You are silent more often now than you used to be, more insular than I remember. I worry that you are broken and in the next thought, I worry that I am, too. After the traumas of the last several years, I think about what it takes to be truly fractured and I wonder how many of us are and what the reverberations of this trauma may be into the future. In the end of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Frodo sails to the Undying Lands because the quest to destroy the ring decimates him. Though he tries to return to the shire and his life there, he is incapable of living the life he did prior to his journey to Mordor.
When I was younger and read the books, the detail of Frodo's passage into the Undying Lands felt like an unimportant post script. As an adult, I understand clearly why Tolkien included it; some evils can break us and there are some burdens people suffer which leave them irreparably altered. It was important to recognize that such a great sacrifice on the part of one person allowed others peace and prosperity, but the cost of their calm is the totality of Frodo's life in Middle Earth.
I think a lot about Mordor and Sauron and the evils Tolkien so masterfully details. In the midst of all the darkness, he still includes a kind and brave cast of characters willing to die for one another. There are moments of beauty and light in a story shrouded in darkness and terror. So much of the levity and the goodness is centered on the devoted friendship and love of the heroes and the sacrifices they make for one another.
Some days I feel like the weight of the fires, the shooting, and the pandemic are insurmountably heavy. Some days I feel so fragile that the smallest nudge sends me toppling. But in those darkest of moments where the bruises of the last several years have a stranglehold on my heart and I sense I am careening terribly close to the edge, the grace and love of those around me gives me the courage to breathe. Indeed, it is your arms that carry me through the crushing weight of my terror that what has broken inside me may be unfixable.
Are you okay? I don't think that I am. But in this long, dark night of uncertainty, I am so infinitely blessed to walk beside you, to stumble forward hand-in-hand openly acknowledging that we probably cannot go back to the way things were before because we have been fundamentally changed. Feeling you next to me, borrowing your courage when I do not have my own, is a grace and a life raft until our feet are back on stable land.
"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for." J.R.R. Tolkien
