An Introduction

I first read one of my favorite quotes in the front of Michael Lang’s memoir The Road To Woodstock:

 With blustering resonance, these words echoed in my mind long after the first reading, persuading me to do the things I hadn’t thought to do before, pushing me towards the edge of everything unknown, towards the edge of a found sweetness.

Leaving high school and my hometown of Peachtree City, Georgia at the age of sixteen and traveling to the Northeast for early college was among the first marks of my irreverence for those experiences had merely in the name of convention. It was also a tremendous leap, perhaps more unexpected by myself than anyone else. It was a departure from my chronic cautiousness, and it changed my life for the better more than anything else.

Two years and a degree later, I couldn’t convince myself to stay in college in pursuit of a “higher” degree. For all my vast love of learning and my college’s community, I wasn’t quite fulfilled by the idea of staying in school for another two years. Then the opportunity came to spend the summer in Brooklyn as an in-office extension of my magazine internship. My parents would say, “This is your semester away from school to get some real world experience before returning for your Bachelor’s.” And I would agree, until the point where I stopped agreeing and started to know, intuitively, that some other path was waiting for my trek.

Looking back I now recognize that the first path only saw me attempting to triumph through a footslog, trying to fit myself into the role of my magazine internship position. But then one evening when I left the office, I decided to stop forcing myself into a box that I wasn’t meant for… and I never went back.

All the while, I’d continued nurturing my natural passion for vegan food, scouting out new vegan restaurants and bakeries with great frequency,  observing their inner workings and atmosphere, and taking advantage of finally having a kitchen at my disposal. Then it occurred to me that I just might have a love for the culinary arts and for sharing food that promotes good health for the earth, people, and animals. So while I was lost in my internship, I started to become found in the kitchen and in a wonderful little café called Sun In Bloom, where I recently took a job.

So there I was and here I am now and where I will be I cannot know. The “so far” is all I have, all any of us have. The so far holds our memories and our past cares, our used-to-be’s and our maybe’s, our whispers and our screams, our walking and then running to the now. Every day adds new experiences to our “so far.”

This blog captures mine.

Newly graduated from Bard College at Simon's Rock, all smiles as I approached the next part of my life and what it would teach me.