Rising Above a Narrow Vision

My wife recalls a day in her teens when she helped shingle the steep roof of her mother's Michigan house.  My wife says that being on such a high slope was so scary that by the end of the afternoon she had worn off most of the fabric of the seat of her jeans, having never dared stand up.  I know myself that sloped roofs can be scary.  However, in many cultures down through time, and even today, a flat, level roof has been a means to rise above the pressures of life, to lift one's spirits, re-connect with Nature, and even expand one's vision.

I have experienced myself that occasional desire "to get away from earth awhile," as Robert Frost put it in his poem "Birches."  However, because I grew up in U.S. suburbs, I did not experience firsthand how claustrophobic living in a dense city can at times become.  So, I think it was through the R & B song "Up on the Roof" that I first heard testimony of how healing to the human spirit getting up on a roof can be.   People living in dense cities, and especially in ghettos, do not have pliant sling-like birches to lift themselves and their spirits above the ground when life's burdens get too heavy.  A roof can help.  As the songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King conveyed, getting "Up on the Roof" can enable a person to rise above the street noise, and above walls that are too close, and even above life's troubling cares.

rooftops in Athens

In many countries of the Mideast, houses have been traditionally built with flat roofs, in part because of the hot climate.  Unlike that wintry climate in which my wife's mother's house was built with a steep roof so snow would not accumulate, Mideastern peoples have had to deal with heat.  A cave-like house is protection against the daytime sun. But once the sun has been down awhile, being up on the roof -- even sleeping up there -- can be a relief.  So important has been the roof as one living space that ancient Jewish law in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) included a building code requiring that "When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof.. [because someone might] fall from it." (Deut. 22:8, NRSV).

Roofs can be a place for cooling off, both literally and figuratively.   They can even be a place for raising one's sights as we re-connect with the healing touch of Nature.  A light breeze.  The sight perhaps of a distance shore.  And seeing the stars.

stars wider than our vision

The most expressive testimony I have read to that fact was by a twelve-year old black urban girl, as recorded by the psychologist Robert Coles.  In the girl's own words:  "I guess I'm doin' all right....  A  lot of time, though, I wish I could... find myself... a place where I could walk and walk, and I'd be walking on grass, not cement....  At night, sometimes, when I get to feeling real low, I'll climb up the stairs to our [apartment's] roof, and I'll look at the sky, and I'll say hello there, you moon and all your babies -- stars!  [U]p there, I feel I can stop and think about what's happening to me-- it's the only place I can, the only place."

~~~

Have you experienced Nature's ability to lift spirits?  Has that ever involved expanding your vision?

(The quotation by the girl is from Robert Coles's introduction in

The Geography of Childhood, by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, © 1994. p. xxii.)