There’s an invisible mountain of emotional weight that comes with someone’s itchy trigger finger on the mute button. That seemingly small impediment, the blocked red microphone icon, prevents spontaneous thought from bubbling up, spilling forth, being shared in the moment.
As I prepare for this project, I invite you to talk to me. Over the next few months, on my social media, I will be hosting “Food Fridays.” I will ask questions such as…What’s a food that makes you feel really good in your body when you eat it?
Who is someone you really trust that you think could help fix our food systems?
What do you think of when you hear the words ‘food systems’?
What emerged was an essay, “The Garlic Epiphany,” comprised of short reflections on a world without him, a world where his voice was silenced, how I struggled to feel alive on some days spent stretched out for too many hours on the couch he’d left to me. The title came from the ending where I was struck with the very sensory experience of standing at the stove, stirring garlic in a pan, the pungent odors and crackling sounds washing over me…
A spiritual walk with grief in some ways is, and in some ways is not, like these paths. A walk with grief, especially at the beginning, is more like being totally off the grid, mucking around, with no discernible path at all.
Here are some of my favorite ways that I’ve kept going–what I’ve done to keep myself occupied, reflections on my best and hardest moments, and what I hope to carry with me into next year when we emerge into another new reality…
As the election season has dragged on this autumn, I’ve found myself falling back in time to that time four years ago when the wheels of change were starting into motion for me. The actual week of the election I was still trying to juggle my full-time job as the managing director of a dance company while also conducting a storytelling residency at Virginia Tech.