Rekindling

Dear Readers,

In the words of the narrator of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “I been away a long time.” It’s true. I’m sorry for my prolonged absence. It seems, however, that the time has arrived to rekindle this food blog.

So. LIFE UPDATE. A couple years ago I started meditating and practicing Buddhism again. In August I moved to Brooklyn, which I do believe was a very wise decision. I also got an iPhone over the summer. What? Hello, twenty-first century.

Seriously though, life has been good to me over the last year and a half of my food blogging hiatus.

I’m now four years into my doctoral program for American cultural history. After wavering in the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go dance of graduate school, I recently decided (i.e., six days ago) that perhaps I’ve been pursuing the wrong course of study. Then it clicked. It's not that academia isn’t for me. It's that I've been struggling to study topics not appropriate for me at this point in my life. A moment of clarity dawned upon me and I realized—I’m a historian of cannibalism. How could I have ever thought I was anything else? It all made sense. My dissertation? The Donner Party.

Of course.

Which brings me to the next and, quite honestly, most important aspect of my life right now. THE TOWER. For just under the past year I’ve been serving as a dramaturg for an incredible play called The Tower (as in the tarot card representing chaos, collapse, sudden change, downfall, revelation…) about the Donner Party, a topic I’ve always found fascinating. For months I’ve been researching the history that surrounds these ill-fated emigrants who notoriously resorted to cannibalism to survive a brutal winter in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846-47. Most amazingly, I’ve been able to fulfill a passion I didn’t quite know how to best manifest on my own—turning the past into art.

Now that I’ve become intimately involved with the members of the Donner Party it seems I have no option but to stay with them. I’m just riding the energy I’ve tapped into through this process, and I’m ready to see where it takes me. So, dissertating? It’s a thing, apparently. I think I’m finally ready for it.

What does this all mean for A Slice of Earthly Delight? Well, I’m about to be immersed in food history. Which means I’m going to need an outlet to write about food thingz. Which means you all get to hear my ramblings once again! Everybody wins.

It also means that I’m going to be writing a lot about cannibalism. Be prepared.

Love,
Maya