Creating Space

This blog has been quiet since 2021. From 2007 until then, it lived alongside my photography — every post paired with pictures, one always explaining the other. I’m not starting something new here. I’m just picking the same space back up, minus the camera this time, because I still need somewhere to think out loud.

I’m writing to you today — really writing, for what feels like the first time in years — and I want to tell you why before I tell you anything else.

I used to want to write. Hiding in a straw fort as a kid, filling notebooks with short stories. Up too late by lamplight, trying to conquer the “hook.” That part of me went quiet for a long time — not because I stopped wanting it, but because there was no room left for it.

High school graduation slides a contract across the table and hands you a pen before you’ve read the terms — sign here, a whole future, no room to negotiate. Mine came with that same pen already in my hand. I made a pact with a friend who stood between futures with a lot less wiggle room than I had. Prestige mattered where she came from. She wanted Duke. I wanted a book. We promised each other: she would go to Duke, regardless of what anyone expected. I would write the book. I thought the book was the goal. I didn’t know yet about a family that would grow loud and full around me. About a whole career built behind a camera I hadn’t even picked up. About a hotel, a hundred years old, waiting for me two states and two decades away. My friend kept her promise in a single, brave choice. Mine got buried for decades under everything else I built instead.

I didn’t sit down to write today because I finally decided to finish the book. I’m writing today because I finally stopped hustling long enough for the wanting to come back. That’s the whole thing, really — the reason for all of this: resting in something bigger than myself is where the good stuff comes from. Writing has always been part of how I find myself, underneath all the motion.

A year ago yesterday, the Historic Balch Hotel became mine to steward. Last week I sent a newsletter out telling everyone I wanted to mark it with some kind of celebration. The day came and went. No celebration. Which is, if I’m honest, a pretty accurate nod to who I am at the core — big plans, big ideas, and never quite enough time to do it all.

A few guests I’ve grown to love over this past year sent me kind emails acknowledging the date anyway. That small gesture meant more than I can explain. They are doing the exact thing I’ve hoped for all along: coming, making art, talking too long, eating good food, actually being here instead of just passing through. They’re part of creating the beauty here, whether they realize it or not — they understand what I’m doing, even on the days I can’t get everything done.

For most of my adult life, I have run on motion. Everything always moving. Everything always noisy. Some of it was gift. I’m the kind of person who fills a room with flowers and light because I genuinely can’t help it — who throws a birthday party for myself  as an excuse to lavish everyone I love. Who can say no to someone on their birthday? And I don’t regret a single one of them: piñatas, sumo wrestlers, mini cocktails, ugly sweaters, all of it! (Stefan might have preferred a slightly less “colorful” wife. I don’t think he signed up, back when he married me, for planning the perfect event to quietly become his lot in life too — and yet here we are, decades in, and he still shows up. To hang the streamers. To buy the old hotel.)

Somewhere along the way, those same parties turned into soup nights in the backyard, raising money and gifts for foster kids who moved in and out of our house more times than I can count. Motion, for me, was a state of always being in the middle of something, so that nothing ever got to become the main thing — and somehow the middle of everything turned out to be a whole life. None of that was evasion. It was grace poured out on me and then poured back out through me — an Enneagram 7’s particular way of loving people, filling every moment because I honestly can’t help it. That motion is a form of love. I do believe that.

But some of the motion was cover. Productivity never disappointed me the way vulnerability did, so I kept producing. A full calendar is a respectable way to never sit still long enough to feel anything. When I first started taking pictures, the photos and the writing lived side by side — a blog where they had to be connected, one explaining the other. Then the hustle took over. The business took over. I stopped writing, and kept taking pictures, and didn’t notice for a long time what had gotten quietly left behind. The color went slowly, the way it does when you’re not paying attention to it going.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then: the hustle did more than just tire me out. It’s not that I wasn’t living — we built a whole, full life in all that motion, and I wouldn’t trade it. But slowly, without my ever deciding it, the things that made me feel alive got pushed out to make room for the things that I had to get done. Creating, talking, feeling, writing, music — the things life is actually made of — need space to happen in. They don’t survive motion; they just get crowded out of it, one unfinished thing at a time. I just slowly forgot what it felt like to dream.

I didn’t come to Dufur knowing anything about running a hotel. I didn’t know the difference between ADR and RevPAR, or what a commercial refinance actually meant, or even how to run payroll — any of the hundred things I’d end up learning at eleven o’clock at night over the past year. I knew none of that.

What I did know feels like what I call faith — faith in a bigger story I’m only a part of. My part was to slow down here, pay attention, and see what came of it. Not because I earned it. Because somewhere under all my managing and doing, I was finally tired enough to trust something deeper than myself.

I know how that sounds — resting, trusting, letting the fear go, when I’m still the one who has to make payroll on Friday. I don’t say it to convince you of anything. I’m not sure I could, and I’m not sure that’s my job. But I’ve watched what actually happens when I let go of needing to control the outcome: the fear goes with it. Call that whatever you want. Maybe it was a Field of Dreams kind of feeling — rest, and do my part to create beauty and goodness, and trust the people would come. I wasn’t in control. And for the first time in a long time, that felt like the safest place I could stand.

I still believe that. But I’ll be honest with you — over this year, the pressure of decisions and payroll and getting reservations started creeping back in, the way it always does, and instead of resting in the One who already had it in His hands, I felt the old pull to manage it all myself. To go back to doing instead of trusting. I know that pull well. It’s the same one that used to keep me moving instead of sitting still, back when sitting still meant I might have to feel something I wasn’t ready for.

But here’s what I’m learning, slowly, imperfectly, one quiet morning at a time: not being in motion — not filling every hour — is the secret to all of it. When I stop, I feel more alive instead of less. Thoughts get room to finish themselves instead of getting cut off by the next thing. My senses stop being dulled by the sheer volume of doing — I notice there are stars here, more than I’ve ever seen from a city. I notice the people, and the specific histories they carry into this small town without anyone asking them to. That’s where the real work happens. Not where I work harder. Where I stop long enough to let something more powerful than my own effort take over.

And I’ve started to see the fruit of it, even in a year that was also genuinely hard. Fruit I didn’t manufacture. Relationships that have softened in ways I didn’t push toward. A staff whose histories were already theirs before I arrived, who were understandably skeptical of the new owner — and with whom I’ve earned, one shift at a time, something that actually feels like working respect. A goodbye with a longtime contractor that could have been bitter and instead left the door open, because neither of us needed to prove anything. Creativity coming back — the eye I thought I’d lost when I stepped away from photography, showing up again in how a table gets set, how a room gets lit, how a menu gets built. Beauty. Goodness. I didn’t build any of it. I just finally got out of the way long enough for something bigger, and more beautiful than anything I could construct with flowers and candlelight alone, to do what only it can do.

Back in January, I found myself in a completely empty hotel. No reservations until February. No arrivals, no departures, no one asking anything of me. I stood in the doorways of each room and for once the quiet didn’t feel like loneliness. It felt like space — like room being made for something I couldn’t have made room for myself. This is when I knew what the job was. To create space.

I think that’s actually what the Balch is, if I’m honest about it. Not a boutique hotel with a nice restaurant attached. It is a place for people who have been useful for a long time — capable, responsible, carrying more than anyone realizes — and who don’t need more noise, more urgency, or more performance. You already have enough of that. Your calendar is already full. You are already managing more than one thing at once, the way I was, the way most of us are, most of the time.

What we’re building here is somewhere that doesn’t ask that of you. Flowers and candlelight and an extra glass of wine or chocolate chip cookie because beauty matters and you deserve to sit inside it for an evening. Real musicians — local, unpolished in the best way, playing because they love it — because music that’s actually alive does something to a room that background noise never will. Shared plates, meant to be lingered over, not rushed through, because some of the best conversations of your life are going to happen over bread and wine with people you love, if you let them go long enough. Good food that surprises you, in a small town that isn’t supposed to have food this good, because surprise is its own kind of grace. And underneath all of it, quiet. Not the absence of anything — an invitation. Space to breathe. Room to hear yourself again, the way I finally started to hear myself standing in an empty hotel with nowhere I had to be. A quieter kind of luxury, if you want a name for it.

A place to make art, or write the thing you keep meaning to write, or fumble through a new guitar chord until it finally sounds right. A place to laugh too loud, play a card game past when you meant to stop, and really talk with the people you came with instead of just sitting across from them. A place where the strangers at the next table turn into friends somewhere around the second glass of wine, the way it keeps happening here. A place quiet enough to finally hear your own thoughts — and to practice the harder things too: gratitude you have to work at, a forgiveness you’ve been putting off, a goodbye you haven’t said out loud yet.

One night, early on, a couple was nearly the only ones staying here. They stayed up long past when I’d gone to bed, playing games and talking in the parlor, the way people do when nobody’s rushing them toward anything. They checked out the next morning — and then came back a few hours later, just to buy the Margaret Plumb painting that had hung on the wall above them the whole night. They wanted it in their own home, they said, so they’d always have something to remember that night by. That’s the whole thing, really. Art, and history, and unhurried time, doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. Not decoration. The actual reason people fall in love with a place enough to want to carry a piece of it home.

There’s a chair in the parlor I love — gold, vintage, the kind of chair that looks like it’s been waiting its whole life for someone to actually enjoy themselves in it. One night a local, someone we hardly ever get in here, was laughing so hard with friends that he spilled red wine straight onto it. I never had it cleaned. The stain’s still there, a little faded now, and every time I see it I remember exactly what it was — him, laughing, that particular night, this small town showing up for itself in a room I just get to steward. I tease him about it every so often. But mostly I leave it alone, because it’s proof. Joy actually happened here, on some ordinary Tuesday, and left a mark I’d rather keep than erase.

The more I practice hearing myself in these rooms, the more I want to build that same room for you. It isn’t generosity, not really — it’s closer to recognition. Every time I catch a real thought instead of outrunning it, every time the quiet here actually settles instead of asking to be filled, I want this place to hold more of that, not less. The vision keeps growing because I keep finding out, one still morning at a time, what’s actually possible once a person is finally quiet enough to hear themselves. I want the Balch to be that, over and over, for whoever walks through the door next.

You can come here for a wedding, a winemaker’s dinner, a Friday night with music spilling onto the patio, and that’s more than enough reason. But if you’re anything like me, you might also come here carrying something heavier than an evening out — a season that’s been all motion and no rest, a year where you’ve been managing everything in your own strength and are tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. If that’s you, I want you to know this building has room for that too. Not because I have anything figured out. I don’t. I’m one year into learning this, not finished learning it. But I believe with my whole heart that something bigger, more powerful, and more beautiful than any of us is doing work in the people who walk through these doors — and it isn’t up to me to manufacture it. Only to keep the rooms quiet enough, and the table set beautifully enough, that there’s space for it to happen.

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth — do you not perceive it?

That’s what I keep coming back to this year. Not because everything is resolved. It isn’t. I’m still learning the difference between resting in Him and managing threats instead of tending life. But a year in, I can tell you this much: something new really is springing up here, in me and in this place, and it didn’t come from my hustle. It came from finally being still enough to let it.

There’s a lot happening at the Balch this fall — music, dinners, evenings I think you’d love, and I just wanted you to know what’s actually underneath all of it. Whatever season you’re carrying right now, there’s something wide and quiet and unearned waiting here too. I can’t fully explain it. I just know it’s real, and I’d love for you to come find out for yourself.