There is a particular kind of recognition that happens when you encounter a book that seems to have been written for you, even though the author has never heard your name.
Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (2008) arrived in my hands on Day Four of my thirty-day retreat in Loreto, Mexico, and I felt, for the first time since arriving, that I was accompanied in what I was attempting, if only across time. Maitland fell silent in her late forties, after her marriage dissolved and her children grew into their own lives. I came to solitude at sixty, after decades of caregiving, teaching, committee work, and the relentless noise of being needed.
She walked into the moors of Scotland and the deserts of Sinai seeking something beyond language. I stepped onto a malecón in Baja California Sur, watching pelicans dive into water the colour of jade, trying to understand who I might become if I stopped performing the person everyone expected me to be. We are separated by continents, by decades, by the particular textures of our lives. And yet, reading her words, I felt the shock of kinship that comes when someone articulates what you have only half-known about yourself.
What draws me most powerfully to Maitland’s work is her insistence that chosen silence differs fundamentally from imposed silence (Maitland, 2008). This distinction sits at the heart of what I am calling alonetude, an intentional, contemplative orientation toward solitude characterized by volition, presence, meaning, and felt safety. Maitland (2008) argues that the quality of silence depends entirely on whether one has entered it freely or been forced into it against one’s will. Solitary confinement destroys the psyche; a hermitage can heal it. The difference lies in the presence of choice rather than the absence of sound or company.
I think of my mother, now eighty, widowed and living alone in Lethbridge, her solitude arrived at through loss rather than choice. I think of the years I spent in relationships where I was technically accompanied but profoundly unseen. And I think of these thirty days in Loreto, where every morning I wake in a casita that holds only my breath, my books, my slowly settling self, and I know that I am here because I chose to be here. That choice, Maitland helps me understand, is everything. It transforms absence into presence, emptiness into fullness, aloneness into something that, with patience and courage, might become its own kind of home.
Maitland (2008) also names something I have struggled to articulate: the cultural suspicion that attaches to women who choose solitude. She observes that female aloneness has historically been constructed as dangerous, improper, or indicative of failure. A man alone on a mountain is a philosopher.
A woman alone in a cottage is a witch, a madwoman, or a woman whom no one wanted. When I told friends I was taking thirty days in Mexico by myself, I watched their faces cycle through concern, confusion, and something that looked uncomfortably like pity. “Will you be lonely?” they asked, as though loneliness were the inevitable destination of any woman who steps outside the orbit of others’ needs.
Maitland’s work gives me language to push back against this assumption. She demonstrates, through both scholarly analysis and lived experience, that a woman can choose solitude because she has succeeded at knowing herself well enough to understand what she requires. What I need, it turns out, is this: mornings on the malecón, the gentle pull of the natural world of waves against stone, the slow unravelling of decades of noise, and the quiet company of a book written by a woman who walked this path before me and left breadcrumbs I am only now learning to follow.
The Book of Silence
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
I have been staring at the sea for two hours. Maybe three. Time has become slippery here, something I can no longer hold in my hands. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (1989) wrote about fascination, the effortless attention that natural environments invite, a quality of engagement that restores rather than depletes. The sea fascinates without demanding. It holds my gaze without asking anything in return.
Today I permitted myself to do nothing. I said it out loud this morning, standing in the kitchen of the casita with coffee warming my palms: Hoy, nada. Today, nothing. The words felt dangerous, like a confession. Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, argues that rest is an act of political resistance, a deliberate refusal to participate in systems that equate human value with productivity, and that the recuperative power of rest is itself a form of collective defiance. I am trying to believe her.
El Mar y Sus Preguntas / The Sea and Its Questions
The Sea of Cortez is a particular blue I have never seen before. It shifts throughout the day, turquoise in the morning light, deeper sapphire by noon, silver-grey as evening approaches. This is what the Kaplans (1989) call the gentle pull of the natural world, a gentle hold on attention that leaves space for reflection, distinct from the hard fascination of screens and urgent notifications that dominate modern life. I watch the water change, and my thoughts change with it, drifting from one thing to another with no clear direction.
I think about my mother, who died eleven years ago and whom I still miss in ways that surprise me. Grief, writes Miriam Greenspan (2003), is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to suppress or transcend rather than honour. She argues that grief carries wisdom if we can bear to feel it fully, that the only path through difficult emotion is directly into it rather than around it (Greenspan, 2003). Here, with nothing to distract me, grief surfaces like sea glass, worn smooth by time but still present, still catching light.
I think about the students I have taught over nineteen years, wondering where they are now, whether they are happy. I think about the papers I should be grading, the emails I should be answering, and then I remember: I am here to stop shoulding myself.
Debería. I should. The word haunts me even in Spanish. Ryan and Deci (2017), in their foundational work on self-determination theory, distinguish between autonomous motivation, acting from genuine interest and valued choice, and controlled motivation, acting from internal or external pressure. The voice of should is the voice of controlled motivation, and I have let it run my life for decades.
El mar no juzga. Solo recibe.
The sea receives, without judgment.
Pensamientos Sueltos / Loose Thoughts
My mind wanders. This is what minds do when you stop giving them tasks. Neuroscientists call this the default mode network, the brain regions that activate when external demands release their hold (Buckner et al., 2008). Far from idle, this network supports self-reflection, autobiographical memory, and the imagining of the future. The wandering mind is working, just on different problems than our productivity culture recognizes.
I think about the word retirement and how it sounds like something is being put away, stored in a closet, made invisible. I am 60. I am approaching the end of one kind of life and the beginning of another. Dan McAdams (2001), the narrative psychologist, writes that identity is an ongoing story we tell ourselves, a personal myth that integrates past and present into a coherent sense of self. Sitting here watching the waves, I wonder who I will be when I am no longer someone who works. The question has no answer yet. Perhaps that is why I keep asking it.
I think about all the women I know who are tired. Tired in their bones, exhausted in their souls, tired in ways that sleep alone cannot remedy. Sharon Blackie (2019) writes about the “long soul” of women at midlife, the accumulated weight of decades spent tending to others, and the fierce necessity of reclaiming time for oneself. We carry so much. We have been carrying for so long. I wonder if any of them are sitting somewhere right now, staring at water, permitting themselves to rest.
I think about the word enough to determine whether I have done enough. Whether I am enough. Brené Brown (2010) names this the voice of scarcity, the cultural message that we are never sufficient, that worthiness must be earned through endless striving. Brown (2010) describes wholehearted living as the practice of showing up in one’s own life from a foundation of inherent worth rather than conditional approval. I am 60 years old and still learning that my right to exist requires no earning.
The sea offers no answers. It just keeps moving, wave after wave, patient and indifferent and somehow, because of that, kind.
El Cuerpo Descansa / The Body Rests
I have done almost nothing today, and my body is grateful. I can feel it in the way my shoulders have dropped, the way my jaw has unclenched. Stephen Porges (2011) calls this the shift from the body’s alert state, the mobilized state of fight or flight, to genuine safety engagement, the calm alertness that emerges when the nervous system perceives safety. Small surrenders. The body knows how to rest if we let it. The problem is the letting.
I ate breakfast slowly this morning. Papaya, yogurt, and strong coffee. Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994), who brought mindfulness practice to Western medicine, writes about mindful eating, the simple act of being fully present with food. I tasted each bite instead of eating while scrolling, eating while working, eating while planning what comes next. Just eating. Just tasting. Just being a body receiving nourishment.
Qué lujo, I thought. What a luxury. And then I felt sad, because eating slowly should be ordinary, should be the baseline of a human life, and instead it feels like an extravagance I have to travel thousands of kilometres to access. This is what Hersey (2022) means when she writes that rest has become a privilege rather than a right, a commodity rather than a necessity.
Lo Que Emerge / What Surfaces
When you stop moving, things rise. Memories. Feelings. The sediment you have been outrunning for years. Greenspan (2003) proposes that grief, fear, and despair function as messengers, uncomfortable but purposeful signals that carry information about what we value, what we have lost, and what needs attention in our lives. Solitude creates the conditions for these messages to be received.
Today, I remembered a conversation with a colleague from years ago. She told me I worked too hard, that I would burn out if I kept going at that pace. I smiled and thanked her, and changed nothing. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered burnout research, defines burnout as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I wore my exhaustion like a badge, proof of my dedication, evidence of my worth. I had no way to know then that worth is birthright, that existing requires no proof of value.
I am learning this now, at 60, staring at the sea. Better late than never, I suppose. Better here than nowhere at all. Weinstein et al. (2021), in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, found that older adults often experience solitude as more restorative than younger people, having learned, perhaps through accumulated wisdom, how to be at peace in their own company.
A pelican dove into the water while I was writing that last sentence. It emerged with a fish in its beak, shook the water from its feathers, and flew on. Life continuing. The ordinary miracle of survival.
Estoy aquí. Eso es suficiente.
I am here. That is enough.
Al Atardecer / Toward Evening
The light is changing now. Golden hour, photographers call it. The mountains across the bay have turned pink and purple, colours I would dismiss as exaggerated if I saw them in a painting. But here they are, real and impossible, demanding to be witnessed. This witnessing, this full presence to beauty, is what Abraham Maslow (1964) called a peak experience, a moment of heightened awareness that transcends ordinary consciousness.
I walked to the malecón this afternoon, to move my body, just to feel my feet on solid ground. An old man was fishing from the seawall. He nodded at me, and I nodded back. No words necessary. Just two people sharing space at the edge of the water, each lost in our own thoughts. Nguyen et al. (2018) found that self-chosen solitude supports learning to settle the nervous system, the capacity to modulate emotional states from within rather than seeking external distraction. The old fisherman seemed to understand this intuitively.
¿Qué busca? I wanted to ask him. What are you looking for? But I suspect he would have turned the question back to me, and I am still working on my answer.
Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep
I accomplished nothing today. I produced nothing. I checked nothing off any list.
And yet.
I breathed. I watched. I let my mind wander without yanking it back to productivity. I sat with myself, which is harder than it sounds when you have spent decades avoiding that very thing. Long and Averill (2003) argue that the capacity for solitude is a skill, something that can be cultivated through practice. Today was practice. Tomorrow will be practice too.
Mañana, quizás, haré más. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will do more. Or perhaps I will do precisely this again. Maybe this is the work I came here to do: the slow, invisible labour of learning to be still what Robert Nash (2004) calls me-search, the deep dive into personal experience that precedes scholarly understanding. I am doing the me-search now, though it looks like nothing at all.
El mar sigue respirando.
The sea keeps breathing.
Yo también.
So do I.
Con cariño,
Amy
Loreto, Day Three
Translation Note
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Blackie, S. (2019). If women rose rooted: A life-changing journey to authenticity and belonging. September Publishing.
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.
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
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.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. Hyperion.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
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
Maslow, A. H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Ohio State University Press.
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
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nguyen, T.-V. T., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Solitude as an approach to learning to settle the nervous system. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 92–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733073
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.
Weinstein, N., Nguyen, T.-V., & Hansen, H. (2021). What time alone offers: Narratives of solitude from adolescence to older adulthood. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 714518. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714518
Academic Lens
Being lost in the blue, absorbed into the sea and sky, is an encounter with what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls flow in its most elemental form: total absorption that dissolves the boundary between self and environment. In the quiet way nature restores us theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989), this state of the gentle pull of the natural world is the primary mechanism of psychological recovery, the mind neither straining nor idle, but gently held. The bilingual title "perdida" (lost/feminine) also carries a gendered valence: a woman permitting herself to be directionless is a quietly transgressive act.
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.
My mother is 80 years old. She now lives alone in an old folks’ home in Lethbridge, Alberta. I am sitting on a terrace in Mexico, watching the Sea of Cortez turn from blue to silver in the fading light, and I am thinking about her hands.
She has always had capable hands. Hands that kneaded bread dough on Sunday mornings, the kitchen warm with yeast and CBC radio playing softly in the background. Hands that crotched quilts for babies born, each stitch a prayer, each pattern chosen with care. Hands that combed my hair before church, her fingers quick and certain. The spirit of God’s hands, I think, though I hold that comparison with uncertainty, standing outside her faith and the faith I was raised in. Perhaps they are simply mother hands, shaped by decades of service, of showing up, of being useful to everyone but herself.
Recuerdos de Su Cocina / Memories of Her Kitchen
I remember standing on a step stool beside her at the counter, learning to roll pierogi. “Not too much flour,” she would say, her hands guiding mine. “You want it tender, not tough.” I was seven, maybe eight. The kitchen smelled of potatoes and cheese, and outside, the wind was blowing snow against the windows. I felt safe in that kitchen, in the warmth of the oven, in the certainty of her presence beside me.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), the humanist geographer, writes about topophilia, the affective bond between people and place. My mother’s kitchen was my first topophilic space, a location where I learned that love could be measured in teaspoons and rolling pins, in the quiet act of making something nourishing with your hands. I carry that kitchen with me still, even here, 2,800 kilometres away, watching a sea she has never seen.
She taught me to can plums in late summer, the kitchen steaming, jars lined up on the counter like soldiers. We would work for hours, cutting and slicing and packing fruit into hot glass, the syrup sweet and golden. “This will taste like sunshine in January,” she would say, and she was right. Those jars, lined up in the cold room, were promises against the long, cold winter. They were her way of saying, “I will take care of you.” I will make sure you have enough.
El amor de una madre vive en lo que prepara.
A mother’s love lives in what she prepares.
La Fe de Mi Madre / My Mother’s Faith
She raised me in the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a faith I no longer practice but whose rhythms still live somewhere deep in my body. I remember the scratch of my Sunday dress against my legs, the smell of the Kingdom Hall a mix of old hymnals and furniture polish and the faint sweetness of old lady sweat. I remember my mother’s voice beside me, singing hymns she knew by heart, her alto steady and sure.
She believed, and still believes, in something with certainty as she later switched to the Mormon Church. I never saw “her God” in the way she did. For her, the gospel is as real as the mountains outside my home in British Columbia, as solid as the bread she bakes, as certain as the sun rising over the prairie. She knows that families are eternal, that her late husband waits for her beyond the veil, that God has a plan, and she is part of it. I envy her this certainty sometimes, the way it holds her steady through grief and loss and the long silence of widowhood.
I left the Church in my teens, quietly, without announcement, the way one might slip out of a party before the host notices. It was quiet, undramatic. There was no single moment of rupture, no crisis of faith that announced itself with thunder. It was more like a slow loosening, a gradual recognition that I no longer believed what I had been taught to believe, that the structure that held my mother so securely felt to me like a house I had outgrown.
Sandra Bloom (2007) writes about ambiguous loss, defined as grief that accompanies losses that are unclear, unresolved, and without the finality of death. I wonder sometimes if my mother grieves the daughter she thought she was raising, the one who would marry in the temple and bear children in the covenant and sit beside her in the celestial kingdom. I am still her daughter, but I am also a kind of ghost of the daughter she imagined. This is a loss we hold in silence, a room in our relationship we have agreed to keep closed.
Pequeñas Bondades / Small Kindnesses
And yet she loves me. This I know. I know it in the way she asks about my work, even when my work puzzles her, her questions sincere and slightly bewildered: “So you are still teaching at that university?” Yes, Mom. Still teaching. Her way of showing love is more in spirit than in words or deeds.
Gary Chapman (1992) popularized the concept of love languages, the idea that people express and receive love in different ways: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. My mother’s love language has always been acts of service, the doing of things, the making and mending and bringing of soup through snowstorms. She rarely says “I love you” directly, but she says it in every jar of peaches, every quilt, every four-hour drive through dangerous weather.
El amor no siempre tiene palabras. A veces tiene sopa de pollo.
Love finds other vessels. Sometimes it has chicken soup.
Viuda / Widow
Her husband died two years ago. They had been married for only a few years, long enough that she had learned the shape of his presence: the way he took his soda, the sound of his wheelchair in the hallway, the weight of his hand on her leg as he sat next to her.
I think about her alone in that apartment, moving through rooms that still hold his absence. The recliner where he sat to watch the news. The side of the bed that is still, somehow, his side, even though he will never lie there again. Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is one of the dark emotions, those feelings our culture teaches us to rush through rather than honour. For Greenspan, grief is what happens to love when it encounters loss, it is connection rendered as sorrow, and it carries within it the very bond it mourns.
My mother’s faith offers her a framework for this sorrow: the belief that marriage is eternal, that she will see him again, that death is a temporary separation rather than a final goodbye. I hold a different view, but I am grateful she has it. It gives her something to hold in the long nights, something to reach for when the house feels too quiet, and the bed feels too empty, and the grief feels too heavy to bear alone.
When I call her on Sunday evenings, she tells me about the temple sessions and the neighbour who helped her with the puzzle. She tells me about the weather, about the cat who visits her backyard, and about the book she is reading from the church library. She keeps to herself the moments when she reaches for him in the night and finds only empty sheets. She keeps to herself the crying in the shower, where no one can hear. These things I imagine, because I am her daughter, because I know her, because some things carry their meaning without words.
Lo Que Más Recuerdo / What I Remember Most
I remember her hands in the garden, turning soil, planting seeds, pulling weeds with a determination that seemed almost fierce. She grew tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, and every summer we would spend long evenings in the backyard, the light golden and slanted, the smell of earth and green things all around us. “Everything needs tending,” she told me once, her fingers in the dirt, a tomato plant cupped gently in her palm. “Gardens, families, faith. You have to show up and do the work.”
After she left my dad in 1977, I remember her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, paying bills by the light of a single lamp, her forehead creased with worry she tried to hide from us children. I had no way to understand then what I understand now: how hard she worked, how much she sacrificed, how many of her own dreams she set aside so that we could have enough. I wonder what she wanted to be before she became a mother. I wonder if she remembers.
I remember the way she cried when she missed my grade eight graduation, her face wet with loss and somehow also sad, almost knowingly, that she had to choose to put food on the table over celebration. For years, I made her feel guilty about this, but as a parent, only I can now understand how challenging life can be as a single mother. Love and loss are always tangled together; mothers carry a grief their children cannot fully see.
Judith Herman (1992), in her landmark work on psychological trauma, writes about the importance of witnessing, the act of truly seeing another person’s experience and honouring it as real. I want to witness my mother. I want to see beyond the capable hands and the Sunday faith and the birthday cards that arrive on time, but also the woman beneath all that doing, the woman who had dreams before she had children, who carries losses she has never spoken aloud, who has spent eighty years being useful and may never have learned that she was allowed to simply be.
Detrás de cada madre hay una mujer que olvidamos ver.
Behind every mother is a woman we forget to see.
La Distancia Entre Nosotras / The Distance Between Us
There are 2,800 kilometres between Loreto and Lethbridge. I looked it up. It would take thirty hours to drive, if you could drive across the Sea of Cortez, which, of course, you cannot. The distance feels larger than kilometres can measure: the distance between faith and its absence, between the life she imagined for me and the life I have made, between who she raised me to be and who I have become.
Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s moral development, argued that women often define themselves through relationships, through connection, through care for others. She called this the ethic of care, a moral framework centred on responsibility and responsiveness rather than abstract principles of justice. My mother embodies this ethic. She has spent eighty years caring for her children, her husbands, her clients, anyone who needed a casserole, a listening ear, or a quilt stitched with prayers. I wonder if she knows how to care for herself. I wonder if anyone ever taught her that she was allowed.
I am here in Mexico learning to rest, learning to be still, learning to believe that I am enough without producing, without performing, without earning my place. And I wonder: did I learn my relentlessness from her? Did she learn it from her mother? How many generations of women have run themselves ragged in service to others, believing that rest was selfishness, that stillness was sin, that their worth depended on their usefulness?
Una Carta Que No Enviaré / A Letter Left Unsent
Querida Mamá,
I am sitting by the sea in Mexico, thinking about you. I am thinking about your hands and your faith and the way you have always shown love through doing. I am thinking about the perogies you taught me to roll, the plums we canned in the summer heat, the quilt you drove through a snowstorm to bring me.
I am thinking about how tired you must be. How tired you have always been. How you never learned to rest because no one ever told you that rest was allowed. I wish I could give you what I am learning here: the knowledge that you are enough, that you have always been enough, that your worth was never something you had to earn.
I am sorry I left the Church. I am sorry I cannot be the daughter you imagined. I am sorry for all the silences between us, the questions we leave unasked, the truths we keep hidden to protect each other. But I am grateful, too. Grateful that you loved me anyway. Grateful that you still call on Sundays. Grateful that your faith gives you comfort even though I cannot share it.
I see you, Mom. I see the woman behind the capable hands, behind the Sunday faith, behind the chicken soup and the quilts. I see how much you have given. I see how much it costs. I wish I had told you sooner. I am telling you now, even though you will never read this letter.
Te quiero, Mamá. Siempre.
This letter will stay here. James Pennebaker (1997), whose research on expressive writing demonstrated the healing power of putting painful experiences into words, found that writing about difficult emotions can improve both psychological and physical health, even if the writing is never shared. The writing itself is the medicine. I am writing my way toward understanding, toward compassion, toward a peace I am still learning to name.
Esta Noche / Tonight
The sun has set. The sea is dark now, just the sound of waves and the occasional cry of a seabird. In Lethbridge, it is already late. My mother is probably in bed, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the empty space beside her filled with faith and memory and the shape of a husband who is no longer there.
I will call her tomorrow. I will ask about the church, the neighbour and whether she has been sleeping well. I will keep this essay to myself, keep the memories I have been turning over like stones, about the letter I wrote and will never send. Some things are better held gently, privately, like a prayer offered in silence.
But tonight, across 2,800 kilometres of desert and mountain and sea, I am holding her in my heart. I am thanking her for the hands that shaped me, even as I am learning to shape myself differently. I am forgiving us both for the silences, for the distances, for the love that has always struggled to find its words. I am seeing her, finally, fully: as my mother and as a woman: tired and faithful and braver than I ever knew, standing in her kitchen, rolling out pie crust, teaching me without words that love is something you make with your hands.
Ella es mi madre.
She is my mother.
Y yo soy su hija.
And I am her daughter.
Eso es todo. Eso es suficiente.
That is everything. That is enough.
References
Bloom, S. L. (2007). Loss, trauma, and resilience: Therapeutic work with ambiguous loss. Psychiatric Services, 58(3), 419-420.
Chapman, G. (1992). The five love languages: How to express heartfelt commitment to your mate. Northfield Publishing.
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
Google. (2026). Mi Madre, a la distancia [Audio podcast episode]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
Translation Note
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
ACADEMIC LENS
This bilingual elegy for the complexity of maternal relationships engages what Menakem (2017) calls intergenerational somatic transmission: the ways that unresolved nervous system patterns pass between generations through attachment, modelling, and the implicit choreography of family life. The grief described here is what Boss (1999) extends beyond personal loss, terms ambiguous loss: mourning a relationship that remains physically present but emotionally unresolved, or that exists in a form different from what was needed or imagined. Hochschild’s (2012) concept of emotional labour applies here in a particular way: the lifelong management of one’s own emotional responses within complex family systems, the careful calibration of need, disappointment, and love that caregiving dynamics require. The distance between continents that frames this reflection also enacts what Tuan (1977) calls topophilia in reverse: the way geographical separation from formative places and relationships illuminates their emotional weight precisely through their absence. Writing this reflection in both Spanish and English performs Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands methodology: moving between tongues to access the full complexity of a relationship that neither language alone can hold.
Understanding Sleep Architecture and What It Requires for Healing
Title: Desert Rose
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
To understand why last night matters so much, why one night of unbroken sleep marks such an important moment in this healing process, I need to explain how sleep actually works. I came to grasp this fully only after reading the research. Sleep is layered, active work. It is far more than “being unconscious” for seven or eight hours. Sleep is a process, a carefully organized progression through distinct stages that unfolds in a specific order throughout the night. Researchers refer to this pattern as sleep architecture (Walker, 2017).
Here is how it works. When we sleep, we move through stages. There are stages of light sleep, which researchers call Stage 1 and Stage 2 non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep for short. Then there is deep sleep, the third stage of non-REM sleep. Scientists also call this slow-wave sleep because, when they measure brain activity during this stage with an electroencephalogram, they see large, slow waves. Finally, there is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, named for the rapid eye movements that occur during this stage, even though the body is asleep (Walker, 2017).
We cycle through all stages all night. Instead, we repeatedly cycle through all of these stages. One complete cycle, from light sleep through deep sleep to REM sleep and back, takes about ninety minutes. A good night’s sleep involves completing four to six of these cycles, which is why we need seven to nine hours of sleep (Walker, 2017).
What I am learning is that each stage does something different and important for the body and mind. Light sleep is a transitional state. It eases us from being awake into deeper states. During this stage, our heart rate slows, our breathing steadies, and we begin to disconnect from what is happening around us. Deep slow-wave sleep is when the body undergoes physical repair. This is when tissues heal, the immune system strengthens, growth hormones are released, and our brains store the factual information we learned during the day, the kind of memory we can consciously recall later (Walker, 2017). REM sleep does different work. This is when we process emotions, when our brains integrate new learning with what we already know, when creative problem-solving happens, and when our psychological equilibrium gets maintained (Germain, 2013; Walker, 2017).
When sleep gets fragmented, when we wake up frequently or leave cycles incomplete, we miss essential processes. The body is unable to finish its maintenance work. This is what had been happening to me for months.
What the research taught me, and what my own body confirmed over these nine days, is that this architecture requires a specific function of the nervous system. Progression through these stages occurs only when the nervous system is in a particular state. Stephen Porges (2011, 2022), who developed a model of how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, calls this the state of genuine safety and connection. I will explain what this means because it is central to understanding what changed last night.
The genuine safety complex is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is associated with rest and restoration. Porges describes it as the most recent evolutionary branch of this system, unique to mammals. When we are in this state of genuine safety and connection, we feel safe. Our bodies can engage socially with others. Porges calls this “mammalian calm,” the state that allows for rest, restoration, intimacy, and even play. You can recognize this state in the body: the heart rate steadies with healthy variability, breathing is calm, the facial muscles relax, and we can make comfortable eye contact with others. And critically for sleep, in this state, we can surrender to unconsciousness without our nervous system remaining vigilant, constantly scanning for threats (Porges, 2011, 2022).
Title: Crown of Thorns
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The problem is that when the nervous system remains in a defensive state, sleep deteriorates. There are two main defensive states. One is the body’s alert state, commonly known as the fight-or-flight response. When this system activates, heart rate increases, cortisol rises, muscles tense, and alertness heightens. The body is preparing to fight or run. The other defensive state is dorsal vagal shutdown, also known as the freeze or collapse response. This is when the body immobilizes, when we dissociate, when we metaphorically “play dead” because the threat feels overwhelming (Porges, 2011, 2022). When the nervous system stays in either of these defensive states, sleep becomes fragmented, shallow, and non-restorative (Germain, 2013; Mellman et al., 2002). The state of constant alertness, always scanning for potential threats, prevents the deep relaxation that complete sleep cycles require. The nervous system resists fully surrendering to sleep because, below conscious awareness, it assesses that doing so would leave us vulnerable to harm.
The research on trauma makes this relationship very clear. People diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, show severely disrupted sleep across multiple measures. Their sleep architecture looks broken. They obtain significantly less slow-wave sleep, resulting in less physical restoration. Their REM sleep is highly fragmented, compromising emotional processing. They wake frequently during the night, driven by what researchers call autonomic the body stuck in high alert, the nervous system’s persistent scanning for threat operating even during sleep (Germain, 2013; Mellman et al., 2002; van der Kolk, 2014).
But here is what matters for understanding my own experience: diagnosable PTSD is unnecessary to experience these patterns. Chronic occupational stress, particularly the sustained and unpredictable stress of precarious employment, produces remarkably similar patterns through the same underlying mechanism (Åkerstedt, 2006; Lallukka et al., 2010). Economic precarity, the sustained threat to livelihood and financial security, generates the same kind of autonomic the body stuck in high alert that traumatic events produce. The nervous system cannot distinguish between different types of threats to survival. It responds to the pattern of threat rather than to the specific content.
When I say I slept through the night, I mean that my autonomic nervous system maintained a state of genuine safety and connection, that state of felt safety, across multiple ninety-minute sleep cycles for seven consecutive hours. My body held the physiological state associated with safety long enough to complete the full restorative architecture of sleep. This is something my system has been unable to accomplish for longer than I want to admit.
Title: Desert Rose
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Nine days. Nine complete cycles of consistent environmental cues, predictable daily rhythms, and the systematic absence of things my nervous system reads as threats. That is what it took for my nervous system to shift its baseline assessment from “unsafe, must remain vigilant” to “safe enough to rest completely.”
Table 1
Sleep Architecture and Autonomic States: Physiological Functions, Indicators, and Impacts of Disruption
Sleep Stage or Physiological State
Category
Description and Biological Function
Physical Indicators
Impact of Disruption or Stress
Key Research Citations
Source
Stage 1 & 2 Non-REM
Non-REM Sleep (Light Sleep)
Transitional states that ease the body from wakefulness into deeper sleep and progressive disconnection from the environment, supporting essential maintenance processes and preparation for restorative sleep.
Fragmentation disrupts maintenance processes and prevents progression into deeper restorative sleep cycles.
Walker (2017)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
Stage 3 Slow-wave Sleep
Non-REM Sleep (Deep Sleep)
Primary stage for physical repair, tissue healing, immune strengthening, and growth hormone release; supports consolidation of factual and recallable memories.
Large, slow brain waves measured by EEG (delta waves).
Loss of physical restoration; markedly reduced in individuals experiencing chronic stress or PTSD.
Walker (2017); Germain (2013); Mellman et al. (2002); van der Kolk (2014)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
REM Sleep
Rapid Eye Movement Sleep
Processes emotions, integrates new learning with prior knowledge, supports creativity, and maintains psychological balance.
Rapid eye movements with muscle atonia; variable heart rate and breathing.
Fragmentation impairs emotional processing and memory integration; commonly interrupted by autonomic the body stuck in high alert in PTSD.
Walker (2017); Germain (2013); Mellman et al. (2002)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
a state of genuine safety and connection
Parasympathetic State (Rest and Restoration)
State of felt safety that enables rest, social engagement, and the capacity to surrender to unconsciousness without vigilance.
Steady heart rate with healthy variability; calm breathing; relaxed facial muscles; ease in eye contact.
Inability to sustain this state interrupts restorative sleep cycles and shifts the system into defensive states.
Porges (2011, 2022)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
the body’s alert state
Defensive State (Fight-or-Flight)
Mobilization response to perceived threat, maintaining alertness and readiness for action.
Produces fragmented, non-restorative sleep and prevents the deep relaxation required for full sleep architecture.
Porges (2011, 2022); Germain (2013); Mellman et al. (2002)
The Architecture of Sleep and the Science of Safety
Note: This table integrates sleep-stage physiology with autonomic nervous system states to illustrate how safety, threat, and stress shape sleep quality. It emphasizes the interdependence between sleep architecture and autonomic regulation in restorative sleep and in trauma-related disruption.
Title: The Science of Resorative Sleep
Created by Notebook LM, 2026
This moment has clarified that restorative sleep is neither accidental nor simply a matter of time spent in bed. It is an embodied outcome of safety. Sleep architecture unfolds fully when the nervous system assesses the environment and the broader conditions of life as safe enough to release vigilance. One uninterrupted night mattered because it marked a physiological shift rather than a behavioural one. My body sustained a state of genuine safety and connection long enough to complete multiple cycles of repair, integration, and emotional processing. Healing, in this sense, emerged through conditions rather than effort. It arose as the threat receded, rhythms stabilized, and my nervous system received permission to rest. This understanding reframes sleep as a diagnostic signal of safety and a quiet indicator of recovery already underway.
References
Åkerstedt, T. (2006). Psychosocial stress and impaired sleep. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 32(6), 493–501. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.1054
Germain, A. (2013). Sleep disturbances as the hallmark of PTSD: Where are we now? American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(4), 372–382. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12040432
Lallukka, T., Rahkonen, O., Lahelma, E., & Arber, S. (2010). Sleep complaints in middle-aged women and men: The contribution of working conditions and work-family conflicts. Journal of Sleep Research, 19(3), 466–477. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2010.00821.x
Mellman, T. A., Bustamante, V., Fins, A. I., Pigeon, W. R., & Nolan, B. (2002). REM sleep and the early development of posttraumatic stress disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(10), 1696–1701. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.10.1696
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
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.
Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
Google. (2026). The science of restorative sleep [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Academic Lens
Finding a morning rhythm in a new place is a form of what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls the early conditions for flow: a structure that is self-chosen, repeatable, and calibrated to one's own pace. The body's uptake of a different daily rhythm also reflects Porges's (2011) nervous system model: the nervous system steadying one another with the environment rather than with institutional time. Rhythm, here, is a body-based baseline from which genuine inquiry becomes possible.
Evening Reflection: When the Shoulders Finally Drop
Video Credit: Gemini, 2026
The sky over the Sea of Cortez turns amber and rose as I write this, the eighth sunset of this retreat. Eight days. One complete week plus one day of threshold-crossing. Long enough for the body to begin believing what the mind decided: that this time is mine, that rest is permitted, that I can stop performing vigilance.
This evening, I sat on the small balcony with nothing but cooling coffee and the sound of waves returning to shore. No task. No plan. No productive purpose. Just sitting as the light changed, watching pelicans settle onto pilings for the night, their bodies perfectly still after a day of diving. They looked the way I feel tonight, arrived, finally, into stillness.
Title: Evening Tide, Sea of Cortez. Rhythm Without Demand.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
La quietud. The quietness. The settling. The quality of being that emerges when striving pauses long enough for presence to surface.
Blue Background Water Colour
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2025
What Happens When the Body Exhales
For eight days now, I have been tracking my body-based state with the methodological rigour this research requires, but also with growing tenderness toward what the body reveals. This evening’s observation differs from previous entries in a manner best described as qualitative rather than quantitative. Something has shifted. Something has softened. The shoulders that have lived near my ears for years, decades, perhaps, have finally dropped.
Stephen Porges (2011, 2022) writes that the autonomic nervous system functions as a surveillance mechanism, continuously scanning for cues of safety or threat through what he terms the body’s instinct to scan for safety. This scanning occurs below conscious awareness, shaping our physiological state before we have language to describe our feelings. For years, my body’s instinct to scan for safety detected threat everywhere: in the precarity of contract work, in institutional politics, in the endless demands that arrived faster than I could meet them, in the quiet terror of never being enough.
Here, by the sea, the cues have changed. Predictable rhythm. Consistent warmth. The constancy of waves. The absence of urgent demands. No emails requiring immediate response. No meetings to navigate. No performances to sustain. Day by day, hour by hour, my nervous system has been gathering evidence: this place is safe. This time is protected. You can rest.
Tonight, the shoulders finally believed it. They dropped. And with that, the tears came.
Title: Circulation Without Effort
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Grief That Hides in Muscle
It is a strange thing to discover that your body has been holding grief in places you had never thought to look. The shoulders, apparently, have been carrying years of it. The jaw, too, clenched through countless nights of fitful sleep, grinding away anxiety that had nowhere else to go. The chest, held tight against the vulnerability of being seen as struggling, as uncertain, as anything less than fully competent.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) documents how trauma, and I would add chronic stress, chronic precarity, and chronic performance of adequacy, gets stored in the body’s tissues, in patterns of tension and bracing that become so familiar we forget they were learned. The body keeps the score, he writes, when the mind refuses to. My body has been keeping score for a very long time.
As my shoulders dropped tonight, something released. Tears came, quiet and steady, undramatic, arriving like rain after a long drought. I wept for the woman who carried so much for so long. I wept for the years of vigilance that never brought the security they promised. I wept for all the moments I had held rigid because softening felt dangerous, because survival required staying braced.
Miriam Greenspan (2004) writes that grief is a kind of alchemy, transforming pain into wisdom when we allow ourselves to feel it fully rather than bypassing it in favour of premature healing. Tonight’s tears were recognition. They were recognized. They were the body finally releasing what it no longer needed to carry.
When we give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break. Adapted from Shakespeare, as cited in Greenspan (2004)
But sometimes grief needs no words. Sometimes the shoulders drop, and the body speaks its own truth.
Title: Stone Angel
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Evening Body-based Record
Table 1 Day 8 Body-based Tracking: Evening Entry
Time
Autonomic State
Physical Sensations
Emotional Quality
Notes
6:00 PM
genuine safety
Shoulders noticeably lower, jaw loose, deep breath available without effort
Peaceful, tender, slightly tearful
First evening where settling feels complete rather than effortful
7:30 PM
genuine safety
Warmth in chest, softness in belly, feet grounded
Grateful, present, emotionally open
Tears came and passed gently; no activation followed
9:00 PM
genuine safety
The first evening in years where sleep feels like an arrival rather than a collapse
Quiet contentment, readiness for rest
The first evening in years where sleep feels like an arrival rather than a collapse
Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection, characterized by parasympathetic activation, social engagement capacity, and felt safety (Porges, 2011). Tonight marks the first sustained evening-long state of genuine safety and connection without the body’s alert state spikes.
What Eight Days Has Taught
If someone had told me on Day 1 that eight days would be enough to feel this different, I would have dismissed the possibility entirely. Eight days against decades of patterning? Impossible. And yet here I am, shoulders lower, breath deeper, tears falling freely because safety has become believable enough for grief to surface.
the quiet way nature restores us Theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995) proposes that natural environments restore depleted cognitive and attentional resources through four key qualities: being away (psychological distance from demands), extent (environmental richness), the gentle pull of the natural world (gentle engagement), and compatibility (alignment between environment and purpose). This retreat has offered all four. But what the theory leaves unnamed, what no theory fully reaches, is the embodied dimension of restoration.
Restoration is body-based first. It is body-based. It is muscular. It is nervous-system-deep. The mind can decide to rest, but the body must be convinced. That convincing takes time, takes consistency, takes environmental cues repeated until the ancient mammalian brain that governs survival finally accepts: we are safe here.
Eight days. That is how long it took for my shoulders to believe it.
Deepening Inner Body Awareness
Another shift tonight: the clarity of internal signals. I knew I was hungry before hunger became uncomfortable. I felt thirsty early enough to address it gently. I noticed fatigue creeping in and sat down rather than pushing through. These micro-adjustments represent inner body-sensing awareness, the capacity to perceive and interpret internal bodily states (Craig, 2002; Mehling et al., 2012), and represent a significant development from Week 1.
When the nervous system operates in chronic defence, inner body awareness dims. The body’s quieter signals get overridden by louder demands: deadlines, obligations, others’ needs. We learn to ignore hunger until it becomes urgent, to override fatigue with caffeine and willpower, to silence the body’s requests for rest because rest feels dangerous when survival depends on constant output.
Here, eight days into chosen stillness, inner body awareness has returned. I am learning again to hear what my body communicates. I am remembering that these signals are information, data rather than weakness; that responding to them is wisdom, deep listening rather than indulgence.
Table 2 inner body-sensing Awareness Development: Days 1–8
Struggled to sustain attention to the body; mind wandered constantly
Day 1
Day 8
Noticing
Difficult to detect subtle bodily cues; awareness fragmented
Clear, early detection of hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature changes
Struggled to sustain attention to body; mind wandered constantly
Attention to body was fragmented; mind wandered constantly
Can maintain gentle attention to internal states without forcing
Emotional Awareness
Disconnection between physical sensation and emotional state
Growing recognition of how emotions manifest in the body
finding our own calm
Limited capacity to use bodily awareness for regulation
Beginning to use breath, posture, movement responsively
Body Listening
Tendency to override or ignore bodily signals
Increasing trust in body’s communications
Trusting
Body felt unreliable, unpredictable
Emerging sense that body’s signals are trustworthy data
Note. Framework adapted from Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA; Mehling et al., 2012). inner body-sensing capacity improves with reduced cognitive load and increased felt safety.
Title: Sea Treasure
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Visual Documentation: Artifacts of Settling
Tonight’s artifact collection includes the grey-blue pebble I found this morning on the beach walk, smooth, palm-sized, temperature-neutral. I have carried it all day, a tangible reminder of what settling feels like. The stone has been tumbled by tides for who knows how long, its roughness worn away by countless returns to shore. It is complete without being perfect. It is whole because the sea has shaped it, held whole by that very shaping.
I also photographed my hands this evening, palms open and resting on my thighs, fingers slightly curled. The image captures something about receptivity, about the body’s capacity to be open without gripping. These hands have held so much: students’ struggles, institutional politics, my own relentless standards. Tonight they are empty. Tonight they rest.
Tomorrow I will try charcoal drawing. I want to capture the quality of light at sunset, the way amber and rose bleed into each other across the water. Charcoal feels right for this: the smudging, the imprecision, the way it cannot be controlled entirely. A medium that requires surrender.
Theoretical Integration: When Safety Permits Grief
Tonight’s experience illuminates a vital relationship between nervous-system regulation and emotional processing. Porges (2022) emphasizes that the social engagement system, which involves a state of genuine safety and connection, must be activated before deeper emotional work becomes possible. When we are in the body’s alert state (fight-or-flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze), we lack the physiological capacity for the kind of emotional experience that supports integration and healing.
This explains why my grief waited eight days to arrive. The tears had to wait until my body released its defence mode. Safety had to stabilize first. The state of genuine safety and connection had to become reliable, consistent, and trustworthy. Only then could the grief surface without overwhelming me, without triggering a return to vigilance.
Title: The Whale Sculpture
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Deb Dana (2018, 2020), translating how the nervous system responds to safety and threat into therapeutic practice, describes this as “building the genuine safety muscle,” strengthening the nervous system’s capacity to remain regulated even when difficult emotions arise. Eight days of consistent safety cues have built enough genuine safety capacity that I could cry tonight without dysregulating. The tears came and passed like weather, leaving me softer rather than depleted.
This has implications for our understanding of healing from burnout. We cannot think our way out of the nervous system, which is thrown off balance. We cannot use willpower to override autonomic states shaped by years of chronic stress. We need environments that consistently communicate safety. We need time, more than we think, less than we fear. We need conditions that allow the body to gather evidence slowly, patiently, until it finally believes: we are allowed to rest.
Spanish Lessons the Sea Teaches
Title: Memories of the Sea
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Spanish phrase I learned today from a local fisher: déjate llevar, let yourself be carried. He was describing how to swim in the Sea of Cortez, how to work with the current rather than against it. But the phrase resonated beyond its literal meaning.
Title: Let Yourself Be Carried
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Déjate llevar. Let yourself be carried. Stop resisting. Stop bracing. Allow the existing support.
I have spent decades swimming against currents that were stronger than I could overcome: institutional precarity, economic insecurity, and cultural narratives that equate worth with productivity. I exhausted myself with that swimming. Here, eight evenings into learning a different way, I am beginning to understand the expression “dejar de llevar.” I am beginning to let the sea, this place, this time, this intentional solitude, carry me.
The shoulders dropped tonight because I finally trusted what was holding me. The grief came because safety made space for it. The healing is happening because I stopped swimming long enough to float.
End of Day Eight
Day 8 marks the threshold: the body has settled enough that analysis can be sophisticated without overwhelming. The artifacts I have been collecting, pebbles, photographs, and journal entries documenting sensory experience, can now begin to speak to one another, to reveal patterns, and to illuminate the mechanisms by which solitude supports healing.
But tonight, analysis waits. Tonight, there is only the amber sky fading to violet, the pelicans motionless on their pilings, the sound of water returning to shore. There is only this body, finally soft, finally believing in its own safety. There is only gratitude for eight days that changed everything by teaching one simple thing:
The shoulders can drop. The grief can come. The healing can happen. All we need is time, permission, and a place that holds us gently while we remember who we are when we stop performing strength.
Title: The Settling
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
La quietud. The settling. The arrival. Finally being here.
Gracias, Mar. Thank you, seaa
Por enseñarme a descansar. For teaching me to rest.
Title: Figure X. The Body-based Arrival: How the Body Learns to Let Go
Image Credit: NotebookLM 2026
Note: The Body-based Arrival: A conceptual synthesis of nervous system settling, inner body-sensing return, and grief release observed across Days 1–8 of the retreat.
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
Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? inner body awareness: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Google. (2026). La Quietud [AI-generated image]. NotebookLM. https://notebooklm.google.com
Google. (2026). Evening Reflection: When the Shoulders Finally Drop [AI-generated video]. Gemini. https://gemini.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2004). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
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., Price, C., Daubenmier, J. J., Acree, M., Bartmess, E., & Stewart, A. (2012). The Multidimensional Assessment of inner body-sensing Awareness (MAIA). PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e48230. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048230
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking Press.
ACADEMIC LENS
Vespers, the evening prayer office, provides the spiritual frame for what Porges (2011) describes as the physiological shift into parasympathetic rest: the moment the nervous system registers that the day’s demands have concluded and safety can be inhabited. The observation that “the shoulders finally drop” documents this transition somatically, naming what Levine (2010) calls the completion of a defensive response and the return to a regulated baseline. The eighth day as a symbolic threshold also resonates with Turner’s (1969) analysis of ritual structure: sufficient duration to begin genuine transformation, the liminal space no longer new and still finding its resolution. The amber and rose sky of the Sea of Cortez functions as what Ulrich (1983) identified as a restorative environment: natural settings with soft fascination that hold attention without requiring effortful processing, allowing the nervous system to discharge accumulated tension. The evening practice of intentional rest described here aligns with Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) argument that the researcher’s own body is a legitimate site of inquiry, and that attending to it carefully, without agenda, constitutes a form of data collection.
I woke this morning with a tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with the night before.
The sleep had been deep, the room cool, the sea audible through the open window. Everything about this place says rest. And yet my body woke braced, as though preparing for something that never arrived.
I lay still for a long time, watching the ceiling lighten. Trying to name what I was feeling.
It took a while to find the word. When it came, it surprised me.
Fear.
The Shape of It
The fear lives elsewhere. I have settled into Loreto more easily than I expected. Solitude has become companionable. Silence I am learning to inhabit.
The fear is of what happens if I truly let go.
For years, decades, I have held myself together through effort. Through vigilance. Through the constant, quiet work of monitoring, anticipating, and performing competence. I have been the one who could be counted on. The one who showed up prepared. The one who held more than her share because holding felt safer than asking for help.
That holding has become so familiar that I cannot quite imagine who I would be without it.
And so the fear: if I release the grip, if I stop the vigilance, if I truly rest, will I ever want to return to life as it was? Will I lose the capacity for striving that kept me employed, that kept me useful, that kept me worthy of belonging?
Will I, in some fundamental way, stop being the person I have always been?
The Paradox of Letting Go
There is a strange paradox here. I came to this retreat because I was exhausted by the holding. Because the vigilance had worn grooves in my nervous system that no longer served me. Because I wanted, desperately, to rest.
And now that rest is possible, I am afraid of it.
Afraid that rest will undo me. That I will sink into it and never surface. The woman who emerges from this month will be unrecognizable to herself and to others. That she will have lost her edge, her drive, her usefulness.
The fear reveals how deeply I have tied my worth to my capacity for effort. How thoroughly I have believed that I am only as valuable as what I produce.
Brené Brown (2010) calls this the use of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as a measure of self-worth. She identifies it as one of the things we must consciously release if we want to live what she calls a wholehearted life. Reading those words years ago, I nodded in recognition. Living them is harder.
Title: Halfway There
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Creating Safety for the Self
In my academic work, I have written about psychological safety: the conditions that allow people to take interpersonal risks without fear of embarrassment, shame, or punishment (Edmondson, 1999). In classrooms and workplaces, psychological safety means being able to ask questions, admit mistakes, and offer ideas that might fail. It means knowing that vulnerability will be met with support rather than judgment.
I have spent years trying to create psychological safety for students. I have rarely thought about creating it for myself.
What would it mean to approach my own interior with the same care I offer others? To make it safe for myself to rest without proving I deserve it? To let go without requiring a plan for what comes next?
Psychological safety, I am learning, begins within. It begins with the quiet assurance that I will stay with myself, whatever surfaces. That I will meet my need for rest with gentleness. That I will carry this retreat forward as what it is: a return to myself.
The body knows when it is safe. Stephen Porges (2022) has shown that feelings of safety arise from internal physiological states and from cues that signal the nervous system can stand down from vigilance. Those cues can come from the environment, from the relationship, from the breath, from the stillness.
They can also come from the stories we tell ourselves about what we are allowed to need.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
There is another fear beneath this one, harder to name.
I am afraid that if I let go completely, I will lose the capacity to love the life I have built. That the stillness will reveal how much of my striving was compensation rather than calling. That I will look back at my career, my choices, my years of effortful contribution, and feel only exhaustion rather than meaning.
I am afraid of becoming someone who no longer wants to return.
And beneath even that: I am afraid that letting go will reveal an emptiness I have been running from. That, without the structure of obligation, without the identity of educator, without the constant motion, I will find nothing but blank space where a self should be.
This is the fear that woke me this morning. This is what tightened my chest before dawn.
Staying With It
I left my phone untouched. I resisted the pull toward plans or tasks or the small urgencies that usually rescue me from discomfort.
I stayed.
I let the fear be present without trying to fix it. I breathed into the tightness in my chest. I asked, with as much curiosity as I could muster: What are you trying to protect?
The answer came slowly. The fear is trying to protect me from loss. Loss of identity. Loss of purpose. Loss of the scaffolding that has held my life in place for so long.
I thanked it. I mean that genuinely. The fear has kept me functional through years that might otherwise have broken me. It has helped me show up when showing up was required. It has been a kind of armour, and armour serves a purpose.
But armour is heavy. And I am in a place now where I can set it down, even briefly. Even experimentally.
An Experiment in Trust
What if letting go means finding? What if the woman who emerges from stillness is clarified rather than diminished? What if rest reveals presence rather than emptiness?
I cannot know without trying. I cannot know from the outside. I can only know by going in.
Brown (2010) writes about cultivating intuition and trusting faith, which requires letting go of the need for certainty. Certainty is what I have always sought. Plans, structures, contingencies. The illusion that if I prepare enough, I can prevent loss. The illusion that control keeps me safe.
Here in Loreto, the illusion is harder to maintain. The sea holds itself apart from my plans. The mountains hold their shape with or without my watching. The pelicans fish without consulting my schedule. Life here unfolds without my management, and it unfolds beautifully.
Perhaps I, too, can unfold without so much management.
Perhaps the self that emerges from stillness will be someone I recognize after all. Perhaps she will be someone I have been waiting to meet.
Morning, After
I made coffee. I carried it to the small balcony. I sat in the chair that had become familiar over these eight days and watched the light strengthen over the water.
The fear remained. It sat beside me like a companion, still present but no longer gripping. I had acknowledged it. I had listened. I had refused to let it drive me back into motion.
This, I think, is what the discipline of staying means. It means feeling the fear fully. It means feeling the fear and remaining anyway. It means creating enough safety within myself to be present with uncertainty, with open-handedness, with the vulnerability of letting go.
The morning was quiet. A boat moved slowly across the bay. Somewhere, someone was beginning their day with purpose and direction. I was beginning mine with a question still ahead of me.
That felt honest. That felt like enough.
¿Y si me suelto? What if I let go?
I hold the question open. But I am willing to find out.
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 Publishing.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Porges, S. W. (2022). nervous system safety: Attachment, communication, finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
ACADEMIC LENS
The question at the heart of this post, ¿y si me suelto?, “what if I let go?”, names the central therapeutic and existential challenge that van der Kolk (2014) identifies in trauma recovery: learning to release the chronic muscular and psychic bracing that survival required, even when survival is no longer at stake. Menakem (2017) describes this as “settling the body”: the slow, somatic process of convincing the nervous system that it may relax its vigilance. The bilingual framing is significant: posing the question first in Spanish allows it to arrive before the analytical English mind can intercept and evaluate it. Anzaldúa (1987) argued that bilingual expression can bypass habitual cognitive filters, accessing emotional knowing that monolingual discourse forecloses. The arts-based imagery accompanying this reflection functions within what Levine (2010) calls the “felt sense”: the pre-linguistic bodily awareness that must be engaged for deep somatic change to occur. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou ontology also resonates: letting go may be understood as releasing the I-It relationship with one’s own body, the instrumental management of the self, in favour of a more receptive, present, and mutual encounter with one’s own experience.
I have been here one week now, and something has changed in my relationship with silence.
For the first several days, silence felt like an absence: the absence of traffic, of notifications, of the constant hum of obligation that had become the background noise of my life. I noticed silence the way one notices a missing tooth, by the shape of what was gone. The quiet felt strange, almost suspicious, as though it were hiding something.
This morning, sitting on the small balcony with coffee cooling in my hands, I realized that silence had become something else entirely. It had become a place. A place I could enter. A place I could inhabit. A place that held me rather than something I had to hold at bay.
Title: The Pause Before the Storm
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Silence as Autonomous Presence
The Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1948/1988), in his remarkable book The World of Silence, offers language for what I am experiencing. Picard argues that silence is neither void nor absence but rather an autonomous phenomenon: a presence that exists independently of speech and sound, a reality that begins beyond the falling away of noise.
Title: Silence as Substance
Charcoal Sketch: Amy Tucker, 2026
When language ceases, silence begins. But it begins for reasons beyond the ceasing of language. The absence of language simply makes the presence of silence more apparent.
Picard, 1948/1988, p. 15
This distinction matters. If silence were merely the cessation of sound, it would be defined entirely by what it lacks. It would be a negative space, an emptiness awaiting filling. But Picard insists that silence has substance, has being, has its own formative power. Silence, in his account, shapes human beings just as language shapes us, though in different ways.
Silence as Autonomous Phenomenon
When Picard describes silence as autonomous, he means that silence exists independently of human will or action. We uncover silence already present beneath the words. Silence, in this framework, is primary. Language emerges from silence and returns to it. The words we speak are like waves rising from and falling back into a vast sea of quiet that preceded them and will outlast them.
Title: Bench, Waiting…
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Learning to Enter
I have spent much of my adult life in noisy environments: classrooms full of voices, offices humming with machines, homes filled with the sounds of family and obligation. Silence, when it appeared, felt like an interruption rather than a foundation. I filled it quickly, almost reflexively, with music, with podcasts, with the radio playing in the background while I worked. The thought of sustained quiet made me uneasy in ways I left unexamined.
Now I understand that unease differently. What I was avoiding in silence was an encounter. Silence waits. It listens. Picard writes that where silence is, we are observed by silence. Silence looks at us more than we look at it. This is precisely what felt threatening: the sense that in silence, I would have to meet myself without distraction, without the buffer of activity and noise that kept me safely busy.
Here in Loreto, I am learning to enter silence rather than escape it. The learning has been gradual. In the first days, I noticed how quickly my mind rushed to fill the quiet. Thoughts formed into lists. Conversations from months ago replayed themselves. The body responded with tension, as though silence required vigilance, as though something might be hiding in the stillness.
Staying silent requires patience. Rather than filling it, I began to notice its texture. Silence, I discovered, carries layers. There are distant sounds within it: the far-off call of a bird, the whisper of wind, the rhythmic breathing of the sea. Silence holds space rather than collapsing inward. Over time, it revealed rhythm.
Silence Has a Rhythm
Title: Breath of the Canopy
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
This has been the week’s revelation: silence is alive.
The sea rises and falls. Wind moves through the palm fronds in waves that sound like breathing. My own breath creates a gentle cadence if I stay still enough to notice. Even the light shifts in patterns that feel rhythmic, the slow arc of morning into afternoon into evening. Silence contains all of this motion. It lives. It moves. It pulses with a life I had been too busy to perceive.
Picard understood this. He wrote of the forest as a great reservoir of silence from which quiet trickles in a thin, slow stream, filling the air with its brightness. The image is precise: silence as source, as reservoir, as something that flows rather than simply exists. Here by the Sea of Cortez, the silence flows from the water, from the mountains, from the vast expanse of sky that has no interest in human schedules or human noise.
Table 1
Qualities of Inhabited Silence
Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction
What It Means
How It Manifests
Autonomous
Silence exists independently of human will or speech
Silence is uncovered rather than created; it precedes and outlasts words
Layered
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows
Wind, breath, distant birds, the sea: silence holds rather than excludes
Rhythmic
Silence has patterns, cycles, flows
Morning quiet differs from evening quiet; silence moves with time
Companionable
Silence accompanies without demanding; it witnesses without judging
A sense of being held, of belonging without performance
Silence has patterns, cycles, and flows
Silence allows internal signals to surface; it reduces interpretive load
Hunger, fatigue, and contentment become perceptible without distraction
Note. The framework synthesizes the work of Picard (1948/1988), contemplative traditions, and personal observation. These qualities emerged through sustained attention rather than analysis.
Title: Inhabited Silence
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
After years shaped by disruption, urgency, and collective strain, silence offers what I had needed without knowing it: relief from constant interpretation.
In my working life, I was perpetually reading: reading student papers, reading institutional policies, reading the room in meetings, reading the unspoken tensions in corridors and committee gatherings. Every moment required assessment, response, and performance of understanding. Even leisure hummed with demand; podcasts, news, and social media all called me to process, evaluate, and react.
Silence asks for none of this. There is no need to respond. There is no performance required. Experience can simply exist without commentary. This permission feels revolutionary after decades of cognitive labour.
In silence, listening shifts from sound to sensation. From external cues to internal signals. Hunger is evident when no distraction overrides it. Fatigue makes itself known without shame. Contentment arises unannounced, without having to justify itself against productivity metrics.
Silence clarifies.
Silence and the Settling Body
The connection between silence and nervous system regulation is becoming clearer to me now. Yesterday, I wrote about the body beginning to remember safety. Today, I understand that silence is part of how that remembering happens.
Stephen Porges (2022) describes how the autonomic nervous system responds to environmental cues, constantly scanning for signals of safety or threat. Chronic noise, whether literal sound or the metaphorical noise of constant demand, keeps the system in a state of vigilance. The body cannot fully settle when it must remain alert to incoming information that might require a response.
Silence provides what Deb Dana (2020) might call a cue of safety. In the absence of demands, the nervous system can begin to downregulate. Muscles soften. Breath deepens. The state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, that felt like normal alertness manifests as chronic tension, and that tension begins to subside.
I have noticed this in my own body over the past week. Each quiet morning reinforces the message that stillness can be supportive. Each evening without urgent input confirms that the world holds steady even when I am unreachable. The body learns through repetition, and silence provides the conditions for that learning.
When Silence Becomes Companionable
Perhaps the most unexpected discovery of this week is that silence can be companionable.
Title: Held Without Asking
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I arrived here expecting solitude to feel lonely, at least sometimes. I expected to miss conversation, to feel the absence of other voices. And there have been moments of longing, particularly in the evenings when the day’s warmth fades, and the darkness feels vast. But alongside that longing, something else has emerged: a sense of being accompanied by silence itself.
This is difficult to articulate without sounding more mystical than I mean. I mean something quite practical: that silence holds without judgment. It asks nothing of me in terms of interest, productivity, or usefulness. It holds my worth independent of output. Silence simply is, and in its presence, I am permitted to simply be.
Picard writes that when two people are conversing, a third is always present: silence is listening. I have begun to feel this even when alone. Silence listens to my thoughts without needing me to speak them. It witnesses my morning rituals, my wanderings to the water, and my afternoon rest. It accompanies without intruding.
Belonging within silence feels different than belonging through interaction. It carries steadiness rather than affirmation. It arises from alignment rather than exchange.
The Noise We Carry
Title: One Missed Call
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Picard wrote his meditation on silence in 1948, and even then, he worried about what he called the world of noise encroaching on human consciousness. He wrote of radio noise as something that surrounds us, accompanies us, and creates a false sense of continuity that substitutes for genuine presence. If he found the mid-twentieth century noisy, I can only imagine what he would make of our current moment.
We carry noise with us now. It lives in our pockets, vibrates against our bodies, follows us into bedrooms and bathrooms and the last quiet corners of our lives. The smartphone has colonized silence more thoroughly than any technology before it. There is no longer any space, Picard wrote presciently, in which it is possible to be silent, for space has all been occupied now in advance.
Coming here required a deliberate choice to leave that noise behind. I brought my phone but set it to silent. I check email once a day, if that. I have no television, no radio, no podcasts playing while I walk. The withdrawal was initially uncomfortable, as with any withdrawal. The hand reached for the device reflexively. The mind generated reasons to check, to see, to know what was happening elsewhere.
Now, a week in, the reaching has slowed. The mind has settled into the rhythm of this place rather than the rhythm of the feed. Silence has expanded to fill the space that noise once occupied. And I am beginning to understand that this space was never empty. It was always full of silence, waiting for me to notice.
A Body-based Record
The body journal continues to reveal patterns. Day seven marks the emergence of what I can only call ease with silence, a comfort in quiet that was absent at the beginning of the retreat.
Table 2
body journal: Day 7
Time
Observation
Morning
Woke without alarm. Silence felt welcoming rather than empty. Sat with coffee in quiet for forty minutes without restlessness. Breath deep and steady. VV state.
Midday
Walked to water in silence. No impulse to fill quiet with podcast or music. Noticed layers within silence: wind, birds, waves. Felt companioned rather than alone.
Evening
Watched sunset in complete quiet. Silence felt like a place I could inhabit rather than endure. Body soft, jaw relaxed, shoulders down. Gratitude present.
VV sustained throughout the day. Silence is experienced as a supportive presence rather than an absence.
Note. VV = a state of genuine safety and connection. The emergence of silence as a companionable practice marks a qualitative shift from earlier periods.
Silence and Alonetude
I am beginning to understand that silence is one of the essential conditions for alonetude: the intentional, contemplative solitude I came here to practise. Without silence, solitude risks becoming merely physical isolation, a removal from others that leaves the inner noise intact. With silence, solitude opens into something spacious enough to hold reflection, restoration, and the slow work of becoming present to oneself.
Silence creates the conditions for attention to turn inward. It reduces the load of constant input that normally occupies cognitive and emotional resources. It allows the nervous system to settle, the body to soften, the mind to stop its endless scanning for threat or opportunity. In silence, energy conserves itself. Presence becomes possible.
This is why retreat centres and monasteries have always understood silence as discipline rather than deprivation. Silence asks to be inhabited rather than endured. Silence is itself the somewhere, the place where transformation becomes possible because we are finally still enough to receive it.
Evening, Day Seven
The sun is setting as I write this. The sky over the Sea of Cortez has turned the colour of ripe peaches, fading to lavender at the edges. The mountains across the water are silhouettes now, their details absorbed into the growing dark.
It is very quiet.
Quiet, mostly. I can hear the water lapping against the shore. A bird calls somewhere in the distance. My own breath moves in and out, marking time. But beneath and around these sounds, silence holds. Silence is the medium through which everything else moves, the space in which sound becomes possible.
Picard writes that silence contains everything within itself. It is always wholly present and completely fills the space in which it appears. I feel this now, sitting in the fading light. Silence asks nothing of me. It holds no anticipation of my next word or my next action. It simply holds, vast and patient and present.
One week ago, I arrived here full of noise: the noise of years of overwork, of worry, of the constant chatter of a mind that had forgotten how to be still. The noise is quieter now. It remains, and perhaps it always will. But silence has made room for itself within me, as it does this evening, surrounding and holding the small sounds of life without being diminished by them.
Silence is a place. I am learning to live here.
References
Dana, D. (2020). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton & Company.
Picard, M. (1988). The world of silence (S. Godman, Trans.). Gateway Editions. (Original work published 1948)
Porges, S. W. (2022). How the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
Academic Lens
Silence as place rather than absence is the lived-experience core of this entry, resonating with Bachelard's (1964) concept of inhabited space: silence becomes a room one can enter and dwell in. This is alonetude at its most concentrated, the capacity to be, in Winnicott's (1958) phrase, alone in the presence of the world without anxiety. The sea as acoustic environment contributes what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call fascination: the quality of an environment that holds attention without effort and allows the mind to rest.
A Scholarly Personal Narrative of Attention, Inner Body Awareness, 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 body-felt 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
the quiet way nature restores us, wherein environments characterized by the gentle pull of the natural world, 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 formalized these insights into the quiet way nature restores us 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 body-based 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.
The Quiet Way Nature Restores Us Theory
The quiet way nature restores us 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 summarizes these foundational components.
Table 1
Four Components of the Quiet Way Nature Restores Us 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 opportunities for exploration.
Fascination
Engaging attention effortlessly through inherently interesting stimuli. ‘the gentle pull of the natural world’ (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 a sense of 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. The gentle pull of the natural world 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.
Inner Body Awareness and Embodied Knowing
Inner body awareness, defined as the perception of internal bodily sensations, represents another essential framework for understanding this experience (Craig, 2002; Farb et al., 2015). Inner body-sensing awareness encompasses multiple dimensions, as outlined in Table 2, which summarizes the Multidimensional Assessment of Inner Body-Sensing Awareness (MAIA) framework developed by Mehling et al. (2012).
Table 2
Six Dimensions of Inner Body-Sensing 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.
finding our own calm
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 inner body-sensing 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 inner body-sensing 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 insight into what and how we know, access to knowledge that emerges through lived, sensory engagement with place.
Embodied Knowing and Feminist Ways of Knowing
Embodied knowing, as feminist epistemologists and lived-experience scholars describe it, refuses the Cartesian assumption that mind and body are separate (Alcoff & Potter, 2013; Grosz, 1994; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Knowledge emerges through the body’s interactions with material environments, sensory perception, movement and stillness, and the integration of affective and cognitive processes.
Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of Situated knowledge emphasizes that all knowledge is partial and positioned, emerging from particular embodied, historical, and geographical locations.
Sandra Harding’s (1991) standpoint ways of knowing further argues that those whose knowledge has been marginalized often possess knowledge-based advantages precisely because they must navigate both dominant and marginalized perspectives. Working beneath the cabana during the rain pause exemplified this embodied ways of knowing. 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 characterized 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, rather than an 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 gave the experience a recursive quality. I was simultaneously livingalonetude 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, honest self-reflection.
Unlike traditional research methodologies that position the researcher as a detached observer, SPN recognizes the researcher as an embodied participant whose personal experience, when properly contextualized 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 characterized 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 sense-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 characterizes forced multitasking.
The Nervous System and Felt Safety
how the nervous system responds to safety and threat, 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 how the nervous system responds to safety and threat
Autonomic State
Characteristics and Functions
genuine safety (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 finding our own calm’ 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 a state of genuine safety and connection. This physiological settling enabled the quality of presence I experienced, the capacity to remain simultaneously relaxed and attentive, open yet focused. Porges emphasizes 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 Knowing 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 ways of knowing, 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 took on particular meaning in 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 what the body knows, 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) analyzes how temporal acceleration characterizes 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 push 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 integrating scholarly work with embodied presence, to the practice of remaining with complexity rather than rushing toward resolution, and 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 rain finally paused. 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 knowledge the body holds, 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 contextualized, contributes to scholarly discourse.
Perhaps most significantly, there was the experiential confirmation that alonetude, as I have been theorizing 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.
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 theorizing abstractly throughout this project. Alonetude, the intentional inhabiting of solitude, characterized 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 being seen as a weakness or waste, is 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 body-felt 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? inner body awareness: 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). Personal inquiry, personal narrative, honest self-reflection: 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). Inner body awareness, contemplative practice, and health. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 763.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a bodily feminism. Indiana University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
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 inner body-sensing 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 finding our own calm. 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.
ACADEMIC LENS
The “pause between rains” as a research site enacts what Moustakas (1961) calls the phenomenological bracketing of ordinary experience: finding, within the apparently unremarkable, the grounds for genuine inquiry. The rain pause functions as a version of what Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) call “being away”: a brief departure from habitual attentional patterns that creates the conditions for restorative experience. The inner body awareness that this post foregrounds is what Levine (2010) calls “interoception,” the body’s sensing of its own internal state, which van der Kolk (2014) identifies as one of the primary casualties of chronic stress: the overwhelmed nervous system progressively loses access to the subtle signals of its own needs and preferences. Attending to the body during a pause in external weather thus constitutes a double inquiry: observing both the outer pause and the inner one, the moment when the nervous system, like the sky between rains, momentarily suspends its habitual patterns and opens into something less defended. Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) argument that writing is a method of inquiry applies precisely here: the act of finding language for inner body states is itself a form of deepening somatic knowledge.
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.
ACADEMIC LENS
The paradox named in this title, that grief arrives with rest rather than with exhaustion, is clinically well-documented. Van der Kolk (2014) observes that the hyperactivated nervous system of the chronically stressed person suppresses grief as an unaffordable vulnerability: one cannot afford to feel the weight of what has been lost while still needing all available resources for survival. Menakem (2017) describes this as the body’s intelligent prioritisation: grief, like other emotions requiring duration and openness, must wait until the nervous system registers sufficient safety to permit it. Levine (2010) calls this the “thaw” phase of somatic healing: as the chronic bracing releases, the feelings it has been holding at bay begin to move through the body. The grief that comes with rest is therefore a sign that the rest is working rather than failing, it is working. Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry framework suggests that this grief is also data: it tells the researcher something specific about the scale of the loss that has been carried, and about the depth of the healing that the body’s intelligence has been waiting to undertake.
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 normalized this state to the point that I no longer recognized 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 the Polyvagal Theory, helps me understand what happened this morning. Safety is a physiological state rather than a thought, regulated by the autonomic nervous system below the level of conscious awareness. We arrive there through the body first. Porges calls this the body’s instinct to scan for safety: the body reading the environment and deciding, before the mind catches up, whether we are safe.
Title: The Pool
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The body’s instinct to scan for safety
The body’s instinct to scan for safety 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, the body’s instinct to scan for safety 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.
Porges’s (2011) 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 alert. 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 how the nervous system responds to safety and threat into practical application, describes the process of befriending one’s nervous system. She writes about learning to notice the micro-moments of genuine safety 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 organized 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 normalized. 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.
Title: 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, a state of constant alertness, always scanning for danger, 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 Body-based Record
Following the methodology I developed for this project, I have been tracking my body-based 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 body journal: 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 a loose jaw
Calm, present, grounded
VV
5
Woke with a looser jaw
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 Porges’s (2011) polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011). VV = genuine safety; SA = the body’s alert state. The trajectory across Days 1–6 reflects a gradual shift from the body’s alert state toward genuine safety 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 thrown off balance 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 nervous system to be thrown off balance. 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 body-based 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, when fully felt, grief 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 recognizes 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). nervous system exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices. W. W. Norton.
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). The body’s instinct to scan for safety: 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 finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.
Porges, S. W. (2022). how the nervous system responds to safety and threat: 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.
ACADEMIC LENS
This post documents what Porges (2011) terms a shift from sympathetic to ventral vagal activation: the nervous system’s gradual movement from sustained threat-readiness toward the physiological state associated with safety, social engagement, and rest. The specific somatic markers described, loose jaw, resting shoulders, unhurried breath, are precisely what Levine (2010) identifies as indicators of successful nervous system discharge following chronic mobilisation. Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that trauma treatment cannot proceed through cognitive reframing alone; the body must be given new physical experiences of safety that gradually revise its baseline predictions. The brown pelican observed in this entry functions as what Ulrich (1983) called a restorative natural element: organisms with purposeful, unhurried movement that invite matching attentional rhythms in the observer. The bilingual Spanish-English structure of this post also enacts the methodological argument: that meaning-making happens in the space between languages, and that bilingual expression can access emotional registers unavailable in a single tongue, an insight developed in Anzaldúa’s (1987) borderlands theory of code-switching as an epistemological practice.
