Tacking Toward Liberation
A Pause Before Weathertop to Practice my Elevator Pitch
Hello readers 🐸 I hope this finds you managing your despair in whatever way seems best to you1. I’m working right now on Chapter 11: A Knife in the Dark, but I had some general thoughts about this project to send ahead of it.
Maybe you wouldn’t think so based on its infrequency, but my commitment to and enthusiasm for Me & Tolkien on the Hungry River has been growing, and the longer I carry it, the more I can feel the efficacy of its slow medicine. Fifteen months since starting out and I haven’t made it to Rivendell yet. But I’m holding out hope—a fool’s hope2—that one day I’ll be writing about the Ring falling into the fiery pits of Mount Doom. One day, Sam will return to Bag End. I wonder how the world and I will have changed when we get there.
I used to worry about whether this project was a worthwhile way to spend time, but I don’t worry about that anymore. Washing dishes last week I witnessed in a flash of clarity how the project beats at the center of me now, even when I’m not paying attention to it. Like a drum, setting pace in the March of All Souls across time who, when darkness surrounded, reached out grasping for courage, faith, love, and hope, and found them.
I’m delighted to see that new people continue to join. Welcome. For your sake and for mine, I’ll reiterate: this is a long-term writing project where I read a chapter from Lord of the Rings3, carry it around with me for a while, and allow a back and forth conversation to develop between the text and my own consciousness.
As I’ve moved through this project I’ve found that many people who identify as progressive and feminist are suspicious about the text and my fealty to it, taking issue with its dearth of female characters, its author’s race and gender, the Abrahamic scaffolding of Middle-earth, the seriousness of its literary value, among other things. If you fall in that camp of skeptics, thank you, especially, for showing up. I offer this project as an invitation to complicate easy narratives, to put into practice thinking non-dually, and to have a little fun.
Out to dinner with two such skeptics, both older, more professional, and (probably proudly) less woo-woo than me4 it occurred to me that an elevator pitch for my project would be useful in social settings outside my inner circle. I haven’t made a very effective one because I still get very embarrassed telling people that the resounding conceit of my spiritual life is this image of myself as Frodo carrying the Ring to Mordor. But that’s what this project is essentially about! And a good elevator pitch needs the fastest path from A to B. If I’m ever going to get where I want to go, I have to practice:
I choose and commit to the path of collective spiritual and social liberation. I know that the end of that path lies far past the limits of my understanding of time. Still, I catch fast glimpses of it—clear and bright—and, from my center, tack toward it.
A few years ago I had what I understand to be my first direct experience with God. At the time, I was reading Lord of the Rings. I hadn’t read it in full since my senior year of high school. Being with the book that season radically altered and expanded the landscape of my consciousness, freeing me from bondage I had come to believe was unbreakable. Or if we want to keep the metaphors consistent, lessening the Ring’s influence over me. Tolkien’s world, with its rich cosmology and history, its many languages, and the varied culture of all of its races, taught me about world building. Reading Tolkien has helped me see how my own understanding of reality has been built by the stuff of other people’s imaginations. From there, I can go beyond just believing that another world is possible. I can lay down bricks for it.
When I think about this path and what it looks like to commit to it, I think about Frodo, shouting into a crowd of squabbling superiors: I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way. My commitment to this project is an artifact of my commitment to liberation. Of carrying the Ring to the edge of Mount Doom. Brick by brick, building a world the Ring has no power over, that I won’t live to see.
That’s too many words to count as an elevator pitch, but it’ll have to do for now. Is it making any sense?
I do believe that if I were writing more for this project, I’d feel less inclined to try to tell you what the “point” of it is. Maybe I’d shed the lingering fear of judgement faster, too. I haven’t found my stride with it yet, but ever my intention is to pick up the pace. This month, two years after stepping away from the company I built with my husband to do a little rewiring, I’ve started taking on paid work again5and building structure around my days that includes taking my writing process more seriously. I’m feeling energized and ready to drill down.
I want to get Chapter 11 out to you by Friday. Someone hold me to it. In Chapter 10, the Hobbits met Aragorn, and, because they couldn’t see a better option, took him as their guide. In Chapter 11, the group, hotly pursued by the Nazgûl, begins their perilous journey from Bree to Rivendell. At Weathertop, Frodo is stabbed by a Morgul-blade. It’s got me thinking and writing about my eczema. Tune in. Thrilling stuff.
Leaving you with this recording from my community choir. Yuri, our choir leader, learned the song from his teacher Laurence Cole, who wrote it with words from Rumi. Somewhere in the bass section I’m singing: In this life that’s shorter than a half taken breath, don’t plant anything but love. I’m trying.
In Denethor voice.
In Gandalf voice.
This is the edition I use, if you wanna follow along.
I think I might be done forever with using the more correct “I” there over the less doofusy sounding “me” here. Curious to know where y’all stand on that one.
Including editing someone’s memoir, which has turned out to be the most enlivening paid work I’ve ever taken on, and something I hope to do much more of. How wise was my fourteen-year-old self who knew this about our future!