Frodo’s Farewell
Today, as if shedding golden tears, the cottonwood tree nodded to the anniversary of 9/11. Being the tallest and widest tree in the neighborhood the first fall of these leaves covers the entire 5000 square-foot yard in front and then beyond these boundaries. Just yesterday the ground was velvet green but now it is a paisley carpet of browns and golds.
The rain has been unrelenting since yesterday eve, the night pockmarked by random punches of thunder, the rattling over my head on the tin roof of the porch nearly drowning out the voice of the poet on my laptop.
Autumn is the season when my soul raises its head from habits, from its hobbit-happy cozying to the carefree summer and the illusion of nature’s grace. This summer I have gulped daily this intoxicating lie – that the world is well, that all are held in beauty and bounty. It is no longer tolerable to murmur some deprecating preface… “I feel so privileged and realize that not everyone…” As if naming our place on fate’s wheel somehow absolves us of responsibility. It was human beings who tipped the wheel upright, bringing some to ride astride the top and grinding others beneath. In nature, the center is always the place of greatness and the 10,000 things arrange themselves closer or farther away from the gravitational core according to their density of longing.
How do you live without claiming unwarranted privilege? without being coy? without hiding behind inscrutable fate? How can you be true to what has arrived inside the undeniable package of the body and the family that brought you into this world? What do you say to the energy that leaps or creeps along the bones and sinews; the flames that either illumine or destroy the perceptions; the unexpected longings that drag you toward places you would not have visited otherwise?
Not all pilgrimages require new shoes - though modern wanderers prefer sturdy soles. I expect that a sturdier soul is what is really required and that the adventure only really begins when you leave your shoes behind – dangling from some low branch for a returning hobbit whose done his bit and now longs only for firelight and a filled stein.
The poet says we all have an inner Gandalf knocking at the door. The question is whether you say yes to the call to adventure. But we all also have both a Samwise Gamgee and a Frodo inside us; one part of us that returns after the adventure to take up one’s place in the presence of those who know us, and one part that is so broken open by the terror of the magnitude of the task to be accomplished, regardless of whether one succeeded or failed, that we faint and fall into the release of the Elvin land of perpetual dreams. That part will gradually grow and take over the rest of the self anyway, as the wildflowers reclaim the tended garden when age slows even our best attempts at imposing our own wills on the world.
Right now, this very moment, thousands of invisible Frodos are throwing rings of power back into the boiling cauldron. They are renouncing some hatred, some impulse to vengeance, a petty grievance, a temptation to lash out in righteous indignation. They are surrendering a boast that would diminish someone else; an ambition that would require too great a sacrifice from someone they love; throwing away a grudge that prevented the free flow of affection between friends.
For some of them, the loss of that long-held grievance was all that kept them aroused to possible satisfaction, so now they will begin the long sailing to the west and be but a shadow on the wall of the house they inhabit. But their act was still heroic and the flinging of the ring no less triumphant than Frodo’s. Though it costs them all their life energy, it moves the wheel of the world toward greater equilibrium; it shifts the balance of what we call good and evil; it pays the debt of sins of commission or omission; it fulfills vows that the soul made before the journey ever began.
If you look closely you may see these spent Frodos going about their business, their golden leaves drifting downward, forming carpets under our feet.
I do not lament these lives. Beauty and grace are still what they are; the fallen leaf is not lesser by being released by the tree. What has given itself, goes on giving. Even in the act of decomposition the art of recomposition continues to bless.
The Sam in me salutes the Frodo in you…
and in me.