the wrong place. We are here because the whale allows it. Because the whale, in its vast mammalian intelligence, has chosen to regard us as harmless.

This is different from the stars’ indifference. The stars choose nothing. They simply are, and my presence or absence makes no difference to them. But the whale is aware. The whale has agency. The whale sees me (I watched its eye track our boat as it passed) and makes decisions about whether I am worth noticing, worth avoiding, or worth approaching. I am in a relationship with the whale, whether I intended it or otherwise. And the whale, by refraining from destroying us, by passing peacefully, by allowing us to witness, is teaching me something about coexistence I had no idea I needed to learn.

Sea Lions on the Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Buber (1923/1970) writes about I-Thou relationships, encounters where the other is met as subject rather than object, where genuine relation becomes possible even across vast differences. The whale encounter fell short of I-Thou in Buber’s full sense (the whale was silent toward me, was entering no reciprocal relation), and yet it resisted the category of I-It (the whale as object, as thing to be observed). It was something in between. Something more like: we share this moment. We share this water. We share the fact of being alive at the same time in the same place, and that sharing, however brief, however one-sided, matters.

Boss (1999) writes about ambiguous loss, about relationships that defy clear categories. I am thinking about this now in a different context. What is my relationship with the whale? Beyond connection in the usual sense (the whale carries no knowledge of me). Beyond threat (I pose none). Beyond kinship (though we share mammalian ancestry, that seems too distant a claim to make). Something else. Something more like a witness. I witnessed the whale. The whale, perhaps, witnessed me. And that mutual witnessing, even without recognition or acknowledgment, creates a kind of relation that matters.

The whale needs nothing from my witnessing. But I seem to need to witness the whale. Need to know that something this large, this ancient (grey whales as a species evolved approximately 2.5 million years ago; Swartz, 2018), this indifferent to human concern still exists. Still migrates. Still breathes air, nurses its young, and navigates thousands of kilometres using senses I cannot imagine. The whale’s existence, independent of my need for it, feels like permission. Permission to exist independently of others’ needs for me. Permission to migrate toward what I need without justifying the journey. Permission to be large in my own right, even when that largeness is invisible to those who look at me and see only the surface.

Fire Becoming Stone: On Transformation and Time

We continued toward Coronado Island, and I was quiet.

The others in the boat were talking about the whales, about luck, about whether we might see more on the return trip. I had no words. No way to translate what I was feeling into words that would make sense to people who had seen the same thing I had seen, but seemed to have experienced it differently. They saw whales. I saw something I still lack language for.

The island rose ahead of us. Red and black stone. Sharp angles softened by millennia of erosion, but are still clearly volcanic. The guide explained the geology: an ancient volcano, now extinct, part of the volcanic chain formed when tectonic plates pulled apart millions of years ago, and magma rose to fill the gaps. The red is iron oxide. The black is basalt. The textures tell stories about how quickly lava cooled, how gas bubbles were trapped and never escaped.

I listened, but I was thinking about something else. About fire becoming stone. About destruction becoming a foundation. About the fact that everything solid was once liquid, once too hot to touch, once actively destroying everything it encountered. And now it sits peacefully in the sun. Now it is a habitat. Now birds nest on it, sea lions bask on it, and fish hide in its underwater crevices.

What does it take for violence to cool into peace? How long? Under what conditions? Can a human lifetime be long enough for that transformation or do we need geologic time, millions of years, the patient work of water and wind wearing down sharp edges until they are smooth?

Herman (1992) writes that trauma recovery unfolds in stages: establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma narrative, and restoring connections with others. But she acknowledges that recovery follows no straight line, that setbacks occur, that some trauma leaves permanent marks even as healing proceeds. The volcanic stone teaches something similar. The violence of eruption is permanent in some sense, the stone will always be volcanic stone, will always carry the signature of fire in its composition and structure. But it is also transformed. Cooled. Made into something that can be touched, that can hold life, that is no longer actively destructive even as it remembers destruction.

I am carrying violence inside me. None of it my own. Violence witnessed. Violence absorbed through trying to protect someone beyond my reach to protect. The past five months have been volcanic: sudden eruptions, molten rage, heat that destroyed everything it touched. And I came here hoping that distance, time, and consistency might cool it. Might turn it from something actively harmful into something that can be lived with. Maybe even something that becomes a foundation.

Two weeks may or may be enough. If thirty days will be enough. If any amount of time in any location will be enough. But watching volcanic stone hold seabirds and sea lions, I felt something like hope. If fire can become this, maybe anything can transform. Maybe cooling is less about erasing what happened but about integration. About the violence becoming part of your structure without remaining your defining characteristic. About carrying fire’s memory without burning.

Touching Ground: Embodied Knowledge

We anchored in a small bay, and the captain said we could swim if we wanted.

I lowered myself into the water, and the cold shocked every thought out of my head. My body contracted. My breath stopped. Then started again, harsh and fast. Then slowed. Then the cold became bearable. Then it became exactly right.

I swam toward the island’s edge where stone met water. Underwater, volcanic rock was even more dramatic: sharp ridges, smooth faces, crevices dark with shadow and possibility. I reached out and touched it. Ran my hand along the surface. Rough. Solid. Still holding some memory of heat, though that heat is millions of years old, cooled now to ocean temperature.

My body knows stone differently than my mind knows it. My body reads texture, temperature, and solidity. My body has no use for tectonic plates or million-year timescales. My body just knows: this is real. This is here. This can be touched. And touching it changes something. The stone remains indifferent. But me. I have been changed by touching the stone that was once fire.

Volcano Rocks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) writes about embodied perception, about how we know the world primarily through our bodies before we know it through concepts. The body’s knowledge is immediate, pre-reflective, and cannot be fully translated into language. This is what Sheets-Johnstone (2011) calls kinesthetic knowing, knowledge that emerges through movement and touch, through the body’s direct engagement with the material world. This knowing precedes and often exceeds what language can capture.

This is what I was experiencing in the water. Feeling the volcanic stone rather than thinking about it. Learning it through skin, through the resistance it offered when I pushed against it, through the way it scraped my palm when I held on too tightly. My body was gathering information my mind struggled to process: the stone’s texture, its temperature gradients, its stability, its indifference to my presence. All of this registered somatically before I had words for any of it.

Damasio (1994) argues that emotion and feeling are fundamentally embodied, that what we call consciousness emerges from the body’s ongoing process of self-regulation and environmental response. The body knows before the mind knows. The body responds before conscious thought directs it. And often the body knows things the mind never fully grasps because those things exist at the level of sensation, of immediate experience, of contact with the world that exceeds conceptual capture.

I stayed in the water longer than I intended. Kept swimming around the island’s edge, kept touching stone, kept trying to understand through my hands what my mind had yet to grasp. Eventually, I climbed back into the boat. Wrapped a towel around myself. Sat in the sun, which felt impossibly good after the cold. And thought: I came here to touch ground. That is what this month is. Touching ground after years of free-fall. Learning what is solid. Learning what holds.

Finding Pattern in Movement

The whales we saw this morning migrate up to twenty thousand kilometres annually. Arctic feeding grounds to Baja breeding lagoons and back. They navigate using what scientists believe is a combination of magnetic field detection, sun position, memory of coastline features, and possibly echolocation. Grey whales are baleen whales rather than toothed whales, so their sonar works differently from that of other sea mammals (Swartz, 2018).

What strikes me is the fact itself, more than the mechanism. Twenty thousand kilometres. Every year. For their entire lives. They stay in no one place. They are built for movement. Their survival requires migration, requires leaving feeding grounds when food runs out, requires travelling to warm water to give birth, and requires trusting that the journey is possible even when you cannot see the destination.

I have been thinking about this in relation to my own life. The constant movement. The inability to stay. Twenty-five years of contract work meant never knowing whether I would be in the same place next semester or next year. Always preparing to leave. Always holding relationships lightly because attachment to place or people or routine felt dangerous when any of it could be taken away with two weeks’ notice.

Standing (2011) writes about the precariat, the growing class of workers whose employment is temporary, insecure, and without benefits or stability. Precarious workers live in perpetual uncertainty, unable to plan for the future, unable to establish roots, always one crisis away from catastrophe. This precarity creates what Standing calls “status frustration” and chronic stress that accumulates over time, wearing away at health, relationships, and sense of self.

But the whale’s migration is different from my precarity. The whale chooses to leave. The whale knows where it is going. The whale has done this journey before and will do it again. There is certainty in the pattern, even though each journey is unique, even though conditions change, even though some years are harder than others. The whale’s movement carries no precarity. It is rhythm. It is a pattern. It is a kind of stability that emerges through movement, even because of it.

What I am attempting here is something like that. No true migration (I will return to the same city, the same life), but the development of a pattern. The trust that this rhythm I am establishing can be carried forward. That I can know where I am going even when I cannot yet see it. That leaving may carry no loss in it. Sometimes, leaving is how you find your way home.

Witness of Joy

On the trip, we also saw hundreds of sea lions.

Sea Lions Playing

I watched them and cried again. No particular sadness in it. No pure happiness either. Just the body’s response to witnessing something it recognises but cannot name. What we call joy in humans belongs to a wider mammalian inheritance.

But watching them, my mind moved away from neuroscience. I was thinking about the five months before I came here. The heaviness. The way joy became impossible, through no choice for sadness but because the capacity for lightness had been worn away by constant vigilance, constant crisis, constant weight. I forgot that joy was possible. Forgot that bodies can move just for the pleasure of movement. Forgot that play is a real thing animals do, a fundamental expression of being alive.

Porges (2011) describes the social engagement system, the neural pathways that support play, connection, facial expression, and vocalization. This system only functions when the nervous system registers safety. When we are in threat states (sympathetic activation or dorsal vagal shutdown), the social engagement system goes offline. We cannot play. Cannot connect easily. Cannot access the lighter states that make joy possible. Play requires a nervous system at rest, a body that trusts its environment enough to lower its defences.

The Lioness

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Play has been absent from my life for months. Maybe years. Have been too vigilant, too responsible, too aware of everything that could go wrong to allow the kind of unselfconscious absorption that play requires. But watching the sea lions, I felt something shift. Recognition rather than permission. Recognition that the capacity for play still exists in me somewhere. That it has been temporarily inaccessible, dormant but alive. The nervous system can move from a chronic threat response back to states where play becomes possible.

The sea lions do it. That whales do it (I read later that grey whales are known to approach boats, allowing humans to touch them, seeming curious about us in ways that look like play). That maybe, given enough time, safety, and consistency, I can do it too.

Brown and Vaughan (2009) argue that play is essential rather than frivolous, serving crucial functions in mammalian development and adult well-being: reducing stress, building social bonds, enhancing creativity, and maintaining cognitive flexibility. The absence of play, they suggest, is a marker of systems under stress, of lives organised around survival rather than flourishing.

I understood: I have been in survival mode. The return to play will signal that something fundamental has shifted. That I am safe enough to be playful again.

Making Meaning

Back at the dock, stepping from boat to land, I felt unsteady.

Physically, I was fine. But something about spending hours on water had changed my relationship with solid ground. The architectural structures of human settlement: buildings, walls, boundaries water lacks.

Afternoon Seista

That evening, I lay in a hammock and thought about the day. About whales’ breathing. About volcanic stone, teaching me that fire can be cooled. About sea lions playing. About my body’s response to all of it: unplanned tears, unexpected joy, a steadiness that came from witnessing things beyond my control continuing to exist in their full complexity.

Nash (2004) writes that scholarly personal narrative requires staying with experience long enough to understand what it means, resisting the rush to conclusions and allowing meaning to emerge through sustained reflection. This is the work of meaning-making, as Park (2010) describes the process by which individuals integrate difficult experiences into their life narratives, restoring a sense of coherence and purpose. Meaning-making bypasses silver linings and forced positive interpretations. It is about the harder work of acknowledging what happened, sitting with its difficulty, and gradually discovering how it connects to the larger story of who you are and what matters to you.

I am doing that now. Making no claim to understand what today meant, only acknowledging that it did. That seeing whales changed something in me I cannot yet name. That touching volcanic stone mattered. That witnessing sea lions mattered. That my body knows things my mind has yet to find language for.

Sea Lions

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Tomorrow I will wake, and the whales will be farther north. The sea lions will be somewhere else in the sea. The volcanic stone will still be there, still cooling, still becoming whatever it is becoming over timescales I cannot comprehend. And I will still be here, still learning what it means to be small and temporary and witness to things larger and older and more indifferent than I am.

But I will carry today. The sound of whale breath. The texture of volcanic stone under my hand. The sight of the sea lions. The recognition that my body still remembers how to cry in response to beauty, still registers awe even after months of numbness, still has capacity for the kind of witness that feels like prayer even when belief in anything to pray to has left you.

Rock Formations

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Gracias, ballenas. Thank you, whales.

Por respirar donde yo podía oírte. For breathing where I could hear you.

Gracias, piedra volcánica. Thank you, volcanic stone.

Por recordarme el juego. To remind me about play.

Gracias, cuerpo. Thank you, body.

Por saber cómo llorar cuando las palabras no bastan. For knowing how to cry when words fall short.

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

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.

Brown, S., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. Avery.

Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Putnam.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Park, C. L. (2010). Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 257–301. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011). The primacy of movement.

Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

Swartz, S. L. (2018). Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus). In B. Würsig, J. G. M. Thewissen, & K. M. Kovacs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of marine mammals (3rd ed., pp. 422–428). Academic Press.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Academic Lens

Whales and stone: two orders of time meeting the human body. The whale's presence — a creature of vast scale, indifferent to the observer — is a profound instance of what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call extent: an environment large enough to contain and exceed the self, producing the felt sense of being part of something beyond individual concern. This encounter also instantiates alonetude (Tucker, 2026) at its most expansive: alone in the presence of something vast, the self becomes appropriately small, and the experience is not frightening but freeing.

Una Noche Clara / A Clear Night

The Impossibility of So Much Light

Tonight, the stars are impossible.

Actually, truly impossible. Beyond figure. The density of them. The brightness. The way they fill every inch of darkness between the horizon and directly overhead. I have been standing on the patio for twenty minutes, and I cannot get used to it. Cannot stop staring up. Cannot stop feeling small in the way that makes you feel more real, more present.

The Sea of Cortez is black at this hour. No moon tonight. Just stars reflected on the water, so the surface still looks like a second sky. I cannot tell where the ocean ends and the atmosphere begins. It is all just darkness held between points of light.

Estrellas sobre el mar. Stars over the sea.

What City Skies Hide

I grew up under city skies where you could see perhaps a dozen stars on a clear night. The Big Dipper, if you knew where to look. Maybe Orion in winter. The rest washed out by streetlights and shopping mall parking lots and the general glow of human activity that makes us forget the sky is actually full of light we cannot see until we get far enough away from our own brightness.

Here, there is no artificial light competing. The village has streetlights, but they are few and dim. Most houses are dark by nine. The ocean holds no light except what the stars give it. And the stars give everything.

I have been trying to count them and cannot. Have been trying to identify constellations and cannot find the patterns I know because there are too many stars, too much light, and the familiar shapes are lost in the density of what surrounds them. This is the Milky Way at its fullest. The galactic centre is visible as a bright band crossing the southern sky. Thousands upon thousands of stars. And behind them, thousands more.

The Scale That Holds Us

There is something humbling about this much sky.

Humbling beyond the degrading sense. Humbling in the way that reminds you that you are small and temporary and your concerns, however real they feel, are brief against the scale of what continues regardless of whether you are here to see it.

These stars have been shining for millions of years. Will continue shining for millions more. The light I am seeing left those stars before humans existed. Before mammals existed. Before anything I would recognise as life walked, swam, or flew on this planet. That light has been travelling through space for so long that the star that produced it might already be dead, its light still arriving, the ghost of something that no longer exists still visible because of the time it takes for distance to be crossed.

Luz antigua. Ancient light.

Witness and Significance

I am standing here, on the edge of land, looking at light older than memory, older than species, older than the oceans themselves. And it makes my life feel both infinitely small and strangely significant. Small because what am I against this scale? Significant because I am here to witness it. Because consciousness has emerged in this universe that can look up and feel awe. Because somewhere in the process of stars burning and planets forming and life evolving, something became aware enough to stand on a beach at night and feel moved by the impossibility of so much light.

What Weight Looks Like Against Stars

I think about the past six months. The past twenty-five years. The exhaustion. The depletion. The way I have been carrying weight has felt unbearable.

And against this sky, it persists. The weight is still real. The suffering is still real. But it is held in a different frame. Held by something larger than my capacity to hold it. The stars hold no record of my struggles or my presence. But somehow their indifference is comforting rather than cold.

I am here. I am looking up. I am held by the same gravity that holds these stars, the same darkness that lets their light shine, the same universe that has been unfolding for billions of years and will continue to unfold long after I am gone.

Soy pequeña. I am small.

Soy temporal. I am temporary.

Y está bien. And that is okay.

The Relief of Accepting Scale

There is relief in accepting scale. In acknowledging that my life is brief, my concerns local, my influence limited. I can release the weight of everything. I can leave what cannot be fixed to its own time. I can simply be here, for this moment, under these stars, breathing this air, feeling this particular configuration of matter that is temporarily organised as me.

Sky Above, Sky Below

The water is so still tonight that it looks like glass. Dark glass. The stars reflecting on it in perfect points of light that hold perfectly still. Without my standing here, there would be only darkness and light, no visible water. Just darkness and light. Sky above. Sky below. And me between them, small and temporary and held.

Gracias, estrellas. Thank you, stars.

Por brillar sin necesitarme. For shining without needing me.

Por recordarme mi lugar. For reminding me of my place.

Por sostener la oscuridad. For holding the darkness.

Para que pueda ver la luz. So that I can see the light.

What Continues

Tomorrow the sun will rise, and I will no longer be able to see the stars. But they will still be there. Still burning. Still sending light across distances I cannot comprehend toward planets I will never see.

And I will still be here. Small. Temporary. Held by the same universe that holds everything.

Suficiente. Sufficient.

Just this. Just now. Just one small human standing under impossible stars, learning to accept the relief that comes from recognising your own smallness in a universe so large it cannot even notice you are here.

And finding, in that recognition, something very close to peace.

Translation Note

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Day Thirteen: La Tierra Bajo Mis Pies

The Earth Beneath My Feet

The Sea Etched in the Earth

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I woke this morning thinking about roots.

Actually thinking about roots. About how they reach downward into darkness. About how they find water through the soil. About how they hold plants steady against wind while also drawing nutrients upward into the stem, leaf, and flower. Roots as anchor and conduit. Roots as holding and feeding at once.

My attention has been held by the sea. Twelve days of walking in it, watching it, letting it move through my body. Yet this morning, my awareness shifted downward rather than outward. Toward earth. Toward the land that holds this place, this village, this precise curve of coast where the Sea of Cortez meets the Baja desert.

The land has always been here. I have walked across it daily. Still, my attention treated it as surface, as passage, as the space between cottage and shoreline. Water received my devotion. Land remained background.

This morning, I attended differently.

Turning from Water to Land

Today I leave my current space and move to a small village called Nopoló, also settled along the sea’s edge. The change feels subtle yet consequential. A relocation measured in minutes yet weighted with meaning. A shift in orientation rather than distance.

The Colonial Village

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Entering the Landscape

In the afternoon, I explore Loreto Bay at Nopoló. The sea, the rock formations, the cliffs. I move slowly, allowing the landscape to lead rather than plans or expectations.

The earth here carries a different texture than the earth I know. Rocky. Sparse. The colour of sand, yet compacted and dense, shaped by centuries of sun, wind, and a climate where rain arrives rarely and leaves quickly. Growth here reflects careful strategy. Cacti store water patiently. Shrubs hold small leaves that conserve moisture. Palms appear only where underground water rises close enough for roots to reach.

This kind of understanding emerges through long attention to place. Anthropologist Keith Basso describes how knowledge forms through sustained presence, through learning how the landscape holds memory, instruction, and meaning over time (Basso, 1996). The Cochimí people lived on this land for thousands of years before the arrival of Spanish missions. They knew which plants carried water in their roots. Which animals moved through during particular seasons? Where springs surfaced after rare rains. How weather revealed itself through birds, air, and light.

I lack this knowledge. Thirteen days cannot produce it. Still, attention can begin. I can notice that the land teaches differently from the sea. Each carries wisdom shaped by its own rhythms.

Learning What the Land Knows

Place-based learning grows from exactly this kind of attention. Knowledge is formed through bodily presence, through noticing patterns, textures, and temporal rhythms associated with a specific location. Gruenewald describes this learning as emerging from a relationship rather than abstraction, from inhabiting a place rather than observing it from a distance (Gruenewald, 2003). Ingold similarly writes that understanding arises through movement, through walking landscapes and learning their contours over time (Ingold, 2021).

Here, the land teaches patience. Economy. Endurance.

The Faces in the Rock

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I climb higher. The street becomes a dirt road. The dirt road becomes a path. The path leads to a small rise where I can see the village below me, the sea beyond it, and the islands visible in morning light across the channel.

I sit on a rock, a rock embedded in the earth, part of the hillside’s bone structure. Warm already from the sun, though the morning is still early. Rough texture. Solid.

My body recognises this differently from water. Water yields. Shapes itself around you. Holds you through buoyancy, through displacement, through the physics of floating. Rock is what yields to. Rock holds its form. Rock is a limit, a boundary, a fact that stops you.

And yet that framing needs adjusting. Rock does yield. Just slowly. On timescales beyond human body perception. Wind erodes rock grain by grain. Water wears channels through stone. The mountain I am sitting on was once seafloor, thrust up by tectonic forces that continue to reshape this landscape, imperceptibly, constantly.

Geologic time: the scale at which mountains rise and fall, continents drift, oceans open and close. The scale at which everything solid reveals itself as fluid, moving at speeds that make our lifetimes appear like single breaths (McPhee, 1981).

Sitting on this rock, I am sitting on an ancient seafloor. The calcium in my bones came from the same ocean that deposited the limestone this rock is made of. I am made of the same elements as the mountain. Different arrangement. Different timescale. But the same stuff.

My body knows this. My bones recognise stone. The calcium, the minerals, and the slow patient being that both rock and bone share.

The History of Time

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Shared Heat

A lizard appears beside me. Small. Brown. Entirely still except for the pulse in its throat and the movement of eyes tracking something unseen.

We sit together for several minutes. Two beings warming ourselves on the same sunlit rock. The lizard remains. I remain. No negotiation. No interaction. Shared occupation.

This differs from encounters with village dogs, which involve social cues and mutual recognition. The lizard and I coexist. The rock holds us both.

When the lizard disappears into a narrow crack, I stay. Feeling warmth against my legs and palms. Feeling how my body prefers stone to sand or grass. Perhaps an ancestral memory. Mammals draping themselves across sun-warmed rock for temperature regulation.

Thermoregulation describes the capacity to maintain internal temperature. Humans rely on metabolism, shivering, sweating, and also behaviour. Seeking the sun. Seeking shade. Using the material world to support cellular life.

The lizard depends on this more actively. Still, I participate as well. Sitting. Warming. Settling.

The land teaches this, too. I am material. I require what stone requires. Stability. Mineral composition. Time. Stone holds what I require. Warmth. Solidity. Memory.

The Breath of the Sea

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Land as Relation

Walking back down the hill, I think about Indigenous land relationships. The Cochimí and later the Kiliwa and Paipai peoples understood themselves as continuous with the land, responsible to it and shaped by it (Shipek, 1988). Land existed as a relation rather than a possession.

This understanding largely disappeared within settler cultures. Land became property. Resource. Commodity. Something external to the body rather than continuous with it.

Basso writes that Western Apache people understand places as teachers. Places carry stories. Places remember. Time spent with place produces change. Knowledge emerges through relationship, through being shaped by landscape over time (Basso, 1996).

Thirteen days mark the beginning of this instruction. Teaching arrives through the body rather than language. Bones recognise stone. Lungs adapt to this particular air. Skin acquires a balance among sun, wind, and dryness.

What Place Teaches

This reflects place-based learning. Knowledge formed through sustained physical presence. Through walking contours. Through noticing what grows where and why. Through feeling the weather on the skin. Through reading time through light and seasonal rhythm (Gruenewald, 2003; Ingold, 2021).

The land teaches groundedness. Literal grounding. A reminder that I am terrestrial. That my legs belong to earth. That water offers refuge while land offers belonging.

Sea Bone

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Held, Temporarily

The day warms. Pelicans follow their mid-morning patterns. The sea continues its rhythms.

Something has shifted. Attention expands. Land joins water. Earth beneath the cottage. Mountains rising westward. Desert stretching along the peninsula. All alive. All teaching.

Tomorrow I will walk again. Perhaps up the arroyo that cuts through the village, dry now, shaped by rare floods. Perhaps south along the beach where buildings end, and desert meets sea without mediation.

The land has been here long before me. It will remain long after the cottage crumbles and the village becomes another layer in the geologic record. The rock that held me this morning has existed for millions of years. It will continue for millions more.

I am here briefly. The land holds me the way it holds everything. Temporarily. Lightly. Aware that all presence passes, all bodies return borrowed elements.

Gracias, tierra.
Thank you, Earth.

Por sostenerme.
For holding me.

Por enseñarme la paciencia.
For teaching me patience.

Por recordarme que soy hecha de ti.
For reminding me that I am made of you.

Y que volveré a ti.
And that I will return to you.

Shoreline

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Walking back down the hill, I think about Indigenous land relationships. How the Cochimí and later the Kiliwa and Paipai peoples understood themselves as part of land rather than separate from it, continuous with it, responsible to it and for it (Shipek, 1988).

This is what settler cultures have largely lost: the understanding that we are of the land rather than on it. That land is relation, kin, the material basis of existence that cannot be owned any more than you can own your own body (though capitalism tries to convince us we can and should).

Basso (1996) writes about how Western Apache people understand places as teachers. Actually, beyond metaphor. Places hold stories. Places remember. Places shape those who spend time with them. To know a place deeply is to be taught by it, changed by it, made into someone slightly different from who you were before you arrived.

I have been here for thirteen days. The place has begun to teach me. Through presence rather than language, and the land’s own language may always exceed my fluency, but through my body. Through my bones, recognising stone. Through my lungs, adjusting to this particular quality of air. Through my skin, learning this specific combination of sun, wind, and dryness.

Place-based learning: knowledge that emerges from sustained physical presence in a location rather than from books or lectures,on. From walking its contours. From noting what grows where and why. From feeling the weather on your skin and reading time through light, to learning the daily and seasonal rhythms that make this place what it is.

The land is teaching me something the sea cannot teach: groundedness. Literal grounding. The reminder that I am a terrestrial animal, that I walk on legs designed for earth rather than fins designed for water, that my primary relationship is with solid ground, even when I love the water.

The Tide

Back in my space now. The morning has warmed considerably. The pelicans are fishing their mid-morning pattern. The sea continues its rhythms.

But something has shifted in how I hold my attention. Less focused solely on water. More aware of the land: the earth under the cottage, the mountains rising to the west, the desert stretching north and south along the peninsula. All of it is alive. All of it is teaching.

Tomorrow I will walk again. Different direction perhaps. Up the arroyo that cuts through the village, dry now but carved by occasional floods when rare rains come. Or south along the beach to where buildings end, and desert meets sea directly, no human settlement mediating the meeting.

The land is here. Has been here. Will be here long after I leave, long after the cottage crumbles, long after the village itself becomes another layer in the geologic record. The rocks I sat on this morning have been sitting there for millions of years. They will sit there for millions more.

I am here for thirty days. The land holds me the way it holds everything: temporarily, lightly, knowing that all occupation is provisional, all presence fleeting, all bodies eventually returning to the elements they borrowed.

Gracias, tierra. Thank you, Earth.

Por sostenerme. For holding me.

Por enseñarme la paciencia. For teaching me patience.

Por recordarme que soy hecha de ti. To remind me, I am made of you.

Y que volveré a ti. And that I will return to you.

Translation Note

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032004003

Ingold, T. (2021). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge.

McPhee, J. (1981). Basin and range. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Shipek, F. C. (1988). Pushed into the rocks: Southern California indian land tenure, 1769-1986. University of Nebraska Press.

Academic Lens

Ground beneath the feet — earth, sand, rock — is one of the oldest somatic metaphors for stability. In Levine's (2010) somatic experiencing framework, grounding is a literal therapeutic practice: contact with the earth as a nervous system intervention, activating the sense of being held. The land of Baja California — Cochimí territory — is not neutral ground; this entry is implicitly engaged with what Wilson (2008) calls relational accountability in Indigenous research methodologies: the land has its own knowledge, its own history, and its own rights as a witness.

La Continuación / The Continuation

I woke before the light this morning. I woke free of anxiety. My thoughts moved gently rather than racing toward demands. I was simply awake in the way an animal wakes: aware, present, responsive to some internal signal that sleep was complete and consciousness could return. I slept solidly last night.

Crack of Dawn

Photo Credit: January 13, 2026

The darkness held a particular quality at this hour. It was dense and gentle. The Sea of Cortez whispered rather than spoke, its sound intimate and close, as though sharing secrets only pre-dawn can hear. I lay there listening, tracking the gradual shift from deep black to grey to that moment just before sunrise, when the world begins to remember colour.

Fifth morning of unbroken sleep. Cinco mañanas.

I notice how differently I hold this information now than on Day Nine, when the pattern first established itself. Then it felt miraculous, fragile, something that might shatter if examined too closely. Now it feels ordinary. It is natural-ordinary, the way breathing is ordinary: essential, life-sustaining, but no longer requiring constant amazement.

My system no longer scans for threats upon waking. It simply wakes, assesses the environment as safe through accumulated data points (consistent sounds, familiar light patterns, the absence of disruption), and allows consciousness to emerge without the defensive mobilization that characterised my mornings for months before arriving here. This is co-regulation with place. The sea, the light, and the flight patterns of pelicans are my companions in restoration. My nervous system orients to their constancy.

This is re-inhabitation. A return to the deeper rhythms that survived beneath who I had to become. Learning has shifted from conscious recognition to embodied knowledge. From something I observe to something I am.

The light is beginning now.

A View From My Deck

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I can see it even with my eyes closed: the gradual brightening that comes before sunrise, the world remembering itself. I get up, pull on clothes, and walk to the balcony. The pelicans are already fishing, their morning routine as established as my own has become.

I watch one pelican dive. The complete commitment of it: wings folding, body dropping, the compact missile of intention entering water with barely a splash. Surfaces. Waits. The fish is visible in the throat pouch, and the backward tilt of the head sends it down. Then stillness. Complete stillness. The body rests on water while the system processes what it has caught. No hurry. The pelican rests with what it has before seeking the next fish. Digests. Allows the body to complete one cycle before beginning another.

Esto también es una enseñanza. This too is a teaching.

The pelican dives because its body signals hunger, beyond any schedule that dictates it should fish at this hour. This is intrinsic motivation in its purest form: action arising from internal states rather than external pressures or rewards.

For twenty-five years, I lived according to externally imposed rhythms. What I was experiencing, I now understand, was chronic autonomy frustration, one of the three basic psychological needs Self-Determination Theory identifies as essential for well-being.

This kind of exhaustion is disproportionately borne by women. Especially those navigating midlife in systems that reward endless availability and punish embodied limits. What I am naming here extends beyond personal recovery. It is a reclamation of rhythm in a world that teaches women to ignore their own.
What Gabor Maté (2022) calls “the myth of normal” is unravelling. I no longer pathologise exhaustion or anxiety as personal flaws. I see them as natural responses to abnormal conditions, conditions I am now beginning to unlearn.

What is Normal?

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Twelve days ago, I arrived here holding the question of whether I could stay. I am here. The days unfold. The routine continues. And somewhere in the last twelve days, I stopped asking for permission and simply started living.

This is what Haraway (1988) means by situated knowledge: beyond abstract theorising about what knowledge might be, grounded in the concrete recognition that I am in this body, in this place, at this moment, noticing what I notice. That observation matters.

Coming here, choosing this documentation, claiming this experience as scholarship: these are acts of resistance against that denial. I am saying my knowing matters. My observation counts. My embodied experience constitutes valid data.

The sunrise is happening now. The pattern provides structure. The variation provides life.

How do I document my own experience with enough rigour to make it a scholarship while remaining present enough to actually experience what I am documenting?

The theoretical scaffolding continues to build. But this morning, before the reading begins, I simply sit with what is here. Water. Birds. Light. Breath. The embodied reality that theory helps me understand but cannot replace.

And you, reading this: what has your morning taught you? What rhythms in your life have asked to be trusted, held without cross-examination?

Coffee now. The smell of it. The warmth of the cup. The first sip that signals morning has arrived, you are awake, and the day is beginning.

I think about routine again. It has stopped feeling like a constraint and has become a container. The predictability allows spontaneity because the calculating has quieted.

My body is learning to read time by sunrise, by the pelicans’ fishing patterns, by the quality of light at different hours. These serve as zeitgebers, helping my disrupted circadian system recalibrate to a more natural rhythm.

Now I know the difference. Freedom is a structure you choose that holds you safely and that you can trust to continue even when you stop monitoring it.

Soon I will swim. What I am learning through swimming is what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls flow, though the flow I experience is quieter than what he typically describes.

Perhaps this is what alonetude looks like in motion. Beyond performance or accomplishment. Just being fully present with yourself in an activity that asks nothing beyond presence itself.

Rock Art

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2o26

La luz me sostiene. The light holds me.

El mar me enseña. The sea teaches me.

Y mi cuerpo recuerda. And my body remembers.

Translation Note

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.

Siesta

Afternoon

The heat has arrived.

By one o’clock, the temperature has climbed into the mid-thirties, and the village has responded the way it responds every afternoon: by stopping. Shops close. Streets empty. Even the dogs find shade and cease their wandering.

Fishing Boat

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I am learning this rhythm. Joining the collective surrender to the heat rather than fighting it. After lunch, I close the curtains against the sun, lie on the bed under the ceiling fan, and simply rest.

Rest, rather than sleep. The body horizontal, the mind quiet, time passing without purpose or productivity.

This is siesta. The practical wisdom of a place beyond romanticised tourism, a place that knows heat must be respected. You stop. You release the push-through. You rest. You wait for the world to become livable again.

For twelve days now, I have been learning to stop without guilt. To rest without justifying it. To simply be horizontal in the afternoon heat and let that be enough.

Today, it finally feels natural. Simply the appropriate response to what the day is asking.

El calor manda. The heat commands.

Y yo obedezco. And I obey.

Day’s of My Life

By three o’clock, the worst has passed. The temperature remains high, but the quality changes. Bearable. Moveable. I get up, drink water, and sit on the shaded patio watching the water.

A pelican flies past. Low and slow. Unhurried.

The village is beginning to wake again. A shop door opens. A car starts. Life resuming its rhythm, altered by the heat and still intact.

I think about the years I spent overriding my body’s signals. Tired but pushing through. Hot but staying at the desk. Needing rest but never quite allowing it because rest felt like failure, like giving up, like evidence that I lacked the strength others seemed to carry so easily.

Afternoon Skies

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The wisdom here is different. Rest is a response. It is the appropriate accommodation to conditions that require it.

Twelve days of practicing this, and something is shifting. The guilt that used to accompany rest is dissolving. Slowly. But dissolving.

Poco a poco. Little by little.

The body learning what the village already knows: some hours are for work. Some hours are for rest. And knowing which is which is its own kind of wisdom.

Mission Church

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Memory: The Moment That Changed Everything

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

May 2, 2025. Friday morning. My kitchen table at home.

The notification sound chimed while I was grading papers, the familiar tone I had conditioned myself to respond to instantly after seventeen years of contract teaching. I reached for my phone expecting routine correspondence, perhaps a student question or a committee meeting notice. Instead, the subject line read: “Employment Status Update.”

My contract position for the fall of 2025 and 2026 was uncertain.

The email was brief, professional, and efficient. It explained enrolment shifts, budget realities, and difficult decisions. It thanked me for my service. It wished me well in future endeavours. It arrived without conversation, without the relational check-in that twenty-five years at Thompson Rivers University might have warranted. It arrived as data, a notification, a conclusion reached somewhere in a spreadsheet I would never see.

I sat at my kitchen table, the same surface scarred by coffee rings from decades of grading student papers, and stared at the screen. Seventeen years as contract faculty. Twenty-five years total at the institution. Course materials I had developed, teaching awards I had won, students I had mentored, committees I had served. Excellence that had earned institutional recognition but never security, never permanence, never the guarantee that May would arrive without this particular notification.

The plaques were arranged on my shelf, forming a timeline of institutional validation: the TRU Student Empowerment Award (2021), the TRU Interculturalisation Award (2023), and the Faculty Council Service Award (2024). Each one represented students who had written nomination letters, colleagues who had advocated, and committees who had deliberated. Each one testified to work that the institution deemed exemplary. Yet on May 2, 2025, none of that mattered against the budget’s arithmetic.

Thirty days later, another notification arrived. This time, the subject line read: “Congratulations.” I had won the Faculty Council Teaching Award for 2025. The irony possessed a weight that was almost architectural. The institution that had deemed me expendable simultaneously declared I was exemplary. The same system that processed my termination processed my commendation. Two documents, two logics, two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that never spoke to each other.

I understood something sitting at that kitchen table, something I had been circling around for years without language to name it: I had forgotten how to simply be. I could perform brilliantly. I could show up on time, deliver lectures, grade papers, serve on committees, support colleagues, and mentor students. I could produce evidence of my value constantly, compulsively, because survival demanded it. But when the institution finally severed that demand, when performance could no longer protect me, I discovered I had no idea who I was underneath all that doing.

The months between May and December 2025 felt like slow-motion drowning. I woke at 3 AM with panic attacks, my heart racing, convinced I had forgotten something critical, only to remember I had nothing to forget because I had no employment requiring vigilance.

I checked my email compulsively, even though I had no employer to email. I filled every hour with tasks, projects, obligations, anything to avoid the emptiness that waited when I stopped moving. The relief I expected from no longer needing to perform never arrived. Instead, what came was a vast, disorienting blankness, an inability to rest even when rest was finally possible.

Thompson Rivers University – Faculty Teaching Award 2026

Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, 2025

Twelve Days: Doce días.

La continuación.
The continuation.

No es dramática.
It is quiet, undramatic.

Es como el amanecer:
It is like sunrise:

sucede porque es lo que sucede,
it happens because it is what happens,

sin necesidad de hacer que suceda.
without needing to make it happen.

Yo también estoy aprendiendo esto.
I am learning this too.

Continuar sin esfuerzo.
To continue without effort.

Confiar en el patrón.
To trust the pattern.

Estar aquí.
To be here.

Nada exige urgencia.
Nothing requires urgency.

Todo sigue su secuencia.
Everything follows its sequence.

Yo también.
So do I.

Overlooking the Sea of Cortez

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Los Perros del Pueblo

The Village Dogs

“You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
, Mary Oliver, 1986

The dog stands at the table as though she has been invited. Beyond begging. Beyond servility. Simply present, front paws on the table’s edge, looking out at the Sea of Cortez with the same quality of attention a person might bring to a sunset. Behind her, the early morning light turns everything gold: the water, the sand, the palm fronds moving in whatever breeze comes off the ocean this time of day. A plate of food sits on the white tablecloth. A drink sweats condensation in the heat. The dog notices these things the way you notice things that are simply part of the landscape, neither wanting them nor turning away from them. Just acknowledging: yes, these are here too.

Dog Enjoying the Sunrise

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I took this photograph this morning at a beachside restaurant where I enjoyed a cup of coffee. The dog appeared from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. She checked the table the way dogs check things: a quick assessment to see whether this moment held anything that required her attention. Then she placed her paws on the table’s edge and turned her gaze outward, toward the water. The owner is getting coffee.

What struck me then and strikes me still looking at the image now is her posture. There is no asking in it. No supplication. No performance of need is designed to elicit care. She works toward nothing. She is simply a dog standing at a table at the edge of the sea, and if that position happens to be where food and drink exist, well, that is where food and drink exist. It leaves unchanged the essential fact of her presence, which requires no justification beyond itself.

I sat there for perhaps twenty minutes watching her. Other tourists approached, took photos, and moved on. A waiter brought fresh coffee to the table. No reluctance. No hurry. This part is complete; the next follows, and both are equally fine.

The village dogs of Loreto have been teaching me something I had yet to discover I needed to learn.

I wrote about them briefly in the early days here: the brown dog with gentle eyes who appeared that first evening, who sniffed my hand and then simply stood beside me in the fading light, two beings with nowhere particular to be. I called her a companion then, though companion suggests a relationship more defined than what we actually share. She appears. She stays, or she leaves. She requires nothing. I offer nothing beyond my presence. And somehow this non-relationship has become one of the steadiest features of my days here.

She is far from the only one. There are perhaps a dozen dogs I see regularly in the village. Brindle and brown and black and that particular dusty tan that seems designed by evolution to blend with sand. Well-fed, free of ownership. Collared occasionally (someone’s gesture of care) but clearly belonging to no one, or perhaps more accurately, belonging to everyone and therefore to themselves.

They move through the village with an ease I recognise as what I am attempting to learn. No schedule. No destination that must be reached. No performance of purpose to justify their occupation of space. They simply are where they are; when they are somewhere else, they are there instead, and the transition requires no explanation, no apology, no account of why the first place stopped being right and the second place became necessary.

My Lady Friend

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I have been watching them for twelve days now with increasing attention. The way they navigate public space without claiming it. The way they accept care without becoming obligated. The way they rest in the middle of sidewalks, streets, or restaurant patios without any apparent concern that they might be inconveniencing someone. And the remarkable thing (the thing I am still trying to fully understand) is that the village allows this. More than allows it. Holds it. Make space for it. Treats it as simply as it is.

In the city where I lived for twenty-five years, this would be impossible. Dogs in restaurants must be leashed, under control, and clearly attached to responsible humans. Dogs on public beaches require permits. Dogs that exist without visible owners raise concern: Who is responsible for this animal? Who will manage it? Who vouches for its right to occupy space?

The questions come automatically, reflexively, born from a culture that cannot imagine existence without ownership, without someone being accountable, without the clear assignment of responsibility and control.

But here, the dogs simply exist, and the village simply lets them be. Feeds them when they are hungry. Gives them water when they are thirsty. Tolerates their presence at tables, in shops, and on beaches. And the dogs, for their part, seem to understand the unspoken agreement: we are here together, you and we, and the terms of our togetherness require neither ownership nor abandonment, neither claim nor rejection, just this ongoing negotiation of shared space that somehow works without anyone having to articulate the rules.

I realised, walking back to the cottage in the heat, that I had seen six different dogs in the space of an hour, and each one had seemed perfectly at ease wherever it was. No anxiety. No performance. Just dogs being dogs in the various locations where dogs be.

This is remarkable when you think about it. These are beyond the category of pets that have learned to read human moods and respond to human needs. These are beyond the working dogs with assigned tasks. These are dogs who have somehow negotiated a way of existing alongside humans without becoming dependent on them, without losing whatever essential dog-ness makes them what they are.

They are, I realise, practicing aloneness. Beyond the human version (the one that requires choosing, intending, and reflecting on whether you are doing it right), but alonetude nonetheless. Being with others without losing themselves. Accepting care without becoming obligated. Moving between community and solitude as each moment requires, without any of it needing to be a statement, a position, or a defended choice.

I have been thinking about what these dogs are teaching me about being in community without being consumed by it.

“Settling in asks surrender of nothing. It is choosing to stay with yourself.” Amy Tucker, 2026

For twenty-five years, I worked in an institution that demanded constant availability, constant responsiveness, and constant proof that I was committed, present, and performing my role adequately. Contract faculty hold far less authority to set boundaries than tenured faculty. You are available when needed. You adjust your schedule around theirs. You say yes even when yes costs you more than you can afford because saying no might mean being asked again.

This creates a particular relationship to community and to solitude. Community becomes something you perform. Solitude becomes something you seize in stolen moments, knowing you will be interrupted, knowing you need to stay alert for the email, the call, or the meeting that suddenly arises, requiring an immediate response.

The village dogs know nothing of this exhaustion. They exist in what I can only describe as a gift economy so old and so embedded that it has become invisible. The village feeds them because that is what the village does. The dogs provide companionship because that is what dogs provide. No contract. No performance evaluation. No calculation of whether the exchange balances.

Just: this is how we are together. These are the terms of our coexistence. It holds, or it falls away; if it stops holding, adjustments are made, but none of it requires the elaborate structure of obligation, debt, and credit that governed my professional relationships for all those years.

Watching them, I realise what I am trying to recover. Beyond isolation (I have never wanted that, and this month of intentional solitude has been about drawing near, never about fleeing human contact). What I want is what the dogs have: the capacity to be with others without losing myself. To accept care without becoming obligated. To offer presence without performing. To know when I need to be alone and when I want company, and to trust that both needs are legitimate and neither requires extensive justification.

The dogs are alone together. Present in the community, beyond being consumed by it. They rest in public space without apology. They approach when something interests them and walk away when it loses their interest. And somehow the village holds this, makes room for it, allows dogs to be dogs even amid human activity.

This is the model I am learning to inhabit. Beyond the isolation of withdrawal: the freedom of undefended presence. Being here without bracing. Receiving care without owing. Offering attention without depleting myself.

The brown dog is here again. She has been here for perhaps forty minutes. I have been writing. Neither of us has required anything of the other. We are simply here together, she in her rest and I in my work, and the togetherness asks nothing beyond the acknowledgment that we both occupy this space.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The dog knows without any of this apparatus. She knows when to trust and when to be wary. She knows when to approach and when to hold distance. She knows when someone will feed her and when someone will pass by. She knows where shade is in the heat of the day and where the evening breeze comes first. She knows all of this immediately, without thought, without reflection, without the constant meta-commentary that humans call consciousness.

This is no less knowing. It is different knowing. And it might be the knowing I most need to recover: the capacity to respond to what is without the endless mediation of thought about response. To be hungry and eat. To be tired and rest. To want solitude and take it. To want company and seek it. Without justification. Without explanation. Without the entire apparatus of defence and rationalization that precarious employment built into me so deeply, I forgot it was anything other than natural.

Just: this is what the body knows. This is what the moment calls for. This is what I do.

The Freedom to Simply Be

“I am allowed to land. I am allowed to stay. I am allowed to soften.”

Amy Tucker, 2026

The dog has left now. I missed her leaving. I was focused on writing, and when I looked up, she was simply gone, off to wherever dogs go when they go. The light continues its shift toward darkness. Soon I will make dinner, following the rhythm that has become automatic. The evening will unfold as it has unfolded for eleven evenings before this one.

But something feels different tonight. Less effortful. Less monitored. As though I am finally beginning to inhabit the routine rather than performing it. Beginning to trust that my body knows what it needs and when, and that I can simply trust without constantly checking and verifying that I am resting correctly.

The dogs are teaching me this. How to be present without performance. How to accept care without obligation. How to exist in a community without losing the capacity for solitude. How to move between togetherness and apartness as the moment requires, without any of it being a statement or a defence or a position requiring elaborate justification.

Los perros del pueblo. The village dogs. Teachers with no awareness teach. Companions who require no relationship. Beings who practice alonetude so naturally they have no word for it because it is simply how they are.

I am learning from them. Slowly. With all the awkwardness of someone who forgot and is now remembering. But learning nonetheless. And tonight, this twelfth evening of intentional solitude, I feel closer to what they know. Closer to trusting my own knowing, the way they trust theirs. Closer to being what I am without the constant overlay of thought about whether I am being it correctly.

And I think again of Mary Oliver, the poet who reminded us to let the soft animal of the body love what it loves. Who asked, without urgency but with piercing clarity: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

For the first time in a long while, I feel like I have an answer, though beyond words, and beyond any plan. It is in the small things: in the way I sit without bracing, in the way I walk without explanation, in the way I trust the day to shape itself without my need to define it in advance.

I, too, find my front paws on the table’s edge, beyond asking, beyond waiting, just watching the water shift its shape, and feeling the sun arrive exactly as it is.

Beyond performance. Beyond striving.

Just this: the body knows. The moment knows. The dog knows.
And that knowing, I am learning, is enough.

Thank you, my lady friend.

References

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Oliver, M. (1986). Wild geese. In Dream work (pp. 14–15). Atlantic Monthly Press.

Serpell, J. (1995). The domestic dog: Its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people. Cambridge University Press.

El Ritmo de los Días

The Rhythm of Days

Observing the Pelicans

The pelicans know when to stop.

I have been watching them for twenty minutes now, their final flights to roosting sites marked by something I can only describe as completeness. Simply no hurry. No reluctance. Just the simple recognition that the fishing day is done, that rest is what comes next, that tomorrow will bring another cycle.

They raise no question about whether they have fished enough. They carry no worry about tomorrow’s needs. They simply finish when finishing is what the body, the light, and the day require.

The Three Palms

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Discovering the Pattern

I am learning this. Estoy aprendiendo esto.

Eleven days of the same evening sequence, dinner as light begins to change, gentle movement, watching sky transform, settling into darkness, and something in me is finally believing it. The rhythm is something beyond my imposing. It is something I am joining. Something that was here before I arrived and will continue after I leave.

The pelicans taught me this first. Nowadays, the days themselves are teaching it.

My View

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Tonight, sitting on this balcony as stars appear one by one above the Sea of Cortez, the questions feel less urgent than they did this morning. Less like problems requiring a solution and more like… context. Background. The theoretical scaffolding that helps me understand the larger significance of what I am doing here, yet the thing itself remains just beyond language.

The thing itself is simpler.

Unlearning Vigilance

I came here exhausted. Sleep fragmented, thoughts scattered, body braced against threats that had become so constant I no longer noticed the bracing. Twenty-five years of precarious employment had taught my nervous system a particular kind of vigilance, necessary for survival, corrosive to everything else.

My body was more than tired. It was dysregulated.

I was beyond overworked. I had become wired for survival. Survival allows no room for rest. It requires vigilance, constant adaptation, and the refusal to soften.

Now, after days of consistency, the rhythm is beginning to offer a different experience. A quiet structure. A sense of what comes next. The return of a nervous system that no longer waits for disruption, but begins to anticipate calm.

It is subtle. Gentle. Emerging like light at the edge of morning.

What once felt like repetition now feels like relief. The pattern releases me from constraint. It holds me. It offers what the nervous system has long needed but could never request: predictability, softness, and something that resembles safety.

Eleven days of consistent rhythm, and the bracing is releasing. All at once? No. Dramatically? No. Just gradually, like ice melting so slowly you barely notice the transition from solid to liquid, you only notice one day that what was frozen is now flowing.

Reclaiming Routine

I have been thinking about routine.

For twenty-five years, routine was what I resisted. Every semester brought different courses, different students, different schedules cobbled together from whatever the institution needed and was willing to pay for. I prided myself on adaptability. On being able to shift quickly. On moving without consistency.

But that pride was really a cover story for precarity. You cannot depend on routine when your employment is contingent. You learn instead to be endlessly flexible, endlessly available, ready to reconfigure your life around whatever work appears.

These eleven days have shown me what I lost in that flexibility.

The routine here is simple. Wake with the light. Swim in the morning. Read. Walk in the afternoon when the heat has softened. Watch pelicans. Make dinner as the sky transforms. Sit on the patio as stars appear. Sleep.

Collected Beach Treasures

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The same pattern, day after day.

It is a healing ritual, organic rather than imposed, beyond the performative, emergent. A sequence the body now recognises as kind. As sacred. As home.

And instead of feeling monotonous or constraining, it feels… liberating. My nervous system knows what comes next. My body can anticipate the rhythm. I can release the need to constantly recalibrate, constantly adjust, and constantly brace for the unexpected.

The routine holds me. And in being held, I can finally let go.

This is what I would call settledness. Or maybe: re-inhabiting the self. It is beyond transcendence. It is about being able to stay with myself, without bracing, without apology.

This is what I came here to discover, though I arrived without knowing it. Beyond dramatic transformation. Beyond sudden enlightenment. Just the quiet recognition that routine is the ally, never the enemy, of freedom. Precarity is. Routine, the kind you choose, the kind that serves your actual needs rather than someone else’s demands, is the structure that makes freedom possible.

Afternoon Seista

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Evening Reflection: What the Day Held

Pelicans are completing their fishing day. Sky is transforming through its sequence. My own completion of the day’s work, reading done, walking done, body cared for, mind given what it needs.

The pattern repeats. And I am learning to trust the pattern.

Tomorrow I will read more deeply, Haraway on situated knowledges, more Ahmed on orientation and the work of reorientation. The theoretical scaffolding continues to grow, helping me grasp the broader significance of what I am documenting here.

But tonight the theory feels secondary to something simpler. To the recognition that my body has stopped bracing. That sleep comes without struggle. That I can sit on a balcony in the evening watching pelicans and feel… at peace. Simply at peace. Without needing to analyse it, justify it, or turn it into something useful.

Good Night Loreto

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

This is alonetude. Beyond concept. Beyond framework. Just this: being with yourself in a rhythm that your nervous system trusts, in a place that feels safe enough to finally stop performing, surrounded by the ordinary beauty of birds and water and light that asks nothing of you except that you notice.

I notice.

Lo noto.

And tonight, that is enough.

Tonight I will follow the familiar sequence.

Dinner already eaten, simple fish grilled with lime, rice, and vegetables that I no longer think about preparing, my hands knowing now what the routine requires. Cottage already tidied, the small acts of care that signal evening’s approach. Soon I will dim the lights, sit on the patio and watch the stars emerge, then shower and prepare for sleep.

Will I sleep through? Fifth night in a row? Or will tonight bring waking, the pattern interrupted, the nervous system deciding it needs to check, to assess, to maintain some vestige of vigilance?

The answer remains open. But tonight I notice something different in my open-wondering. No anxiety about whether I will sleep. Just… curiosity. The way you might wonder whether it will rain tomorrow. Information that will reveal itself when it reveals itself. Nothing to control. Nothing to fix in advance.

This, too, is letting go. Learning to hold the question without needing to force the answer.

The pelicans carry no worry about tomorrow’s fishing. They simply rest tonight, trusting that tomorrow will bring what it brings, that they will respond to what it requires, that the rhythm will continue, with or without their worry.

I am learning from them. Slowly. With the particular awkwardness that comes from unlearning decades of vigilance. But learning.

The day ends. Another day will begin. The rhythm continues.

And I am here, finally, learning how to join it rather than fight it.

Credit: NotebookLM 2026

El ritmo de los días.
The rhythm of days.

Simple. Constante. Sanador.
Simple. Constant. Healing.

No necesito entenderlo completamente.
Understanding it completely can wait.

Solo necesito confiar en él.
I only need to trust it.

Y esta noche, confío.
And tonight, I trust.

El patrón sostiene.
The pattern holds.

El cuerpo descansa.
The body rests.

Y eso es suficiente.
And that is enough.

When we are at last able to rest, we learn that effort was never the only way to belong.

Amy Tucker, 2026

References

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Google. (2026). El Ritmo de los Días [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Translation Note

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.