How We Got Here

Portland

In June of 2012,  Scott and I packed up the Pod parked in front of our suburban Chicago apartment and made the over 2,000 mile journey west to Portland, Oregon.

This journey was set into motion many months before on a spring break trip to Tucson, Arizona in March of 2011.  We spent this trip running through Sabino Canyon National Forest, swimming, reading, walking and thinking.  At the time, I taught history at an outstanding high school (my alma mater) and Scott had a comfortable corporate job and we lived in Barrington, Illinois - a scenic and affluent suburb where Scott had grown up.  We were happy, but felt restless.

We couldn't shake the feeling our lives were too comfortable and the values of the place we lived in and the places we worked were no longer matching up with who we were and the types of lives we wanted to live and the types of people we wanted to be.  Our values and our dreams were evolving based on a number of life changing experiences and ideas.  In the spring of 2010, Scott and I traveled to Indianapolis to hear the Dalai Lama speak.  We didn't fully realize the impact of his words then, but his message to simplify, to value people and experiences over material goods and to cultivate compassion, would become increasingly central to our own value system.  In the summer of 2011, I had a profound and transformative experience while swimming through the silky waters of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts - I realized that I was a Transcendentalist (150 years after the Transcendentalist movement ended) and I wanted to live my life like Thoreau who said this, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Walden, 90) 

On spring break of 2011, Scott picked up the book, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream by William Powers at a local bookstore in Tucson, Arizona.  Powers made us really question our suburban existence and the pace, quality and comfort of our traffic-filled, competitive and materialistic lives in Barrington.  Thoreau, the Dalai and Powers had powerful calls to action: live deliberately, simplify, find yourself in nature, love others and collect new experiences.  We began to take on these calls to action as personal truths.  After my Walden Pond experience, I started making each history class I taught about three questions: "Who am I? Who are We? and What is good?"  Scott and I also started to seriously ask and answer those questions ourselves.  So, we put pen to paper and wrote out the following lists of what we knew to be true.

Lessons Learned - Spring Break 2011 (unedited)

• Being outdoors and immersed in nature is a key to happiness and mindfulness
• Simplicity makes happiness
• Idleness is a key to creativity
• Losing technology expands your mind
• Taking a risk can lead to something beautiful - a new perspective
• We are very small and a split second in the universe
• Part of living life to its fullest is being scared and uncomfortable
• We are happy and in love
• Touching nature is important
• Playing in the pool is for everyone
• Seeing, hiking and running on trails gives wisdom

Goals and Dreams - Spring Break 2011

• We need to move toward nature, simplicity and creativity
• We want to find inspiration where we live
• Meredith loves being a teacher and wants to be a transformational teacher
• Scott wants to work on transformational projects
• We want to make the good great
• We want to connect with others more
• We want to love more
• We want to be better family members

We decided then that it might take many years, but we would move west to be near the mountains, forests and open spaces that we found so inspiring and life affirming.  Our decision to move west was intentional, but we we didn't seriously consider Portland as a real possibility until a job offer made it possible. We visited Portland in the summer of 2010 and found it to be the city of our dreams - a city with a sense of humor, with more treeline than skyline, where people are progressive and kind, and a place that is walkable, bikeable and runnable.  We also realized that Portland had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and an underfunded, challenging public education system.  We, sadly, stopped pursuing Portland and fixed our attention on other cities out west  - namely, Seattle, Denver and Boise.  In the spring of 2011, Scott and I decided that it might take years, but that we would move to the city where one of us found a job first.  After many rounds of interviews across the country for both of us, the stars aligned and Meredith found the perfect teaching position in the Upper School at Catlin Gabel and Scott found a position at a non-profit a few weeks later. 

We love Portland.  While sometimes terrifying and tragic in ways that most cities can be -we find it to be life-affirming, inspiringly beautiful and without pretense.  We love that we have many varieties of vegan cheese to choose from at the local grocery store, that Scott can commute by bike, that Meredith's students never have to fill in bubbles on tests, that everyone seems to be listening to a song in their own head, that we can run on forested trails and gaze up at a Mountain and learn from authors and artists any day of the week.  We feel fortunate to have arrived at our new home.