Good places to live have big skies and safe streets. As a result, they also have community. When I think back on the places I've lived, many of my strongest and happiest memories are from bike rides I took, gazing up at the clouds. I think about riding through Salem to the hops fields on the outskirts of Keizer or in Aachen peddling towards Belgium as the sky grew ever darker. I might forget the street names, but I'll never forget the invincible and freeing feeling of flying along on a bike with an enormously blue or gray or black or indigo or pink or orange sky above. This past weekend I went to Seattle and experienced a delightful azure sky and community.
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| Who knew the PNW could get so schön? |
The UO Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) went on a trip to visit and network with PR professionals in Seattle. We saw the agencies Edelman and WE Communications (aka Waggener Edstrom Worldwide) as well as Microsoft's corporate headquarters. The agencies were pretty hip, what with chairs made out of canoes, professionally graffitied stairwells and locally brewed beer on tap 24/7. I tend to consider myself an in-house kind of gal, but you know, the perks sure do seem perky. Microsoft had its own allure being so high-profile, on its own campus, being at the forefront of the technological world. It also, in the brief hour we were there, oozed stress, hyper-professionalism and intellect.
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| Oui, WE! UO PRSSA Executive Board looking agency-ready. |
At Edelman, which is in the heart of downtown Seattle, we got to go out on the office patio. There's nothing quite like looking down from the 26th floor on all of the little ant-people scurrying about and just taking in the broadness of the bay with -- what I'd like to imagine were -- the peeks of Olympic National Park framing the horizon. Yeah, I think I could get used to the whole agency dealio.
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| From Microsoft to Maddie. |
I ended up spending the entire cloudless weekend in the Emerald City. In a beautifully fortuitous twist, one of my host brothers from Aachen, Daniel, was in Seattle on business. Two or so hours after he landed we met up downtown and spent the better part of the afternoon catching up. I also got the chance to spend the rest of the weekend with my fellow CBYXer, Maddie, who was in the Aachen area with me back during the exchange. It's always kind of surreal to reunite with friends or family in a place other than the one in which you first met or most frequented together.
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| Auf der Suche nach Starbucks. |
The weekend wrapped up with an early morning bus and then train back to Eugene. It was refreshing and energizing to see spring springing out the cabin window -- little lambs wobbling through the fields, goslings waddling out of ditches, fluffy white clouds punctuating the sky. Biking to Yawn Patrol Toastmasters, a club that meets weekly in downtown Eugene at 6:15 a.m., this most recent Friday morning, I felt thankful for my current community as well as the ones in which I've gotten to live.
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| What an evening on the quad. |
Community isn't just who you know. It's how you feel when you're in the thick of it. Community is the freedom to go on a bike ride and give a friendly nod or smile to passersby. Community means trust, support and connection. The individual communities in which I've lived over the years have scattered across the globe, so when the opportunity arises to reconnect with pieces of them, I go for it. Even though my communities will never all be in the same place at the same time, I hold onto them like a patchwork quilt over my shoulders. Some patches are bigger than others, but it's all there, sewn together into the seams of my life.