I’m eager to find my Vocation of Place, my calling in response to who I am, what my unique skills and gifts offer, and what is needed by my community. I want to find my role in the community building, awareness and activism work that is being done to address the feelings of disconnection and fragmentation in our culture, and how we can build a culture of participation, resource sharing, and ecological engagement.

Additionally, I am eager to better understand how my efforts on our land and in our community can be in fuller relationship with who the community is and what is needed in its larger context. If we set aside our project as the center of attention and move our attention to the community, what new priorities might emerge? How can we invite people into a conversation that allows us to learn more about what’s important to them? What is our experience of the community at its core and what is its potential to become? How do we make our intentions visible and intelligible to the community? Why are we working on solving these problems? What’s the larger purpose we are trying to live into?

Social networking, team building
One of the first qualities people use to describe me is curious. I enjoy seeking out new people and places, and thinking about how they might fit together. I try to maintain a sense of humility and openness to learning from others, and am an active listener. My playfulness and humor are good for drawing people out and fostering a sense of closeness and connection.
I am interested in more actively making a space for collaboration - I am fortunate to be resourced with tools, land, and a barn that can serve as an event /gathering space. I’d like to use this as a space to explore together, create different narratives about what is possible in our lives, and choose into more inspired and co-created realities.

Planner /organizer, holder of structure
I am thorough, task-oriented and organized. I have a diligent nature and a determination to see things through. I’m good at taking an aspiration and breaking it down into steps, and placing those steps on a timeline. I enjoy making lists, drawings and diagrams. All these skills are useful for organizing people and coordinating their efforts.

Builder /visionary
One of my gifts is bridging the artistic with the technical. I have a strong creative spirit and imagination, and combine this with a pragmatic orientation and skills in problem solving. This makes me a valuable community asset for bringing a vision down to earth and making it both tangible and actionable.

I aspire to lead/engage projects and share skills in a way that allows others to lead and share as well, and centers connection and participation. It is so easy for me to get consumed by my own narrative, and to revert to a more individualist approach. I need to continually remind myself that I don’t have to do it all myself - I can ask for support, extend an invitation, widen the circle of inclusion. I must continually remind myself how much more is possible with the help of community, how much more enjoyable it is, and how much more vast the emergent nature of co-creation is compared to what I am able to conceive and achieve on my own.

This will require stretching my social comfort zone, since as an introvert /ambivert I sometimes feel inhibited reaching out to others and playing a host /organizer role. It can feel safer and easier to just do things on my own, or play a more background /support role. I need to learn how to find the right balance between personal time to restore and tend to myself, and social /collective time to share and connect. Negotiating the divide between individual and communal work, between solitude for contemplation and the sense of belonging to a community, is essential for me to maintain energy for participation in the collective.

An energetic settling. A shift away from constant stimulation and ingestion. A digest and metabolize phase. Away from incessant distraction and the need to busy yourself. Towards slow, sustained work. Long timeline, patient, cyclical, multi-season, multi-year work, working with time as a medium.

Recognizing my own potential to send down roots into the land. To seize hold of a bigger dream and story for my life. One of sweat and building and growing and tending; of community building and holding; of being a host and facilitator, and not just a guest and participant. To begin a life of real reciprocity and abundance.

Balancing my career direction with my sense of artistic and spiritual fulfillment. I have a strong sense of careerism, success-orientation, and diligence that can crowd out other parts of my self and of my life. My rational, working, “task list” brain is always in command. Putting more energy into my artistic and spiritual selves is an earnest intention of mine that feels forever sidelined by work and the demands of daily living.

Where are the “right” places to be putting my energy is a big question at this life crossroads. How to continue developing my career and making “responsible” life choices, while also living an inspired and imaginative life that has a feeling of freedom, creativity, adventure and joy at its core? How can I continue to stretch myself without feeling limited by self-doubt? I’d like to move through my life with a sense of confidence and empowerment, and a deep trust of emergence and my ability to fluidly adapt to change.

I’d like to explore how my spiritual journey can be centered more in my life through ceremony/ritual and personal /community practice. Especially in my shift to more land-based living, living in a way that is imbued with an animist spirit (ie tending life force and regenerative earth care), and not simply “chores” or “maintenance” on the land is very important to me but at present feels aspirational most of the time. I’m also ready for a shift from a mostly individualistic life orientation to a more communal /collectivist one, and feel this shift will need to happen in part in the spiritual realm.

In my current role, I am the sole Architect/Designer on our team - which means I’ve gotten a lot of opportunity to learn by doing and get a lot of leadership/autonomy, but often work alone and lack collaboration/mentorship. Having worked in collaborative design environments in the past, I sometimes find myself missing the relationships and skill sharing that come with working on a team of creatives.

On a more existential level, I’m curious about engaging community scale social, cultural, and ecological considerations more than I do in my current role. Especially as a shift away from an urban /capitalist /individualist lifestyle to a more rural /land-based /communal lifestyle, I’m curious how my livelihood might be able to reshape itself to align more fully with these values.

I’d like to evolve my work to give a broader consideration to site and setting, to the surrounding landscape and ecology. I’d like to use a systems thinking approach with a regenerative lens to grapple with important questions like: What is the cultural and ecological story of your place? What does the land want to be? What would have been there without us? How can this place be an asset to the community of your place, and not just those that own /live on it? How does a building and its use relate to the surrounding architecture and community, to the story and history of a site? How do the materials and landscaping relate to the local environment? How can an emphasis on local material supply chains, water catchment and energy use, native plants, pollinators, birds and animal communities, bring our personal needs more into relationship with collective ones?

Since I was young, I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in my education and learning journey. Academics was my main focus, along with art. As a result I can be very achievement oriented, especially creative/technical achievement. By nature I have a strong sense of duty and diligence. As an adult, this at times has looked like a consuming sense of careerism, work focus, and success orientation that takes mindfulness to balance with a broader sense of play, engagement, and fulfillment. If I’m not careful, an excessive focus on productivity can crowd out other parts of my life.

For the past 10 years, I’ve been living in cities, working in design and architecture - and as such I’ve been very much inside the capitalist machine. My entire education and brain has been oriented very much towards the man-made world, the built environment: engineering, design, architecture. I took a lot of classes in math, physics, structures - but not anatomy, biology, ecology, earth systems. That’s what I’ve built a career around, while I forever dream of a more hand-crafted, earth-connected way of existing. And it poses tensions with my personal value system and broader life aspirations.

One force that has been helpful in this regard is my deeply ingrained creative impulse. I have continually sought opportunities to play with new mediums. I’ve been called to develop a relationship with craft - the idea of a handmade life is really compelling to me, and a handmade home. This has led to a scattered pursuit of hands-on skills as a builder and artist. 3 years working closely with the trades as an architect in design-build. Lots of learn by doing experience. Wanting to be able to bring construction skills to a community context, ie living on land with friends.

I’ve spent a lot of my free time in nature and in the wilderness, and have been called towards people and communities that live a more land-based lifestyle. This led me to enroll in an Urban Permaculture Design course with City Repair here in Portland, and to seek out visits to friends on some really beautiful land projects - Spirit Pine and Quail Springs in southern California being two standouts. I’ve been called to delve deeper into permaculture, village building, a life lived close to the land and to community.

A year ago, I moved outside of the city of Portland onto a few acres south of town with my partner and a friend. The intention behind this move was to have a testing ground for building land-based community and resiliency skills. It has involved a move towards caring for plants and animals on a daily basis, rooting more deeply into home and into place, making sacrifices and putting in effort for their care and sustenance - and finding the meaning in this shift towards a slower rhythm, towards tending and nurturing more than just myself. Towards not always having immediate gratification and sole prioritization of my own personal desires - a deeper consideration of others, a widening of my circle of inclusion and care. Towards interdependency, feeling the ways that my community is building a shared capacity for projects and undertakings on the land, and how a collective sense of trust, confidence, and mutuality is key in our flourishing here.

Mark Lakeman and his work with Communitecture and the City Repair Project
Placemaking and village building, urban permaculture, natural building, tactical urbanism, participatory design
City Repair explores opportunities to reclaim the commons and activate underutilized spaces - the activation of public space. By bringing back gathering spaces within the urban grid, they are giving people a container for social engagement to unfold. Their hope is that our public spaces become reflections of the spirit that each community has to offer.

Paulo Soleri and his work with arcology and Arcosanti
Arcology is a fusion of architecture and ecology. It is an experimental model that reimagines urban sprawl, excessive consumption and ecological disconnect. Instead, Arcosanti offers “walkability, access to nature, localised food and energy, and a focus on frugality.” Buildings become the underpinnings for a new ecology, in which cities are an integrated part of the surrounding ecosystem.

Wendell Berry, culture of place
We move in closer accord with nature’s rhythms. We must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of us. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence.

Bayo Akomolafe’s “post-activism”
Put wounds to work, to treat them as portals and cracks connected with larger territorial shifts instead of matters to be eradicated by a dominant mode of being. Meeting the world differently, a falling-apart-together, a coming alive in another way

David Abram, and the “New Animism”
the more-than-human world, the space of human culture was a subset within a larger set — that the human world was necessarily sustained, surrounded, and permeated by the more-than-human world — encouraging a new humility on the part of humankind (since the "more" could be taken not just in a quantitative but also in a qualitative sense)

Human as stewards
Tending the wild, people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship
Part of a mycelial web, a magnificently complex and collaborative structure
a glimpse into a world that is not confined to our wishes. A world much bigger than ourselves. A living and infinite world
When we enter into this realm of imagination
And recognize the Imaginal as something more than fantasy; that the Imaginal is a real realm that exists beyond our brains
when our hearts are open and rid of our fixed ideas, we see the world not as a dead thing, but as a place made of breathing, feeling, individual sentient beings
this hugely important ‘communal’ factor seems to be lacking
It has been lost in the focus on the individual
This is why incorporation – giving back to one’s community – is so crucial. Incorporation is the continuation of love. There is no life without diversity
Nature and our nature is cyclical. We are constantly our becomingness
We are growing into ourselves, over and over and over again
One of the things the natural world reminds us is that we are not in control, and offers lessons about our own way of adjusting to what happens around us
We are nature and the more we learn and observe how nature grows and becomes itself, moving through the seasons, the more we learn about how to continue to grow ourselves.
We must remember and return to a knowing so much older than the traumas that have severed us from it,
a knowing that re-connects us with the truth and wholeness that lives deep in our bones
We must remember the ancient wisdom of living and dying in connection with the natural world.
And integrate ceremony and nature-based practices into everyday life and work.