endings, beginnings, and the dreamy liminal space in between
menu 008
Structured like a tasty meal for weird/creative/silly geese, Goose Food is your weekly-ish whimsy-fueling checkpoint to add some pizazz back to your inbox and some creativity back to your juices.
Hi, I’m Noelle! I’m a writer, dog lover, and booktuber with an IRL background in events, wine, and luxury hospitality. There’s a goofy little word goblin chef under my hat cooking up the newsletter carte du jour— bon appetit!
🧀 appetizer
cleanse your palate with an amuse-bouche for your brain
choose your fighter: The Death Card
In tarot, the “death” card is about endings and beginnings, lasting change, and transformation. It’s a checkpoint that says “this is a point of no return, make sure you’ve saved your progress.”
In my life right now, there are many endings and beginnings swirling around in my peripheral vision.
ending - My dog Sunday has terminal cancer, and we are increasingly aware every day that our remaining time with her is running out.
beginning - We adopted another rescue dog in April. For now, we are a 2-dog household, and are enjoying starting this process all over with him.
ending - As I prepare to enter my 30’s this year (another ending/beginning of its own), my parents and grandparents are also entering the next phase of their lives. Retirement. Golden years. Health changes. New routines.
beginning - After dating for nearly 7 years, my boyfriend and I are tentatively planning our elopement. (!!)
ending - Gophers have completely mowed down my backyard vegetable garden. I’ve honestly cried about it (more than once). What was my happy place now just feels sad and wasted.
beginning - I’m finally writing again, and with some semblance of routine and sustainable momentum. I feel freshly creative and inspired after a long, LONG, period of dormancy.
For the fourth year, on bookish internet I am hosting The Tarot Readathon during the month of July, to gamify a month of reading (kind of like your library’s summer reading challenge) while also encouraging self-reflection and exploration with tarot cards. We have a reading prompt for each card in a standard tarot deck of 78 cards. The prompt for the Death card is: Read a book that explores a transformation.
Transformation and change can come in many different forms, in many different shapes and moods and colors and flavors. There is no one recipe for navigating death/grief/change/transformation. But the only way out is through.
I have collected many different tarot decks over the years, and each of them explores these archetypes with different art and energy.
Here are 9 of my favorites:
What symbolism comes to mind for major change?
What is ending? // What is beginning?
🌭 main course
chef’s special— chew thoroughly!
perfectionism is kneecapping your ability to finish things
I’m not good at calling a project “done.”
If it’s done, then I can’t keep working on it. I can’t keep improving it. If it’s done, it will be permanently imperfect. My partner and my therapist have both been known to gently call me out when I’m neglecting a project after getting it 90% of the way complete (they both call this “90%-ing”).
Recently, I watched this episode of
’s Wild Geese podcast: the life design process that changed my art (& actually, changed everything). Kinship of goose-adjacent nomenclature aside, Wild Geese is constantly inspiring me and opening my eyes to new nooks and crannies to explore within a life of curiosity and creativity.This episode in particular sticks with me because of the way it unpacks the different muscles involved in any creative process. That starting, executing, and finishing something are all distinct skills, and can be practiced and honed like anything else.
(so then obviously I had to contextualize it with a goofy metaphor)
Of course I want a juicy creative ass. I certainly have not been doing my creative squats [finishing projects].
Towards the end of this Wild Geese episode, Anna references this Substack piece by
:
I am not being hyperbolic when I say this^^^ essay has changed my life. It has altered my brain chemistry. I’m so serious.
The idea that something is always “lost” during the creative process, the tension between the idealized concept and the inevitably imperfect creation, the miraculous alchemy of creating something [art] from nothing [an idea]. The messy, untamable, liminal space In Between.
The quote that I’ve now memorized, shared with everyone I know, and written on a post-it in my office, is this:
To create something real is to kill the idea of it, and you have to get a taste for blood.
I can either have the perfect idea, or I can have the imperfect manifestation of the idea. Pick one. Birthing a project into existence will cost me my fantasized version of it. This is genuine alchemy to me. To change something’s state comes with a precious price. What could be more magical? What could be more natural?
“To create something real is to kill the idea of it…”
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of regrets. Søren Kierkegaard’s famous Either/Or philosophy explores the idea that both taking action and not taking action have a chance to cause regrets. But he theorizes that the regrets from not taking action are worse.
I’ve spent so much time avoiding the death of my ideas [not taking action], I’ve failed to notice I’ve been suffocating my creative life as payment. The artist’s doula is imperfection, and I cannot weather the alchemical change from idea to reality without her.
“You have to get a taste for blood.”
🥗 sides
perfect pairings for the vibes we’re cooking with today
it’s my liminal space and I’ll romanticize it if I want to
There’s something about this particular cover of The Chain that just perfectly captures the idea of liminal space to me:
The driving, minimalist percussion. The flirty hint of techno. The slight grain on the floaty vocals. The space to breathe between each verse. Not to mention the ICONIC lyrics themselves:
Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise
Run in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies
Wind, sunrise, shadows, love & lies—
Listening, watching, running—
All of these things feel so profoundly IN BETWEEN and transitional to me. “The Chain” itself links the Fleetwood Mac members together amidst other endings/beginnings/changes, to say that even though *some* things change, other links will persist.
practicing *actually* completing big projects
Earlier this month, I finally got around to editing and posting this behemoth of a YouTube project:
In the span of a year, I finished every book that was on my “currently reading” shelf on my Storygraph (notice it only has 1 book at the time of writing this— the book I’m actually currently reading. Yeah, please clap.).
Lots of real practice with finishing stuff in this video. I completed a bunch of books that had been quite literally collecting dust on my nightstand, and I also completed an ambitious creative project (read: 90+ minute video) that had been collecting digital dust in my Dropbox.
It was exposure therapy for sure, but it’s now one of my favorite videos I’ve ever made. Funny how that works.
🍰 dessert
a dopamine snack for your mental sweet tooth
clocking in to gather little treats for my digital village
A while back I saw a meme that said something along the lines of “if your partner sends you a ton of reels, that’s just their gathering instinct trying to provide for you, be grateful and appreciate them.” And since then whenever I send reels or memes to Wes, now we call them “berries.” I found so many good berries for you today. Have you eaten any of those berries yet? Etc.
So my goosies, here are some tasty berries I gathered for you recently:
🥡 take it to-go
feeling full? like it, share it, & reheat the leftovers whenever you need ‘em
end-of-post secret:
I have an accidental collection of Shrek t-shirts (I think I’m up to 5 or 6). 100% of them have been gifts. I love them. Today I’m wearing the one that simply says, in Shrek font, “cigarettes after Shrex.”
Love ya, hungry geese!
Stay funky,
Noelle
YouTube // Instagram // Storygraph // Ko-Fi