This has been a season of radical acceptance. I have drawn what, two comics this year? Maybe three? Though I am working on other projects, both visual and literary, it does sting to be away from here so much. I miss the artistic vernacular, developed over years and years, that is attached to this specific project. Drawing these comics is always a practice of accessing my hidden mind, letting one part of me rest while the other part plays. That’s not something you can easily replace, though of course I do not regret the reason (being present with my child through his very young life.) We are doing a bit more daycare now, so I’m hopeful I can be back here more frequently, despite occasional unexpected road bumps.

(Yesterday he was home sick with a fever, making a three-day weekend into a four-day. But it did result in an excellent moment of parenting slapstick, wherein the child fell asleep under my bed, and when I pulled him out – by the ankles! – he stayed asleep, continuing to fully snore through the ordeal. Is such deep rest even possible during adulthood? One wonders.)

We are entering the Bay Area’s actual summer, which I am told encompasses September and October, but seems really like it encompasses maybe yesterday and today, and perhaps a bit of tomorrow. (It has been 65-75 for basically the whole summer; yesterday was 80, today is supposed to be 90, tomorrow 75.) Sometimes we sit outside on the deck and Harvey lies down with his face pressed against the boards and says, “I like the hot, mama.” I had a dream that I was in a beautiful canyon in Tucson, watching a hawk soar overhead, which made me miss the desert quite keenly, though when I woke up I realized that in the dream, it hadn’t been hot. It was one of those worlds outside the world which exist in dreams and also in storybooks, landscapes that remain untouched by avarice or development, self-sufficient and pristine. Though actually in the dream I was just outside a resort where everyone was wearing high-soled bright yellow Timberlands. So maybe not entirely pristine.

What was my point again? I don’t think I’ve expressed one. This isn’t an essay with a particular mission statement, except insofar as I’m thinking about the way we build worlds. For ourselves, for our children, for our art. My office here is very similar to my office in Tucson (same art, same rug, similar furniture), which speaks to my delight in routine as a scaffolding from which to hang my art. I am similarly engaged in the process of building a legible world for my child, or rather creating the circumstances in which he can build one for himself. I was talking with some friends yesterday about how children want all our attention, all the time, and don’t really understand what a wild request that is: how they use us as their mental and emotional booster packs to process and arrange all the parts of reality they’re not yet equipped to navigate. It’s no small thing! No small imaginative project! And yet also totally normal, and part of the world in which we have to pick what’s for dinner every night!

Some parts of the world simply require you to submit to them, though, and that part of child-rearing is, I think, one. See also: my passionfruit vine, which grows so abundantly that it’s strangling our other trees, despite the fact that I hack it back at least four times a year. Right now our kitchen is overflowing with passionfruit: each tier of the fruit basket, the desserts in the fridge, the box that functions like a little drawer: pull it open, and surprise! Passionfruit. We are ankle-deep in the stuff, though this is not actually a complaint.

What I’m realizing is, neither part is. No part. Things require you at certain times, and you give to them what they require. Writing requires that I focus for a number of hours every day, and I give that too, threading thoughts about my projects across every notebook and surface of my existence, letting those thoughts drop into the deep pool of my subconscious. In previous parts of my life I’ve thought about my notebooks as capturing essential lines and ideas for my projects, but with the book I’m working on, what I’m realizing is, they are more of a lifeline to the deeper world of the project, a rope tied around my waist and to a tree back there in Narnia, as I dangle over the free-fall of my ordinary world. Which is to say, a lot of the shit I write down which feels so essential in the moment does not make it into the book. It comprises ideas and feelings and sometimes a kind of synthesis, wherein I am teaching myself to understand the book, but don’t need to put that understanding into the book as text. It’s already there, ideally. It’s flowing into me, and not the other way around.

What else? The trees, despite our current summer weather, are itching to turn; some indeed are already turning. It rained the other day, which meant the world smelled delicious and new. Harvey can ride a pedal bike, though he has also been very into his scooter lately. We spent a day at the beach which was so ideal I almost forgot that it was real as it was happening, floating at once in the overcast sheen of the sun and in the mist off the water and in the water itself. When the mist rolled in, Harvey said, “Look, the ocean is making steam.” He has been telling stories lately, sometimes long ones, which seem to combine every story he has ever heard in his life but which also escape them into something canny and new; when he gets tired of telling them he says, “Now the story is falling out of my body into your body,” which does not mean the story is over, it means it is being passed to me, and the telling will continue, between us, forever.