proteanme

I cooked up a storm the other day. I roasted beets and roasted chicken with garlic in olive oil. I boiled new potatoes, sauted some fava fresh beans, made a vinaigrette for two heads of lettuce that I cleaned and tore and I simmered a big bunch of collard greens from our garden in white wine and chicken stock. I think I started cooking at 6pm and got done around midnite, although I did stop to eat along the way. Everything turned out super tasty too, which is a relief, because I’ve had a number of mis-steps lately. I’m mentioning all this because spending all that time in the kitchen – twice shelling the favas, marinating chicken, cutting cleaning 40 leaves of collards –  it was like I had my old me back, meaning that for many, many months I’ve been missing some vital part of me that included getting lots of joy and meaning from being ambitious in the kitchen.

Ever since my dad died I thought that the me I was missing had gotten done in from grief, but I’ve come to realize that I was letting my job rob me of that part of myself. So I’m going to try a new approach on the inside, something a little more sane and balanced, I hope. And a new point of view on the outside too, meaning I’m leaving my current job and in short time, I’ll be starting up a  new job at somewhere new. I don’t talk about work much in this forum, a purposeful choice, but it’s a big change – self imposed upheaval – and that process is worth noting and sharing. Especially because it’s a bit of a roller coaster ride which I’ve been trying to notice that, how I move from fear to sadness to excitement, all in the matter of a couple hours and often generated only from whatever I’m mulling over in my head.