“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.”
—Barbara Kingsolver
This may sound strange, but 2020 has been a year in which I’ve thought a lot about roofs. In April, we had a hail storm that caused damage to the roofs of most buildings in the area, including the buildings at Prairiewoods. In August, the inland hurricane that wreaked so much devastation on our tree canopy also caused untold damage to area roofs, with many homes breached to the elements. During that storm, I cowered in a closet under the stairs and felt certain that the roof of my apartment building was being torn off (luckily, that was not the case, though the solar panels were ripped from the roof and landed on my car in the parking lot).
At first, my thoughts about roofs were of a practical and straightforward nature: how bad is the damage? Is there a concern about water entering the buildings? How quickly can an insurance adjuster inspect? Where will I find a contractor, and how long is the wait list?
By mid-August, I was grieving for families who had lost their roofs, whose homes had been so damaged as to be unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable. Now, as this year of pandemic wears on, there are almost daily news reports about people for whom having a roof over their heads has become a nebulous thing, even with a national moratorium on evictions.
So when I stumbled upon the Barbara Kingsolver quote, above, in a journal entry from several years ago, it struck me in a new way. This year, many of us have learned something new about what it means to live under a roof—what it offers by way of shelter, what it says about our lives that we have a roof. Or that we don’t.
Here in Linn County, we’ve also learned a lot about what it means to live under the roof of hope. We’ve learned this from neighbors who have stepped into the open spaces left by a scrawny safety net. Folks who fed and housed their neighbors in the immediate aftermath of the storm, and who continue to do so as the need lingers in our community. If what we hope for in this life is to be part of a true community, we could emulate them and be living right up under that roof.
Kingsolver invites us to get clear on what we hope to co-create with this precious life we’ve been given. Once we’ve formed a clear picture in our hearts and minds, she recommends that we live it into being. Hope, she implies, isn’t about holding on to a gauzy dream. It is about moving fully into that hope as if it were a literal space, trusting that it will offer shelter even as you build the world you envision. Charles Eisenstein named one of his books The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, and Kingsolver is saying something similar: If we hope for it, our hearts already know it is possible. But we have to live it into being.
Thanks to Barbara Kingsolver and 2020, the questions I’ve been asking myself lately are:
Have you figured out what you hope for?
What would it look like if you moved into that hope, and lived under its roof?
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director