During Covid-19, the Foolish Beauty of Building a Pagoda
During more than three decades of marriage, my wife Melanie has never asked for anything. Except a hot tub. Since raising three children makes it nearly impossible to find a few thousand dollars under the couch cushions, it just never happened.
Covid-19 hit a few months after we became empty-nesters, giving us both the time and resources to finally invest into a hot tub and a long overdue renovation of our deck.
I really want to honor your one and only request, I said to my wife immediately picturing myself next to her relishing the jet streams while bingeing episodes of the Watchmen through an HD projector.
I was more than willing to make this sacrifice for such a loving wife.
At first, Melanie had a couple of objections — it was still a good chunk of money, and how could we justify such extravagance during a time of such suffering? My guess you have figured this out: Melanie is a good woman.
We compromised, and bought a refurbished, 3-person, Caldera Spas Paradise Series hot tub that would allow us to sit side by side to talk, stream, pray, and relax.
Even before the man we called Hot Tub Harry began to refurbish it, we gave him a $100 down payment. Armed with precise measurements, we returned home with the idea of recessing the hot tub into our deck after a makeover.
About the same time, we visited some friends of ours, who entertained us underneath the beauty of their pergola. Neither Melanie and I knew what it was called, but we loved the beauty of lines and structure. When my friend told us what it was called, I thought he said, pagoda.
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Building our pagoda was at once a brilliant and foolish idea.
Brilliant because we created beauty together during a historically ugly time.
Brilliant because it allowed me to do something besides curl up into the fetal position of a deep depression.
Brilliant because it gave Melanie’s Tigger-like energy an option for becoming a couch potato.
For both of us, it provided a focus on higher realities.
This clip provides an analogy for our marriage. Imagine how the scene might have played out if Christopher Robin was living in a world riddled with pandemic.
I can’t even begin to list the ways why building our pagoda was a foolish idea on the level of charging the Alamo or filling the Hindenburg with hydrogen. Instead, permit me to share a story or two to demonstrate how impossible a challenge we were up against.
Headed into construction, we were inexperienced and wounded. We had learned the centrality of level and square in the renovation of a house built in 1870 earlier in our marriage, but had nothing on the resume listing decks or pagodas. Due to a bulging disk in my back, I am limited in movement. Melanie, on the other hand, suffers from neck, shoulder and foot injuries caused by a stack of 12-foot drywall sheets falling on her years ago. In approaching the project, we divided tasks to compensate for each other’s vulnerability to pain — for the most part, Melanie stooped; I lifted.
Needless to say, we set no speed records, but did manage steady progress before fresh injuries brought us to a near standstill. In the process of prying off a rotted deck board, I slipped and fell. To stop the rapid progress of my testicles toward a joist, I rammed my bare foot into a ragged concrete slab. I saved my balls but gashed my foot.
One of these joists was what my testicles were headed for.
The next day, limping behind my wife during our daily visit to Lowe’s, Melanie also fell — helping move a 12-foot 4 x 4 into our cart. She saved the board but not her butt, which produced a bruise the shape of New Hampshire and nearly the same size.
Even after a couple of days rest, we moved like Tim Conway’s old man from the legendary Carol Burnett Show. As you watch, imagine and an old man and old woman on a construction site.
Crippled by disability and exhaustion, we literally shuffled toward the finish line. Near the end, it was more a matter of being drawn by beauty than moving toward it.
We were inspired by less painful accidents. Evolutionary Biologist Stuart Kauffman defines the creative process as one of “adjacent possibility.” For example, in order for the skyscraper to have come into existence, the elevator had to be first invented. A spontaneous chain of What-ifs led us forward.
We asked ourselves:
What-if, to shield us from view of a neighbor who shot our dog, we wrap a privacy mesh around the pagoda and pool?
What-if, while framing the privacy cover, we use a 4 x 6 board along the top to create a bar space overlooking our garden and backyard?
The privacy screen eventually wrapped around the pool as well, creating a sense of space.
What-if, to match the color of the privacy screen, we choose various shades of blue throughout the project, including cushions, iPhone stands, electrical outlets, accent lights, art, bug zappers, and Steve, an aqua-colored Beta swimming in a custom-designed shelf next to the hot tub?
Even Steve, our Beta fish swimming in a shelf next to the hot tub, was chosen because he was blue.
What-if, to compensate for the unexpected height of the pagoda (due to an inability to dig post holes deeper), we buy flats of flowers at Painter’s Greenhouse half-price sale and hang baskets mixed with marigolds, petunias, bougainvillea, gerber daisies, celiosa and assorted ivy?
Hanging baskets gave us our first peak into potential for beauty.
What-if, in order to see in the dark, we create many spaces for fire and warm solar light?
What if, to stream movies, we mount the projection screen at a perfect viewing angle from the hot tub?
As we slowly healed from injury, we pursued these adjacent possibilities with more purposeful passion, even when it hurt to bend over.
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Building the pagoda was often an unpleasant experience. In telling the story, Melanie and I freely admit to bouts of exhaustion, resignation, ineptitude, endless searches for misplaced tools, and frequent acrimony.
During a few fits of anger, I would often swear like someone with Tourette’s on crack, inventing new and creative combinations of profanities on the fly. I imagine it like speaking in tongues, only in reverse.
A couple of times, when Melanie wanted to argue with me while I was carrying a heavy beam, I would accuse her of trying to crucify me.
We experienced deep regret when our son-in-law, Jose, threw his back out helping lift a 12-foot frame of 6 x 6 posts, and gained much respect when he returned an hour later acting on a determination to “take this bitch out.” We were encouraged as well by the coming together of our family in service and laughter.
Despite the obstacles, or maybe because of them, Melanie and I — soulmates, husband and wife and best friends for 32 years — experienced together a collaboration of unparalleled joy.
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In our work together, we never lost sight of the context of 2020 — the ravage of disease, division, and desperation. In our shared pursuit of creating beauty, building a pagoda focused us on hope. If you can create beauty in a time of Covid, you build a monument to the possible. Creativity possesses the power to wrench you away from what seems overwhelming, the forces moving in heavy shadows of darkness by revealing the light.
I love Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s quote about beauty: People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
At one point during the project, after missing a microdose, my depression returned along with a suffocating shame and sense of hopelessness. In Darth Vader’s raspy voice came the doubt.
In a world rife with pandemic and hatred, what business and expectation do you have in creating your own private oasis?
In a losing war with depression, what will keep you from simply retreating into your fantasy invention, content to sit side-by-side in a hot tub with the love of your life streaming Fargo until you lose all relevance?
Floating in the pool listening to the gospels, the Spirit whispered an antidote in a descending darkness. The epiphany came through another What-if?
What-if — despite your own brokenness — I have designed this beauty, this space, as a place of refuge, worship, sanctuary and mission launchpad?
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During a time of enforced isolation and retreat, I began to long again for my friends, the human connection of loving relationships. A month before quarantine, Melanie and I began to meet with a group of 30 or so people, mostly misfits and artists, to explore adjacent possibilities residing in Micah 6:8:
Practice justice
Love mercy
Walk humbly with your God
Diverse in nature — democrats, republicans, rich, poor, black, white, brown, believers and unbelievers, evangelicals and liberals — we centered in a different kingdom, one whose eternal king made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, dying on a cross. In a nation focused on power, our desire was to seek a kingdom that moves through love. By telling stories, rejecting pretense, serving our community, worshiping authentically, we envisioned life as a series of investments into one another, the hidden treasures in the parable of Jesus.
Many of us who joined our first Gathering in March had experienced disappointment, hurt, or betrayal by the church. During our time together, we felt the Spirit fall upon us in profound and healing ways. In moving toward our next monthly meeting, we commissioned teams of multimedia artists to come together to create stories around the theme of lament.
A week before our next scheduled Gathering, Covid raged through our world and nation. After canceling our meeting in light of a shelter at home order, we posted our art online and held a Zoom meeting. A true Gathering, we learned, required us to come together in person, not through digital images arranging us into a glitching, dysfunctional Brady Bunch.
Almost by necessity, we drifted apart.
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After my pool epiphany, Melanie and I agreed to consider the possibility of reimagining the Gatherings — smaller but more often. That led us to another series of What-ifs?
What-if, in order for a gathering to meet as safely as possible, we purposively measure social distance — flexible seating in the pagoda, the deck as balcony, and blue pool lounges for theater seating?
What-if, in order to continue to share art and story, we purchase bluetooth speakers, a wireless mic, a quality HD projector, and create different screen mounts for additional perspectives?
What-if, we envision beauty as catalysts for worship and community and continue to purposively saturate the space with warm light, flowers, art, design lines, and fire?
Becoming strategic, we met with our dear friends, Tim and Genell Allmond. We learned that they, too, were in the process of creating an outdoor space and loved the idea of leading worship and hosting a Gathering as well. Together, we shared a belief that we could safely meet in “eights and tens,” understanding that in 2020 and beyond, risk inhabits reality.
The great temptation in our world is the permission, maybe even encouragement, to retreat. For an introverted, depressed person like me the only hope resides in service to others. Awash in beauty, Melanie and I, Allmonds, and others feel called to deeper levels of art, community, intimacy and mission with our friends. To do whatever we can to pinprick the darkness.
This evening, armed with the art and story already created for our previous meeting, some of us will come together for another Gathering, six months after our first meeting. With slightly modified formats, we hope to meet with a different groups of eight to ten each Saturday through October.
We invite you to join us.
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On the same day our hot tub was installed, Amazon delivered 12 different types of solar lights for us to choose. We installed the ones we most liked, setting aside the others for a visit to our second most frequented store — UPS — for returns.
Melanie and I prayed together, side-by-side, in our hot tub. Again, not much of a sacrifice for Jesus.
As a blue-purple twilight fell, triggering the solar lights, one after the other, a gentle dance of warm light against falling darkness: Thank you, Lord, for the privilege and joy of creating beauty together.
On the side of the hot tub, the solar spotlights of the metal art were the last to illuminate, a reminder of the energy, symmetry, mystery and power of Spirit.
After watching Shakespeare in Love on the 120-inch screen in a hot tub with 23 streams of 102-degree water soothing a legion of ailments, Melanie and I surveyed the beauty around us.
Can you believe we did this?, Melanie asks.
When I remind her of our recent discovery that we built a pergola, not a pagoda, we share a belly laugh that echoes into the night. Catching our breath, we agree our remaining work is to inscribe underneath the metal art:
Through beauty, the Spirit draws us to the source, a lovely and loving creator.