Welcome to Wandering Grace
Wandering Grace was the idea for a “migration tour” along the Pacific Flyway of migratory birds, which I incubated and iterated on throughout 2022. Wandering Grace evolved into a personal Healing Pilgrimage through the itinerary planning of winter 2022 and spring 2023. From April through June of 2023, Wandering Grace manifested as 3 months of DIY artist residencies throughout Oregon, Northern California, and Southern California (with a sidequest to New Mexico).
Wandering Grace is an essay series in newsletter form. I want to share writing here on substack on a bi-weekly basis exploring themes of place and (be)longing — one piece for each stop on my Healing Pilgrimage (give or take).
If you want to come along for the ride, please subscribe. I will be offering the essays to all — whether you are a free or paid subscriber — every other Thursday. Paid subscribers will get extra snapshots of the road (e.g. postcards, packing lists, soundtracks, kitten photos, etc.) on alternating Sundays.
About the Path
Wandering Grace was revisiting places I have lived, loved, and left. Wandering Grace was somatic opportunity to move whatever feelings still needed to be felt about those places. It was chance to revisit old versions of myself and have late night chats with her about why and it’s okay and couldn’t we have, no of course we couldn’t have. It was encountering a layer cake of time. It was multiverse jumping.
Wandering Grace was done on a humble budget, drawing from artist funds and travel savings and cooking when I could. It was cobbled together, and I moved from place to place within each city or region a lot — just as I had when I lived there.
Wandering Grace was mostly fueled by a lot of asking and receiving — gifts of hospitality rooted in relationship. Wandering Grace healed some relationship tensions and deepened other friendships and showed where webs of weave could support in expected and surprising ways.
About the Inquiry
Wandering Grace is the physical movement of my body through space and time in order to shake up stagnations of the heart and to unstick contortions of spirit.
Wandering Grace is a reckoning with how racial and economic forces affect our movement and migration. Wandering Grace is an intergenerational questioning of choice and agency, power and responsibility, amidst our own displacement.
Wandering Grace is a recipe in rootmaking. It’s the verb of rooting in the face of uprootedness. It’s the (re)insecure practice of making roots when the fog of rootlessness tricks you into believing you don’t know how.
Wandering Grace is inquiry into place and longing.
Wandering Grace is me reclaiming my voice.
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I look forward to sharing this still-unfolding journey with you.
About me
“Christina Tran is a comics artist, essayist, and teacher born in Houston, Texas and currently based in Albany, Oregon. Her art and writing give breath, voice, and spaciousness to things that are often too hard to put into words. She invites us to ask braver questions of each other, together. Her backgrounds as an educator, designer, and community steward inform her work and her workshops. Her hope is that we remember the wholeness in our complexities, the lineages of our seeking, and the many possibilities for healing. More of her work can be found at sodelightful.com.”
