Shifting around ideas, dreams and experiences of the past year - I forget what it means to be thankful for a new year and also to remember and contemplate on the year that has just passed.

I stare off at a blank wall, deciding what comes first — freedom from academia and a trip that would change my world.
I purchase a world map because I like maps. Okay, I love maps and I’m not sure why. I like to imagine what life is like way up there, above Canada or in the middle of the Great Oceans. I wonder who in Ireland is meeting their friends at the pub after work, or if they’re going home to their wife and kids or maybe just their dog. I think about life on the Mediterranean or Mass taking place in the South of Spain.

But on this map, I see a journey. The place where the poor brought me closer to God and where I further became part of this Great Mystery with the Broken Body called the Beloved. 
I see where I met my wife - who became a great friend and who held me when I had hurt the most. An admiration that lasted longer after my feet stepped off the plane. A common symbol to us both. 

I was going to see this girl. I was going to marry this girl. 

But that required me driving across the coldest parts of the US - albeit, the most beautiful.
Memphis, Kansas City, Omaha, Denver, cough*Salt Lake City*cough, and Boise. 
I left the day Obama was sworn in as President.
It was a memorable day — sad and exciting; bittersweet and melancholic. 

As millions cheered for a new face to our country, I hugged my Mom goodbye; holding back as if weeping was the last thing I needed to do at that moment, and I believe the same went for her - though I know we both cried that day.

I left the deep South and headed for Oregon. The land of gorgeous and thick Fir trees with winding rivers that lead up to a magnificent mountain.

I saw beautiful hills and bare branches from that unforgiving cold wind. Water towers shaped like tea pots and local gas stations where I felt like a hippie - though I’m sure that wasn’t it.
I saw lots of snow and frozen lakes and beautiful people. I hid all the money I had in a book Hannah made me, thinking it would be the last place someone looked if I were to get robbed. 
I made friends with low hanging clouds and empty highways and the occasional couch surfing host, who I was so thankful to be welcomed into their homes. Each has such simple and lovely stories of life and hopes and ideas. It was nice to listen to people talk about life in terms that weren’t about Grad School or consuming some other experience that would conflict them even further — it was nice to sit and listen about what music they liked and where they came from.
After all, it’s the people that make the journey.

I arrived in Portland with everything I had in my car. Clothes. Books. A guitar and a few snacks that had been warmed and thawed too many times. Hannah was with me on the last leg of my journey in which it hit me that this part of my trip was coming to an end and another part was about to begin.
Rounding the dark ridges of the Columbia River Gorge - I wept in sadness - for leaving home and being afraid of what was ahead of me: a new life in a place I’d never lived before and starting a family.
I needed these things to hit, because it didn’t seem real until the landscape changed and my thoughts became flooding in like water over a buckling dam. I couldn’t stop them — but it was necessary. It was painful and beautiful and scary - and it was necessary. 

I had the idea of being born again into a different life.
I’d still be the same quiet mumbling boy from the deep South, but I’d be shifting and I was okay with that. At least for the most part.

As we drove into Portland, I see the familiar bridges of past visits - “Made in Oregon” flashing its welcoming rhythm at the end of the Burnside Bridge - my second favorite bridge in Portland. [The first being St. Johns, of course.]

Welcome to the land of Stumptown coffee, wine grown from the country, microbreweries and excellent cuisine that screams words like…sustainable, cage free, local, gluten free, organic, naturally raised and direct traded goods.
Because in Portland, it works.

Because in Portland, it rains. A lot. But it’s welcoming to a brotha who enjoys a good overcast day to read and write with a good cup of fresh coffee. Not only freshly brewed, but freshly roasted - because us coffee nerds know that it makes all the difference. 

PDX,
You’re home now and, well, I sort of have a crush on you.
Sincerely, one of your newest residents in 2009,
Josh