Reading through the archives of this blog, which I started in 2013 to document my life in Haifa, Israel, I am struck by the changing of life phases. My commitments were few when I arrived in Haifa fresh out of college—no spouse, no career. The job I held there, a secretarial position that mostly entailed cataloguing things, left me creative energy to write and do the occasional art project.

That young, single, and free phase gave way to the married phase in 2014 (a phase I hope will last as long as I do!) and to a married-and-pursuing-a-career phase when I entered grad school in 2015. Sergey and I added homeownership in 2021. All three commitments give purpose to my days; I feel blessed to have a wonderful husband, a meaningful career, and a beautiful home.

If you look at the previous blog post, you’ll see it dates from 2016. Now, it’s not that I’ve done no writing in the intervening years. As my collections of scholarly articles and essays for Bahá’í publications show, I’ve been pretty productive. Heck, I wrote an entire dissertation! But, apart from Katayoon’s Kitchen, a cooking and writing project that brought me joy during the pandemic, I’ve done little writing for the sake of pleasure, finding that my job responsibilities burn up my apparently finite supply of creative fuel.

I suppose I’m trying to explain to myself that there is a reason other than laziness or, worse, an ebbing of my word-smithing abilities, to explain the quiet—that poem ideas no longer spring into my mind, that my watercolors have been slowly drying in their tubes. Major creative undertakings require a great luxury, lots of free time, which I’ve not had since Haifa.

But perhaps minor creative undertakings, such as this blog, can be done with the scraps of time and energy I can scrounge up in this life phase.