Holy shed II

Contemplations on safe spaces — both public and private — and defending your peace

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s been hard to feel good about much over the past few weeks; and, like many, I’ve been feeling the whiplash-mixed-with-burnout being offered up in what feel like minute-by-minute portions by the all-hungry news cycle.

However, the best news in my little corner of Sandpoint has been the recent completion and near-total furnishing of my long-awaited backyard writing shed. If you know or converse with me regularly, you’re probably sick of hearing me say the word “shed.” I’m sick of it, too, but certainly not sick of the finished product. 

Since getting my desk, chairs, end tables, couch and various gimcracks installed, it’s been a real struggle to leave the space. I swore to my wife and kids that I wasn’t going to move out of the house altogether — and I really can’t, since the shed has no plumbing — but I’ve certainly been ducking out an awful lot to revel in the solitude and contemplative peace I’ve found.

The last time I wrote about this topic, in a “Back of the Book” essay titled “Holy shed” in July, I wrote in part: “The term ‘safe space’ has gotten a bad rap — specifically from people who make spaces unsafe — but that’s exactly what we all need.” 

Having spent the past week or so periodically ensconced in my own “safe space,” I can attest that it’s definitely something we all need, and now more than ever.

Having lunch with an old friend the other day, I found myself showing him pictures of the shed on my phone like it was one of my kids. It got us talking about these kinds of personal spaces — and not just the physical ones, like a shed, shop, studio or garage, but the notion of fighting for and defending your “peace.”

It’s not as easy or self-helpy as it sounds. At a time of such broad-based and intrusive unrest, it feels almost obscene to be seeking solace in retreat of any kind. When I look around my shed, I am keenly aware that it is an enormous luxury. 

There are uncounted millions of people around the world who are displaced — either with no roof over their heads at all or, in so many cases, under the roof of some authoritarian regime. Yet here I am, sitting in just under 200 square feet of fully insulated, heated space with high-speed internet, electricity and a lock on the door on property that I own — no mean feat even in Sandpoint, which is admittedly far from any of the real battlelines in our current world.

But I return to that notion of defending your peace because, on many levels, I think that’s what people of good faith are currently trying to do — defending the peace of their families, friends, neighbors and themselves. 

Rather than a retreat, I’m starting to feel like a safe space (whether it be a “holy shed” or a whole neighborhood where people aren’t terrified of going outside lest they be pepper-sprayed, arrested without due process or far worse) is actually a position of strength, and maybe the strongest position of strength.

For many centuries, “sanctuary” was the offering of churches and only made possible by the power they wielded to transcend the claims to authority by the outside world of kings, barons or other tyrants. 

That’s because refuge requires protection and protection requires strength, and that’s what I feel when I’m in my shed and experiencing the calm and clarity I find there — and when I’m among my many fellow humans who have been reclaiming their public spaces for peace so that private spaces may be made more peaceful.