READ YOUR LIFE.

Wake Up Little Sleeper

Sometimes something taps you on the shoulder, or the heart, and says, “it’s time to wake up now”. 

You could have been wrapped up in any number of dreams - in many levels of sleep -but you can still feel the tap and hear the command.

 Our bodies read their lives too.

We didn’t always have the information to know how they function best...but now we do.

I've known it for more than half my life.

November has been a coming back to an honoring of the body that has served me so faithfully and so well throughout my life. A body I haven’t always appreciated or thanked or revered as much as I wished I had now. 

A body I haven’t always stood up for when “professionals” gave me their opinion of how it was doing. 

But, the time is now to reopen the vault of knowledge I’ve stored up over the last three decades.

I was a vegetarian for eight years because it made me feel more connected with myself and with nature. 

Last January, I decided to take a year to revisit eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I made homemade ice cream for the first time.  I ate hamburgers.  I ate BBQ on the 4th of July.  I ate fried chicken at an old “meat ‘n three” in a town in the middle of nowhere and green beans floating in bacon grease. I’m not sorry I took this year of eating haphazardly.  Some of it was a lot of fun. I met a lot of wonderful people and took a lot of great photos.

But as hard as it is to type this out, the fact remains: I lost a connection with myself I had grown to depend on.

I let my esophagus burn while my stomach tried to digest the grease. I allowed my blood sugar to skyrocket and then plummet, leaving me foggy-headed and exhausted. I switched to looser-fitting clothing to accommodate the increasing size of my arms, legs and everything else. 

And as I ignored the “wake-ups” my body was sending me, I also suppressed the aching in my teeth; the doubts in my mind; the decisions that were waiting to be made.

I pushed them aside while still silently praying that something would magnetize all the fragments into something whole to propel me forward with a renewed sense of my body's value.

 I had the first astrology reading in my life this summer - on a lark really - but November loomed large in the prophesy.  And it came through or true?

Or else...it just came.

I will not recount what happened physically to get my attention. But it has to do with my head. 

My skull was in trouble.

Danger in my skull was a wake-up I had to address. 

One week post-op and I am still on a liquid diet. No coffee. No alcohol. No sweets. No acids. For at least seven months.

Bone grafts are in place. Stitches hold them firm.

My body. It's not mine, at the moment, to entertain with a bowlful of flavors and textures. It's for me to protect it. To love it. To feed it with the stuff that imparts energy and opens up all its potential. 

To raise it up again for the promise of another adventure. 

And just in case you're wondering...I'm quite awake now.

Hello Muse....Come here often?

Where have I been? Oh, right where I always am for about 6 to 8 hours a day.

My fingers are lightly hovering over and then sporadically pecking out letters to form words - then sentences-then paragraphs.  My eyes continually scan the screen. They are little roving editors.  They're ready to take a proverbial axe to any misspelled word or (what they see as) any awkward phrase. They call out “D-E-L-E-T-E!!! D-E-L-E-T-E!!!”  to my brain and, perhaps, directly to the ring finger of my right hand. The one that works with the executioner eyes to do their bidding, stretching over to come down squarely on the delete key. Leaving a blank space for me to fill.

I've been writing a screenplay. And it's not the ten or so half-started ones I've been stewing over (from time to time) for the last two decades. It's a “wandering” story that found me.

Much to my amazement (and confusion), it feels a lot like falling in love with a person. It's not in the least like what the scores of books I've read on writing through the years say it's like. It’s not like any project I’ve ever created for a client or with the objective of making money.  It's just like love.

And it's much more like bliss. Like faith. Like falling through the air with a sweet anticipation of brand, new insight.  It’s as if it occurred somewhere outside of myself in spite of my trying so resolutely to shape it into an entirely different experience. 

The process of writing, a practice I've always approached with reverence and have always felt I could “do” better is now a transformed, transfigured, evolved friend and, surprisingly, an inspiring, light-hearted  companion at that. Not critical of my comma placement. Not pointing at the ineptness of my descriptors. Not laughing at the style of my language.  Just letting my fingers dance on the keyboard. Encouraging my words to sway in front of the executioner eyes. Even enchanting them and making them collaborators who wait a moment before deciding whether a word should go or stay exactly where it is.

Just having survived long enough to have another birthday and to experience a treaty among my eyes, my brain, my fingers, my perception, my language and this loving, encouraging, creative influence infuses a sense of excitement as I step into my role as an elder.

A role I haven’t come to as joyfully, or as easily, as I did marriage and motherhood. 

Several years ago I typed this quote into the form of a letter which I keep on my desk.

 Martha Graham was born in 1894 and was considered to be as important to the world of dance as Picasso was to modern art and Stravinsky was to music. 

 

She said these words I have framed on my desk to Agnes De Mille. De Mille was  the choreographer for many plays (including Oklahoma! shown in the clip below). She confessed to Martha in 1943 that she wanted to be excellent in her work, but was absolutely sure she would never be any good at it.

 

Martha went through a difficult time when, in her 60s, she had to watch young girls perform the dances she had choreographed for herself and her husband, with whom she had been so much in love.

The regret she felt - that she had passed her season of creation - forced her to nearly destroy herself for the next ten years.

 Then she fell in love again....

...with the desire she'd been trying to hide from for a decade. At age 76 she turned and, once again, embraced the nurturing force which had been sitting by her deathbed. Holding the hands that now were those of an old woman. Calling for her to open her eyes, stand on her feet and D-A-N-C-E again. 

 That she did for the next twenty years.

Martha danced and imagined at least ten new ballets until she was 95 years old with her eyes locked firmly, lovingly on the gaze of her interior creative partner.

 

 

U R THE Audience

Here are two filmmakers who inspire me every single time I take the time to revisit their art films. 

First Dziga Vertov. His name translates to something akin to "spinning top" in Russian. It was a name he chose for himself. As if he was a character in his own life. Born in 1896 as David Kaufman, he was obsessed with translating what he experienced into a visual medium. 

"I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only I alone am able to see it," he said. 

Above is a 4 1/2 minute segment of a film called Enthusiasm. The song "Everything is Free" is sung by a Swedish group named The Tiny. I'm crazy about this pairing but not sure Vertov would be. In his silent film Vertov called, "an experiment in the language of pure cinema" and "Radio Eye",  MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA was made in 1929 in Russia.

Yes, it certainly is a documentary showing life in the recently created Soviet Union showing both the amazing opulence and the heartbreaking poverty. Vertov was a communist. He documents the Bourgoise and the Proletariat.  The film is one hour and eight minutes long and hard, if not impossible, to watch in one sitting. But what you can watch of it is mesmerizing!

It has no embedded storyline, as Chris Edwards points out in his blog about monumental, and often forgotten, silent movies, its only story is the one you read into the sequences of images. You bring yourself to it. You see what you see. It's pure visual genius.

I see Vertov as the hero of his film - he literally IS THE MAN with the movie camera. He documented himself deep inside his history and smack dab in the middle of his culture. And, almost a century later, he's STILL there! He will be there for all time asking every viewer to come, "can you see what I saw?" "Can you see me NOW - there in time THEN?"

He had seen the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 masterminded by Lenin. He allows us to use those same eyes (through the lens of his camera) to see what he sees and then he places us behind him or in front of him to witness Vertov right inside the film as he photographs it. He shows the camera he uses in action. Its crank. Its wooden case. Its glass eye of a lens.

No matter how much he carries us along with him though, ultimately, HE was the person he shot his films for. Vertov was his own audience. This is crystal clear to me in all of his work.

It's inspiring, yet, at the same time it challenges me to ask myself if I have enough courage to rise to that calling in myself?

Little Rebel Doll, Oakley Park Red Shirt Shrine, Edgefield, SC 2009

A shelf at the Goodwill, Aiken, SC 2011

 

Oil Tank, Pasadena, TX, 2010

As I unravel my interior symbology and translate it into the sequential visual images illustrating how the world appears to me: I am the one who is seeking to understand it the most. And eventually, unless my work/play/art is authentic - it will be worthless to anyone who might ever discover it sometime in the future anyway.

Which brings me to Maya Deren.

She too was born with another name in 1917. And also in Eastern Europe. She moved, with her parents, to New York in 1922. In 1943, at the age of 21, she purchased a 16mm Bolex camera and began making movies.

She chose the name Maya to fit who she perceived herself to be as a filmmaker.

"I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick," she said.

AT LAND was her third film, which runs 15 minutes.  Deren described herself as a poet who discovered that film "said" all she wanted to convey inside through words alone. 

 

I like Vimeo best to embed video, but youtube had the silent version of this film which I treasure. Above is the first part of the film and below is the last half.

 

After about 30 seconds, you will see why watching this without sound is phenomenal. It enables you to connect your "radio ear". All of a sudden, you realize that you do hear something.

You hear the soundtrack in your head. It's a remarkable experience.

Maya too was her own audience. Even though she had political and social ideas she wanted to talk about - when I watch her films now, I see only through Maya's lens.

Only through Maya's eyes.  

These two filmmakers had to go to great lengths and great expense to make their inner visionary pieces.

We live in a time in history when for less than a pair of designer shoes, we can use our cameras as our paintbrushes and our computers as our canvases. 

Look at this clip to set your mind a spinning like a top! 

IPad 2 movie making

Now Ask Yourself, "What Do I Want To See In The Movies I Make?"

Here's one of my personal movies from several years ago.  Now go create your own.

Why I Love My Scanner And You Should Too!

I love my scanner. 

I’m also a little superstitious about saying that I love my scanner for fear it will stop working. And sure I could buy another scanner, but it's not MY scanner!

It would be hard for me to approximate how many thousands of scans it’s made for me but for more than four years now it’s given me all it’s got.  

I love yooooooou Little Scanner of Mine (please don't quit doing what you do so well!)

 It did stop working once and I was terrified. I won’t share that story because you’ll jump to the conclusion that I think my scanner has a personality and an opinion of its own. And even though I won’t tell you to which political affiliation I think my scanner belongs - I assure you it has one. 

But after profuse apologies for my utter insensitivity and the promise of cleaning its glass once a week, it decided to start working again the next day. 

You see, I drag my poor scanner all over the country, expose it to airport security, plug it into my laptop and force it to scan as many images as I can manage to slap onto its glass face before my time is up.  Many times I’m interviewing people who’ve brought photos of their family or old newspaper articles. I talk to them and scan. Take notes and scan.  Record video and....that’s right....scan.

 I’ve tried to scan lots of things and my willing sidekick has played along. 

 Some things turn out much more interesting than I thought they would.

 And some things I scan just don’t take to the flat surface and extremely narrow focus area as I well as I had hoped.

 Whatever rendition of the thing I'm trying to scan happens to pop up on my computer screen - the image is always ethereal in some way.

The more three-dimensional the object I’m scanning is, the more pieces of it are both in and out of focus. It’s sort of like looking at something submerged in water with binoculars.

 Recently I found a couple of old contact sheets. The images on them are from the early 80s. At that time I wasn’t making movies so when I found them I was astounded by seeing the sequential nature of a contact sheet as a Read Your Life documentary tool.

 

I scanned the whole sheet and then zoomed into specific frames. These were personal images that had never been printed.

One series was taken in Abiquiu, New Mexico around Georgia O’Keeffe’s property.

She was still living at that time in 84 or 85. Abiquiu is about 50 miles from Santa Fe, and as we were photographing the Peniteinte Morada that sits on a mesa just above her house, we saw her emerge, dressed in her signature all black clothing, and get into her black Mercedes. 

The other contact sheet was from when my son was born on January 23rd, 1981.

  We didn’t know if we were welcoming a son or a daughter. Brooks was a complete surprise because I was absolutely convinced it was another girl.

I had never seen this one beautiful moment when I touched the cheek of my little baby boy for the first time. Are you starting to understand why I love my scanner?

Apparently there were also celebratory fireworks going off in the delivery room because just two frames later on the contact sheet I saw the above images.

If it hadn't been for my oh-so-amazing scanner - I never would have seen them 30 years later. 

Media through images, sounds and technology runs both ahead of us and trails behind us. (Please, oh please, notice the pearls my grandmother is wearing with her ballcap and string of fish - priceless!)

The old pictures you've looked at a million times become infused with magic when you scan them at a high resolution and look at them closely on your computer screen.

Just DO IT!!! Then you'll love your scanner too. May you both be very happy together.

 

 

 

Picasso's Advice

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael,but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

This quote from Pablo Picasso has always fascinated me. Why would a master, an artist and the consumate craftsperson want to unlearn complex techniques that had taken him years of work to perfect? The need for this perception shift came as a revelation to Picasso in the fall of 1906 (some say 1907) when fellow artist, Henri Matisse, showed him an African mask one evening at the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Matisse had recently received acclaim for his painting, Le bonheur de vivre. It was a representation of his artistic vision using distorted shapes and vivid colors that were not shaded or refined so they appeared flat. Also influenced by his exposure to African Art.

The legend is that Picasso was so overwhelmed by seeing the mask that he would not be parted with it for the entire evening - not even during dinner. When he returned to his studio at Le Bateau Lavoir, he painted furiously all night to capture the primal images that the mask had caused to bubble up to the surface of his consciousness. In the morning, he was found asleep, surrounded by pictures of a "one-eyed, four-eared, square-mouthed" images.

If I apply his line of thought to my own writing and image making, I begin to understand the process and the necessity of following Picasso’s lead. To find an authentic, genuine avenue to get what I perceive on the inside to the outside media, without the influences I've unconsciously (or consciously) absorbed from other people’s expressions, I have to find a way to bypass those filters I've set into place over the course of many years.

 And, as Picasso implies about his own work - I have to constantly work on freeing the channel that has been blocked by the many detour signs I've placed in my path because I happen to appreciate another person’s individual artistic expression.

 I find it takes something akin to discipline to force myself to see and experience my world in a child-like way. I have to constantly remind myself that it is I who have made an image because I am looking at something. It is I who am whispering in my own ear what I see through an image I made. That's the purpose of my cameras, my computers, my paints, my pens and my pencils. I am my own audience. And if someone else finds meaning there - that's fine.

   

When I edit, crop, enhance or just stare at an image I've taken, it because I want to know what it means to me. That idea becomes clearer to me when I spend time with children. It's easy to let them to re-teach me to unlearn what I’ve come to regard as “the right way” to photograph or write.

 Children too can't escape their fate. They're constantly absorbing what they watch parents and older siblings doing. Yet they just can’t stop from reflecting the way they experience pieces of their world as themselves. They spontaneously revel in it.

 

How do we go back? Thankfully, there are some other things we can do to connect ourselves with the essence of what we see.

We can make the time to spend some time around elements that can be read as simple basics. Like...

Light.

Wood.

Water.

Muddy earth.

 Here's the first piece Picasso created after he was mesmerized by the African mask.

Here's a portrait of me taken by a 3 year old who I thought was just playing with my phone.

I couldn't help but see something familiar!

Play. Style. Look. See.

I sort of accidentally fell into being a stylist.  

I wanted to be a film writer.

Then I thought I wanted to be a commercial photographer.

But I found paying work arranging props, people, food and just about any thing else that could be worked into a scene....and I really liked it.

Then I spent a great deal of my life as a photo and film stylist. It’s always hard to wrap it up in that one word because it included doing almost everything to make a photo or a movie (meaning moving pictures whether tv, video, or film) look a certain way.

I did it because it was fun, but mostly because there was always good money to be made when I needed it. 

 
I’ve done everything from attaching green leaves to a naked tree in the dead of winter to give the illusion of summer. To applying brown eyeshadow to a chameleon who refused to change color on cue (It was a girl chameleon. I gave her a nice bath after her performance and she was happy.)  

And putting dirt under other people's fingernails...on purpose!

 
I’ve changed a young woman to an old woman and transported contemporary rooms back to antebellum parlors.

 
It’s the part of my job I consider “play".  Whenever I’m "just" the stylist (instead of the director or line producer or writer too) I can slip into another dimension where what I’m creating is all that’s important. It's immediate.

The world shrinks down to that one room; that one table; that one item. And it's at those moments that I see colors and shapes best. The shadows and the highlights are real things I can push around to change them into what I want them to be. 

 
Lately I’ve been inspired by blogs like Tartlette, A Creative Mint, The Blue Hour and Mister Mort. Each of these photographer's style their images so I’m visually carried to the same magic place I am when I’m making my own vignettes.

They have very different stylistic sensibilities, yet the end result is the same. I’m there. In the image.  I’m looking all around when I’m inside.  I’m hearing the sounds I imagine are . I’m smelling the aromas. I’m inspired to tell a picture story myself.  I want to share the way I see things. I want to share the things I see.

It's for this reason that I'd suggest to everybody who's interested in looking at their old photographs (or snapshots) and seeing MORE than they ever notices before to arrange a scene on a tabletop. 

You can just take one item you like from your collection of things you love (or things you just can't seems to part with) and take a picture of it. 

When you transfer it to your computer screen, zoom in to check not only to see if you got your focus right - but also to look closely at the textures, colors, shapes, light and shadow patterns on the object you photographed. Look at it like you've never seen it like this before....because you probably haven't.  P-L-A-Y with looking at the different parts of the image you've captured.

It's kind of like a meditation on it, but more fun than that.

It's the magic of the intentional act of looking at it and truly SEEING it that will astound you. 

I promise, you'll be surprised.  

Tell me what you SEE when you look...

 

 

Three Things You Can Do To Start Reading Your Life Today!

 
“Reading Your Life" is a method that focuses on recognizing the specific ways we each decipher information that’s meaningful for us individually. Everyone who has ever lived on earth has had at least one way she (or he) communicated with others. They've also each had his (or her) very singular, very personal language in which they communicated with themselves.

You too have your own alphabet; your own melodies; your own symbols; your own codes. 

One of the best ways to start to discover how you communicate to yourself about that deep river of meaning running beneath your attention is to investigate the snapshots you've taken over the years. Not necessarily the ones you've framed. More like the ones you stuff in a dresser drawer or hide in the back of your closet. Those photographs you take quickly, without much planning are just like a box with a big red bow on it, waiting to be opened.  They're golden!

 Before you can actually begin to decipher the clues in your snapshots, there are three things (I call them "Quests") you can try to help you start looking for the shapes and symbols that make up your particular "alphabet".

First, you've just got to take a trip away from your ordinary reception channel.  Pick a time each day, not more than two minutes, to mentally move out of the context of the everyday world. Retreat from the place where we all struggle to find our own meanings by looking through other people’s lenses instead of our own. 

Find a comfortable place where you can have a whole two minutes to yourself. Now, picture yourself in front of an old door that looks like it hasn't been opened in decades.

This is the door between the two worlds. You'll have to turn the rusty, squeaky knob of the door until you hear it dislodge. Then push hard enough and firmly enough until it begins to creak open allowing a space just big enough for you to squeeze your mind through.  Stand there, on the other side of the door, and try to adjust your eyes (the ones in your mind of course) to the subtle kind of light in this place. Almost instantly, you’ll start to make out familiar silhouettes. You’ll be able to see a color, a shape and you may even hear a sound (bells, music, singing). This isn't like meditation or hypnosis - you aren't clearing your mind. You're actively allowing these elements to come to you.  Ultimately, you’ll be able to use them, and all the others you'll find, to read your life. They're always there and have been there for as long as we’ve been alive. We've learned, as almost all of us do when we’re growing up, that we had to compete or rely on drawing our primary meanings from someone else's view of ourselves. We overrode the simple wonder of this great vocabulary we’d spent so much time constructing for ourselves. This intricate matrix of individual meaning and complex purpose took a back seat to making good on a test at school, dressing for success, swimming with the sharks.

Here's a fellow who's just beginning to be influenced. Zack is one of my favorite teachers.

 

 It’s still there.  It’s alive with the elements that electrify your deepest sense of who you are and always have been. Your alphabet is populated by and represents the people you admire; colors you adore; music you worship; words, symbols, signs and aromas you cherish.  It’s always ready to infuse your waking life with who you know yourself to be at your widest, most soulful depths.

Here’s three ways you can get started right away. 

 1. You with a Capital “U”

Okay, hang with me for a moment. Focus on the “U” in “Unique”. I phrase it in this particular way because it’s the first step to relearning how to look at shapes and meaning.  It appears simple. It sounds like a children’s song. It’s comes across that way because it's basic. You can hum it or you can rap it but it’s more than a favorite line of Mr. Rogers. 

There’s only one of you (U). . . dum dee dee dee dee dee dum....

U is also a letter. . . dum dee dee dee dee dee dum....

U is also a symbol. . . dum dee dee dee dee dee dum.....

U is also a shape....dooooooooo wahhhhhh...

U   r   U ! 

U R the only one of U there will ever be. U R the writer of your movie. U R the director of your movie. U R the actor in your movie. U R also the audience (most important point).

It’s so critical to this process that you understand this concept first, on a very deep level, and ACCEPT it. Just consider it permission to spend time having fun finding out what you’re saying to yourself.

Although other people may be more than thrilled to give you advice, help you see the forest for the trees, pass along a hint, or flat-out lay their opinion of what they perceive about your life on you: they CANNOT “read” your life. 

Only U can.

 2. “I BELIEVE IT!!” 

You have to trade in the exclamation, “I don’t believe it” or “unbelievable” for “I do believe it” and “believable”. 

A lot of times we don’t want to believe the most obvious combinations of images we see (or perceive) right in front of our eyes. All it takes is a little practice. And it’s mostly a lot of fun. It shifts U over time until U do BELIEVE what you reading in your life.

 

When U begin to believe what you see, it’ll drench you a with feeling of awe you’ll carry around with you for days at a time.  And the more you believe, the more you'll see.

Of course, if you’re the least bit like most people, you probably say it once a day (“Oh my gosh! I don’t believe that just happened!”) Just try it the next time a phrase containing “unbelief” passes your lips (or pops up in your mind). Change it. Quick!!!

  3. See the light!

Unless you’re a person who works as an artist, a photographer or a videographer/cinematographer; you probably don’t give the element of light a lot of brain space.   It’s just there. It’s good. It’s too bright. It’s not bright enough.

When we put our attention on light, we realize can’t do anything without it except perhaps sleep. But no light, no day. No plants. No progress. No life at all.   

Light has also been used as a metaphor since people were started making them up to represent other things they wanted to explain. “You are the light of the world.”  “She saw the light.” “He lights up when she walks into the room.” “I’m gonna punch his lights out.” “The light went out of her eyes.” You get the picture.
 Just a quick brush up on a metaphor: it’s a figure of speech that uses a real element to represent an idea that’s less easy to grasp without it.

Metaphors can be represented by other images as well, but for our purposes the element of light is both a real, observable phenomenon all around us, everyday and it's a way to represent a thought or idea.

We think, see and read our lives in metaphors. We’ve made up our own internal metaphors to remind us of what something means when we encounter it.  

A powerful experiment in the beginning stages of reading your life is to notice and become increasingly familiar with light.   Watch it in the morning. Walk around your house. Go into a couple of rooms and notice the shapes it makes because it’s there or because it isn’t.

What shapes do you see in either the patterns of the light or the areas where the light isn’t?  Watch it in the middle of the day and into the late afternoon. How does the amount of light and its direction change in your rooms from the morning light?

How does that make you feel? Does it remind you of something in particular?

Watch it in the early evening and into the night.  How does the quality of the light change in each of the rooms?

What color is the light now?

When you see the color of the evening light, do you remember a sound, a word, a smell?  Have a good time with these “Quests”.  I like that word a lot more than "exercise"!

 

Stunned by Summer: Blueberry Peach Upside-down Cake

So I gained ten pounds working on my last documentary film. I didn't eat any more than usual, I just had to sit for such long hours editing and looking for images that my lipase enzymes shut down: or so they tell me. Mostly carrots and celery for me now until my clothes fit again.

Hey the movie's finished and we're already starting on another one. So I'm setting my alarm to get up from my computer chair for at least 10 minutes every hour to jump on a mini trap, ride around the neighborhood on my coolest beach bike or just speed through the never ending list of housework.   

But what I really want to do (in keeping with my rebellious nature) is bake. This would explain my two straight posts about pies and cakes....geez! 

 Summer in the South is going to be sweltering for all eternity. It just is. I don't even intentionally look at the temperature in the paper or on the bank sign near the woods where I walk most mornings.  I just take it for gospel that I'm gonna sweat. 

Yes, sweating reminds me of summer and summer reminds me that my beloved Saturday farmer's market is going to be a barn full of colors every weekend. I'm addicted to the farmer's market the way some people are to addicted to casinos. It's my entertainment.  It's the place I'll spend every dime I have in my pocket because it's cash only...and there's always just one more veggie or plant or do-da I'm going to fall in love with.  I need a support group!

It seems to me the peaches are early this year, but I'm assured I'm mistaken. It's probably because I've had my head in a computer since January. Like a kid at a carnival, I walk slowly, look at every single table and talk to each of the growers who have become almost like family to me over the last 8 years. Just in the last two years, it seems as if they're in a competition to see who can grow the most best looking crops.  Alright by me! As I was blissfully tucking the baby squash into my basket, my eyes rested on the peaches and the clear box of huge blueberries nestled beside each other., I knew right then I was going to have to figure something out to hitch 'em up. They just made such a cute couple!

I had been playing around with the recipe for the Strawberry Upsidedown Cake from my new guru Joy the Baker.  I had made a Peach Upside-down Cake instead of a strawberry on and it literally made my guy swoon.  It was logical to take it to the next level - they would be together forever in wedded bliss on the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it) of a cardamom cake. The cardamom is what makes this cake heavenly!

Blueberry Peach Upside-down Cake with Cardamom (based on a recipe by Joy the Baker)

This makes one 8-inch cake (I made mine in a funky pie pan that was given to me by my mother-in-law and has lots of love in it)

Topping (what will be on the bottom when it cooks and on the top when it's finished):

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/4 -1/2 cup brown sugar (depending on how sweet you want to make it)

1 cup sliced peaches (blanched to remove the skins)

1 generous handful (up to 3/4 cup) whole blueberries

Cake:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Put the 2 tablespoons of butter in the bottom of the pan and place the pan in the oven. Keep an eye on the butter until it's melted (don't let it burn), remove pan from the oven.  

Being careful not to burn yourself, use two pot holders to move the pan around, coating the sides of it with the melted butter.  Sprinkle 1/4 to 1/2 cup of brown sugar into the melted butter in the cake pan.  Set this pan aside.

Place a medium saucepan on a burner, fill with about 4 inches of water and bring it to a boil. Turn to low so it's bubbling but not at a rolling boil. Get 3 large or 4 small-to-medium whole, fresh peaches.  With a slotted spoon lower them into the water in the pan on the stove. Leave them in the hot water for about a minute to loosen their skins. The softer the peaches are to the touch, the less time you want to leave them in the water. If they are more firm, you can leave them in up to 1 1/2 minutes.

Gently remove them from the hot water (carefully!!) and place them on a plate to cool a bit. Set aside until cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cardamom.  Set aside.

Test to see if the peaches are cool enough to peel. If they are, pick up one in your hand and make a cut all the way around the pit. Pull the peach apart.  Starting with one half, place the edge of a paring knife under the skin and pull toward you. It should come off in one piece.  Cut the half into slices. When you've peeled all the peaches, measure out a cup full. Get the pan and lay the peach slices over the brown sugar and melted butter. If you have some left over, save them in the fridge to add to cereal or yogurt or freeze them for smoothies.  Fill in the holes between the peaches with the blueberries.

In the bowl of an electric stand mixer, cream butter and brown sugar until slightly pale and fluffy, between 2 to 3 minutes.  

Then stop the mixer, scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula, and add the egg and vanilla extract.  Beat for another minute.

Turn off the mixer, then add the dry ingredients.  Stir together before turning the mixer back on to a low speed. Add the yogurt and beat for just another minute until the batter holds together.  This batter will be thick.  Turn off the mixer and remove the bowl. Finish mixing any ingredients that are on the side of the bowl with the spatula.

Spoon the batter over the fruit in the pan and spread it out as evenly as you can with the spatula.  

Bake for about 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let cake rest for at least 10 minutes before running a knife around the edge of the cake and inverting the cake onto a cake plate. 

Serve warm with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream or serve cold for breakfast. 

 

 

Anniversary of the Day My Life Changed

There's a full moon tonight, I found an amazing through-the-woods-wilderness-path to Walmart and it's my first child's birthday. The numbers associated with my birthday sometimes give me pause ~ but it's the number of years my children have been on earth that always makes me spend those days bound up in nostalgia: sliding between chuckling and bouts of tears. It's also Wednesday. Candice Michele Barley was born on a Wednesday.

I thought I was ready for her to get here, but it wasn't until she arrived 34 years ago that I had the least idea what I'd gotten myself into. I wasn't the same 22-year-old girl anymore. My life was changed. I was better than I had been just a the day before. I am light-skinned, green-eyed and blonde.  Candice was asleep when the doctors lifted her from my flayed belly. It was easy for her and as she opened her eyes and woke up (I was panicked because I'd thought a just born baby was supposed to cry but she just squeaked a little) and everybody in the room (including 30 student nurses) ahhhhed.  Somebody told me I had a daughter. In 1977, in South Carolina, they wouldn't tell you the sex of your baby.  It was a big secret. I laugh about that now.  And the father was not allowed in if you were having a caesarian. 

I had wanted a girl, more than I should have.  I had willed it to be a girl. With dark hair and dark skin who would never have to hide under an umbrella at the beach. Candice was and is an olive-skinned, dark-haired beauty. I had fallen in love with her father mostly because he was tall, dark and handsome. And because he made me laugh and feel like lightening bolts were shooting out the bottom of my feet (hee hee Candice).  And as I think back now, who's to second guess the mystery and hormones that push us out of the driver's seat sometimes and start steering the bus for us while we sit dumbfounded in the back of the bus.  I wouldn't have changed a thing - at least for another 5 years or so until I had my son. It was all worth it to have them be exactly who they are and to have a good dose of Native American melanin to override the straight-up European white girl genes.

Today, I am so far away from her. So I baked her a cake anyway. Well not really a cake, because Candice isn't crazy about cakes ~ she loves beautiful berry tarts.  And I found one just the other day on Shutterbean.com. The perfect tart for my perfect memories. I made sure not to cry into the bowl of berries!

 As I made the dough, I remembered her face at two when she saw the cake with Barbie crammed down into the pink frosting.  She squealed. My heart melted. 

Candice has brought so much sunshine into my life (in fact that's what I wanted to name her and she cringes every time I remind her). We are so very different. But, at the same time, it's as if we share the same brain sometimes.  

She's an actress. She's gorgeous. She's smart and witty. She has three boys whom I love with every fiber. She has a husband (who has the same birthday) who amazes me.  She's strong. She's resourceful. She can make me laugh with just a look. She's as much a wonder to me as she has been since the first instant I saw her 34 years ago.

I wish I could hold her in my lap just one more time and put my cheek next to her little, soft brown curls.  I still remember the smell of her as a baby. That's the thing you don't realize when you become a mother. You don't get to keep them.  Sure, you know that. But somehow you still don't believe it when they're small. No picture can bring them back.  No video can freeze them in time.  Just once more I'd like lay beside her as she fights sleep and pat her back and sing to her. Just once more watch her kick her feet wildly as she lays back in the bathtub and bats her eyes when the water she kicks splashes on her face.

 Just once more hear her look at the clothes I pulled out of her drawer and exclaim (at 3) "mommy, dohs dun match!"

So here's your birthday cake Dissa, Biscuit Buns, Sweetheart!  You've brought me more joy than it's possible for me to explain and made June 15th one of the best days of my live.  I love you. I'll make this for you in person when I see you in July. I'm so glad I got to be your mommy! 

And Rich can have some too. Happy Birthday you two!

The Hankering in Your Heart

South Carolina hasn't gotten a lot of good press lately...well pretty much it's never, ever gotten good press. And there's a really fascinating reason for that. No really, there is!

This is a complicated, maddening, freakishly seductive place.  It's drawn me (and all kinds of folks) to it for hundreds of years (for all kinds of reasons). I've floated in and out of here through a series of, what appears on the surface to be, unrelated forays over my lifetime. 

My father packed up our family in the old Bonneville and drove us to Myrtle Beach in the 1960s from Charleston, West Virginia. I was 6 or 7 years old. As I sat, unseatbelted, on the massive backseat of the car, the dilapidated sharecroppers cabins, moss covered plantation houses, and massive wooden barns beaconed to me.  I stared out the open car window, my face practically melted by the hot summer air, mesmerized by the them. I wanted to stop to look inside every structure we passed.  I wanted to know the names of the people who had lived there, what they ate for breakfast, what their furniture looked like, how they felt about living their lives at their particular era in time. I wanted to sit with them on their porch swings, with the sounds of the mosquitos buzzing and an occasional waft of cool air of the evening while they told me stories they'd heard from their grandparents. 

You don't want to ask me why I was so hyperfocused on these odd and disjointed aspects of the South because neither one of us has enough time for me to explain it - although I do know the answer now. It's weird and it's spooky, but I know it.  Let's just call it a "hankering in my heart" that was planted then - or maybe long before then - but it was during those 8 hour car rides when I experienced the first tugs of a mission, followed by the magnetic incidents that kept pulling me back to South Carolina over and over again.

These photographs were taken in March of this year (2011) when, as I was driving to Texas from South Carolina, I was forced off the road somewhere just before Biloxi, Mississippi by a sign that read: "Beauvoir-The Last Home of Jefferson Davis". Now I didn't pull off the highway and look for it because I'm a big Jefferson Davis fan: I'm quite the opposite. However, the road leading from the town I live in (Aiken) to Augusta, Georgia is named "The Jefferson Davis Highway". I'm not kidding. Named for the doggone President of the Confederacy: what we would call in today's news report - the leader of the "insurgents". And yes, there are still rebel flags all up and down that little highway. Don't get me started.

I'd love to go back to my black and white, right and wrong position about the South that I was so sure of 10 years ago. Before I started making movies about southern subjects - because I HAD to. As I've learned over and over...it's complicated. But isn't everything? Just about everything we find ourselves spending decades unravelling is hardly just right or wrong, black or white. 

This is my first stab at talking about the issues that hang around the town I live in like Spanish moss from the oaks ~ and what is it about this place, and the whole south in general, that made me move from California in 2002. Like I said...it's complicated.

Here's a pic of Jeff Davis appearing to hold a light post in his hand, forever staring out at the Biloxi Bay on the Gulf of Mexico...

 What's the "hankering" in your heart that keeps showing up in your photos and movies?