Food For Thought: Fall, Week 8
The end of a cycle: celebrating a full year of writing prompts
It has been a full year of writing!
We have come to the end of the Food for Thought writing prompts. I came up with this idea last fall as a way to bring some of what I teach in my food memoir classes to a larger audience. Over eight-week sessions, each corresponding to the seasons, we explored numerous topics, feelings, and memories about our relationship to food, nature, ancestry, and nourishment.
We began with musings on the power of gratitude and spent a winter season meditating on giving and receiving gifts, the taste of grief and being present, making do with less, and contemplating slowness.
In spring, we communed with the wind, spent some energy spring cleaning, took inspiration from nature, practiced connecting with that which is fleeting, and pondered the more than human world.
By summer, we welcomed in abundance, tried to stay positive during a heat wave reflected on the deliciousness of cherries and ice-cream, and wrote an ode to lunch (and salads).
And during the fall, we wrote about soup, the rituals of harvest time, a trip to an orchard, and a visit to a farm.
I have felt so grateful working on these prompts and sharing them with you. I have enjoyed the challenge of writing a mini-essay each week, of letting go of perfectionism and seeing what comes to the surface, of noticing what wishes to be expressed on any given day.
The full archive of Food For Thought is now available for free so you can access these writing prompts at anytime or work through them again for more insights into yourself.
So as we come to the end of this journey, it’s time to take stock of what we have gained, but also to notice what we have been able to release and compost from our lives and narratives.
As we enter the season of slowing down, it’s helpful to take some time for reckoning.
What did I plant in spring? Did it come to fruition in the fall?
What do I wish to carry forward into next year and what would be better to let lie fallow? To compost and return to earth?
How will I prepare over the winter so I am ready for the next spring?
How do we embrace the art of letting go? The art of dying? So that we may be reborn again and again?
My Substack isn’t going away, but it will change in the New Year.
I’m not totally sure how the next iteration will look, but my writing will likely be less frequent (we all want less emails!!). You can still expect the occasional unhinged musings, thoughtful questions, and concern for how to live a beautiful life on a planet in peril. I am excited about a new format that let’s me be a little more creative in what I write about. Paying subscribers will have new perks as well!
Thank you for being here!
Scroll below for this week’s writing prompts!
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