Artist Statement: I came to the sea to learn how to be still again.
After twenty-five years of precarious academic labour—the endless contracts, the performed gratitude, the body always braced for the next uncertainty—I arrived in Loreto with a nervous system that had forgotten what safety felt like. Van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body keeps the score. Mine was keeping a tally I could no longer afford to pay.
And then, this pigeon.
I was walking the shoreline when I noticed it standing at the edge of things—not fleeing, not grasping, just present. Tan quieto. Tan presente. So still. So here. Something in its posture stopped me. The bird was doing what I was trying to remember how to do: occupying a threshold without anxiety, watching without the need to fix or flee or perform.
I chose black and white because colour felt like too much. My nervous system was learning to tolerate simplicity again—what Porges (2011) might call the slow return to ventral vagal safety, the state where we can finally rest because we sense, at last, that we are not in danger. Stripping away colour became its own kind of healing practice. What remains is texture, light, shadow, presence. What remains is enough.
This image belongs to my inquiry into alonetude—the third shore I am learning to inhabit, the liminal space between the loneliness that was imposed upon me and the solitude I am choosing now. Alonetude names the labour of transforming structural harm into something generative. It refuses to pathologise exhaustion as personal failure. It insists that withdrawal can be protective, that attention can be medicine, that small acts of witnessing can become acts of care.
The pigeon does not know it is teaching me anything. It simply stands where land meets sea, holding its ground without effort. Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes about befriending the dark emotions—grief, fear, despair—rather than bypassing them. I think there is something similar in befriending stillness. Not forcing peace, but allowing it. Not performing recovery, but witnessing the moments when the body, unbidden, begins to soften.
Aquí estoy. Aquí me quedo. Here I am. Here I stay.
This photograph is not about a bird. It is about what happens when a body that has been running finally stops. It is about the courage it takes to do nothing when everything in your training says produce, perform, prove your worth. It is about discovering that presence—quiet, attentive, undemanding presence—might be the most radical thing I can offer myself, and perhaps, eventually, the world. The shoreline holds both of us: the pigeon and me, learning how to stay.
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