aboutaphaia-blog

[aboutaphaia-blog]

OF ZUCCHINI AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF SUMMER

We are back on the island for the summer season, a summer like no other. Sadly, the Corona crisis is still circling the globe, with spikes and surges keeping most people from traveling, but we are determined to make the best of it. No, let me rephrase that. We will turn this huge upset upside down and make Wild Fig a place of peace and refuge from the virus. 

Ariana and Martin...our new Work Away friends!

We are open for business and because of our remote location, we have even managed to get a few bookings, but we also intend to enjoy these lean months on Zakynthos Island with its empty beaches and roads, its closed tavernas and villagers greeting you with hopeful stares. Everyone has been poised and ready to re-open, but the tourists are slow in coming. We see a few cars with Romanian license plates at Porto Vromi, and in town we are stopped on the street by bored tour guides, thinking we are the tourists!  It’s so strange to swim in places that at this time last year were packed with bodies, slathering on sunscreen, or to drive for over ten minutes and not see another vehicle or scooter zooming past you at break-neck speed. I’ve even bought a Vespa and figure this is the perfect time to learn how to ride, with so many miles of deserted roads. Another blog on that later!  

Kosta and I have welcomed another couple from the Work Away program to live with us and help out on the property, Arianna and Martin. Arianna is from Italy and Martin from Slovakia, they met in Thessaloniki during an Erasmus program (study abroad for Europeans) and then moved to Athens to take a job in one of those enormous call centres that subcontract to companies like Apple. They spent the Covid-19 lockdown actually working, glued to a computer screen for hours, so they were desperate to get out of the city and spend time in nature.

What surprised them was how mountainous our area is, how wild. “I can hear the nature here, crickets, crickets and more crickets,” Martin says. Arianna shared “It’s like a little world, all its own,” nothing else around. And no one else for sure.

So here we are, just the four of us, washing windows, putting up sun umbrellas, picking enormous zucchinis from our garden, because they just keep growing. In fact, there are so many zucchinis we are eating them with every meal and I am amazed at how tasty they are, and how I don’t grow tired the vegetable’s soft, delicate taste. Technically zucchini is a fruit, but for culinary purposes it is most treated like a vegetable. Since Arianna is from Italy, where the fruit masquerading as a vegetable originated, we decide to make zucchini bread.

Zucchini bread bears special meaning for me, since it was something I used to eat after school with my best friend, Rainey. Her mother regularly made the dark, thick bread sweetened with honey and our teen-age appetites devoured thick slices while we talked about boys, swooned over Peter Frampton or Paul Molitor (the handsome shortstop who played for the Milwaukee Brewers) and pondered our future. I spent many hours on her old blue couch in the family room with Rainey, fleeing a difficult home life, and the smell of this bread brings immediate relief. Arianna is a much better baker than I am, so the two of us will attempt to bring back this memory. Below is the recipe, and we invite you to bake and break bread with us, in honor of your best friend, someone you miss or who helped make you whole in a difficult time. 

ZUCCHINI RECIPE

As Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “there are years that ask questions and there are years that answer them…” This is a year of both I think, and consuming zucchini bread might just help us all get through it.

[aboutaphaia-blog]

AFTER WILD FIG, FEELING THE FOG

I haven’t checked in in a while...have been traveling and re-branding (hate that word) and generally laying low these past few months after returning from an incredible summer on Zakynthos Island... where my boyfriend Kosta and I have been building our dream house and retreat, navigating a new life and love together, opening up to new experiences, visitors, adventures.   

I watched the documentary The Center Will not Hold on Joan Didion a few weeks ago and it has been bouncing around in my head ever since.  Re-reading her article, written in 1970 (!) in Vogue on self-respect, I think about how this idea of self-realization, self-knowledge and deep self-acceptance are so key to unlocking our potential as women, as leaders, as actors in this space and span we call life.

Didion writes about herself as “A woman who is radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people…a woman who misplaced whatever slight faith she had in the social contract…” and this profound self-searching permeates all her work.

And this is where I find myself today, ironically as I step aside from the leadership of GlobalGirl Media, an NGO I ran for ten years and into a new role, as yet undefined, I am embracing this notion of displacement. Is it not what we always feel as women, no matter what our origin, generation, location? Just a little insecure, a little uncertain, slightly outside ourselves.

And this was no more glaringly obvious this week during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice. I can barely write about it now, given how down-to-the-marrow harrowing it was, to watch full frontal misogyny on display. Hearing one man’s disrespectful, vitriolic, righteous indignation versus  one woman’s wavering, yet calm, almost apologetic account of abuse reminded me of the gender lock we are still in. Male anger trumping women’s rational vulnerability, male lies devouring women’s truths. It’s another blog, deconstructing what happened this week in that hearing room, but I think I will wait out the week the FBI has to investigate, think of how lucky I was to live on an island far away from this fray. For now, I invite you to listen to a new female singer songwriter I heard recently, opening for Beck at Red Rocks Jenny Lewis one of her songs kind of sums it up: Just One of the Guys

[aboutaphaia-blog]

Thinking of heart openings...and how one conversation can lead to a kind of breeze that blows straight through your heart. I learned this from a friend and mentor, Joan Blades who was the co-founder of Moveon.org as well as #momsrising and now runs www.livingroomconversations.org 

SEE THEIR LATEST IN THE FILM AMERICAN CREED

@americancreed 

What does it mean to be American? What holds us together during turbulent times? These are the questions being explored in the PBS special American Creed. American Creed premieres as a televised special Feb 27th on PBS and is free for download on their website starting Feb 28th. Check out the short that features Mark Meckler Co-Founder of the Tea Party Patriots and Joan Blades Co-Founder of MoveOn.org talking about their Living Room Conversation at https://www.americancreed.org/stories.

[aboutaphaia-blog]

New title for my blog!

I am renaming my blog to ABOUT APHAIA, named after a little-known Greek Goddess, Αφαίας, who was known as the “goddess who got away…” she jumped into the sea rather than marry Minos, who Zeus had arranged for her. She was saved in the nets of fishermen, brought to the island of Aegina in Greece. There is a temple there I visited in 2015, and never forgot it. Little did I know I would meet a Greek man, Kosta, in 2017 in Oakland, California, fall in love and find my way back to a Greek island, this time Zakynthos, where I intend to live part-time as I explore the meaning of this obscure Goddess. I invite you to follow me on my journey, a still rambunctious, wanderlust woman in her mid-fifties, starting over (again), following a dream, living off the land and… ever the nomad, opening up to new cultures and corners of the world. 

It is my intention to continue to write and work as a journalist and filmmaker, focused on the stories of immigrant, migrants, women and girls in the MENA region (Middle Wast and North Africa). I will be spending time in Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco, and points beyond…if you work or are from these countries, have something to share: a poem, a recipe, a photo, a memory, a story…please reach out your hand…and I will catch it!   www.globalgirlmediaproductions.com

[aboutaphaia-blog]

Haddasah

In her lips a shadowed smile vigilant over its luster. If she held sway over the boys they never told what their nights would not. Hands full with girls that would turn them both to sensible soon enough.

Once a girl who never wanted to be patient, thought she could pass go straight to sensible. Carried grit, goals, and teeth against her chest cacao beat other girls bartered when sensible

looked more appealing. Her hands were too full to caress egos; fast footing to a water stop unmanned by the time she made it. She made It.. Money. Decisions. She made one dish meals. She

made lists. She made wine disappear in real crystal glasses. She made top this and first that and made believe and water of every plan in dark rooms; artisan she was, She made them believe She was lean.

Shoulders straight, eyes direct never accusing, and in her lips a shadowed smile vigilant over its luster. Grit, goals, teeth scattered on the floor of her flat like scrabble letters refusing vocabulary to the naked eye.

-Darlene Anita Scott

[aboutaphaia-blog]

Our grapes at #WIldFig, the retreat center and organic farm we are developing o on the island of #Zakynthos, #Greece

[aboutaphaia-blog]

This is Hamid. I met him in Greece when is boat blew off-course form Turkey. He is a refugee from Afghanistan, but he is much more. Hear his story. 

[aboutaphaia-blog]

A day that doesn't have a Dance in it is a lost day... Nietzsche

[aboutaphaia-blog]

Salt of the earth. Collecting salt off the coast of Zakynthos, Greece.

[aboutaphaia-blog]

New title for my blog!

I am renaming my blog to ABOUT APHAIA, named after a little-known Greek Goddess, Αφαίας, who was known as the “goddess who got away...” she jumped into the sea rather than marry Minos, who Zeus had arranged for her. She was saved in the nets of fishermen, brought to the island of Aegina in Greece. There is a temple there I visited in 2015, and never forgot it. Little did I know I would meet a Greek man, Kosta, in 2017 in Oakland, California, fall in love and find my way back to a Greek island, this time Zakynthos, where I intend to live part-time as I explore the meaning of this obscure Goddess. I invite you to follow me on my journey, a still rambunctious, wanderlust woman in her mid-fifties, starting over (again), following a dream, living off the land and... ever the nomad, opening up to new cultures and corners of the world. 

It is my intention to continue to write and work as a journalist and filmmaker, focused on the stories of immigrant, migrants, women and girls in the MENA region (Middle Wast and North Africa). I will be spending time in Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco, and points beyond...if you work or are from these countries, have something to share: a poem, a recipe, a photo, a memory, a story...please reach out your hand...and I will catch it!   www.globalgirlmediaproductions.com

[aboutaphaia-blog]

Female Abstractionist painter Helen Frankenthuler at exhibit @denverart

[aboutaphaia-blog]

“The first rule is there are no rules” Helen Frankenthuler. If you don’t know her, you should. Prominent Female artist, abstract impressionist from the 5-60′s. Check this out:

[aboutaphaia-blog]

On my way to DC for the State of Women Summit...honored to be part of the momentum...#nowisourtime #wegotthis

[aboutaphaia-blog]

I haven’t been around in a while, checking back in with this new poem I wrote, in honor and memory of the 19 Yazidi women who were burned alive by ISIS for refusing to have sex with their captors. May they find peace in the after-life...

MOVING THROUGH SILENCE

The weight of words, of language are the women who sing, alone

So I try

With this voice of mine I hear from far away

In the soft Sahara, lies a girl heavy with ancestral music

Staring at stars with her eyes closed

Where is actual death?

I wanted clarity for this lack of light

Words die in the memory

The girl lying in the sand nestles into me inside her iron cage

The one who couldn’t stand it anymore

And begged for flames that would set her on fire

[aboutaphaia-blog]

This is the northern most tip of Africa...Haouaria, Tunisia...the final days I am here.