Hope in the Summer of 2020

In the winter of 2014, my parents purchased a dilapidated old farmhouse nestled in the rolling hills outside of Cincinnati. Everyone thought they were crazy for trading their finished home in the suburbs for holes in the walls! I remember asking my Mom directly (and she later confessed that I was the only one with enough nerve to ask): What will you do if your cancer comes back? Do you ​really​ want to spend your final days here? She had a vision that I couldn’t see. They went on to name the property “Hope Farm.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Hope Farm and what it means. Despite what we may tell ourselves, having hope doesn’t mean that everything will magically work out. This summer has proven that in so many ways, for so many people. Like others, I have frequently hoped that we were just a few weeks away from returning to “normal.” Yet my life in the arts still remains far from normal.

I know we’re entering a new world, a new normal. As the social activist and writer, Arundhati Roy recently wrote:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

I wonder what this new world will really be and what role the arts will play. Many of us acknowledge music’s incredible power to spark hope. Music reminds us that just maybe the sun hasn’t set and that maybe there is still a chance to create, experience or be a part of something beautiful.

This summer, I’ve seen glimpses of what will be possible. I saw it during IMP’s first virtual program with Main Street Connect​, as one participant gleefully described Jiyoung’s performance of Chopin’s ​Grand Polonaise Brilliante.​ He wrote,

It sounds like gentle raindrops. I am twirling in the rain and dancing in the woods.

And I see it during the fourteen hours of virtual one-on-ones that Iris Music Project musicians provide every week for residents of retirement communities, many of whom haven’t been outside for over five months.

As one resident recently remarked,

Music makes life better, better, better. With so many awful things going on, I need music. It replenishes me and it makes my heart beat stronger.

Mom loved music, and helped lay the foundations for the Iris Music Project. She hoped she would live another 20 years. That did not come true. And yet, as the walls of Hope Farm were patched up and painted, more and more of us began to see her vision. Hope Farm became a reality, a place of beauty, peace and happiness, even as she continued to struggle with her health.

So this is the thing about hope. Often what we hope for doesn’t come true. But it gives us the will to go on, to adjust, to find peace and to celebrate moments of connection as we walk through the portal between the old and new world.

Written June 2020

Dedicated, with love, to Patricia Thoman Latessa (1961-2020).