Cornmeal. Milk. Flour.

The recipe then unfolds into individual taste and style.

Not one. Many. My mother made cornbread one way. My sister made it another. My grandmother had her own version — a little sweeter, a little thicker, cooked in a cast iron she had owned for thirty years. None of them wrote the recipe down. They felt, they observed. They relied on their senses to carry the personal flavor profile and on their connection to trust in capability and technique. The same tools somehow made the recipe unique.

I made each one slightly wrong at first — too dense, too dry, missing something I could not quite name. But with each attempt I got closer. Not just to the recipe, but to something in myself. What I valued. What I was made of. What kind of life I was actually trying to build, here, now, far from home.

Finding the perfect cornbread recipe was a practice in home, imagination and creativity using simple ingredients combined with a desire to create something special that can be passed down for generations.

But Cornbread isn’t about food.

It’s about depth through simplicity and craft, and the wonder that emerges — through what we see, feel, think, touch, wear and smell — on the relentless search for joy and happiness in our lives. It's a recipe I’ve used for many years to remind me that home is where I am, right here, right now. And that sometimes all it takes is a simple reset to shift my focus towards what matters most, where I can use the ingredients of my life to create new recipes for my personal, home, and work life transitions.

It starts with a daily question: what do I carry forward, what do I create around me, and what does it mean to live — really live — with purpose and intention, wherever I am?

These questions became Cornbread.

I grew up in Detroit drawing cars.

Not trees. Not dogs. Cars. My home town Detroit has always been a city that makes things with its hands — where the act of making something real is how you understand the world. My parents came of age in a neighborhood alive with music, in a city where the sound coming out of small studios and big factories changed what the world listened to and how the world moved its soulful hips and curvy roads.

My aunt worked at Volkswagen and listened patiently as I talked endlessly about design as a child. She would promise to take my crayon drawings to the engineers. One day they'll build your car, she would say. Every time I saw her I asked: is today the day? She'd smile. Soon.

Eventually I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and joined General Motors as a quality design engineer. But it was my first visit to the GM Design Studio in Michigan that changed everything. Walking through those doors I encountered something I had no language for yet — a car was not simply a machine. It was a decision about beauty, taste, and form combined with the hard realities of textiles and steel. It was the perfect balance, sparked by a choreography of moving objects, people, and electricity in the name of bringing craft and creativity to life and elevating experience. I understood that what is made with intention can never stay still — and what is cultivated within radiates outward, changing the quality of ourselves and the world around us.

That realisation sent me to New York.

[cue Alicia Keys]

“Ooh, New York. Ooh, New York

Grew up in a town that is famous as a place of movie scenes

Noise is always loud, there are sirens all around and the streets are mean…”

Alicia Keys could never! Or could she?

I arrived as an independent writer in the early days of sharing content directly with online readers — before platforms, before algorithms, before anyone had a word for what we were doing. I wrote about queer life.

Information, travel, health, culture, the full texture of a life being lived openly and honestly in the big city. I walked the streets of Harlem collecting everyday people's stories to share with the world. Looking back, you might call it early influencing. I would call it what it always was — the belief that ordinary lives carry extraordinary stories, and that sharing them is an act of courage and the audacity to bear witness.

New York taught me that beauty lives closest to the ground. That wonder is not reserved for galleries, institutions, or academies. That joy, properly nourished and pursued, is available to all of us.

Then that search sent me further across the same ocean my ancestors once carried me in hopes and dreams.

To Vienna first — to connect with artists, writers, thinkers — where the same questions I had been asking about machines and people were being asked about painting, architecture, philosophy, objects, the body, the city, sound. Then to London, where I spent the better part of my European journey teaching and learning — philosophy at Goldsmiths, art history at UCL, the visual cultures of a world far wider than the one I had been trained to see. I moved through those years with the same curiosity my mother carried. She loved literature, she loved film, she loved a good story and everything she had ever learned — and she shared all of it freely. I suppose that is why I eventually became a philosopher and a teacher of the history of art. The questions kept leading somewhere new.

From London to Rotterdam, where I led research into digital culture and the hidden lives of objects and what it means to live in the process of becoming something or someone you’ve always wanted to be. To be the protagonist of your own story, walking hand in hand with lemons that you are determined to turn into lemonade.

Three ingredients: Water. Lemon. Sugar.

Then to Amsterdam.

Along the way I learned, slowly and then all at once, that whether it was engineering a new motor, designing a new system, dreaming a first chapter, walking the streets of Harlem with a vintage camera and notebook, cooking, or delicately crafting a dream living space hand by hand — life is connected to the people, objects, and experiences we love. That give us meaning. Things that we want to take with us. Things that we want to leave behind. And that connection — with ourselves and our environment — is handcrafted. One fine material at a time. One step. Your own recipe.

Then somewhere in my kitchen in Amsterdam, a long way from home, a long way from and back to myself, I found my own recipe. My own cornbread. My family's cornbread.

I hope that Cornbread.‍ can be this space for you. To use the ingredients you have to find the layers underneath and create an atmosphere that brings you closer to home, no matter where you are.