A few weeks ago, I ordered and received a watercolor kit from Mossery. It was a little pricey but I’ve been wanting to learn and create watercolors and this was a complete kit that would help me to learn and it felt worth it to order. Thankfully, it has been.

Many evenings since receiving the kit, I have been sitting down with my notebook, small instruction booklet, and supplies and doing a few minutes here and there of watercolor. I worked through the color chart at the beginning and have been playing with color since then. It has been intensely satisfying.

For me, painting like this involves a fairly high level of concentration, but not so high that I can’t perform the task in the more open space in my house with my kids and husband nearby. It requires just enough concentration to make it interesting but not so much that I ignoring the needs of the people around me. In fact a few times this week, I needed a second opinion about some color options and it was great to have someone nearby willing to give their two cents.

I named this blog, Wild Goose Land, in part because in some places in the world (mostly in Ireland, I think), the Holy Spirit is referred to as the Wild Goose, going wherever it pleases. And for me, chasing the Wild Goose means pursuing creativity and those moments that transcend whatever it is that is getting me down or stressing me out. Some people, I think, sometimes call these moments, “being in the zone” where physicality and intellect and creativity become one. In the zone (or with the Holy Spirit), I am (and I think most people are) able to let go of the worries and troubles of everyday life.

Painting can, from time to time, get me there, into the zone, can allow me to empty myself out to a degree that the Holy Spirit (or muses or however else others might think about that) can enter in a take charge.

My description is sounding perhaps more dramatic than the product of my paints and brushes are in reality (mostly a page of fruits and vegetables at this point): it is, for me, after all mostly about the process and that energy I put into the things I am painting. The final product is merely a side benefit, but it is still immensely gratifying to look at something I’ve painted or drawn (or even, from time to time, written) and to know that I had something to do with bringing that image into reality, even if it is that I tried to extend an invitation to the Wild Goose.

One of the things that makes Cash Blackbear such a great literary character is the way in which she is not only fully realized but that she is a relatively isolated. Readers are invited in to be a part of a life that (in direct contrast to how so many lives these days are lived splattered and public all over social media) is quiet, seemingly simple, and very, very private. We get to experience her full interiority in ways that even those around her do not.

Whilst reading the first Cash Blackbear book (Murder on the Red River), I ordered Girl Gone Missing, the second one. I knew that I would be disappointed if I couldn’t almost immediately find out what Cash was up to after I finished the first one. I was not wrong. And while each book would be fine as a stand alone, I highly recommend reading both in order.

In Girl Gone Missing, we find Cash in her first year of college. A girl from her town has gone missing and Cash soon learns of the disappearance of a second girl from the same region. Cash, of course, ends up trying to help Sheriff Wheaton locate this girls. (Spoiler alert: she ends up pretty much on her own tracking down the girls, although Wheaton does offer a soft landing pad.

Cash’s brother shows up unexpectedly and while his reappearance is obviously painful for Cash as it stirs up the most painful memories and feelings of abandonment from her childhood. As she works through some of this, however, she and her brother end up taking care of each other. We even see Cash laugh a few times, which are welcome moments which involve her brother, who struggles as much if not more than Cash as he recovers from both a difficult childhood and time served in the Vietnam War. Especially after the ways in which so many people failed Cash, it has been life-affirming to watch Cash begin to allow herself to form meaningful relationships.

During a book club meeting to discuss the book There, There by Tommy Orange, other Native American authors came up. I mentioned Marcie Rendon in part because it could probably be called a “mystery.” In other words, I enjoy books written by under-represented groups in which the struggles and conflict all center around the characters being members of said underrepresented groups. In this case, Girl Gone Missing is a mystery and while Cash’s identity are important to both solving the mystery and to her survival, she’s also a great person with whom to spend a whole book.

Girl Gone Missing is a fast-paced (in spite of the seeming slow pace of Cash’s life) mystery with a strong woman central character. I highly recommend, especially as a summer (but really any time of the year) read. Enjoy.

This morning, I sewed new masks for two of my kids (the two older ones who will actually agree to wearing masks, the youngest, the three year old does not care to wear a mask so we don’t take him places where he might need to be indoors) and myself. I’ve only made myself one and the “VOTE” painted on the front feels a bit out of date now.

For the girls, I’ve made a few masks over the past year or so. Today, Ms8yo pulled out the older ones and laid them next to the ones I made this morning. “Look how much better these new ones are, Mom!” Everyone needs a hype-person like my Ms8yo.

She wasn’t wrong. In the rush of trying to get everyone masks last year, I slap-dashed a few together. Today, we reminisced about how we couldn’t even get elastic last year. I’d used stretchy hair ties for them to loop over their years, which are predictably rough especially on little ears. And then even when I was able to get proper elastic, it was still too heavy a stiff. We were eventually able to get our hands on some soft, light elastic like those found on disposable masks. (For a while, I had been cutting it off the old ones, but quickly realized that that is part of the mask that wears out the fastest so it wasn’t really worth it to try to recycle it.)

I made ones in two styles today. Both of them agreed that the old ones I’d made that mimicked surgical style ones usually ended up in their mouths. They prefer either the curved ones with a seam down the middle or the “3D” ones where the cloth is held pretty far from one’s lips.

I did recycle some bendy metal nose pieces and inserted those into these new masks. So when my hype-daughter said these ones were better she meant design, materials, and comfort.

Truth be told, I don’t know that I imagined I’d still be making masks at this point in this year. But my husband and I talked about how masks are probably something we won’t give up too soon, even perhaps once our kids are able to get vaccinated. “I liked not being sick this past winter,” he told me. Same.

And it was soothing, in a way, to be sitting at my sewing machine again, cutting and piecing together fabric that my kids had chosen from my stash. One selected the remnants from the first skirt I ever made for myself, ages ago. It’s nice when the masks can make me think about something other than being sick. And it’s nice to feel competent at making something, and something that might possibly be keeping my kids safer. We’ve realized that it’s still going to be a while — perhaps this winter — before our kids can be vaccinated and so in some ways not a lot has changed for us over the past year. We’ve had second thoughts about a lot of activities and things we’d otherwise feel comfortable doing. At the very least, I suppose, all the things we’ve had to do differently over the past year have started to feel a bit more like second nature. The new normal isn’t so new anymore and maybe that’s a good thing, maybe that’s the best we can hope for at this point in time.

God willing, we’ll get there, though. We’ll get there.

Most days, lately, I have to remind myself that we are still in a pandemic. I’ll be moving through daily tasks and suddenly feel incredibly exhausted and I’ll wonder for a moment or two whether there’s something truly physically wrong with me. “Oh no,” I’ll think to myself, “remember? We are in a pandemic. These times are unprecedented, or at least that’s what they used to say.” And for a short while, I will feel a bit OK with being tired.

But I still have moments when I think, “wow. I haven’t done anything today.” And I guess I have to remember that what I mean to say is, “I haven’t gone anywhere today.” Because I’ve done loads each day. And I’ve been doing loads each day. And will continue to do loads each day. But when much of these loads of things that I’ve been doing all day feel a bit ordinary or a bit mundane or even a bit merely life-sustaining, it feels like it doesn’t add up to much. The keeping the children relatively well-fed and moderately engaged doesn’t feel like much. Perhaps this feeling is compounded with all the Olympic achievement in the ether.

Take today for instance. Amongst a few other things: I cut two heads of hair. (Please note, I did not say I cut two heads of hair WELL.) I’ve been cutting my dad and my husband’s hair for the past 16 months or so. It’s not that it’s so hard to do at this point (again, please note that I did not say I do it WELL), but it does take time and not just today. For at least a few days now (and probably longer), I will look at my dad or my husband and all I can see are the mistakes and what I could have done better. This in and of itself takes time. Those who cut hair in a shop or salon have it made: they don’t have to assess their work daily over meals and throughout the day. Because its the self-judgment that’s the energy drain, innit?

And they have those comfy-ish chairs with the clever foot lever so they can smoothly move the head of hear up and down to a reachable height. We have … a kitchen stool for my dad. And for my husband we move between a barstool and a dining room chair depending on the height I need him. (Honestly, it’s a step up from when I cut my son’s hair and I have to put him on a footstool and then kneel). We

When I first started cutting my dad’s hair, I asked him who used to cut I when he was a boy in Thailand. “A Vietnamese barber,” he told me, “he was very good, very detailed.” I considered this as I hacked away at his thinning coiffure. But more than whether I too was being suitably “detailed” in my work, I was surprised that my dad’s barber as a boy in Thailand was from Vietnam. Somehow, I’d always associated immigration almost exclusively with my country of birth, the US. Apparently this mythos is so strong as to make me surprised when I hear about people immigrating to other places in the world. Which is particularly close minded on my part when you consider that my grandparents immigrated to Thailand from China.

So in a way, the hair cutting ritual sometimes gets me thinking about things perhaps even in ways that goes against my upbringing.

I didn’t need to ask Eric while he was “in the chair” about his childhood haircuts in rural western Minnesota. I already knew that he had a regular woman whose house he’d go to. I don’t think she was Vietnamese but I supposed I’ve never asked.

In any case, it’s not lost on me that in some ways my husband and my father had, in some ways, childhoods more similar to each other than to my own. I grew up, like my mom, in DC. I don’t remember having a place or person I went to for my hair. I have a feeling it was just kind of whatever place was convenient, and usually it was a Hair Cuttery. My uncle brought my brothers to a regular barber, in a shop called, “Camello’s,” but I think that as a girl I got them less frequently and thus never had a “spot” where I’d typically go.

Which is all a long way to say that the hair cutting I’ve been doing has not been without its benefits. But so too, in spite of my moments where I tell myself otherwise, I have not been doing nothing.

Life is asking me to slow down which is a little odd as I feel as though I’ve been moving through peanut butter for the past year or so. Everything seems to take so much damn effort. Still the signs are clear and present.

The first one isn’t the heat, it’s the humidity, the air muddy and thick. I’d say that first step out the door is like hitting wall but it’s not: the heavy air seeps in around the doorway so it’s more like a zero entry sauna, if such a thing existed. Not slowing down is not an option. I haven’t gone for a run or exercised since Friday, the last time the dew point was high enough that a slight breeze was even a possibility.

The second sign is my left foot. I don’t know how or when, but I injured it at some point. I’m guessing it has to do with simply pushing myself to run more and longer than I really should be. So I’m not running at all right now. I’m getting my exercise other places. Slow down, my foot tells me. Don’t forgot about us extremities.

The third sign is sleep. Or lack thereof. I know I need it, so I’m trying to take it everywhere I can get it.

The fourth sign is my kids, who, when I’m really doing a good job of paying attention, remind me always and in myriad ways to slow down. Today, two kids were off in a bedroom “playing” (which is to say, throwing stuffed animals hither and thither) and the third, the oldest, was lying down on the couch. “I’m SO tired,” she moaned.

“You can rest,” I told her but then I took out my notebook and sat down at the dining room table, pen at the ready.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

“Writing,” I told her. One of the things I really like about kids (or at least my kids) is that they rarely ask for more specifics in situations like this. Perhaps she could tell that I was absorbed in the task enough that I wasn’t likely to expound.

She went and got her notebook that contains one of her recent writing projects. And we sat writing, jotting down notes in companionable silence. It was only a few minutes and I don’t think either of us wrote more than a few notes here and there (or, at least, I didn’t do more than that). But we both got a little bit done. My 8 year old daughter came in whilst we were writing. She saw what we were doing, didn’t ask any questions, and immediately turned and left the room. She returned a few minutes later with her science project. She paged through a book and took a look at her project. I glimpsed the page she was open to and saw the word “nanotechnology” across the top. The three of us worked on our individual projects for a few minutes and then put them all away.

I’ve been trying to carve out a little time here and there to work on a piece of fiction I’ve been writing, but this was far and away one of my most productive few minutes of working on it. In large part, this was because my sitting down and putting pen to paper had inspired my daughters to work on their own projects. I don’t often work on my own “fun” projects around my kids. In part because it feels a bit self indulgent. But the truth is, of course, that they see and are watching everything we do. By pulling out my writing this morning, even just for a few minutes, I conveyed two things to them. Your work (of learning, of creating, of doing whatever it is that inspires you) is important. And two, even just a line edit here or there or a reread or just opening the pages is moving you closer to the goal, whatever that may be.

I know that part of why my foot is injured is that I pushed myself too fast. I was getting tired of the too slow incremental gains on the running program I was following and so I jumped ahead. My body wasn’t ready for it. Writing and even other creative tasks can be like this too. The best and most lasting type of change and growth and learning is incremental. There’s something deeply satisfying in that.

Tonight I made pita bread for dinner. It’s a process that I have down, more or less, by rote, or at least well enough that it’s the sort of thing that I have, most of the time, done with something else playing in the background: the radio, an audiobook piped in through my earbuds, even the odd TV show streamed in on my iPad. We’ve been cooking at home a lot lately and the specter of boredom seems to haunt the corners. Media is my talisman against it.

But tonight I put my earbuds aside. I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks, some great, some less so, but enough so that they are starting to mesh together into one mass. I guess I was looking for a break from those anyway.

After I use my rolling pin to cajole the dough into something resembling a circle, I sometimes pick up the disc-like dough and use my hands and gravity to stretch the thicker parts out a bit. As my fingers slide the slightly floury dough from one hand to the other, it makes a satisfying sh-sh sound against my hands. It’s subtle and, of course, had I been listening to anything else, I wouldn’t have heard it but tonight for a brief moment that dough-against-hand sound struck me as something that many women and moms and caregivers and providers and humans have been familiar with throughout much of human history and throughout much of the present day world. Flatbread, after all, is beloved and a staple in many diets.

Had I missed this sound because of my earbuds, I would have not had this feeling of connectedness and of having a place in history. As I’ve tried to cut back on consuming media, I have been encouraged to find that what rises up (which is to say, mostly my own thoughts) has been at the very least, not boring,

I’ve been trying to write more in a more meaningful and focused way and as I’ve spent less time consuming social media (please note I said less and not nil), it hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be to find the time to write and to find content that interests me.

When I woke up this morning, I had been planning to run or at least some sort of exercise. But when I let the dogs out, a wall of humidity greeted me. And then as I crept around the house feeding the dogs, I realized that my left foot, which has been sore for a few days, didn’t feel much better. I’ll hop on the elliptical, I thought, or do something else later in the day. I needed to lie down for a while longer. I hadn’t gotten enough hours of sleep the night before and it felt that I was receiving a reminder that rest, and specifically sleep, should be a priority. There was absolutely no sense in powering through a sore foot and wall of humidity. Yes, I have certain health and exercise goals and not running one morning was not going to help those goals … well, except for the obvious fact that I needed rest and sleep and that my body was telling me that that would be better for my help than running on a sore foot.

Later on, I didn’t end up having time (see: making pita bread) to exercise on the elliptical or anywhere else for that matter and yet, and yet, I managed to meet all of my daily exercise goals including steps and moderate activity minutes. Turns out, without rest and sleep, I can’t meet any of my other goals like daily writing and exercise. Speaking of which … I’ve got to sleep now. I was planning on creating an image or images to go with this and to do much more, but it’s nearly midnight and I need rest.