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Mirador Community Store is a store in Portland, Oregon. Mirador offers vegan and vegetarian cookbooks, "uncookbooks" for raw foodists, special diet books such as for food allergies, health books, juicers, dehydrators, canning equipment, bread making supplies, sprouting equipment, herbal tinctures, flower essences, homeopathics, candles, massage products, essential oils, goods from recycled products, and more.
We (Steve and Lynn Hanrahan) started Mirador in order to fulfill many of our life goals. In a way, it is a culmination of ideas that germinated in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Steve had managed to get the small company he worked for to let him work three days a week, but he really wanted to do something positive with his life -- and to make a living while doing it; what Buddhists call "right livelihood". We decided on a retail store that would sell products that would help people regain a real connection to their Life. Mirador started out as the idea to sell bread-making supplies, since Steve was getting back into making whole-grain bread with freshly-ground grains. In line with this, we registered the name "Grain Revolution", created in one of the many tea ceremonies that we had in Steve's free afternoons.
Up to this point, this was really Steve's "thing" because he was getting increasingly desperate to get out of his corporate job. But as the idea became more real, Lynn decided to take full participation and to include her interest in alternative healing as part of Mirador. She had quit her corporate job in the early '90s and had become a massage therapist, working out of a room in our house. This allowed her time to explore many alternative healing ideas and she became increasingly desirous of being able to share this with more people. And she also had had some experience in a small retail store that made her feel that doing a retail store would be a good fit for our desire for right livelihood.
Around this time, we realized that just selling baking supplies and health products wasn't going to be enough; we needed to be a more broad-based store, selling general kitchen supplies along with the baking equipment and we also added a third category: Home. This came from our conviction that people needed to spend more time just quietly being; that this also helps foster a deeper connection to Life. This idea came to us from the realization that our afternoon tea sessions fostered our connection to our Selves. What products (beyond teapots) this category would entail was unclear, but has come to mean things like suncatchers, candles and holders, picture frames and things that are not necessarily stricly home products, like cards. (And it turns out that many of the products in this category are made from recycled materials, such as the Think Again bags and wallets, a good fit for our values.)
At that point, it became obvious that Grain Revolution was not going to be a good name (though we still love it!). After weeks of tea and wine ceremonies, we finally came on the name Mirador in the dictionary (we were looking up words related to one of our cats, Mira) and immediately liked it because of it's meaning-- "a window or turret with an extensive view" -- and the way it would allow the store room to evolve and not be tied to one particular type of product.
At the same time that we were deciding how to make a living in a satisfying manner, we were getting increasingly involved in issues of peace and justice in the Portland community. It gradually became clear to us that we didn't want to spend our lives just protesting bad things; we wanted to be a place that manifested how we wanted the world to be. We were especially interested in helping to rebuild local community. Fortunately for us, the area of Portland that we live in has been undergoing a resurgence in locally-owned businesses for the last few years. There is a lot of character to these businesses and it makes being out in the community a real joy. We wanted to be a part of that because we think it is vital that America stop the slide to corporate commercialism and return to its "main street" roots, albeit in a manner that is more conscious of the implications of what locally owned business means to the greater community.