Re-Finding Myself as a Poet & Photographer in Central Oregon

Growing up, we moved constantly. Every year seemed to bring a new state, a new home, a new school.

No, it wasn’t the military, as one might assume.

It was worse: Walmart.

I was raised in a home perpetually uprooted by a retail giant, where daily conversations revolved around inventory, freight, and shrink. What could be more unholy?

I learned how to adapt quickly. How to make new friends. How to belong somewhere almost immediately—and then how to leave it all behind.

By the time I was a teenager, I had lived in six different states.

And I had had enough.

Finding Home in Portland, Oregon

I found myself in Portland, Oregon, in the 2010s, and almost immediately I knew: this was home.

For the first time in my life, with some sovereignty over where I would stay, I stayed put.

And there, I built a life.

My first son was born in 2014, when I was just a babe myself at twenty years old. Motherhood began a search inward that I did not yet have language for. Somewhere in those tender, consuming years, I began to find myself for the first time.

I healed.

I became a mother.

And through all of that tenderness and beauty, I found photography.

I began to make art.

My career as a photographer blossomed in the City of Roses. With every person who trusted me to photograph them, every business that invited me into its story, every image I made that felt true, I grew a little more certain of where I belonged.

I sprouted roots.

Photography gave me a way to serve people while also satisfying something essential in me: the desire to notice beauty and make something of it.

My life, finally, felt like my own.

When Photography Stopped—and Poetry Began

Then the world turned upside down.

In 2020, photography was deemed “non-essential,” and the business I had spent years building came to a sudden halt.

Like so many people during that strange stretch of history, I was given an unfamiliar abundance of time. I went looking for somewhere productive to place it.

So I wrote.

At first, it was simply a daily practice.

Then the pages accumulated.

The practice deepened.

And slowly, unbeknownst to me, those daily writings became something large enough to hold in my hands.

They became a book.

That book is Bliss Born of Pain, my poetry collection.

The poems were written during potent years—years of rupture, motherhood, longing, healing, love, uncertainty, and becoming. They are a record of what I was noticing while the familiar structures of life were shifting beneath all of us.

By every outward measure, though, my life in Portland was already full.

I had built community. Friendship. Work. A sense of belonging.

After a childhood spent being moved from place to place, I had created something entirely different for myself: a life of my own intentional making.

And still, there was one space that remained empty.

Partnership.

Even before I met the man who would become my husband, I could feel in my bones that change was coming.

The roots I had worked so hard to grow were beginning, almost imperceptibly, to loosen.

A gentle quaking beneath the life I knew.

And then I met him.

My husband. My lover. My king.

And somehow, I knew it was time to leave home.

There was no question and very little fear. Some decisions arrive so completely that doubt has nowhere to enter.

So I said goodbye to the forest that had grown me and drove east into the light.

Becoming a Poet and Photographer in Central Oregon

Central Oregon has been the backdrop to my life, my love, and my art ever since.

In some ways, moving here brought me full circle.

Once again, I was starting over.

A new landscape. A new community. A new version of home.

Only this time, I was no longer the child being carried from one place to another. I was the woman choosing where to go.

There is an important difference between being uprooted and choosing to transplant yourself.

Central Oregon asked me to discover who I was when so many of the familiar markers of my life changed again. Without the same streets, the same routines, the same community surrounding me every day, I found myself following a quieter current underneath it all:

the unchanging truth of who we are when everything around us changes.

I got to meet myself again.

Not as the young mother beginning a photography career in Portland.

Not as the twenty-something trying to build a life sturdy enough to stay inside.

But as a poet, photographer, wife, mother, artist, and woman entering an entirely new season.

The landscape here has changed my work, too.

The high desert asks for a different kind of attention. There is less lushness to hide behind. Beauty is often quieter here: light moving across sagebrush, a river cutting through volcanic rock, an enormous sky, the particular stillness that arrives when the sun falls behind the Cascades.

Living and creating in Central Oregon has drawn me even more deeply toward what has always been at the center of my poetry and photography: beauty, wonder, transformation, and the practice of paying close attention to an ordinary life.

Three years into this new home, I can feel circles beginning to close.

I have married the man I came here to love. I have grown our family. I have published the poetry that began during another great season of change. I continue to nourish the friendships and photography clients I love in Portland while slowly growing roots again here in Central Oregon.

And I am still discovering all the ways beauty wants to manifest through me.

Perhaps that is what I have been learning all along.

Home is not simply the place where we manage to remain.

Sometimes home is the self we become certain enough of that we can carry her anywhere.

After a childhood spent leaving, a young adulthood spent learning to stay, and a life that has asked me more than once to begin again, I no longer think roots mean never moving.

I think roots are knowing what is true beneath you.

Photography helps me see it.

Poetry helps me name it.

And here, beneath this enormous Central Oregon sky, I am learning once again how to belong.