Homecoming

It’s really a story about finding home. About making our way home. About making a home.

Yesterday, I drove from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains to just south of the confluence of the Willamette River with the great Columbia. From the oaks and grasses to the flowering trees. And from one home to another.

Ostensibly, home is here - well, sixty or so miles east of here, up the Columbia in it’s officially-acknowledged-to-be-scenic Gorge. A year and a half ago, we bought ten acres on a gentle south-facing ridge above Mill Creek, which flows into the White Salmon River, which flows into the Columbia River (roll on Columbia, roll on!). Last April, we moved onto that land, into a yurt that we threw up with a dozen volunteers a week after lil’ Wren’s due date. So that’s home of course!

Well, maybe, but then last November we packed up the van and left for the warmer foothills and shores of California, where we have been for the last four months. I was born and raised there and Kay and I met there and lived more of our adult lives there than anywhere else. So that’s home of course.

So, when people ask me if I’m excited to go home, or what the weather’s like at home, I sound like a smartass when I say “which home?” but I really do need clarification. Well, OK what’s the big deal? Nobody in our college-educated demographic of our generally unrooted society lives where they’re from anyway and most people have two or three homes if they stop and think about it. Yes, but... we set out very deliberately to create a home, THE home, a mega-home for ourselves and others to truly come home to (like a mega-church, but a home): THE CENTER!

A brief history of The Center:

Six years ago, Kay and I sold a house in Oakland that I had spent two years renovating. We made a good chunk of money all at once, so we put it away and thought about what we should do with it. A vision emerged of The Center - a place where we would live with some other folks and make good things happen. The Center became a catch-all for our dreams. Anything we thought the world could use more of, we would imagine how it would weave into the fabric of the center. Workshops! Worktrades! Retreats! Big open-air communal spaces! Little sleeping cabins tucked away in the trees! In our minds and hearts, The Center accepted all things inspirational and beautiful with equanimity.

For a few years, The Center ebbed and flowed in our consciousness. We moved around, sometimes together and sometimes not, wondering if we could really commit to this vision, and to each other. It would get lost in the weeds of the day-to-day and then in moments of stillness, it would emerge front and center as that-which-must-be-done to fulfill our true potential. We visited other centers, volunteered and asked questions. We egged our like-minded friends on. I gathered the most likely conspirators into an e-mail group (re-reading the old introductions and notes we sent now I am struck by a degree of continuity in our lives that is hard to see from the present). We planned a ‘visioning retreat’ at my folks’ house two years ago. Our friends Colin and Kristen were there with their two-year-old. We schemed and dreamed and looked at the map and then Kay and I set off on in our van on a semi-random trajectory northwards from San Francisco.

Such a strange hyper-privileged yet sort-of-desperate modern thing: to drive around looking for the perfect home. We spent a few days each in different places, exploring and talking to people. We visited an old 70s commune in Mendocino that an artist had bought and is reviving as an artist collective and retreat center.

After a few weeks we arrived at my brother’s place in the Columbia Gorge, an hour and a half east of Portland. Spring was in full glory and we wound our way past whole mountainsides of white and pink fruit tree blossoms up to his land with unreal views of two immense volcanoes. My brother had visited a communal venture called Atlan across the river in Washington previously and was impressed by it. He said they were looking for more people to get involved. We checked out their website and it looked interesting, so we decided to go to their weekly garden volunteer day. The dude who greeted us seemed like a bit of a cool-aid drinker but the middle-aged British woman who lived nearby was very welcoming. After hearing the story of our land hunt, she said “oh, you should talk to Ryan and Holly right over there, there is a piece of land for sale right next to theirs and adjacent to Atlan.

So we did. And then six months later we bought the land. By that time, Kay was five months pregnant and we were living in a tiny house next to Atlan’s shop.

And now here we are, a year and a half down the road, about to head back to Bubbawood (as it’s come to be known). The basic comfort and life support systems are in place: we have a yurt to live in and a tiny house for guests; there is a composting toilet and an outdoor shower; water comes out of the tap; there’s a shipping container in the driveway. The winter away has given us some much-needed perspective, and some rest from the craziness of doing so much through the already intense time of Kay’s pregnancy and Wren’s first months.

So, my questions now are these:

Is this The Center? If no, what does that mean? If yes… now what? Could the center ever actually be an actual place, or was it just a direction to head in, an orientation towards the future? What is our relationship to this land, exactly? What is our relationship to Atlan? Is there really any greater meaning or potential to all this than just a nice place to live? Should there be? Am I just a rich white kid pretending to be doing something interesting? How can I make this project a part of my spiritual path? Are there too many plants living here for me to ever really feel at home?