The year is 2012. I am 30 years old. I am male. I am Caucasian. I happen to be straight. I live in Portland, Oregon USA.

I was recently pointed to this article written by John Scalzi, which I think goes a long way to describe what the above information equates to… “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is“.

Contrary to what the inactivity of this blog might lead you to believe, I’ve been contemplating life quite a bit over the past couple years. Our leap to Portland has been everything we hoped it would be: challenging, fulfilling, surprising, even confusing. In short, it’s been life-altering, but not in the sense of finding a “destination” – rather, engaging a needed journey. And, as the Scalzi article makes very clear, I’ve got it easy in this world. Not that I don’t have obstacles – it’s just important for folks like me to understand what difficulty setting we were born into.

So where am I with the big questions of life? You know, meaning… purpose… hope? Good question.

I am hopeful.

I am overflowing with love for my family and many people around me.

I have found the ongoing battle between contentment and ambition to be taxing but fruitful.

I feel as though I’ve rediscovered some of my childhood wonder of design over these past few years, and it comes alive for me in the context of the city and business.

The city. Where people are inspired and frustrated… where new deals are crafted while opportunity seems nonexistent… where progressive art happens in both galleries and alleyways… Maseratis and fixies… glass skyscrapers and homeless vomit. The paradox keeps me coming back day after day after day.

I want to play. I’m going to play. As in, deal me in. Because, while life is very uncertain, all of us have choices. Sit up straight, and make some decisions!

The city isn’t the only paradox around here. There’s one in the mirror at my house. I’m the same person as I’ve always been – but I’ve changed. A look back at the writings on this blog from 2009 and earlier will show you that I’ve changed. Isn’t it fascinating how we all have to decide what we do with and/or how we use the experiences of our past? They might fit us like an old shirt left in the dryer too long, but we’ve still got to decide if we’re going to try to wear it occasionally or just leave it at the back of the bottom drawer because we don’t have the heart to throw it away just yet. I’m not throwing it away just yet. But some significant chunks of my past are taking on a certain musty presence from too much time in the bottom drawer.

The sun rises, the sun sets. The day illuminates, the night rejuvenates.

We learn, we teach. 

Compared to last summer, life is different now… to say the least. At the most random times, I feel myself zoom out from whatever my present circumstances may be and ask,

“What just happened here?”

The question isn’t rooted in discomfort or frustration, but rather is born from the amount of change our family has experienced over a relatively short period of time.  I don’t think I’ve quite figured out how to process it all.

My office in the heart of Old Town Portland

Maybe it’s helpful to recount it all in simple terms:

+ After a few years of feeling like we were stuck in the Arizona desert (which was not where we wanted to raise our family), Tara & I resolved to do something about it in October of last year when we decided we would move to Portland, OR in early 2011. Our hope was to place ourselves in a more urban and more sustainable lifestyle. In the face of one of the worst job markets in recent history I was hopeful that, despite the significant risk, my job hunting would be most effective in-person. I’d get a job eventually, right?? ;]

+ During the first week of January, I made a solo trip out to Portland with the sole purpose of finding a place for our family to land in the new city. Our criteria were pretty straight-forward: as well-located in the city, as walkable, and as AFFORDABLE as possible. We ended up finding a small house built in 1910 in the heart of the historic Sellwood neighborhood of Portland. We didn’t know much about Sellwood at the time, but the price was right and the neighborhood looked pretty great so I signed it up for a Feb 1 move-in.

+ The next day I woke up and did some job searching online (a staple of my daily routine for well over a year at that point), and I came across an opening at a sustainability-focused architecture/urban design firm in downtown PDX… for various reasons, I was hooked. I paced the room as adrenaline shot ideas through my head about how to get a job there. The next day I spent my entire flight back to Phoenix writing out my strategy for my cover letter/resume for that specific company.

+ Three weeks later, we packed up our lives in AZ, went through a painful departure, and made our way west and north. Based on my planning, we had saved enough money to last 6-7 months without any work… not that we wanted to draw-out anywhere near that, but that was the structure we had in place.

+ We arrived at our 800 sq ft rental house with the help of some great family members and friends along the way. Sellwood has turned out to be an incredible little neighborhood: coffee, parks, food carts, library, local grocery, historic swimming pool, restaurants, shops, the Willamette River, a dedicated trail into downtown… seriously.

+ I launched into my job search. I’ll spare the gory details in this post, but suffice it to say that it was every bit as challenging as I expected it to be. I networked like I never knew I could, I went to countless gatherings and conferences, I leveraged any and all Portland contacts I had (which wasn’t much when I first arrived), and I ultimately spun those contacts into 60+ one-on-one meetings with business people all over the city. I got a couple interviews and was making some great connections, but job offers weren’t materializing and the weight of it all started to really weigh on me as the light didn’t really seem to be appearing at the end of the tunnel.

Shea dusts off her tunes at the piano shop

+ Every time I wrote our rent check, paid our insurance, put gas in a car, etc., it felt like a fist to my gut. We were over three months into the journey, and my stress level was compounding as our savings drained. Our girls were having a tougher time with the move/transition than we anticipated, and Tara and I were facing challenges that had we had never dealt with in our marriage up to that point. One gapping hole in our home was our lack of a piano.  Tara was a piano performance major in college and Shea was quickly following in her mama’s footsteps as she would take time to play piano everyday in AZ (on her own accord!). But that piano was borrowed and had to stay when we moved.  In the midst of the heavy times, we took Shea to a nearby piano store to give her a little q.t. with the 88 keys.

We knew it was going to be a difficult “adventure,” and surprise!  - it. was. rough.

+ In a recent conversation about those months with my buddy, Zac, he mentioned that I didn’t really communicate the weight of those burdens through my random social media updates or perhaps even in phone conversations.  As I’ve tried to think through what took place in those months, I’m not sure I even knew what to do with the emotions in the moment. I got really familiar with waking up in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, mind racing trying to figure out the next step.

My sorting-out-life view over the wildlife refuge

I took quite a few walks by myself after we got the girls to sleep. I would go sit at the overlook of the wildlife refuge down the street or I would sit cross-legged at the end of the dock on the river and try to find focus… ideas… endurance.  Tara was/is the most incredible partner, and yet, I think those months put both of us through our own individual trials.  It was a lonely experience in a lot of ways – perhaps necessarily so.

+ And then I got a call. From somebody at that original design firm (think back to January). They wanted to meet me, so we did. And then more weeks went by. Another call. Another meeting. And another…

… and then, a job offer.

Minutes after receiving a job offer

To this day (nearly three months into my work there), when folks ask me how I’m liking my job I tell them that it still hasn’t quite sunken in that I work there and that I do work that truly excites me. Even as it was all coming together at the end of May, I restrained myself from getting too excited about the possibility because it all sounded too “storybook” – too idyllic.

—

So, yes, life is very different now. Since I work in the heart of downtown, I bought a bike, sold my car, and now ride along the river everyday to and from the office.  I am surrounded by really great colleagues in the Urban Design + Planning studio, and I’m learning a ton. Our old house in Arizona had a Walkscore of 32, and our current place is a new world with a score of 85.  There’s now a great piano in the middle of our home that we rented mere days after I got the job offer (picture the happiest 4 year old face you can imagine).  And as I type this, a 65 degree breeze slips through our open living room windows (a sensation I’m not used to experiencing in August).

So, life is perfect, right? We survived the Great Leap of 2011, and this is the part of the story where we ride off into the sunset, right?

Of course life’s not that simple. Don’t get me wrong, we still have to remind ourselves that this all really happened – that the outcome has generally been really good for us. But some of the most difficult times for our family actually came after I got the job (leave it to me to insert melancholy), and I’ll walk through some of that in Part 2…

I have no idea. I, myself, have yet to fully realize/comprehend what just happened over those five weeks.

Planning. Managing. Stressing. Executing. Hurting. Terrible sleep. Adrenaline. Packing. Sick. Drowning. Keep going. Goodbye AZ. Leave. Drive. Excitement…

And then there’s this moment as we’re rolling down the highway through central Oregon in a stupidly huge, obscenely yellow Penske truck half-full of all our belongings and towing my Nissan… we’re winding up a mountainside, pines swishing by and creek running in the valley below, and I feel the first bit of our new chapter setting in.

We made the leap, and we were about to land.

***

So we’ve been here almost one month now [which is unreal]. A few scattered reflections…

* my wife + me = a beautiful, yet complex, balance that is never to be taken for granted

More than a few times over the past weeks I have stopped to consider the fragility of what we were doing as a couple and as a family. I say fragile because that’s what I believe healthy relationships to be: something that needs to be handled with intention and care. I don’t mean it in the sense that the smallest bump in the road can cause it to crack [healthy marriages can withstand a lot of impact], but rather that embarking together on an adventure of risk and uncertainty requires a lot of delicate functions and actions to work in concert — not unlike a system of the human body. Encouragement, listening, communicating, physical presence, like-mindedness, disagreement… and if you somehow have all of those functions pumping in harmony, there are still a host of outside forces to consider: one of us could get hurt/sick, etc. If you have a version of this balance in your life, this is me encouraging you to be thankful and to embrace & foster it!

All of this to say that I am so grateful for our balance because a lot of it feels “outside” of us, if that makes sense. And I am mindful of this because we have definitely felt this balance tested by our new challenges – parenting woes in a new setting, financial stress that simmers in the background, job search uncertainties, blah blah blah.

* My Job Hunt/Rite of Passage

Every morning, I wake up before the sun and jog down to the bank of the Willamette River wearing only my boxer briefs. I ceremoniously kneel at the dark water, scrape my fingers across the ground and proceed to smear Portland mud across my face and chest. I then leap up, raise my fists, and howl at the city lights downstream from where I stand.

I am on a hunt. A job hunt.

None of that’s true [except the hunt part]… but you get the idea. More on all of this later.

* Portland is home. [This post is getting long so I'll make this brief.]

We are falling in love with this city.

I hope you are as captivated as I was when I watched it for the first time…

[HT: The Fox is Black]

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

- William Stafford

Things are really crankin’ right now as we approach the move-date, yet in the midst of the craziness we were able to host a really special event in our home three nights ago:

A living room concert by Seattle-based musician, David Bazan!

[Long story, short - Bazan periodically selects a city to drop in and perform a couple shows in folks' living rooms.  He announced they were looking for hosts in Phoenix a few weeks ago, we submitted our place, and we got it - boom!  His management released 40 tickets for sale, and they sold out in about 30 minutes so we knew there would be some great energy in the place.]

—

The Show:

While the total size of our house doesn’t overwhelm at 1,450 sq ft, it does have a good-sized living room. With the show being billed as a holiday show, I thought it woud be fun to use the front landing (which is a step up) as a mini stage with our Christmas tree as a backdrop.  With chair-seating around the perimeter of the room and the balance of the audience sitting on pillows on the floor, we somehow managed to fit 50+ people in the space without it feeling too crammed.

Bazan showed up just before showtime, and he brought along his parents and grandmother who happened to be in town which was a cool surprise.  With all of the guests in place, he basically walked right in, pulled out his little Martin guitar [LX1E I think], said “Hey…I’m gonna play some tunes…” and off he went.  No amplification.  No microphone.  Just the driving strum of his guitar and his unfiltered vocals more than filling the room.

— Raw and amazing. —

Everybody was instantly drawn inward… for me it was a very communal experience.  I couldn’t think of a better way or a better artist to bring a sort of “capstone event” to our time in this house:  fill it up with people enjoying live music from a deeply moving artist.

—

The Music:

If you’re not familiar with David Bazan, now’s a good time to change that.  Sitting among strong company on Paste’s 100 Best Living Songwriters, Bazan paints poignant elements of the human experience with lyrics & melodies in a way all his own.  Known by many as a formerly outspoken Christian who has very publicly shed his evangelical faith on a journey to contemplative agnosticism, his songs affect people on different levels.  While I can certainly resonate with his spiritual trek, it’s David’s transparency that captivates me the most...

In this world, we are all born into a tribe.  For no one is this a choice, and for some, that tribe is more clearly defined than others.  For me, the tribe is American, Caucasian, upper-middle class, & Evangelical Christian.  I didn’t choose any of that.  And no more did I choose any of that can I deny its role in forming my reality.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t push back on my tribe. And from my vantage point, that’s what Bazan is doing.  He refuses to stuff his questions, his doubts, his observations… instead he writes & sings about this stuff.  That is true art. And that makes some people very uncomfortable.  And it brings him a measure of wholeness and health (along with many others following along).  [see Zach Lind's thoughts on 'Why So Many Christians Love David Bazan']

Especially fun was the chance to chat it up with David’s parents and grandmother after the show.  They gave some insight into the inspiration behind some of the new tunes he played that night, and they talked about what life was like growing up in the Bazan family.  Cool to see the family support despite some of the initial fallout from his spiritual path.

—

A Cool Twist On the Evening

As if the evening wasn’t already exciting enough, I got last-minute word from friends Zach & Holly that they would be bringing some out-of-town friends with them to the show:  Rob & Kristen Bell.  Yeah – that Rob Bell.  Ha!

Of course, I was trying so hard to treat him like a normal dude that I hardly spoke with him [doh!] – but he and his wife were very genuine, and it seemed liked they had a good time.

Plus it certainly boosts Bazan’s publicity when Rob Bell posts a picture of the show to his 46,000+ Twitter followers!

—

Enjoy this video of his tune “Hard to Be” off of his recent ‘Curse Your Branches’ album [thanks again to Zach for the footage]:

Getting down to five weeks until departure.

This is hard.  It’s no surprise that uprooting our life here in Phoenix would be a challenging, even painful, task… but you can’t know the full extent until you are in the midst of it.

Except for the four years I spent around Chicago for school, I’ve called Gilbert, Arizona home for the past 24+ years (the same house even).  And yet, ever since I moved here when I was four years old, I have been reluctant to embrace Gilbert as home — but that’s a topic for another time.

There’s a subtle eeriness to life right now.  The weather has been ridiculously pleasant, holidays seem to make people friendlier, and yet we’re in the middle of this huge transition while trying to enjoy the now.  It’s not bad at all – just strange and foreign.

Interacting with friends and family has a different air to it as well.  Bittersweet tones linger in the conversations and the glances.

Leaving is only painful if you’re connected to something.

We are deeply connected to some incredible people here.

This is going to hurt… but I think that’s okay.

In the heart of Seattle, WA exists a top-notch design+build firm known as BUILD LLC.  Recently deemed to be among the Top 50 NW Architects, I have followed their blog for quite a few months now, always inspired by their design sense and project range.

The two owners of the firm come across as very transparent and accessible, so I recently emailed them to see if they could offer me some architecture/design ideas for a project that I’m working on out here in the Phoenix suburbs.  Barely two hours later, I received a very thorough response giving me an array of great resources.

So you can imagine my complete surprise yesterday when I was catching up on their latest blog post to see my own beady little eyes looking back at me!  Their post reviewed various web-links that they wanted to highlight for their readers, and they included a shout-out about my video résumé.  Little did I know that they followed the link in my email signature back when I originally emailed them, and apparently they dig my approach to creating a video résumé.

Needless to say, it was great bit of encouragement for me.  I look forward to following along as BUILD LLC continues to grow for years to come!

This sort of heroic effort can come in many forms: slaying a grizzly bear with a plastic spoon so your daughters can eat… roping a wild mustang and breaking its spirit down to a domesticated level so your daughters can have a “pony”… OR entering your name in a product giveaway on Twitter.  It’s all the same.

I’ve been following a website called Father Apprentice for a couple months now, and it’s an all-around good time (young fathers, point thy browsers thusly).  The elves (no offense, Chase) over at Father Apprentice have been busy this holiday season, and I actually won their recent Twitter giveaway!

The prize? A fantastic beanie cap + mittens set courtesy of the artisans at The Fuzzy Robot.  The girls love’em!

Observe… [pictures courtesy of my lovely wife]

These two, in particular, really grabbed me. The unfathomable power of the natural world vs. the harm that humanity’s consumption is causing.

See more of the entries here…