Where do we go from here?

Look to the chefs — to the farmers and producers — to the artists

Last week, while the news cycle spiraled, I found myself hosting three days of events centered around seafood and blue economy collaboration.

During a few unseasonably warm days in Portland, Excel spreadsheets, emails, and event logistics were split-screen to an endless stream of dystopian headlines: ICE. Corruption. Genocide. A winter without snow.

While I worked, I was stretched thin between this boots-on-the-ground work and the existential dread of it all. While we ate bites of carefully curated seafood, I wondered if it mattered. I asked how can we go on like this, while the world burns?

And then I remembered that what we eat is of the earth, dust as we are.

In Iceland my studies focused on regional development and fishing quotas and the idea of using the whole fish for more things, like cosmetics and dog food and medicine. Who knew this 100% utilization idea would follow me to Oregon? And here it is, we too are talking about the ocean and our catch because it’s the foundation of coastal life: the ways we travel, work, and live — it all comes back to the water.

In Iceland, I looked around and thought I’d found my people — the ones who love the sea. How lucky I was, to find those people again here in Oregon — on a new western horizon — tackling the same challenges, alongside a new cohort of innovators and people so equally passionate about their corner of the world. And how grateful I have been to watch these worlds cross over: to work with an Icelandic Ocean Cluster in tandem with a newfound sister Oregon Ocean Cluster in creating an event dedicated to the very future of the blue economy, in all its local specificity and all its potential for global influence.

This month, we hosted events in pursuit of resilient oceans and a thriving blue foods economy — and this has everything to do with tourism and even more to do with personal relationships to place, and maybe even something to do with God.

Hear me out.

We filled rooms with entrepreneurs, researchers, policy-makers, community builders, students, and artists. The conversations that happened between bites of seafood, workshops, chef demos, and on-stage talks will become the next year—five—ten—of a rapidly evolving industry.

Because in hard times, we gather. In hard times, we cannot help but create.

So I look to the chefs — I look to the farmers and producers — I look to the artists.

I look to the ones who in the face of what is heavy, choose to take action by making something beautiful.

Creative twists on sustainably caught fish.

A cascading print in the shape of a dorsal fin.

Cyanotype prints of sea life that tell the story of the ocean’s shifting ecosystems.

Gyotaku impressions of a whale that washed up in Neskowin.

I look at a moving forest of kelp, a dream installation that came together in the last days of planning and the final hours of setup — stringing up nets and twine across a 40-foot stretch of open air, climbing up ladders and railings and trying anything and everything to make it work.

And of course the work was worth it — because it created the kind of atmosphere —the sort of liminal space where anything can happen. The conversations that happen in rooms like this, full of people who want to do good work — these conversations beget action. These spaces are moments of reprieve and havens to re-energize us for the months ahead of Zoom calls and emails and grant proposals and all the doom scrolling in-between.

A little bit of magic happened in Portland this week. In the midst of a week that loomed dark — at a time when everything is uncertain and heavy — we took a deep breath together, we looked to the sea, celebrated its bounty, and we agreed to keep charging forward with good plans and big visions for a better future.

There it is: exactly where the work sits at the intersection of faith, of God and art and love of place.

Stay with me, now.

Jesus turned water to wine to prolong a celebration, and then he multiplied bread and fish to feed five-thousand. Symbology for the Kingdom of Heaven has always been written in the language of sustenance and hospitality.

And so if our work is similarly an act of devotion, then I am honored to be in the company of those with hearts set on every-possible future where our communities are resilient and thriving.

We create art. We make good food. We set tables. And maybe all of this, in our own way, is an act of resistance.

Maybe this is how we reflect heaven on earth.

Between bites of good food, in the space of a drawn-out goodbye, and even in the excited promise to follow-up and circle back. It is our creation—our collaboration and our doing—that makes the kind of waves needed for change.

Today more than ever, I feel that swell of energy building.

So as much as this is a scattered reflection on a long week’s work, it is also a prayer:

May we always work in pursuit of goodness and love. May this be our collective stand: to feed each other good food in loving hospitality, with a heart turned expectantly towards the light in the face of all that would stand against us.

Amen.