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In this article, the movement between the gravity and synchrony of love in pandemic times as revealed through the creative practices of poetry and cellphone photography is addressed. Informed by literature on slow scholarship published prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the author explores the ways in which listening to and caring for the small sounds of a familiar place–here a rural backyard–can act as a generative theoretical space to reconsider the meaning of love and its implications for academic work. The principal questions include: how can the practice of writing poems and taking photographs foster the intentionality of slow time? How can immersing oneself in this time provide insight into perhaps worn-out conceptualizations of what is considered precious? What implications, if any, can these insights have for understandings of love and the need for slow scholarship post-pandemic?

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This article addresses the struggle of crafting a recognized professional scholarly identity, and reflects on the significance of puppets to interrupt this struggle, assert one’s voice, and creatively occupy one’s space. Our interdisciplinary contribution aims to extend conversations on the realities of academic life that are often muted or diluted such as anxiety, self-doubt, weariness and failure, with implications for creative research practices. We engage the aforementioned realities through a mix of creative and whimsical writing styles (e.g., human-puppet dialogues; poetry; reflection), leveraging insights from the Jungian psychological approach to archetypal symbol and the imagination as well as transformative arts-based approaches involving storytelling, voice, and liminal space. After exploring our own experiences carving out space as creative and reflective scholar-practitioners, we discuss two examples where puppets disrupted the status quo of particular academic settings and provided opportunities for different, more spontaneous forms of engagement with the self and with others.