30 Days by the Sea – Page 7 – A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore

The Pause Between Rains

A Scholarly Personal Narrative of Attention, Interoception, and Embodied Knowing

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Today, it rained in Loreto, and then the rain paused. In that pause, I carried my research materials to the poolside cabana, settling beneath the palapa’s thatched roof to continue the work that has become both intellectual inquiry and embodied practice. The sky remained heavy with moisture, grey clouds pressing low over the date palms and bougainvillea that frame this small sanctuary. The air smelled of wet earth and salt from the nearby Sea of Cortez. Water droplets clung to palm fronds, occasionally dislodging to fall with a soft percussion onto the terracotta tiles surrounding the pool.

This moment, seemingly ordinary in its domestic simplicity, exemplifies the core dynamics of

alonetude, the intentional solitude practice I have been documenting throughout this retreat. The pause in the rain created conditions for what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) developed as

attention restoration, wherein environments characterised by soft fascination, such as natural settings between weather events, allow directed attention to recover from the depletion caused by sustained cognitive effort. Kaplan’s (1995) subsequent theoretical framework formalised these insights into Attention Restoration Theory. Yet what unfolded at the poolside extended beyond simple restoration. It involved the integration of contemplative presence with scholarly work, demonstrating how

embodied knowing, knowledge accessed through somatic awareness and sensory engagement with place, informs and enriches academic inquiry.

Theoretical Positioning

This narrative draws upon several intersecting theoretical frameworks that have shaped both my retreat experience and the scholarly methodology through which I examine it.

Attention Restoration Theory

Attention Restoration Theory (ART), developed by environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989; Kaplan, 1995), proposes that natural environments promote psychological restoration through four key characteristics. Table 1 summarises these foundational components.

Table 1

Four Components of Attention Restoration Theory

Component	Definition
Being Away	The sense of psychological distance from routine demands and mental fatigue. Physical distance helps, but conceptual distance (a shift in mental content) is essential.
The match between environmental affordances and personal purposes. The setting supports what the person is trying to accomplish and is inclined to do.	The coherence and scope of the environment. The setting must be rich enough to constitute a whole other world that engages the mind and offers exploration opportunities.
Fascination	Engaging attention effortlessly through inherently interesting stimuli. ‘Soft fascination’ (clouds, water, rustling leaves) is restorative, unlike ‘hard fascination’ (television, video games).
Compatibility	The match between environmental affordances and personal purposes. The setting supports what the person is trying to accomplish and inclined to do.

Note. Adapted from ‘The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective’ by R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan, 1989, Cambridge University Press, and ‘The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework’ by S. Kaplan, 1995, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), pp. 169–182.

The poolside setting during the rain pause embodied these qualities. I experienced being away through physical distance from daily obligations and the conceptual shift from routine to contemplation. The environment provided extent through the visual scope created by the intersection of built and natural elements: the cabana’s shelter, the pool’s reflective surface, the layered palm grove, and the distant sea. Soft fascination emerged from water droplets falling rhythmically, cloud movements across the grey sky, and the gentle sway of palm fronds. Compatibility arose from the alignment between the environment’s quietness and my need for a reflective workspace where scholarly writing could unfold organically.

Interoception and Embodied Awareness

Interoception, defined as the perception of internal bodily sensations, represents another essential framework for understanding this experience (Craig, 2002; Farb et al., 2015). Interoceptive awareness encompasses multiple dimensions, as outlined in Table 2, which summarises the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) framework developed by Mehling et al. (2012).

Table 2

Six Dimensions of Interoceptive Awareness

Dimension	Description
Noticing	Awareness of bodily sensations such as heartbeat, breathing, temperature changes, and muscle tension.
Attention Regulation	The ability to sustain and control attention to bodily sensations during focused awareness.
Emotional Awareness	Recognition of connections between physical sensations and emotional states; the embodied dimension of affect.
Self-Regulation	Using bodily signals to modulate distress and regulate emotional responses adaptively.
Body Listening	Actively attending to the body’s messages about needs, limits, and preferences with curiosity rather than judgment.
Trusting	Experiencing bodily signals as reliable and safe sources of information about one’s internal state.

Note. Adapted from ‘The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA)’ by W. E. Mehling et al., 2012, PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230

During the pause in the rain, my practice involved precisely this kind of interoceptive attention. I noticed the cooling sensation of post-rain air against my skin, the subtle shift in breathing as humidity changed, the grounding quality of sitting in stillness while water sounds created ambient texture, and the alignment between my body’s need for contemplative pace and the environment’s invitation to settle. This embodied awareness did more than simply register physical sensations; it provided epistemological access to knowledge that emerges through lived, sensory engagement with place.

Embodied Knowing and Feminist Epistemology

Embodied knowing, as articulated by feminist epistemologists and phenomenological scholars, challenges the Cartesian separation of mind and body by asserting that knowledge emerges through lived, sensory engagement with the world (Alcoff & Potter, 2013; Grosz, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). This framework recognises that understanding develops through the body’s interactions with material environments, through sensory perception, through movement and stillness, and through the integration of affective and cognitive processes.

Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of Situated knowledge emphasises that all knowledge is partial and positioned, emerging from particular embodied, historical, and geographical locations.

Sandra Harding’s (1991) standpoint epistemology further argues that those whose knowledge has been marginalised often possess epistemic advantages precisely because they must navigate both dominant and marginalised perspectives. Working beneath the cabana during the rain pause exemplified this embodied epistemology. The knowledge I generated about solitude, attention, and restorative practice emerged from integrating sensory awareness, environmental responsiveness, and intellectual inquiry.

The Lived Moment

I arrived at the pool carrying my laptop, notebook, and the now-familiar blue bag that has become a symbol of my mobile research practice. The thatched palapa roof overhead, traditional in this region of Baja California Sur, provided shelter while maintaining environmental porosity.

Unlike the enclosed rooms where I sometimes work, the cabana offered what I think of as a threshold space, simultaneously within and without, protected yet permeable. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) work on place and experience illuminates how such spaces shape emotional geography, how our affective responses emerge through the interplay of enclosure and exposure, intimacy and vastness. This liminality, this state of being between enclosed shelter and open exposure, created optimal conditions for the kind of contemplative work that has characterised this retreat.

The pool water, still and translucent in its turquoise containment, reflected the grey sky with perfect clarity. This mirroring created what I think of as visual resonance, wherein landscape features repeat and reinforce each other, generating aesthetic coherence. The concept draws on Anne Whiston Spirn’s (1998) work on landscape as language, particularly her insight that designed and natural environments communicate through legible patterns. The pool’s surface doubled the sky’s presence, making weather visible in two planes simultaneously. Behind the pool, date palms rose in irregular clusters, their shaggy trunks and feathered fronds creating layered textures against the weighted atmosphere. Some palms stood straight and tall, while others leaned at gentle angles, their shapes recording years of wind patterns and growth responses. Pink bougainvillea, vivid even under grey skies, cascaded over the stone wall that marked the property’s boundary, its colour intensified by the moisture-saturated light.

Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich (1983) demonstrated that visual exposure to nature, particularly environments featuring water and vegetation, produces affective responses that support psychological recovery. His research established that natural settings reduce stress and promote restorative experiences. Sitting beneath the palapa, I experienced this settling as a lived sensation, beyond abstract theory. My shoulders, which had held tension from concentrated morning writing, gradually released. My breathing, which had been shallow during focused work, deepened and steadied. The environmental cues surrounding me, soft sounds, muted colours, and the rhythm of occasional water drops communicated safety and spaciousness.

Integration of Work and Presence

Opening my laptop to continue writing about intentional solitude while inhabiting that very state created a recursive quality to the experience. I was simultaneously living alonetude and documenting it, simultaneously experiencing the present moment and reflecting upon the patterns I have observed across weeks of practice.

This integration exemplifies the methodological strength of Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), the approach that frames this entire project, as identified by Nash (2004). SPN honours lived experience as legitimate scholarly data while maintaining intellectual rigour through theoretical grounding and critical reflexivity.

Unlike traditional research methodologies that position the researcher as a detached observer, SPN recognises the researcher as an embodied participant whose personal experience, when properly contextualised within broader theoretical frameworks and social structures, generates valuable knowledge (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Richardson, 2003).

My work beneath the cabana involved this dual consciousness. I remained attentive to immediate sensory experience, observing the quality of light, the ambient sounds, and the feeling of air against the skin, while simultaneously engaging these observations through conceptual lenses provided by attention theory, neuroscience, and phenomenology.

The work itself flowed differently here than it does in enclosed spaces. Ideas emerged with less forcing, sentences formed more organically, and connections between concepts became visible through a process that felt closer to recognition than construction. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (1979) describes creative thinking as pattern recognition across disparate domains, the capacity to perceive structural similarities between seemingly unrelated phenomena. The poolside environment, with its combination of focused containment (the cabana’s defined space) and ambient stimulation (changing light, the sound of water, the movement of palm fronds), created conditions conducive to associative thinking.

The Neuroscience of Pause

Neuroscientific research illuminates what occurs during moments such as this pause between rains. The default mode network (DMN), a collection of brain regions that activate when attention shifts away from external tasks toward internal mental activity, becomes engaged during restful states characterised by environmental softness (Raichle et al., 2001; Buckner et al., 2008). The DMN supports autobiographical memory consolidation, future planning, perspective taking, and the integration of experiences into coherent narratives. Research by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and colleagues (2009) demonstrates that DMN activation correlates with ethical reasoning, identity formation, and meaning-making processes, suggesting that these seemingly passive moments of mental wandering serve essential psychological functions.

Simultaneously, the salience network, which includes the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, maintains awareness of both internal bodily states and relevant environmental stimuli (Seeley et al., 2007; Menon & Uddin, 2010). This network acts as a switching mechanism, determining which information merits conscious attention and facilitating shifts between externally directed focus and internally oriented awareness. During the rain pause, my experience involved precisely this dynamic balancing. I intermittently attended to my writing, the poolside environment, internal physical sensations, and the flow of ideas, with attention moving fluidly across these domains without the fragmentation that characterises forced multitasking.

Polyvagal Theory and Felt Safety

Polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011), offers another lens for understanding the embodied quality of this experience. Table 3 outlines the three hierarchical autonomic states identified by Porges.

Three Autonomic States in Polyvagal Theory

Autonomic State	Characteristics and Functions
Ventral Vagal (Social Engagement)	Associated with feelings of safety, calm, and social connection. Supports rest, digestion, face-to-face communication, and prosocial behaviour. The nervous system state that enables learning, creativity, and contemplative practice.
Sympathetic (Mobilisation)	Involves activation and arousal, preparing the body for action. Supports adaptive responses to challenge through fight-or-flight mechanisms. Becomes problematic when chronically activated without opportunities for recovery.
Dorsal Vagal (Immobilisation)	Associated with shutdown, conservation, and disconnection. In extreme cases, produces freeze responses, dissociation, or collapse. Can also support healthy rest and sleep when accessed from a place of safety.

Note. Adapted from ‘The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation’ by S. W. Porges, 2011, W. W. Norton & Company.

The poolside environment communicated safety through multiple channels. The shelter of the cabana, the visible boundaries of the space, the absence of threat-relevant stimuli, and the gentle, predictable quality of environmental changes all signalled to my nervous system that it could remain in the ventral vagal state. This physiological settling enabled the quality of presence I experienced, the capacity to remain simultaneously relaxed and attentive, open yet focused. Porges emphasises that felt safety, rather than actual safety alone, determines which autonomic state predominates. The poolside setting provided both objective safety (shelter, containment, predictability) and subjective safety cues (soft sounds, visual beauty, environmental coherence), creating conditions wherein my nervous system could downregulate defensive responses and support contemplative engagement.

Embodied Epistemology in Practice

The knowledge I generated during this working session emerged through bodily engagement with the environment as much as through cognitive analysis. This exemplifies what feminist philosopher Sandra Harding (1991) calls standpoint epistemology, the recognition that all knowledge is situated, emerging from particular bodily, social, and historical locations. My standpoint during this retreat is grounded in specific intersecting positions. I am a white settler-Canadian woman in midlife, a precarious academic worker experiencing career displacement, a mother whose children have launched, a person exploring intentional solitude after years of collective disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and someone temporarily inhabiting a landscape markedly different from my northern home. Each of these positions shapes what I notice, what feels significant, and how I interpret experience.

The cooling sensation of post-rain air carried particular meaning within this situated context. For someone accustomed to Canadian winters, the idea of cooling being associated with comfort rather than discomfort, with relief rather than challenge, represents a sensory reversal. This embodied knowledge, the visceral understanding that cooling can signal respite, becomes metaphorically resonant when thinking about emotional regulation and the need for periods of reduced intensity following sustained activation.

Similarly, the sound of water, whether falling droplets or the distant murmur of pool filtration systems, activated associations shaped by my geographical origins. Water sounds in northern contexts often signal seasonal transition: the breakup of ice, the rush of spring melt, the first rain after winter’s snow. Here in Loreto, water sounds carry different meanings. They mark the rare gift of precipitation in an arid landscape, the maintenance of human-created oases, the intersection of scarcity and abundance. These layered meanings, emerging from the meeting of personal history with present place, constitute situated knowledge, knowledge that acknowledges rather than erases its specificity (Haraway, 1988).

The Pause as Practice

Pausing, the deliberate slowing or temporary halting of activity, represents a practice often devalued within cultures of productivity and constant engagement. Sociologist Judy Wajcman (2014) analyses how temporal acceleration characterises contemporary life, with technologies promising efficiency paradoxically generating experiences of time scarcity and rushed consciousness. Against this backdrop, the choice to pause, to sit at the poolside rather than pushing through the work in an enclosed room, constitutes a minor but meaningful resistance to the imperative toward continuous productivity.

The poet and essayist Mary Oliver (2008) writes that attention is the beginning of devotion, suggesting that how we direct awareness reflects what we value and shapes what becomes possible. During the rain pause, I devoted attention to the integration of scholarly work with embodied presence, to the practice of remaining with complexity rather than rushing toward resolution, to the capacity to hold multiple modes of awareness simultaneously. This practice of pause differs from complete cessation. I continued working, but the quality of that work changed within the poolside environment. Ideas emerged with less striving, prose flowed with greater ease, and the relationship between effort and ease was better balanced.

Contemplative scholar Pico Iyer (2014) observes that in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow, and in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. The rain pause created conditions for this luxurious attention, through environmental support for sustained awareness rather than forced focus. The threshold space of the cabana invited presence without demanding performance. The sensory richness of the setting engaged attention gently, providing sufficient stimulation to prevent mind-wandering into rumination while maintaining sufficient spaciousness to allow creative association.

Reflection and Integration

As the afternoon progressed, the pause in the rain eventually ended. Moisture began falling again, first as sporadic drops, then as steady precipitation that pattered rhythmically against the palapa thatch. I remained at work beneath the shelter, the sound of rain creating an acoustic texture that enhanced rather than disrupted concentration. This transition from pause to rain illustrates what philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1964) describes as intimate immensity: the experience of feeling both enclosed and connected to vastness, protected within a small shelter while remaining in relationship with larger atmospheric forces.

The hours spent at the poolside cabana generated multiple forms of knowledge. There was the intellectual work captured in written prose, the development of arguments and the articulation of frameworks. There was the somatic knowledge gained through embodied presence, the visceral understanding of how the environment shapes consciousness and how intentional positioning within space influences the quality of attention. There was the methodological insight into how Scholarly Personal Narrative functions and how personal experience, when rigorously attended to and theoretically contextualised, contributes to scholarly discourse.

Perhaps most significantly, there was the experiential confirmation that alonetude, as I have been theorising and practising it throughout this retreat, represents a learnable skill rather than an innate capacity. The ability to inhabit solitude with presence, to maintain attentiveness without anxiety, to hold steadiness amid transition (such as the shift from rain to pause to rain again), emerges through repeated practice within supportive environments. The poolside cabana offered such an environment. Its combination of shelter and openness, containment and permeability, created conditions wherein contemplative presence could deepen.

The Power of the Pause: How Solitude and Environment Shape Your Mind

Photo Credit: Notebook LM, 2026

Pause

The pause between rains, seemingly a minor meteorological event, created a doorway into a deeper understanding of how attention, environment, and embodied presence interrelate. Working beneath the palapa during that pause allowed me to experience directly what I have been theorising abstractly throughout this project. Alonetude, the intentional inhabiting of solitude, characterised by volition, presence, meaning, and felt safety, flourishes within environments that support rather than overwhelm attention, that invite rather than demand, that hold space for both focused work and wandering awareness.

This narrative represents one moment within a larger investigation, yet it captures the essence of what I have been learning. Knowledge emerges through the body as much as through the mind. Environment shapes consciousness in ways both subtle and profound. Pausing, rather than representing weakness or waste, constitutes a necessary practice for sustained creativity and well-being. And scholarly inquiry needs to diminish lived experience to generate insight. Instead, when personal narrative is properly grounded in theory and critically examined, it contributes meaningfully to academic discourse while remaining accessible to readers seeking practical guidance.

The rain eventually stopped completely, leaving the landscape refreshed and the air sweetened with ozone. I closed my laptop as the afternoon shifted toward evening, having produced both written work and experiential knowledge. The poolside cabana, with its threshold position between shelter and exposure, had held space for integration, for the meeting of intellectual inquiry and embodied practice. Tomorrow it may rain again, and I will likely return to this same spot, continuing the practice of alonetude, continuing the work of paying attention, continuing to discover what becomes possible when we pause long enough to truly inhabit the present moment.

References

Alcoff, L., & Potter, E. (Eds.). (2013). Feminist epistemologies. Routledge.

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

Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1440.011

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894

Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733–768). Sage.

Farb, N. A. S., Daubenmier, J., Price, C. J., Gard, T., Kerr, C., Dunn, B. D., Klein, A. C., Paulus, M. P., & Mehling, W. E. (2015). Interoception, contemplative practice, and health. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 763. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00763

Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Indiana University Press.

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

Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Cornell University Press.

Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. Basic Books.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., McColl, A., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (2009). Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(19), 8021–8026. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810363106

Iyer, P. (2014). The art of stillness: Adventures in going nowhere. TED Books/Simon & Schuster.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

Mehling, W. E., Gopisetty, V., Daubenmier, J., Price, C. J., Hecht, F. M., & Stewart, A. (2009). Body awareness: Construct and self-report measures. PLoS ONE, 4(5), Article e5614. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005614

Mehling, W. E., Price, C., Daubenmier, J. J., Acree, M., Bartmess, E., & Stewart, A. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA). PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230

Menon, V., & Uddin, L. Q. (2010). Saliency, switching, attention and control: A network model of insula function. Brain Structure and Function, 214(5–6), 655–667. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-010-0262-0

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)

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

Oliver, M. (2008). Red bird. Beacon Press.

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

Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676–682. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.98.2.676

Richardson, L. (2003). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Sage.

Seeley, W. W., Menon, V., Schatzberg, A. F., Keller, J., Glover, G. H., Kenna, H., Reiss, A. L., & Greicius, M. D. (2007). Dissociable intrinsic connectivity networks for salience processing and executive control. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(9), 2349–2356. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5587-06.2007

Spirn, A. W. (1998). The language of landscape. Yale University Press.

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

Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human behaviour and environment: Advances in theory and research (Vol. 6, pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.

Wajcman, J. (2015). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. University of Chicago Press.

The Grief That Comes With Rest

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

Title: Night Shore

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

No one told me
that when the shoulders finally drop,
The tears begin.

That the body, loosening
its long-held grip on vigilance,
would release more than tension.
It would release the unlived hours,
the dinners declined,
the calls shortened,
the visits swallowed by marking,
by meetings,
by the endless proving
that I deserved to remain.

I thought healing would feel like relief.
And it does.
But it also feels like mourning
the woman who said yes
when she meant no,
who signed the third contract,
and the fourth,
who lay awake rehearsing indispensability
because dispensable meant invisible,
and invisible meant gone.

Duelo, the Spanish say.
Grief.
And duel.
As if mourning were a kind of combat,
a reckoning with all that was lost
while I was too busy to notice the losing.

I grieve the braced mornings.
The jaw that forgot softness.
The breath held shallow
like a child waiting to be corrected.

I grieve the writing set aside,
the ideas that flickered
and went dark
for lack of time
that was never mine to hold.

I grieve the woman
I might have become
had I trusted
that I was enough
without performance.

Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes
that no emotion is negative,
only refused.
That grief, if allowed to move,
becomes gratitude.

So I am letting it move.

Here by the sea
where pelicans rest between dives,
where nothing asks to be proven,
where waves keep ancient rhythm
without apology,
I let the tears come
for all the years
I kept dry.

This is what the body knows
that the mind resists:
Safety is what allows grief
to arrive.

The shoulders drop.
The sorrow rises.
The jaw softens.
The unlived life
asks to be mourned.

Healing, I am learning,
moves in spirals
from broken toward whole.
It is a spiral,
circling back
to gather the fragments
left behind
when survival required speed.

El duelo que viene con el descanso.
The grief that comes with rest.
The mourning that waits
until we finally stop.

The pelicans grieve differently than I do.
They dive when hungry.
They rest when full.
They have never been asked
to earn stillness.

I am unlearning.

Here, by the sea,
salt on my face
that might be spray,
that might be tears,
that might be both,
I am unlearning
the fear of rest.

Descansa,
the water whispers.
Rest.

And I do.
And I weep.
And both are holy.

Title: Hammock Between Roots

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 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

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.

Day Six: El Cuerpo Comienza a Recordar la Seguridad

Brown Pelican

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Body Begins to Remember Safety

I woke this morning without an alarm, and for several minutes I lay still, noticing.

My shoulders rested flat against the mattress. My jaw hung loose. My breath moved in long, unhurried waves, rising and falling like the sea I could hear through the open window. These details might seem unremarkable to someone who has always slept peacefully, but for me, they marked a shift I had almost forgotten was possible.

For years, I have woken braced. Shoulders already climbing toward my ears. Jaw clenched against the night. Breath shallow and quick, as though the day’s demands had already begun pressing against my chest before I opened my eyes. I had normalised this state to the point that I no longer recognised it as anything other than how mornings felt.

This morning was different. The body had begun to remember something older than vigilance. It had started to remember safety.
And with that, remembering came something I had tried to avoid. The grief.

The Science of Felt Safety

Stephen Porges (2011, 2022), the neuroscientist who developed Polyvagal Theory, offers a framework for understanding my experience this morning. His research demonstrates that feelings of safety emerge from internal physiological states regulated by the autonomic nervous system, which operates largely below conscious awareness. We arrive at safety through the body, long before conscious thought; the body perceives it first, through what Porges terms neuroception.

Title: The Pool

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Neuroception

Neuroception refers to the nervous system’s continuous, unconscious scanning of the environment and internal bodily signals for cues of safety, danger, or life threat (Porges, 2003, 2004). Unlike perception, which involves conscious awareness and interpretation, neuroception operates below the threshold of awareness, triggering reflexive shifts in autonomic state without requiring conscious evaluation of the environment. This process evolved to enable our ancestors to respond rapidly to threats, but it can become miscalibrated by chronic stress, trauma, or prolonged exposure to demanding environments.

Polyvagal Theory proposes that mammals possess three primary autonomic states, each associated with distinct neural circuits that emerged at different points in evolutionary history (Porges, 2011). These states form a hierarchy, with the newest and most sophisticated circuit supporting social connection and calm, and the oldest supporting immobilization and shutdown.

What I Am Learning in the Body

Understanding the theory helps me name what I have been experiencing. For much of the past several years, and perhaps much longer, my nervous system has operated in a state of chronic sympathetic activation. The demands of academic work, the precarity of contract positions, the emotional labour of supporting students through their own struggles, the vigilance required to navigate institutional politics: all of these kept my body in a low-grade state of mobilization, ready to respond to the next challenge, the next deadline, the next crisis.

I became so accustomed to this state that I mistook it for normal. The tight shoulders, the clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the difficulty sleeping through the night: these seemed features of adult life rather than symptoms of a nervous system stuck in defence mode. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. The body becomes a place of tension rather than rest, alert rather than ease.

Here, by the Sea of Cortez, something is shifting. The cues my nervous system receives have changed. The rhythm of the waves provides what Porges might call prosodic cues of safety: low-frequency sounds that signal the absence of threat. The warmth of the sun, the slow pace of the days, the absence of urgent demands, and the faces of people moving without hurry all communicate safety to a body that has been listening for danger.

Deb Dana (2018, 2020), whose work translates Polyvagal Theory into practical application, describes the process of befriending one’s nervous system. She writes about learning to notice the micro-moments of ventral vagal connection, what she calls glimmers: small sparks of safety and calm that can be cultivated and expanded over time. I am learning to notice these glimmers here. The warmth of coffee in my hands. The sound of pelicans diving. The way my breath deepens when I sit by the water.

Title: Pelicans Waiting for Dinner

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Grief That Comes With Softening

But here is what arrived unbidden: as the body begins to soften, grief rises to meet it.

This morning, after noticing my loose jaw and flat shoulders, I lay in the early light and felt the tears come. They were tears of relief, certainly, but they were also tears of mourning. Mourning for all the years I spent braced against a world that demanded constant vigilance. Mourning for the woman who took on contract after contract because she was terrified that if she said no, there would be nothing. Mourning for the version of myself who believed she had to be everything for everyone, and who quietly disappeared in the effort.

Miriam Greenspan (2003), in her essential work Healing Through the Dark Emotions, argues that grief, fear, and despair are transformative rather than pathological when we allow ourselves to experience them fully. She calls this process emotional alchemy: the transmutation of difficult emotions into wisdom and connection. But the alchemy only works if we are willing to feel what we have been avoiding.

Title: The Circle of Life

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Emotional Alchemy

Emotional alchemy refers to the transformational process through which emotions culturally labelled as negative, such as grief, fear, and despair, can become pathways to gratitude, joy, and faith when they are authentically and mindfully felt rather than suppressed or bypassed (Greenspan, 2003). This framework challenges the dominant cultural emphasis on emotional control and positivity, suggesting instead that what we call healing requires moving through rather than around rugged emotional terrain.

I have been avoiding this grief for a very long time. There was no space for it in a life organised around survival. When you are juggling three contracts across two institutions, preparing courses in whatever hours remain after committee meetings and student advising, there is no time to sit with the question of what you might be losing in the process. The hamster wheel of precarious academic labour does what it is designed to do: it keeps you running too fast to notice that you are running in place.

An Accounting of What Was Lost

What did I lose in those years of overwork and fear-driven striving? The list is long, and I am only beginning to acknowledge it.

Time with people I love. The dinners declined because I had marking. The phone calls were cut short because I had to prepare for tomorrow’s class. The visits went untaken, because there was no time, no money, no energy left over after the institution had taken its share.

My own creative work. The writing projects set aside, year after year, while I wrote endless course outlines, assessment rubrics and committee reports. The ideas flickered and faded for lack of sustained time to develop them.

My health. The chronic tension I normalised. The sleep I sacrificed. The stress that accumulated in my body while I told myself I was fine, I could handle it, this was just what working hard looked like.

Presence. The capacity to be fully present where I was, rather than mentally composing tomorrow’s lecture or worrying about next semester’s contract while sitting at my own dinner table. The ability to rest without feeling guilty, to play without calculating what I should be accomplishing instead.

Myself. Somewhere along the way, in trying to be everything for everyone, I lost track of who I was outside of producing, performing, and proving my worth through labour. The woman who existed before she became a human productivity machine.

Crab Life

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

The Fear Beneath the Overwork

Why did I accept so many contracts? Why did I work through weekends, through holidays, through the body’s increasingly urgent signals that something was wrong?

The answer is simple and painful: fear.

Fear that if I said no to one contract, there might never be another. Fear that I would be forgotten, passed over, rendered invisible in a system that treats contract employees as interchangeable parts. Fear that my value depended entirely on my usefulness, and that the moment I stopped being maximally useful, I would cease to matter

This fear was entirely rational. The conditions of precarious academic employment are designed to produce exactly this kind of anxiety. As I explored in my earlier research on contract faculty experiences, the structure of term-by-term appointments creates what scholars have called artificial scarcity: a manufactured sense that opportunities are scarce, competition is fierce. One must constantly prove one’s worth to secure even temporary belonging.

Title: Prayers for the Sailors

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Artificial Scarcity

Artificial scarcity is the institutional production of resource scarcity that serves extractive logics rather than reflecting genuine constraints. In academic contexts, this manifests as deliberately limited contract renewals, competition for positions that could be made permanent, and funding models that pit workers against one another for resources that institutions choose to withhold. The effect is to transfer risk from institution to worker while intensifying individual self-exploitation to maintain employability.

Greenspan (2003) writes that suppressed fear often converts into anxiety, hypervigilance, or what she calls “toxic rage” that finds no appropriate outlet. For me, the fear transmuted into overwork: a constant striving that kept the terror at bay by keeping me too busy to feel it. The hamster wheel spun fast enough that I could pretend I was going somewhere.

Allowing the Dark Emotions

Title: The Land Before Time

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Greenspan (2003) insists that we cannot heal by bypassing the dark emotions. We can only heal by moving through them. This morning, lying in the grey light with tears running into my hair, I began to let myself grieve what was lost.

I grieved for the years of contracted time, sold in increments to institutions that refused to commit. I grieved for the version of myself who believed she had to earn her right to exist through constant productivity. I grieved for the students I taught while running on empty, giving them less than they deserved because I had nothing left to give. I grieved for the relationships I neglected, the boundaries I failed to uphold, and the needs I refused to acknowledge, because acknowledging them would have required slowing down.

And I grieved for the woman I might have become if I had been able to trust that I was enough. The woman who wrote her own work, who rested without guilt, who knew her value stood apart from her usefulness to others. The woman who could be, without having to justify her existence through labour constantly.

That woman is still possible. She is emerging slowly, her shoulders learning to drop and her jaw to soften. However, her emergence requires mourning the years during which she had been unable to exist fully. Grief is part of becoming.

Title: Pillars of Life

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

A Somatic Record

Following the methodology I developed for this project, I have been tracking my somatic state each morning and evening. The patterns are beginning to reveal themselves. What I notice now is that the emergence of grief marks a new phase in the body’s work. The nervous system begins to settle, and the emotions held at bay by chronic activation begin to surface.

Table 1
Somatic Log: Days 1–6

Day	Morning Observation	Evening Observation	Primary State
1	Tight chest, shallow breathing, jaw clenched	Restless, difficulty settling	SA
2	Woke with a loose jaw	Some softening after water time	SA → VV
3	Breath deeper, still some tension	Easier sleep, fewer interruptions	SA/VV
4	Woke with looser jaw	Calm, present, grounded	VV
5	Recognition of overachiever pattern	Emotional release, then peace	SA → VV
6	Shoulders flat, jaw loose; grief arose	Tears for lost years; then gentle calm	VV + grief

Note. States are classified according to Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011). VV = ventral vagal; SA = sympathetic activation. The trajectory across Days 1–6 reflects a gradual shift from sympathetic activation toward ventral vagal regulation, with grief emerging as a regulated and tolerable affective state.

Day six marks the continuation of physical settling alongside the emergence of emotional content that demands its own kind of attention. The body softens enough to feel what it has been protecting me from feeling. This is precisely what Greenspan describes: the dark emotions arise when we finally create conditions safe enough to hold them.

Complicating the Framework

Title: Paradise

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

It would be tempting to treat this grief as purely personal, a private mourning for private losses. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the structural dimensions of my experience. My nervous system became dysregulated through specific, structural conditions. The conditions of precarious academic labour, the expectations of constant productivity, and the erosion of secure employment are systemic features of contemporary work that affect millions.

Byung-Chul Han (2010/2015), in The Burnout Society, describes how neoliberal economies produce subjects who exploit themselves more thoroughly than any external master could. We become subjects of achievement, experiencing our self-exploitation as freedom, as choice, as personal ambition. The violence is hidden because it comes from within. The exhaustion feels like personal failure rather than structural extraction.

Healing my own nervous system, while valuable, leaves untouched the conditions that initially caused the dysregulation. I hold both truths: personal healing matters, and structural change remains necessary. The grief I feel this morning is mine, but it is also collective. It belongs to every contract worker who said yes when they wanted to say no. It applies to anyone who has tried to be everything for everyone and lost themselves in the effort.

Title: The Monkey Face

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The Body Archive

One of the most generative ideas I have encountered in my research is the body as archive. The body stores experience in ways that resist verbal articulation but emerge vividly through attention to somatic sensation. Muscle tension, posture, breath patterns, sensory associations: these hold histories that may never have been consciously processed or integrated into narrative memory.

When I notice my shoulders dropping, I am reading the archive. The body is releasing its record of vigilance, one slight relaxation at a time. When my jaw softens in sleep, the body is revising its story, replacing the narrative of threat with emerging evidence of safety. When tears come, the body finally allows what was stored to flow outward. The grief I feel is archived, years of unshed tears for years of unlived moments.

van der Kolk (2014) describes trauma as an experience that becomes stuck in the body, unable to complete its natural cycle of activation and discharge. The inverse may also be true: healing becomes possible when the body finds conditions that allow it to complete cycles interrupted by chronic stress. The sea, the warmth, the solitude, the absence of demand: these may be creating the conditions my body needs to process what it has been carrying. The grief is part of that processing.

Title: Sea Lions

What the Pelicans Know

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Later this morning, after the tears had passed and I had dressed and walked to the water, I watched the pelicans again. They rest on the water between dives, floating with apparent ease, their bodies loose and buoyant. They seem to know something about the alternation between effort and rest, between activation and recovery, that I am only now beginning to learn.

The pelicans show no sign of grief. But perhaps that is because they have never lost access to their own rhythm. They have never been asked to produce constantly, to prove their worth through labour, to fear that rest makes them dispensable. They dive when hungry, float when satisfied, and fly when they choose. The simplicity of it undoes something in me.

Porges (2022) argues that safety is a biological imperative, suggesting that social connectedness and the experience of felt safety are fundamental human needs wired into our physiology. Perhaps the grief I feel is the recognition of how long I lived without this safety, how long I ran on vigilance and fear, how much I sacrificed to a system that asked everything and offered no guarantee in return.

Day six. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw is learning to soften. The breath is learning to deepen. And the tears are learning to fall. All of it is necessary. All of it is the body doing its quiet work of remembering what it means to be safe, and mourning the years when safety had been beyond reach.

Greenspan (2003) promises that grief, fully felt, transmutes into gratitude. I am still on the way. But I trust the process. I trust the tears. I trust the sea and the pelicans and this slow, patient body, finally allowed to feel what it has been carrying.

Safety, it turns out, is something the body both recognises and grieves. It is something the body grieves when it finally arrives.

Title: The Path

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Title: Life on the Sea

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I am still here.

References

Dana, D. (2018).
The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation.
W. W. Norton.

Dana, D. (2020).
Polyvagal exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices.
W. W. Norton.

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

Greenspan, M. (2003).
Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair.
Shambhala Publications.

Han, B.-C. (2015).
The burnout society.
Stanford University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2003).
Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1008(1), 31–47.
https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1301.004

Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.

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

Porges, S. W. (2022).
Polyvagal theory: A science of safety.
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227

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

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.

La confesión de una sobreexigida

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

An overachiever’s confession

A Reckoning by the Sea

It happened while I was watching the pelicans.

They dive with such certainty, folding their wings at the last possible moment, surrendering to gravity and instinct. They trust the trajectory. They dive and let instinct decide the rest. They dive, surface, swallow, and rest on the water until the next impulse moves them.

Watching them, coffee cooling in my hands, I felt something crack open inside my chest. The realization arrived without announcement, without the careful preparation I usually require before allowing myself to know brutal truths.

I am an overachiever. And I am burned out.

The words felt foreign, even as I knew them to be true. For decades, I had called it other things: dedicated, committed, hardworking, passionate. I had worn exhaustion like a badge, proof that I was earning my place in a world that seemed to demand constant demonstration of worth.

What Remained Hidden

Brené Brown (2010), in The Gifts of Imperfection, names the belief system I had been living inside without recognising its walls. Her research reveals that perfectionism operates as a self-destructive and addictive pattern, rooted in the belief that flawless appearance, behaviour, and accomplishment can somehow shield us from shame, judgement, and blame. Brown’s work demonstrates that most perfectionists were raised receiving praise primarily for achievement and performance, whether academic grades, good manners, rule-following, or people-pleasing. Somewhere in that conditioning, many of us internalised a dangerous equation: our worth equals our accomplishments and how well we accomplish them.

Reading those words by the sea, I felt the shock of recognition. That belief had been the operating system of my entire adult life. Every committee I joined. Every extra course I taught. Every student crisis I absorbed as my own responsibility. Every late night, every weekend sacrificed, every moment of rest interrupted by the nagging sense that I should be doing something more, something better, something that would finally prove I deserved to be here.

Brown’s research reveals a more complicated truth: perfectionism fundamentally concerns itself with earning approval and acceptance rather than with genuine self-improvement (Brown, 2010). The pattern follows a predictable sequence: please, perform, perfect. I had been following that formula in education for twenty-five years, believing it would eventually lead to security, to belonging, to the sense that I had finally done enough.

It never did. It never could. That is the nature of the trap.

What Burnout Looks Like From the Inside

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter (2016), the researchers who developed the most widely used measure of occupational burnout, describe it through three interconnected dimensions. The first involves overwhelming exhaustion, the sense of being worn out, depleted, and unable to recover. The second manifests as cynicism and detachment from work, a protective numbing that separates us from caring too much. The third is a diminished sense of professional efficacy, a creeping belief that nothing we do makes a real difference.

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

What struck me, reading their work, was how the third dimension creates a vicious cycle. The more burned out we become, the less effective we feel. The less effective we think, the harder we push to prove our worth. The harder we try, the more depleted we become. I had been running that cycle for years, perhaps decades, without seeing it clearly.

Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in The Body Keeps the Score, observes that people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. While I would hesitate to claim trauma as an identity, I recognise its residue: the years of institutional vigilance, the constant calibration to others’ needs, the way exhaustion became so familiar I forgot it was exhaustion. My shoulders, perpetually braced. My jaw was clenched through the night. My sleep, fractured by worry that arrived without specific content, just a generalised dread that something was undone, someone was disappointed, some standard had been missed.

Here, by the sea, those symptoms have begun to ease. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw softens. Sleep comes and stays. The body is remembering safety, one quiet morning at a time.

Exhaustion as Status Symbol

Brown (2010) names something I had never consciously examined: the cultural tendency to treat exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as the measure of self-worth. In academic culture, in caregiving, in so many of the roles I have inhabited, exhaustion signals commitment. To admit tiredness is to demonstrate that I am working hard enough to deserve my place. To acknowledge a need for rest is to risk appearing uncommitted, unserious, insufficient.

The contract I wrote this morning, the one promising myself eight hours of sleep and mornings without performance, pushes directly against this belief. Every clause is a small rebellion against the culture that trained me to equate worth with output, value with visible effort.

Jenny Odell (2019), in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, writes about a different kind of productivity, one focused on maintaining oneself and healing rather than generating output. That concept stopped me when I first encountered it. The productivity of healing. As if rest could be framed as output. As if I needed permission, even from myself, to justify time spent recovering.

Perhaps I do need that permission. Maybe the language of productivity is the only dialect my overachiever’s mind can currently accept. If so, I will use it as a bridge until I can cross to the other side, where rest requires no justification at all.

What Solitude Makes Visible

Christopher Long and James Averill (2003), in their foundational study of positive solitude, found that being alone provides a particular kind of freedom: release from external constraints, from the performance demands of social interaction, from the need to calibrate ourselves to others’ expectations. In their research, people reported that solitude allowed them to see themselves more clearly, free from the distortions of social performance and others’ expectations. Solitude strips away the roles we perform, leaving us face-to-face with who we have become.

That confrontation can be painful. What I am seeing here by the Sea of Cortez is a woman who has spent decades outrunning her fear of inadequacy. A woman who believed, at some level too deep for conscious examination, that if she ever stopped performing, stopped achieving, stopped proving, she would discover she was nothing at all.

This is what Brown (2010) means when she describes perfectionism as a heavy shield we carry around, believing it will protect us, when in reality it prevents us from taking flight. I have been carrying that shield for so long that I forgot it was heavy. Here, I am finally setting it down.

What Comes After Recognition

The novelist Anna Quindlen once observed that the truly difficult and truly amazing work lies in giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself (as cited in Brown, 2010). That work starts here, in this place where no one knows my credentials or my accomplishments or how many hours I have logged in service to institutions that offered little security in return. Here, I am simply a woman by the sea. A woman learning to rest without guilt. A woman discovering that her worth existed before she proved anything, and will remain after she stops proving altogether.

Brown (2010) describes herself as a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enoughist. That phrase makes me smile, this gentle reframing of recovery from perfectionism. I am an aspiring good-enoughist. I am learning to accept that enough is a destination, perhaps the only one worth reaching.

The pelicans are diving again. They keep no score. They make no comparisons with yesterday’s haul. They rest when they are full and dive when they are hungry, floating on the water between efforts, trusting that the sea will continue to provide.

I am watching them. I am learning.

Learning to Be Alone Without Loneliness

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

Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.

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

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

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311

Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

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

A CONTRACT WITH MYSELF

30 Days by the Sea and Beyond

Name: Amy Tucker

January 1 – 31, 2026

PREAMBLE

I enter this agreement with myself in good faith.

I acknowledge that I am in a period of completion rather than initiation. I recognise that my body, mind, and spirit require containment, rest, and clarity to finish well. I affirm that my worth is inherent, independent of productivity, praise, or perfection.

This contract exists to protect my energy, my work, and my dignity.

ARTICLE I: SLEEP AND REGULATION

I agree to:

Honour my need for 8–9 hours of sleep whenever possible
Treat sleep as essential infrastructure, as fundamental as food
Respond to irritability, fatigue, or anxiety as signals to rest rather than push

I release the belief that exhaustion is evidence of commitment.

ARTICLE II: FOCUS AND SCOPE

I agree to:

Work on only one primary intellectual task per day
Prioritise 30 Days by the Sea as my MA thesis
Engage with defence preparation lightly and strategically while feedback is pending
Refrain from creating new projects, commitments, or obligations during this period

I accept that sequencing is wisdom. It is discernment.

ARTICLE III: FEEDBACK AND REVIEW

I agree to:

Meet feedback with curiosity rather than self-judgement
Separate my identity from my work during review processes
Read feedback in stages, allowing my nervous system time to settle
Ask for clarification rather than assume criticism

I understand that feedback is part of the completion process, separate from any measure of my value.

ARTICLE IV: BOUNDARIES AND ENERGY

I agree to:

Limit exposure to negative, draining, or nagging interactions
Release responsibility for other people’s emotions or expectations
Say no, delay, or disengage without justification when needed
Protect mornings and evenings as sacred bookends of the day

I recognise that my calm is a responsibility I take seriously.

ARTICLE V: BODY AND CARE

I agree to:

Move my body in ways that feel supportive and kind
Eat and nourish myself without moral judgment
Allow rest days without guilt
Use walking, swimming, stretching, and silence as forms of care

I commit to listening to my body before correcting it.

ARTICLE VI: INNER LIFE AND COMPASSION

I agree to:

Speak to myself with honesty and gentleness
Release perfectionism tied to recognition or proving
Allow space for uncertainty without rushing to resolve it
Treat this season as a threshold, a passage rather than a proving ground

I accept that being enough is already true.

ARTICLE VII: WHEN I STRAY FROM THIS AGREEMENT

I agree that if I:

Overcommit
Push through fatigue
Spiral into self-criticism
Attempt to carry everything at once

I will respond by returning, with gentleness rather than reprimand.

I will ask:

“What can I remove or rest right now?”

AFFIRMATION

I affirm that:

I am finishing important work
I am allowed to move slowly and still succeed
I am capable, thoughtful, and prepared
I trust the long arc of my life and scholarship

Sincerely,

Amy Tucker, January 5, 2026

The Sun Always Rises and Sets

Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

By the Sea (My To Do List)

Wake with the light.
Open the window.
Let the air in.

Fruit and yogurt for breakfast,
cool and simple.
Coffee by the sea.
Write in my journal
while the morning finds its shape.

Walk the Malecón.
Watch the pelicans dive.
Pet the dogs, often.
Pause when something asks for attention.

Follow El Camino Real,
the Mission of Our Lady of Loreto.
The Royal Road stretches north,
from Sonoma, California,
roads that remember those who have passed before.

Walking becomes meditation.
Finding space.
Listening for silent whispers
beside the Sea of Cortez.

Suntan on the beach.
Swim in the sunshine.
Dip toes into salt water.
Find the tide.
Ride the tide.
Look for glass on the beach.

Pick a random food truck for lunch.
Eat without hurry.
Drink bubbly Topo Chico,
cold and bright.

Read in the early afternoon.
Nap in the shade,
without apology.

As the evening cools,
watch the sunset.
Drink bubbly Topo Chico,
Eat flan for dinner,
because pleasure counts.

Watch the stars dance.
Watch the moon rise.
Notice what the dark makes possible.

Close the day gently.
Nothing left to prove.
Only the quiet work of staying.

El Camino Real

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

January 4: Día Cuatro: Caminando el Malecón

Caminando el Malecón on the fourth day: a bilingual reflection on walking the seafront promenade in Loreto, and what the body learns when it is given permission to move slowly, without destination.

Title: The Bench That Waits

Artist Statement

It was empty when I arrived.

Empty, waiting. The kind of waiting that holds space for whoever might need it, without straining toward arrival. Positioned between palms and water, the bench faced outward, offering its view without instruction. Sit or continue. Stay or keep walking. The invitation was gentle enough to refuse.

I noticed how naturally my body moved toward it.

As if rest recognises itself. The slats still cool from morning air, the sea stretching steady beyond the shoreline, mountains holding their distance across the water. Nothing demanded attention. The bench offered comfort directly. It simply provided it.

I stayed just long enough.

But long enough to feel the pause it offered. Long enough to understand that some forms of support ask nothing in return. They exist so that, when needed, we can set our weight down for a moment and remember what it feels like to be held without expectation.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

This morning, I walked.

It sounds unremarkable, and perhaps it is. People walk every day for transportation, exercise, and the simple need to move from one place to another. But this walking was different. This walking was deliberate, unhurried, without destination. I walked the malecón, the seaside promenade that curves along Loreto’s waterfront, and somewhere between my first step and my last, something shifted. I began to find myself in the rhythm of my own feet.

Rebecca Solnit (2001), in her meditation on the history and meaning of walking, writes that “the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts” (pp. 5–6). Walking, she argues, is locomotion and so much more. It is a mode of being in the world, a way of thinking with the body, a practice that has shaped philosophers, poets, and pilgrims for millennia. I set out this morning simply to move. I set out to move. But movement, I am learning, has its own intelligence.

El Malecón / The Promenade

The malecón stretches along the edge of the Sea of Cortez, a paved path bordered by palm trees on one side and water on the other. In the early morning, before the heat becomes oppressive, it fills with walkers: elderly couples moving slowly arm in arm, young mothers pushing strollers, fishermen heading to their boats, tourists like me trying to find our place in this unfamiliar landscape.

I joined the flow without speaking to anyone. I was alone in a crowd, solitary yet surrounded, occupying what the sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) called civil inattention: a delicate social contract in which strangers acknowledge each other’s presence through brief eye contact or a nod, then politely look away, granting each other the privacy of public space. There is a particular freedom in being unknown. No one on this malecón knows my name, my history, my roles, my failures. I am simply a woman walking, indistinguishable from any other woman walking, anonymous in the best possible way.

Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer whose work explores the relationship between people and place, distinguishes between space and place. Space, he suggests, is abstract, undifferentiated, open. Place is space that has been given meaning through experience, through movement, through the accumulation of memory and feeling. I am in the process of transforming this malecón from space into place, step by step, morning by morning, until it becomes somewhere I belong rather than somewhere I am visiting.

Title: Looking Up

Artist Statement

I noticed the sky because the trees asked me to.

Their trunks moved upward and outward, drawing my gaze away from the ground I had been watching all morning. Palms reaching, bending slightly, as if shaped by years of wind and salt air. I stood beneath them, small in comparison, aware of how rarely I stop long enough to look up without purpose. What held me there was the layering.

Fronds crossing one another. Dark silhouettes against a pale, clouded sky. Movement without urgency. Even the stillness felt alive, suspended between breeze and pause. It reminded me that perspective shifts quietly, sometimes offered by nothing more than changing the direction of your gaze. I stayed a moment longer than expected.

Simply allowing the upward view to hold me. A reminder that rest arrives in many forms beyond lying down. Sometimes it arrives in the simple act of lifting your eyes and letting the world open above you.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

El Ritmo de los Pies / The Rhythm of Feet

There is something about the pace of walking that matches the pace of thought. Frédéric Gros (2014), the French philosopher who wrote a book-length exploration of walking as a philosophical practice, observes that walking is human. When we walk, we move at approximately five kilometres per hour, the pace at which humans have moved for most of our evolutionary history. This is the speed at which the world makes sense, at which details can be noticed, at which the mind can wander without becoming lost.

I noticed things this morning that I would have missed from a car or a bus. A pelican perched on a piling, utterly still, watching the water. An old man mending a fishing net, his fingers moving with the ease of decades of practice. A child chasing pigeons, her laughter bright against the morning quiet. Bougainvillea spilling over a white wall in shades of magenta and coral. A dog sleeping in a patch of sun, so profoundly at peace that I envied him.

These small observations accumulated as I walked, asking nothing, just offering themselves to my attention. This is what the Kaplans (1989) meant by “soft fascination”: the gentle engagement with the environment that allows the mind to rest while remaining alert. Walking provides a constant stream of such fascination: the changing view, the shifting light, the small dramas of ordinary life unfolding at the edges of the path. My attention was held without being captured. I was present without being vigilant.

Una Mujer Caminando Sola / A Woman Walking Alone

There is a particular experience of being a woman walking alone in public space. Lauren Elkin (2017), in her exploration of female flânerie, the art of wandering through city streets, notes that the figure of the flâneur, the leisurely male stroller who observes urban life, has historically had no female equivalent. Women in public spaces have been subject to scrutiny, harassment, and assumptions about their availability or their morality. The freedom to wander, to be seen without being accosted, to occupy space without justification, has been a privilege unevenly distributed.

Here on the malecón, I felt safe. The morning light, the presence of families, and the openness of the waterfront all contributed to a sense of ease. However, I am aware that this ease is neither universal nor guaranteed. I carry decades of conditioning about where women can go, when, and with whom. I have the vigilance that women learn early, the constant low-level assessment of threat that becomes so habitual it feels like instinct. Walking alone, as a woman, at 60, in a foreign country, is an act of quiet defiance. It is a claiming of space, a declaration that I have as much right to this malecón as anyone.

Sara Maitland (2009), writing about her own experiments with solitude, describes the gendered dimensions of being alone. “For women,” she observes, “aloneness has often been constructed as dangerous, improper, or indicative of failure” (p. 42). A woman alone must be waiting for someone. A woman alone must be lonely. A woman alone must require rescue, company, or protection. These assumptions persist even when we have consciously rejected them. Walking the malecón alone, I am practising a different narrative: that solitude can be chosen, that a woman can be complete unto herself, that walking alone is pure presence.

I am finding myself, precisely here.

Caminar Como Pensar / Walking as Thinking

Title: Standing with Myself

Artist Statement

I saw the shadow before I saw the photograph. Cast long across the sand, shaped by a sun beyond my direct view, my body appeared as outline rather than detail. No expression. No colour. Just form held briefly on the surface of the earth. I stood still for a moment, noticing how unfamiliar it felt to look at myself without the usual identifiers. No face. No eyes. Only presence. What stayed with me was the clarity of the silhouette.

There is honesty in shadow. It removes performance. Removes the small adjustments we make when we know we are being seen. What remains is posture. Weight distribution. The simple fact of occupying space. I realised I was looking at evidence of being there rather than proof of who I am. A quieter form of documentation. The sand held me without resistance.

Wind-shaped ridges moving outward in soft repetition, my shadow resting across them without altering their pattern. Temporary. Already shifting as the sun moved. I stood there aware that this is what much of life feels like, moments of presence held briefly on landscapes that existed long before us and will continue long after. I let the shadow remain a while.

I let the shadow remain intact a little longer, recognising it as companion rather than absence. Beyond loneliness. Beyond solitude. Just the simple act of standing with myself, visible in outline, grounded in light.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

The philosophers understood what neuroscience is only beginning to confirm: that walking changes how we think. Aristotle taught while walking, his students strolling beside him through the Lyceum’s colonnades. Rousseau claimed that he could compose only while walking. Nietzsche declared that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” (as cited in Gros, 2014, p. 18). Wordsworth walked an estimated 180,000 miles in his lifetime, composing poems with each step.

Contemporary research supports these intuitions. Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014), in a series of experiments at Stanford University, found that walking significantly increases creative divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple solutions to open-ended problems. Participants who walked, whether on a treadmill or outdoors, produced more creative responses than those who sat. The effect persisted even after walking ended, suggesting that movement primes the mind for creative thought in ways that outlast the activity itself.

This morning, as I walked, thoughts arose that had been inaccessible during the first three days of sitting and settling. Ideas for writing. Insights about patterns in my life. Connections between things I had read and things I had experienced. It was as if the movement of my body had loosened something in my mind, allowing thoughts that had been stuck, dammed up behind the exhaustion, vigilance, and accumulated tension of years to flow. Walking, I began to think again. Walking, I began to find the thoughts that had been waiting for space to emerge.

Title: A Small Signal

Artist Statement

The self-portrait arrived without intention. I was watching the shoreline, the way the stones gathered where the tide had last reached, when my shadow entered the frame. Familiar now, this outline of myself appearing unannounced. My hand lifted without planning, two fingers raised in a quiet gesture. For no audience at all. Just a small signal that I was here, standing between water and land, present in the light of that moment.

What stayed with me was how brief it was. The sea kept moving. The sand kept holding its patterns. My shadow shifted as the sun moved, the gesture dissolving almost as soon as it formed. And yet it felt enough. A soft reassurance offered inward rather than outward. I am here. I am steady. Still arriving, even now.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

El Cuerpo Recuerda Cómo Moverse / The Body Remembers How to Move

I have been a swimmer, a triathlete, a woman who pushed her body through marathons and triathlons. Movement has always been part of who I am. But somewhere in the last few months, I stopped. The demands of work, the weight of caregiving, the creeping exhaustion that made even small exertions feel impossible: these accumulated until I no longer recognised myself as someone who moved. I became sedentary. I became still in all the wrong ways.

Walking the malecón this morning, I felt my body remember. The swing of arms, the push of feet against pavement, the rhythm of breath deepening with exertion. It was gentle, nothing like the intensity of training, but it was movement. It was my body doing what bodies are designed to do: carrying us through the world, encountering terrain, responding to the demands of gravity, distance, and time.

Researchers in embodied cognition argue that thinking extends beyond the brain, distributed throughout the body and its interactions with the environment (Shapiro, 2019). We think through the world rather than about it from a position of detachment; we think through our bodies, with our bodies, as our bodies. Walking is a form of thinking. Movement is a form of knowing. When I walk, I am doing something beyond transporting my mind from place to place. I am engaging in a fundamentally different mode of cognition, one that integrates body and world in ways that sitting cannot replicate.

Encuentros / Encounters

Near the end of the malecón, where the pavement gives way to sand, and the tourist hotels yield to fishing shacks, I stopped to rest on a bench. An elderly woman sat at the other end, her face weathered by sun and time, her hands folded in her lap. We nodded at each other, the universal greeting of strangers sharing space.

“Bonita mañana,” she said after a moment. Beautiful morning.

“Sí,” I agreed. “Muy bonita.”

We sat in companionable silence, watching the water. I knew nothing of her name, her story, nothing about the life that had brought her to this bench on this morning. She knew nothing of mine. And yet there was a connection, brief and wordless, the kind of connection that can only happen between strangers who have no agenda, no history, no expectation of each other. Just two women, sharing a bench, watching the sea.

The sociologist Georg Simmel (1908/1971), writing about urban life, described the paradox of proximity and distance that characterises encounters with strangers. We are physically close, often closer than we would be with intimates, yet socially distant, protected by conventions of anonymity. This distance, Simmel argued, can be liberating. It allows us to be seen without being known, to exist in public without the weight of personal history.

The woman rose to leave, gathering a small bag I had missed until that moment. “Que le vaya bien,” she said. May it go well for you. “Igualmente,” I replied. Same to you. She walked away, and I stayed on the bench, holding the small gift of that encounter, that moment of human connection that asked nothing and gave everything.

Encontrándome / Finding Myself

Title: Where the Water Waits

Artist Statement

I found it tucked into the wall as though it had always been there, water gathering quietly beneath the carved lion’s face. The stream was gentle, almost ceremonial, falling into the basin without urgency. I stood there longer than I expected, listening to the soft repetition of water meeting stone. There was something grounding in its rhythm, a steadiness that asked nothing of me and yet held the space all the same.

What struck me most was the feeling of offering. The fountain asked nothing of thirst. It simply waited, holding water for whoever might arrive needing pause, reflection, or refreshment. I felt that invitation without having to drink. Just standing near it was enough, reminded that restoration often lives in small, quiet places, flowing patiently until we are ready to receive it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

What does it mean to find yourself? The phrase is so common that it has become cliché, the stuff of self-help books, wellness retreats and midlife crisis narratives. And yet, walking back along the malecón this morning, I understood something about what it might actually mean.

Finding yourself is encountering something in motion, beyond any unchanging core that has been there all along, hidden beneath roles and responsibilities. The self is no buried treasure. Instead, as the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) argues, the self is something we construct through our choices, our relationships, our engagements with the world. “We are selves,” he writes, “only in that certain issues matter for us” (p. 34). We find ourselves by discovering what matters, by choosing what to attend to, by moving toward what calls us.

Walking matters to me. I had forgotten, but this morning I remembered. Movement matters. The body in space, encountering the world at the speed of feet, matters. Solitude in public, the freedom to be alone among others, matters. The malecón is teaching me what matters. Each step is a small declaration: this is who I am. This is who I am becoming.

Dan McAdams (2001), the narrative psychologist, suggests that identity is fundamentally a story we tell about ourselves, a personal myth that integrates past, present, and anticipated future into a coherent sense of who we are. Finding yourself, in this framework, means revising the story. It means writing new chapters. It means recognising that the self is fluid, authored, made.

I am making myself on this malecón. Step by step, I am writing a new chapter in which I am a woman who walks alone, who claims space, who moves through the world at the speed of thought, who finds herself through solitude, because of it.

Paso a paso, me estoy convirtiendo en quien siempre fui.

Step by step, I am becoming who I always was.

Reflexión de la tarde / Evening Reflection

Title: Daybreak Crossing

Artist Statement

I arrived before the sun cleared the mountains, when the sea was still holding night in its depths. The horizon glowed slowly, a thin line of gold widening by the minute, as though the day were being poured carefully into the world. Birds crossed the sky in loose formation, their wings catching the first light. I stood still, aware of how quietly morning begins when no one is rushing it forward.

What I felt most was permission. The water moved without urgency. The light unfolded at its own pace. Nothing demanded that I be anything other than present to the crossing from dark to day. In that moment, I understood arrival differently, as something ongoing, something that happens gradually, like sunrise, asking only that I remain long enough to witness it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I walked again this evening, as the sun dropped toward the mountains and the light turned golden. The malecón was different at this hour: more crowded, more festive, families out for their evening paseo, that lovely Latin custom of strolling together as the day cools. I was alone among the couples and the families, and I felt held by that rhythm, I felt held by the rhythm of the walk, the beauty of the light, the simple pleasure of a body in motion.

Tomorrow I will walk again. And the day after that. Walking has become my practice here, my daily discipline, my way of being in this place and in this body. Each walk is different: different light, other encounters, different thoughts arising from the rhythm of feet. And each walk is the same: the same path, the same sea, the same self, meeting the world one step at a time.

Solnit (2001) writes that “the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness” (p. 10). Here in Loreto, I am slowing down to the speed of thought. I am letting my mind keep pace with my feet. I am finding myself in the ordinary miracle of movement, of breath, of a body carrying me through a world that reveals itself slowly, step by step, along a malecón I am learning to call my own.

El camino me enseña quién soy.

The path teaches me who I am.

Un paso a la vez.

One step at a time.

My Dirty Shoes

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

References

Elkin, L. (2017). Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Goffman, E. (1963). Behaviour in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. Free Press.

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

Gros, F. (2014). A philosophy of walking (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Maitland, S. (2009). A book of silence. Granta.

McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577

Shapiro, L. (2019). Embodied cognition (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Simmel, G. (1971). The stranger. In D. N. Levine (Ed.), Georg Simmel: On individuality and social forms (pp. 143–149). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908)

Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

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.

Academic Lens

Walking the malecon as daily ritual embodies what Pink (2013) calls sensory ethnography: knowledge gathered through the moving, attentive body in a specific place. The body adapting to a new rhythm — new smells, sounds, temperatures — signals the early stages of somatic regulation that Levine (2010) describes as the nervous system's capacity to "track" safety. The bilingual form of this entry reflects the way the Spanish-speaking environment was generating a different kind of cognitive and embodied presence.

Cruzando

Crossing

Two flights.
Six plus hours.
The particular exhaustion
of leaving everything.

Taxi window.
Dust road.
Mountains I have never seen
turning pink in the distance.

¿Primera vez en Loreto?
First time?
Sí.
Yes.

Estoy cansada.
I am tired.

The driver nods.
Sí, se ve.
Yes. It shows.

Key in the lock.
Door swinging open.
A room that belongs
to no one yet.

Bag on the floor.
Zipped shut.
The quiet discipline
of leaving it unpacked.

Salt air.
Open window.
The sea
I came to meet.

Sixty years old.
Alone.
The radical act
of arriving for myself.

No one waiting.
No one expecting.
No one asking
what took so long.

Shoulders dropping.
The body knowing
before the mind
admits.

Threshold.
Umbral.
The space between
who I was
and who I am becoming.

Light fading.
Sea darkening.
The first night
of thirty beginning.

Mañana será otro día.
Tomorrow will be another day.

But tonight
just this
arriving.

He llegado.
I have arrived.

For now
that is enough.

Title: Weathered Open

Artist Statement

I almost walked past it.

It lay half-set in the sand, unannounced, the colour of something that had spent years under sun and water. What drew me back was the opening. Small. Quiet. A hollow worn clean through the stone as if time itself had needed passage.

I picked it up and felt its weight.

Solid everywhere except for that one opening. The hole held no weakness in it. If anything, it revealed its endurance. Pressure had shaped it instead. It had shaped it. Wind, salt, movement, persistence. Forces working slowly enough that transformation appeared gentle even when the forces were fierce.

Standing there, I thought about what it means to be marked without being broken.

How life wears through us in places. How absence forms where certainty once lived. How openings appear beyond damage, as evidence of having stayed long enough for change to move through.

I placed it back where I found it.

Some objects feel less like discoveries and more like acknowledgements. A quiet recognition of what survives shaping. Of what remains strong even with light moving through it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 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

El Umbral

The Threshold

Title: Morning Held in a Cup

Title: Morning Held in a Cup

The coffee cooled faster than I expected.

I had carried it outside before the day fully formed, before voices rose from the pathways below, before the shoreline began its quiet negotiations with footsteps and movement. The mug sat heavy in my hands, ceramic warmed by what it held, painted with colours that felt brighter than the hour itself. Loreto written across it, as place, briefly touching my palms, without declaration. I realised I was holding geography in a way maps never allow. Heat. Weight. Stillness.

What struck me was the pause.

I let it sit first. I let the steam lift, let the horizon remain slightly out of focus beyond the wooden railing. There was comfort in the blur, in allowing the world to stay softened while I woke into it slowly. No urgency to begin the day. No performance required. Just breath, warmth, and the steady presence of water beyond sight but within reach. It felt like a continuation of something I had been learning here, that mornings can be received rather than seized. They can be received.

I thought about how many cups of coffee I have held in my life.

Behind counters. At kitchen tables. In classrooms before students arrived. Each one marking a threshold between effort and endurance, between showing up and staying anyway. This cup felt different. It had everything to do with how I was sitting with it. Unhurried. Unguarded. Simply present to the small ritual of warmth against my hands, aware that sometimes the most profound forms of steadiness arrive quietly, asking nothing more than that we hold them long enough to feel their heat.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Arrival rarely looks the way we imagine it will.

There is the physical act of stepping into a room, setting a bag down, and closing a door behind you. And then there is the quieter arrival that unfolds beneath the surface, the one that takes longer, the one the body negotiates in its own time. I landed in Loreto yesterday, somewhere between waking and dreaming, my sense of time dissolved by two flights and several hours of transit. The body arrives first. The breath follows. The mind lingers behind, still scanning, still carrying the vigilance of the life I have temporarily left.

Estoy cansada. I am tired. The phrase surfaced unbidden as the taxi wound through the quiet streets of this small town on the Sea of Cortez. I said it aloud, testing how Spanish felt in my mouth after so many years. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded. Sí, se ve, he said gently. Yes, it shows.

Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

Cruzando / Crossing

I came here alone. That sentence still feels radical, even as I write it. At 60, after twenty-five years navigating the relentless demands of academic life, I booked a solo retreat to a place where I know no one, where no one expects anything of me, where the only schedule is the one I choose to keep. The decision carried both relief and a strange tenderness, as if I were doing something slightly forbidden.

Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), the anthropologist who coined the term liminality, described thresholds as spaces of transition, neither fully one thing nor another. The word itself comes from the Latin limen, meaning “boundary” or “doorstep”. To stand on a threshold is to occupy the space between what was and what might be, to hover in the doorway before stepping through. That is where I find myself tonight: on the threshold between the life I have been living and something I cannot yet name.

Victor Turner (1969), building on van Gennep’s work, described liminal spaces as places where ordinary structures dissolve, where the usual rules loosen their grip. He called this betwixt and between, a phrase that captures the particular disorientation of transition. I feel that disorientation now, sitting on a terrace overlooking water I have never seen before, in a country where I speak the language imperfectly, in a solitude I have chosen but am only beginning to inhabit.

El umbral es el lugar donde todo puede cambiar.

The threshold is the point at which everything can change.

Después de Años de Disrupción / After Years of Disruption

Title: Where Sound Holds Time

I arrived before the bells moved.

The tower rose out of the morning sky with a kind of quiet authority that asked nothing and yet remained undeniable. Stone layered upon stone, holding heat from centuries of sun, holding prayer, grief, celebration, confession, all sedimented into the structure itself. I stood at its base looking upward, aware of my own smallness against its vertical reach. Contextualised rather than diminished. Placed within a timeline far longer than my own.

What struck me most was the anticipation of sound.

The bells hung still, suspended in that brief space before motion. I found myself listening for something still ahead, aware that when they did ring, the vibration would move through air, through wall, through body. There is something about churches that organises silence differently. Even emptiness feels structured. Held. As though quiet itself has been practiced here long before anyone enters.

I stayed outside first.

I stayed at the threshold, aware that entry is never only architectural. It is emotional. Spiritual. Historical. To cross from sunlight into that interior dimness would be to step into accumulated presence. So I remained outside a while longer, letting the bells remain still, letting the stone hold its stories without requiring mine to be added. Some places ask for reverence through participation. Others offer it simply through standing close enough to feel time moving slowly around you.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Presence of self, rather than absence of others.

This arrival carries history. After the pandemic, many people learned how to be alone in ways they never intended. Isolation arrived suddenly, unevenly, and without consent. Homes became offices. Screens replaced faces. Silence grew louder, then exhausting. Loneliness took many forms, some quiet, some crowded, some invisible even to those experiencing them.

Coming into solitude by choice feels different. And yet the body remembers. It holds traces of vigilance, of separation, of longing for connection that went unmet during those long months. Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in his landmark work on trauma, reminds us that the body keeps the score, storing experience in tissue and nervous system long after the mind has moved on. My body carried the pandemic here, tucked into my luggage alongside my journal and my watercolours. Arrival asks me to acknowledge that history rather than rush past it.

Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes that rest is resistance, a refusal to participate in systems that reduce human worth to productivity. For those of us who survived the pandemic by working harder, by performing wellness while quietly falling apart, rest can feel transgressive. Choosing solitude after years of forced isolation requires a different kind of courage: the willingness to be alone on purpose, to trust that this time the aloneness will heal rather than harm.

La Primera Noche / The First Evening

At first, habit took over. I considered unpacking everything immediately. I thought about schedules, routes, and productivity. My mind offered a list of things I could accomplish before bed: organise the kitchen, plan tomorrow’s meals, and respond to the emails still waiting on my phone. This reflex runs deep, an inherited habit shaped by a world that rewards motion and punishes stillness.

So I sat.

I let the room remain unfinished. I left the bag zipped. I noticed how my shoulders softened when there was nowhere else to be. Outside, light shifted almost imperceptibly, the desert mountains turning pink and then purple as the sun dropped toward the sea. Inside, something settled.

The Kaplans (1989), environmental psychologists who developed attention restoration theory, describe specific environments as offering soft fascination, a gentle hold on attention that allows the mind to rest while remaining engaged. Natural settings, they argue, restore depleted cognitive resources by providing stimulation that requires effort to ignore but minimal effort to attend to. The sea outside my window offers exactly this: something to watch without watching, something to hear without listening, something to receive without reaching.

I opened the windows and let the evening in. Salt air. The distant sound of waves. A dog barking somewhere in town. These sounds asked nothing of me. They existed, and I lived alongside them, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, that felt like enough.

El Acto Radical / The Radical Act

Title: Night Fire, Inner Quiet

Artist Statement

I found this place after most people had gone in.

The courtyard held that particular kind of night silence that is never empty, only softened. Chairs pushed back. Glass tables catching reflections of low light. The ocean somewhere beyond the dark, present but unseen. And in the centre, the fire already burning, as if it had been waiting for someone willing to sit without conversation.

I stood at the edge first, feeling the heat reach outward in small waves. Fire reorganises space differently than daylight does. It draws the body inward. Invites stillness without demanding it. I noticed how the flames moved, steadily consuming what had already been offered. There was something reassuring in that rhythm. Transformation happening without spectacle.

Eventually, I sat.

To accompany the burning. To watch what happens when wood becomes ember, when form gives way to glow. I thought about how many versions of myself had been shaped in similar fires, slow, unseen processes of change that only reveal themselves in hindsight. The courtyard remained quiet. The flames continued their patient work. And for a while, I let the night hold me there, lit just enough to feel present, but held within it.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Arriving alone carries a particular tenderness. There is no one to absorb the moment for you, no one to narrate the experience to, no one whose presence dilutes the intensity of meeting yourself in an unfamiliar place. You stand at the threshold, and you stand there alone, and whatever comes next is yours to receive without mediation.

For women, especially women at midlife, this can feel revolutionary. Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s psychological development, described how women often define themselves through relationships, through care for others, through responsiveness to needs that are rarely their own. To step away from those relationships, even temporarily, can feel like abandonment, like selfishness, like a betrayal of everything we were taught to value.

I think about my mother in Lethbridge, 80 years old, navigating widowhood in the house that still holds her husband’s absence. I think about the colleagues who will cover my responsibilities while I am away. I think about all the ways I have been trained to feel guilty for taking up space, claiming time, and prioritising my own restoration. And then I think about what Audre Lorde (1988) wrote, that caring for myself is an act of political warfare, a refusal to participate in my own depletion.

Tonight, I am practising that refusal. I am letting the bag stay zipped. I am letting the emails wait. I am allowing myself to be tired without apologising for it, without performing recovery before recovery has had a chance to begin.

Descansar es un acto de valentía.

To rest is an act of courage.

Title: Between Palms and Water

Artist Statement

I sat down without planning to stay long.

The chair faced the water, but my body settled first into the pause rather than the view. Two palms stood directly in front of me, their trunks close enough to feel companionable, their fronds catching the last light of the day. Beyond them, the Sea of Cortez moved in its steady, untroubled rhythm. Undramatic. Unclaiming. Just continuing.

What I noticed most was the layering of distance.

My feet resting in the foreground, grounded and still. Sand stretching outward in soft, wind-marked patterns. Trees spaced across the shoreline like quiet sentinels. And then the horizon line, holding everything without urgency. I felt held within those layers, neither separate from the landscape nor fully absorbed by it. Present, but gently so.

There is a particular quality to sitting alone at the edge of day.

The body softens. Breath lengthens. Thought loosens its grip. Nothing is being asked. Nothing needs to be solved. In that moment, I was beyond researching, teaching, producing, or proving. I was simply occupying space, allowing the environment to meet me without expectation.

I stayed longer than I thought I would.

Long enough for the light to shift. Long enough to feel that familiar return to myself that happens when stillness is given time rather than rushed through. The palms remained. The water continued. And I sat there, suspended briefly between land and horizon, aware that presence sometimes arrives quietly, asking only that I remain.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Lo que enseña el agotamiento / What exhaustion teaches

Jet lag is a strange teacher. It strips away the usual defences, the ability to perform wellness even when wellness is absent. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered research on burnout, defines the syndrome as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I recognise myself in that definition more than I would like to admit. I have been running on empty for longer than I knew, and the running itself became invisible, just the way things were, just what the job required.

Tonight, stopped at last, I can feel how tired I actually am. It lives in my bones, in the heaviness of my limbs, in the way my eyes want to close even as my mind keeps scanning for the next thing to do. Stephen Porges (2011), the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, explains that our autonomic nervous system evaluates safety and danger through a process he calls neuroception. The assessment below consciousness shapes our physiological state. My neuroception has been calibrated for threat for so long that even here, in this quiet room by the sea, my body remains on alert, still scanning for turbulence that is no longer present.

It will take more than one evening to convince my nervous system that it is safe. But this evening is where that convincing begins.

Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep

The night has deepened. The sea is audible but invisible now, just the rhythm of waves and the occasional cry of a night bird. In Kamloops, it is late. In Lethbridge, my mother is probably already asleep, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the space beside her filled with faith and memory. I am connected to her across the distance, connected to everyone I love, even as I sit here alone.

This is what I am beginning to understand: solitude is a relational state, shaped by the connections we carry with us even when those we love are far away. Netta Weinstein and colleagues (2021) found, in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, that our sense of connection to others profoundly shapes the experience of being alone. Solitude becomes restorative when it is chosen, when it is bounded, when it exists within a larger web of relationships rather than as exile from connection.

I chose this. I bound it with return tickets and phone calls home, and the knowledge that thirty days will end. I carry my people with me, held in my heart rather than in my hand. And from that holding, I can begin to rest.

Mañana será otro día. Tomorrow will be another day. For now, I am letting this one be enough. I am letting exhaustion teach me what it knows: that I have been carrying too much, that the carrying has cost me, that setting the weight down, even for a moment, is the first step toward remembering what it feels like to be whole.

He llegado.

I have arrived.

Por ahora, eso es todo lo que necesito hacer.

For now, that is all I need to do.

Title: Elegance in Impermanence

Artist Statement

She was already standing there when I walked by.

Umbrella lifted. Dress falling neatly to the ground. There was something composed about her posture, as if she had paused rather than been placed. I noticed the pink first. Soft. Careful. Almost celebratory against the stone behind her.

What stayed with me was the contrast.

Bone and colour. Stillness and personality. The small details, the hat, the purse, the way she seemed dressed for presence rather than disappearance. Honest, rather than morbid. A quiet reminder that identity and expression persist past the finite edges of a life.

I stood there longer than I expected.

Simply noticing. The humour, the dignity, the gentleness within the figure. A simple moment of being reminded that impermanence and beauty can exist in the same space.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

References

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

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

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.

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I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.

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.

The Space Between Five and Nine

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.

A Vignette on Staying Anyway

Title: Portable Colour

Artist Statement

It travels with me.

As permission, beyond equipment. The palette sits quietly on the table, its circular wells holding pigments that feel less like supplies and more like emotional registers. Reds that hold heat. Blues that steady breath. Yellows that carry small, stubborn forms of optimism. I open it when the moment calls. Its presence alone is enough to remind me that expression remains available when language recedes.

What strikes me most is its containment.

Each colour held in its own boundary, yet arranged in relationship to the others. No hierarchy. No single tone dominating the field. It mirrors something I am relearning within myself, that emotions can coexist without needing resolution. That intensity and calm, grief and curiosity, fatigue and wonder can sit side by side without cancelling one another out.

In the context of this journey, the palette becomes less about making images and more about making space. A small, portable landscape of possibility. Evidence that creativity thrives even without perfect conditions. Only willingness. Only presence.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I have learned to stay anyway.

Before Dawn (1995)

The doughnut shop opened at five. I arrived at four-thirty to start the coffee, to arrange the trays, to tie on the apron that smelled of yeast and sugar and the particular exhaustion of people who work before the sun rises. I was twenty-five years old. I had three children at home. I had textbooks in my bag.

Between customers, I would pull out whatever I was reading that week. Introduction to Political Science. Organizational Behaviour. The pages grew soft from handling, spotted with fingerprints I carried from my shift into my afternoon class, and my afternoon class began. I had no idea then that I was living a paradox: surrounded by people all morning, profoundly alone in what I was trying to become. No one in my family had gone to university. No one I worked with understood why I would spend money we could barely spare on books I read standing up behind a counter at five in the morning.

I think now about what I was learning in those hours before dawn. Beyond the content of the textbooks, though, that mattered. I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos. I was learning that solitude differs from simple aloneness. You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose. You can be physically alone and feel accompanied by something larger than yourself. The space between five and nine, between the first customer and the last page I could read before class, became a kind of practice. I lacked language for it then. I do now. I call it alonetude: the contemplative, chosen engagement with solitude that allows you to be genuinely present to yourself rather than merely by yourself.

I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos.

The Long Middle

Years passed. I completed my degrees. I built a career contract teaching at Thompson Rivers University, standing in front of classrooms instead of behind counters, talking about leadership, ethics, and organizational behaviour to students who reminded me of myself. Some of them worked night shifts before my morning classes. Some of them calculated whether they could afford both tuition and groceries. I saw them, because I had been them.

But the uncertainty never fully lifted. For seventeen years, I have worked as a contract faculty member. Each semester brings the question of whether I will be offered work. Each contract is temporary. I have applied for permanent positions more times than I can count and watched others receive what I was told remained just out of my reach. The institution depends on my flexibility, my expertise, and my willingness to show up semester after semester without guarantees. I have learned to live in the space between being essential and being disposable. I have learned that staying anyway is its own form of practice.

When people ask about my research on precarity and belonging in higher education, I sometimes want to say, “I am living this from the inside.” I am living it. The international students I research, the contract faculty I represent, and my children, who need me to show up every single day, regardless of what next semester holds. We are all navigating institutions that claim to welcome us while refusing to secure our place within them.

You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose.

Title: Where Light Breaks Open

Artist Statement

It began with colour before it began with form.

The yellow arrived first. Unplanned. Released. It spread across the page with a warmth that felt less like sunlight and more like emergence. Around it, blues and greens moved in to hold it, to give it somewhere to rest, The horizon line came later, almost as an afterthought, a quiet gesture to ground what was otherwise dissolving.

What I notice now is the permeability of everything.

No edge holds for long. Colour bleeds into colour. Water becomes sky. Sky becomes field. Even the darker mass on the right, tree or memory or shelter, participates in the landscape rather than interrupting it. This is what happens when I paint from sensation rather than observation. The world appears less fixed. More relational. More felt than seen.

In this way, the piece documents a state rather than a place.

A moment where brightness felt held, where saturation was safe to carry. Where expression moved ahead of interpretation. I released the outcome. I let the pigments find their own conversations across the paper.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Thirty Days on the Sea of Cortez

Today, I stood on a malecón in Loreto, Mexico, watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez. I was three thousand kilometres from home, alone in a way I had forgotten since those early mornings behind the doughnut counter. Thirty days stretched before me. No students to teach. No meetings to attend. No one needed me to hold their world together. Just myself and the question of what I would find there.

What I found was presence. I began to understand that all those years of navigating precarity, of staying anyway when institutions offered no guarantees, had taught me something learned only that way. They had taught me how to be with uncertainty. They had taught me that safety lives in the felt sense, separate from the absence of risk, that you can meet whatever comes. They had taught me that meaning is woven into the walking itself.

I came to Loreto with a word: alonetude. This is a word I coined to describe the in-between place of loneliness and solitude. It names the experience of being genuinely present to yourself in solitude, of choosing to be alone in a way that restores rather than depletes. It requires four things: intentional choice, felt safety, present-moment awareness, and meaning integration. All four must be present. You cannot think your way into alonetude if your nervous system is screaming danger. You cannot force meaning onto empty time. But when the conditions align, something opens. You remember that you have always been enough, even when the world told you otherwise.

Title: Held in Stillness

Artist Statement

I noticed the posture before I noticed the figure.

Hands pressed together. Head slightly lifted. In pause, rather than performance. The stone carried a weight of quiet that felt older than the building behind it, older even than the palms rising into the sky. It stood there without announcement, without instruction, simply holding its position between ground and air.

What stayed with me was the gesture of inwardness.

Prayer, perhaps. Or reflection. Or the kind of listening that happens when words are no longer necessary. The surface of the sculpture is rough, almost weathered, yet the stance is gentle. It receives attention slowly, if one is willing to stop long enough.

In that moment, I felt my own body respond.

Shoulders lowering. Breath slowing. A subtle mirroring of the stillness in front of me. Recognition, rather than formal reverence. A reminder that quiet postures carry their own forms of strength. That stillness, too, can be an active state of being.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

Some things you carry with you. Some practices ask only for willingness. The conditions are secondary.

Staying Anyway

I hold what next semester brings with open hands. I hold whether the applications I have submitted will lead to interviews, to offers, to the security I have worked toward for decades. What I know is that I have learned to stay anyway. I have learned that the space between five and nine, between uncertainty and meaning, between isolation and alonetude, is where the real work happens. It is where we become the people we are trying to be, shaped by the precarity and carried through it.

The doughnut shop is long gone. But I still wake before dawn sometimes, still reach for whatever I am reading, still feel that particular presence that comes from being alone with your own becoming. Some things you carry with you. Some practices require nothing more than attention. They need only the willingness to stay, to pay attention, to believe that the doors of education are worth the cost of walking through them.

I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.

Title: Shared Horizon

Artist Statement

They stood on the same rock but faced different directions.

One turned outward toward the open water, body lifted, alert to movement beyond the shoreline. The other remained lower, closer to the curve of the stone, angled inward as if watching the rhythm of the waves meeting land. Two postures. Two orientations. One shared ground beneath their feet.

What held my attention was the balance between them.

There was no sense of separation, even in their difference. No competition for vantage point. Just a quiet coexisting. A reminder that presence rarely requires alignment. That companionship can exist without mirroring. That standing beside another means nothing about looking the same way.

I watched them longer than I expected.

The water moved constantly around the rock, never still, yet they remained steady within it. It felt familiar to me, this act of holding one’s place while everything else shifts. A small lesson offered without instruction. Stability as groundedness shared, across difference.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

I am still here.

I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.