A quiet post / I am not made for perilous quests

Only questions, no answers

In a fairy tale kind of story, we have our protagonist (for example, Frodo) who is just living life and suddenly learns that he is inextricably tangled in some big problem (Sauron wants to enslave all of Middle Earth and that would mean the end of the Shire). So something the protagonist cares about (the Shire) is under imminent threat. At first he asks some questions — to find out if this is like really a threat or are you exaggerating? Maybe it could turn out okay?? (Probably it will turn out okay) (Right?) Then he looks around at the big guy next to him (a wizard!), surely YOU are the one to solve this?? I’m just one hobbit, I can’t take on Sauron—a supernatural being with a legions of horrifying minions—with just an antique vest, a tiny dagger and large, hairy feet. Have you seen the size of my friends? My staunchest ally is a really friendly gardener the size of an emperor penguin.

There might be some blaming (why didn’t the elves deal with this when they had the chance?) and some anger or disgust (if Bilbo had killed Gollum when he had the chance, I wouldn’t be in this mess) leading, eventually, to an unwelcome recognition: The people, places, or ideals that I deeply love are dangerously imperiled, and as hard as I try to think of a possible way for someone other than me to the be the one to do something about it, life has conspired otherwise. I’m holding the ring and Sauron knows my name and address. I can no longer sit in Bag End comfortably enjoying my fireplace and cellar kegs while living off of burgled dragon’s gold.

“Of course, I have sometimes thought of going away, but I imagined that as a kind of holiday, a series of adventures like Bilbo’s or better, ending in peace. But this would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger, drawing it after me. And I suppose I must go alone, if I am to do that and save the Shire. But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well—desperate. The Enemy is so strong and terrible.”

The good news

Thankfully we live in the real world where we are not faced with such dilemmas.

And even if we can see certain parallels between fact and fiction, luckily we aren’t the keepers of magical rings, we haven’t been visited by a powerful being with a clear mandate, Sauron does not know our names, and maybe there is nothing that we love so much as our warm fireplace, our cellar kegs, and our dragon’s gold, nothing we even want to save.

So that’s a relief.

The bad news

At the bottom of the Hill on its western side they came to the gate opening on to a narrow lane. There they halted and adjusted the straps of their packs. Presently Sam appeared, trotting quickly and breathing hard; his heavy pack was hoisted high on his shoulders, and he had put on his head a tall shapeless felt bag, which he called a hat. In the gloom he looked very much like a dwarf.

‘I am sure you have given me all the heaviest stuff,’ said Frodo. ‘I pity snails, and all that carry their homes on their backs.’

‘I could take a lot more yet, sir. My packet is quite light,’ said Sam stoutly and untruthfully.

Samwise Gamgee wasn’t given a magic ring. He’s just a simple guy with a beautiful heart who was offered a mysterious opportunity to be of service and made the choice to pack his bag full of tools to care for life.

What am I doing

I have no idea. Currently, I’m looking for clues about how to proceed in my own life and figure out certain questions related to the burial of a ratskin bracelet by studying how Frodo and Sam found the courage to walk to the Cracks of Doom.

The Two Towers

‘Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.’

A Norwex Party

I went to a neighbor’s house earlier this week to attend a “Norwex Party.” Per an AI:

A "hostess party" business model is a direct sales strategy where a salesperson, often called a "consultant," encourages individuals (hostesses) to invite friends and family to a gathering at their home where products are demonstrated and sold, with the hostess receiving incentives like free products or discounts for hosting the event and generating sales.

I declined to drink the wine that was offered at the beginning of the party and watched with some of my neighbors as the salesperson rubbed her face with the same cloth she had just used to clean a table covered with raw chicken juice.

We sat there, my neighbors and I, and we learned about the dangers of household chemicals. The cancer rates amongst professional housecleaners. The cancer rates of stay-at-home moms attributed to chemicals that are marketed to keep your house safe. A frightening story about a skinless baby who had developed allergies to all food as a result of exposure to chemicals that our government does not regulate. We felt empowered with information. With just the $200 starter kit, our loved ones would be safe. And if we acted now, we could get a 25% discount.

I imagined myself, gloved in the magic dustmitts, waving my hands to remove the deadly mites that are killing my children and visitors. Oh the health and safety we will experience. I must protect us, I will fight this dastardly plot to profit off of the contamination of my family. I will not feel the sorrow of their suffering, or the shame of being its cause. It feels expensive, for a few cloths, but I must have them. What would the neighbors think if I came and bought nothing, what would my host think, what would I think??

We ooh’ed and aah’ed, we laughed and commiserated, and I lined up to place my order.

Hell hath no fury

My neighbor invites me to a gathering.
I like my neighbor, I am there to be part of community.
I am willing to learn something.
A [company] has trained agents in how to [sell cleaning products].
The agent looks like me, a mom raising her kids.
She’s telling me what she’s worried about: all these chemicals in our lives.
I’m worried about it too.
She tells me about her sick daughter.
I would be so scared if my daughter had been sick like that.
I enjoy sitting with my neighbors, we are talking and laughing.
We agree that the chemicals are unhealthy and problematic.
We want to care for what we love.
The agent wants to help me do that affordably, she shares some numbers.
I want health for the world and my family.
I want connection to my neighbors.
She’s ready with the order form and some helpful suggestions.
I sign up to be the next hostess.
I’m doing my part to help share this vital information
access to these life-saving tools
as widely as possible
well, at least as widely as to other people
who can afford this kind
of safety.

Some disorderly thoughts

I can’t watch a movie, read my correspondence, find my son’s soccer schedule, share photos, attend a baseball game, drive down a country lane, look at a carton of eggs, make a phone call, walk into my front door, or accept an invitation from a neighbor unless I’m emotionally prepared to run the marketing gauntlet. Someone has studied my love, my deepest wishes, my hopes and dreams, and they have carefully chosen words and pictures to show me danger or desire, to touch me where I am most vulnerable, and offer me the impossible or frighten me where it cuts the most deeply. If I fold to their pressure I feel shame because I know what they are offering is fool’s gold. If I don’t fold to their pressure I feel shame because everyone else is doing it and what if I’m wrong, what if I’m making the wrong choice and then we aren’t safe.

Businesses, NGOs, politicians, media outlets, authors on Substack are all doing it and telling themselves they are the exception. My product or my aim is so helpful, so necessary, that it’s okay to manipulate by touching them to the quick. It’s okay for me to do it because my cause, my product [can save the world].

It’s okay, we say to each other, to find where spirit lives, where love is, and to exploit it, for clicks, for my cause. We don’t treat hearts with enough care. We study how to squeeze them and tell ourselves the story that it’s for their own good.

Maybe this is one of the Two Towers.

On second thought

Or maybe the tower is the belief that it is God’s plan to redirect 50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% over the past 40 years. I don’t know. Maybe I just need to share that statistic because I think about it every day.

What is an enemy and where does it live?

“Can’t afford a house? Try a budgeting app. Burnt out at work? Perhaps your morning routine needs tweaking. Climate crisis? Recycle harder. Unaffordable healthcare? Have you tried meditation?

We’ve become incredibly good at turning collective challenges into personal shortcomings. The logic behind this thinking is comforting in its simplicity: if you’re struggling, you just need to find the right combination of morning routines, productivity systems and mindfulness practices.” (— Kai Brach at Dense Discovery)

Maybe another tower is disconnection: from other people, from meaningful values, from meaningful work, from the natural world, from status and respect, and from a hopeful future (list taken from Johann Hari’s Lost Connections).

I heard Brené Brown say this morning:

From the time we wake up in the morning to the time our head hits the pillow at night, we are bombarded with messages and expectations about every aspect of our lives from magazine ads and TV commercials to movies and music. We’re told exactly what we should look like, how much we should weigh, how often we should have sex, how we should parent, how we should decorate our houses, and what car we should drive. It’s absolutely overwhelming and in my opinion no one is immune.

Trying to avoid media messages is like trying to hold your breath to avoid air pollution: it’s not going to happen.

It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and Photoshopped world very dangerous. If we want to cultivate a resilient spirit and stop falling prey to comparing our ordinary lives with manufactured images we need to know how to reality check what we see (by using these questions):

1. Is what I’m seeing real, do these images convey real life or fantasy?

2. Do these images reflect healthy, wholehearted living or do they turn my life, my body, my family, and relationships into objects and commodities?

3. Who benefits by my seeing these images and feeling bad about myself?

She inadvertently proposes two possible ways out of our dilemma. One, constant vigilance of every living human being to non-stop manipulation that has been shown to be hugely damaging in particular to everyone alive under the age of 21 or Two, wait what was that about air pollution?? Because we didn’t address that by having everyone buy a hazmat suit while the coal plants belched out ash, we looked at the system and made some collective changes that were in society’s best interest at the level of production, mostly (broad simplification).

Hallelujah for absolute personal liberty! Where every problem is an individual problem. Where every solution is an individual solution. We’re on our own! We either prove our worth or we don’t. We measure our little self next to all the other little selves and we don’t feel a part of anything larger because that would make us too strong.

Rivendell

‘For where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest? Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again; but I go to lose one, and not return, as far as I can see.’

‘But you cannot see very far,’ said Gandalf. ‘Neither can I. It may be your task to find the Cracks of Doom; but that quest may be for others: I do not know. At any rate you are not ready for that long road yet.’

‘No indeed!’ said Frodo. ‘But in the meantime what course am I to take?’

‘Towards danger; but not too rashly, nor too straight,’ answered the wizard. ‘If you want my advice, make for Rivendell. That journey should not prove too perilous, though the Road is less easy than it was, and it will grow worse as the year fails.’

‘Rivendell!’ said Frodo. ‘Very good: I will go east, and I will make for Rivendell. I will take Sam to visit the Elves; he will be delighted.’ He spoke lightly; but his heart was moved suddenly with a desire to see the house of Elrond Halfelven, and breathe the air of that deep valley where many of the Fair Folk still dwelt in peace.’

Selling Bag End

Frodo was about to turn 50 when he learned the nature of the ring he had been given. He began to make his plans and arrangements in the months leading up to his birthday, in the autumn (September, while mine is early October). So I’m taking all of this a bit too literally.

The first thing Frodo has to do is to sell Bag End (gulp).

Well, I’m not there yet but here’s what I’m doing instead:

1: STOP FEEDING ALL MY MONEY TO SAURON. I’ve changed my bank and I’m looking at all the ways our money is being siphoned away from the 99%. I’m trying my best to learn how to help it circulate longer and touch more people.

2: JUST SAY NO TO AMAZON. If anyone in my house considers purchasing from Amazon, we play the song Bezos IV from Bo Burnham’s Inside (explicit). We’ve had a lot of success with this shaming technique.

3: CONNECTION!!!!!! I have called friends, I have talked with neighbors, I have touched dirt, I have joined bookgroups with church people, I have invited people into my house, I have looked for places to volunteer (I have not volunteered), I have stayed informed without breaking, I have written this.

4: SHARING. I have made donations to organizations protecting what is beautiful in this world.

5: EAT CEREAL. I have suddenly begun eating a lot of cereal. I think it is an acceptable form of self-soothing if not self-care. It has fiber.

6: BEAUTY AND LOVE. Frodo and Sam hit the road to protect something they valued. We need to fill ourselves up with the good stuff (see #3) which is the only source of courage (and opposite to fear) that I know.

Tomorrow

Overcoming the growing darkness and destroying the One Ring requires many versions of heroes, a wide group, more than just the travelers and including all those who gave them lodging, or advice, or supplies, or protection, all of the parts of the world that came together when they did, doing their best, in incomplete knowledge, likely to fail, in great danger and at great cost.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Sending love as we all open the door and sort out what belongs in our traveling bags. I’ll see you out there.

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Some recommended reading:
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Johann Hari, Lost Connections
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
Dense Discovery Individual Growth/Collective Crisis