When will we start drawing baths for our friends?

Chapter 5: A Conspiracy Unmasked

In Chapter 5, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, and their friend Fatty Bolger reunite at Crickhollow. They have a happy bathtime, eat a second dinner, and at last it’s revealed that Frodo’s friends—the conspirators—have been snooping around for months and know all there is to know about Frodo’s peril and plans to leave Buckland right away. Before they leave, Frodo dreams about the sea.

Beef Tea

I used to love making a point. Or not even that I used to love it—I just didn’t see the point in saying anything if there was no point to be made. Which absolutely does not mean I kept my mouth shut. It’s hard to stop talking when so many very important points need making.

Now I look around and see just as many points to make, but I’m resistant to making them. The point surfaces. I pick it up with surgical tweezers and put it under the diamond loupe. It snaps into focus and its flaws are revealed, or the light shifts, or another point sparkles brighter somewhere else. All the points are dulled. This is one of several excuses I’ve identified for letting so much time pass between Chapters 4 and 5.

Some points I’ve thought about making from Chapter 5 include:

• How a lot of us aren’t carrying our fair share of the load

• How our slack gets picked up by someone whose back’s about to break

• How seeking only comfort and safety makes soil ripe for violence

• How discourse about rest, boundaries, and self-care gets misappropriated and exploited to prop up and feed the monsters of self-absorption, unyielding self-improvement, selfishness, addiction to safety, addiction to comfort, stinginess, greed, cancelling plans last minute, disconnection, and epistemological gymnastics to justify our pleasure-, comfort- and attention-seeking behavior.

I think maybe the resistance to point making is coming from:

A) Having a clear sense of what my life might look like if I were living into my convictions

B) The comforts and commitments I’m actually ready and willing to walk away from

C) The oceanic expanse between points A and B, where I find myself adrift, bobbing around like a fool as the sea birds encircle.

Another excuse is that I’m finding if I let too much time pass between chapters, I can convince myself that everything I think, say, do, see and feel can, should, and must be tied back to whatever might be happening in Middle-earth. Like the contents of the known universe enshroud me like an iMax theater and I’m John-Nashing it together—click, click, click—til it snaps into focus, walks off the screen and consumes me. A sausage packed so tight it bursts into a formless pile of loose meats and juices. It’s tempting to slither into it and put us all on simmer til we dissolve back into the primordial stew.

You know what I mean?

I’ve noticed that in hard talks with my husband I’ve swapped out points to be made with things I’m just curious about, which comes from good intentions but sometimes is just words I learned from Internet psychobabble to help me seem softer.

Still, let’s run with it…

I’m curious what it’d look like if we showed up for each other as hard as Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Fatty Bolger show up for Frodo.

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A Conspiracy Unmasked

The chapter starts with Frodo, Sam, and Pippin arriving at Crickhollow, the house across the Brandywine, in Buckland, that Frodo is pretending to move into, to keep nosy Old Shire hobbits off his trail as he makes for Rivendell with the Ring.

Buckland is like a colony of the Shire, founded by Gorhendad Oldbuck¹ in the Second Age, who first went east over the river where no Hobbit had gone before. Oldbuck later changed his name to Brandybuck and decreed himself Master of Buckland, where he sired his progeny and built Brandy Hall, with its 100 windows. The house at Crickhollow had been like a staycation home for the Brandybucks of Brandy Hall, when they needed to escape the chaos of the family compound.

Hobbits of the Old Shire, notorious xenophobes, were suspicious and judgmental of their river-crossing brethren, and Hobbits of the settlement were suspicious of Old Shire Hobbits in return. Silly because there wasn’t any difference between Hobbits west and east of the Brandywine, except that the Buckland Hobbits were fond of boats, kept doors locked at night, and some could swim.

Back in the Third Age, Merry and Fatty have been unpacking and arranging all of Frodo’s furniture brought over from Bag End. Not knowing that his friends are in on his secrets, Frodo feels heartbroken and beleaguered to tell them he won’t really be settling into retirement at Crickhollow. He forces a smile and doesn’t let on before bathtime. 

Pippin jumps into the bath at Crickhollow, as illustrated by Cor Blok

I think about bathtime at Crickhollow a lot. Merry has prepared three tubs for his travel-weary friends, so that Frodo, Sam, and Pippin can wash up together, and no one has to wait a turn. The boys splish splash and sing gaily, soaking the floors, then dry-off to tuck into their second mushroom feast of the evening.

“‘Trust me to arrange things better than that!’ said Merry. ‘We can’t begin life at Crickhollow with a quarrel over baths. In that room there are three tubs, and a copper full of boiling water. There are also towels, mats and soap. Get inside, and be quick!’” pg 132

After mushrooms they regroup around the fire and get serious. Merry wants to know what’s going on with the guy on horseback who’s been following them around, and after a lot of talking in circles, Frodo steadies himself to fess up. Then the truth comes tumbling out from all around the table. His friends already know what he’s been so scared to tell them: that “going back to Buckland” was a ruse all along; that he has in his possession the One Ring belonging to Sauron; that he and everyone accompanying him is in grave danger; that he must leave at once. 

Sam, Merry, and Pippin are resolute about going with him. Fatty will “stay behind and deal with inquisitive folk”². It’s all been decided. 

Frodo is confused, baffled, relieved, and touched. Mostly, though, he’s concerned that they still haven’t seen or heard from Gandalf, who said he’d meet up with them before they left the Shire. Frodo considers sticking around Crickhollow a day or two to see if Gandalf might show up, but heeds Gildor’s warning and decides to head out through the Old Forest at first morning light.

That night, Frodo dreams of snarling, menacing creatures, sniffing him out; of a tall white tower; of the sea he’s never seen or smelled.

Mycelial Networks

“Hobbits have a passion for mushrooms, surpassing even the greediest likings of Big People. A fact which partly explains young Frodo's long expeditions to the renowned fields of the Marish, and the wrath of the injured Maggot.” pg 133

Hobbits love mushrooms and I’m sure make excellent foragers because of their close friendship with the earth. Hobbits anticipate each other's needs: they ready the tubs, the water, the towels, the mushrooms. It’s easy for me to close my eyes and imagine food and tools and treasures and gossip moving in networks, entangled and enmeshed, from one smial to another. It’s impossible for me to imagine a Hobbit standing by as their neighbor starved to death.

Here in our world, no friends have ever invited me over to have a bath and sing songs at their house, and mushrooms have gone mass market. I’m sure you’ve noticed. A phenomenon not unlike Pumpkin Spice and Autumnal Cos-Play, where we sip on warm beverages wistfully and wear a new sweater to eat cider donuts at the U-Pick³ apple farm, then sniff around for cozy in the scented candle aisle at TJMaxx. Playacting cozy in Fall is a many-billion dollar market with room to grow; playacting connected, community, and regenerative with mushrooms can be a 365-day-a-year consumer season.

After Fantastic Fungi came out on Netflix, all the Mommies started to microdose, then all the fashion magazines started writing about the microdosing Mommies, and the functional mushroom start-ups blasted the Metaverse with prospecting campaigns. Then the decorative lamps, and the at-home shiitake logs, the retail installs to take selfies in front of, the Moon Juice plumping serums, the glassware and the Target wall art and the mudwatr and the garter belts and the butt plugs and the affiliate-linked⁴ market round-ups, and the content and the content and the content. 

The free market makes it easy for chronically-online consumers in the Western World to like and follow others who are likewise developing a personal-practice of shoehorning the phrase mycelial network into every conversation they have. Fungal fandom, fungi frenzy, mushie madness, mushroom mania, Mushroom Mondays, Fungi Fridays—so many options to pull from for captions and subject lines. A burgeoning industry of products for all rooms in the home to help us replace having to put our hands in the dirt or transfer our excess resources to the depleted places in our networks.

As very smart and big-hearted thinkers who I respect very much started observing and reflecting on what we might learn from mycelium, the markets did what markets do: capitalized on good intentions by churning out products across categories to stick in branded-boxes with cheeky print collateral, free shipping, referral programs, subscription options, maybe a sticker. The net-sum being a deeper cleaving from the mycorrhizal networks beneath our feet. More stuff to Add to Cart, less attention left for learning the names of our neighbors, less dropping a lasagna off on the porch, less rolling in the mud, less washing the feet of our dying, less shared earth in our guts and beneath our fingernails.

Zooming back in, I’ve been working on how to be sick and how to ask for help. The other day when I had the flu and Alex was away on business I sent a group text to six people and asked for anything that could be offered—a meal, time spent with my kids, a prayer. I’d never done that before. The mushroom sends spores from its gills. The spores grow into hyphae—slender filaments like rivulets. The hyphae meet and combine. A mycelial network begins to form. I opened myself to receving their care.

One friend I hadn’t seen in a very long time brought me several gallons of beef tea her chef husband had made for me. I sipped it from a mug that Alex made while she sat on the foot of my bed and told me about the teenager next door she’d taken into her care, whose moms’ ability to parent her had been shredded up by the Big Man’s⁵ rototiller. Earlier that day she’d taken the teenager’s grandfather to the hospital—because if she didn’t, who would? When there’s slack that needs taking, she takes it. A lot of people—including me—have told her that there’s something wrong with someone so quick to pick up loads that aren’t theirs to carry. “I’m learning that it’s my choice how I live my life,” she says as my kids hug her ankles and crawl into her lap. As I sip the beef tea she’s brought me.

I’m closing my eyes and imagining us lifting our voices up and over the spalshing and wallowing of the bath I’ve made for us. Fresh mushrooms in the kitchen. A dream so close I can smell it.

Madre, Martyr, Mi Cuerpo/Su Cuerpo

I’m thinking a lot about what happens when we don’t each carry our fair share of the load. Someone, somewhere, picks up our slack. Their back is aching. I imagine drawing them a bath.

My grandma used to say if a boy broke my heart in Brooklyn, her heart ached in California. That if my leg hurt, her leg hurt more. Mi cuerpo/su cuerpo. My tears/her tears. The night before she died I dreamt I was adrift in the ocean, bobbing around like a fool. Sea birds encircled. And then sharks. I bobbed around in an expanding circle of blood until I woke up crying. When she died, I was so far away. For a year I dreamed of sitting in the sand, letting the waves break over me, until the waves turned into dead horses and the sea turned to blood.

My grandma smelled like dough. Biscuits, buñuelos, sopapillas.  Pecan pie and pumpkin empanadas.  Like yeast and like masa.  Like lard, like butter dripping out both ends of a rolled-up, warm tortilla.

Except for when she smelled like original Colgate, like lipstick—Elizabeth Arden, Lancôme—like Ivory soap, like Pinesol, like earth, like mushrooms.

Except for when she smelled like roses. Like Herbal Essences in the pink bottle. That I sipped in as I shook my face in the tumble of her salt and pepper hair every time we got tossed by the waves and face planted in the shore—a trick she had for getting sand out of our eyes.  

My grandma smelled like dough and like earth and like roses except for when she smelled like the sea.

When I think of the sea I think of my grandma. After she died I’d visit the sea at night and listen to her calling out for me. I’d swim far out to get under the moonlight and there she was, all around me, and I’d imagine dissolving into her, the ocean. Her blood in the blood of my mother in my blood in the blood of my daughters. We’d lay down and die before letting a baby scream herself to sleep alone in the cradle.

That’s how love works in my matrilineage.

My therapist called this emotional enmeshment; I’ve “done a lot of work” to disentangle myself from it. I don’t know, though. I feel unresolved. If mycelial networks had emotions, it’s hard to imagine them not getting enmeshed. I close my eyes and let thoughts surface:

Of people who aren’t carrying their share of the load.

Of feelings that are and aren’t ours to feel.

The screams of babies left alone in their cradles.

Her blood in my blood in the blood of my daughters.

Bodies laid down like a bridge, so that others can cross.

Backs one straw from breaking.

Hearts so full the dam can’t hold.

A boy on fire, picking up our slack.

In tenth grade the girl I looked up to more than anyone in the world tied rocks to her ankles and drowned herself in the pool. After her funeral, my mom drew me a bath and didn’t say a word about knowing how I felt. She ran the water and lit the candles, touched her hand to my head and left me alone. My body. Her body. That was love like I wasn’t used to getting and hadn’t known I’d been hungry for.

Anyway, I appreciate you for sitting through this while I scratch like a house cat at the surface of something very alive for me that I’ve never tried to write about, with no clear point to make.

I guess I’m just wondering how the fuck we’ve all been duped into thinking we should just keep going on like our neighbors aren’t being starved to death.

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Men for Men

Am I protecting my boundaries or am I selfishly hoarding my energy and resources? Am I helping to “build complex patterns and systems of justice and liberation through relatively small interactions”⁶ or am I getting too comfortable alone in the woods with my laptop and my little projects and my presence practice and my long baths and good sex with my husband?  

I used to have a lot of answers.  Now I just have questions like these ones that beget new questions, like a river into streams into rivulets—a delta merging and forking and feeding and crossing like fungal threads. Entangled. Enmeshed. Water and earth dissolving into mud, until the mud flows into the sea.

My clear-thinking mind says it's selfish to stay in the mud too long, where there’s no ground to stand on and no points to make. When I feel selfish it’s useful to think about Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Fatty, sharing a load they’ve chosen to carry. Lifting their voices up over the sounds of water splashing and wallowing. A meal of mushrooms before getting down to business.

I found a point I feel sure enough about making:

All the men I know need to get better at friendship. 

1. An ancestor of Merry (Merriadoc) Brandybuck

2. Pg 141

3. Though none of them down here in Henderson, NC really let u pick the apples off the trees urself

4. No, I absolutely will not get a cash kickback if you purchase a fungi dildo from the links in my Substack

5. Vita voice: society

6. This is how the New Saint adrienne maree brown describes her theory of emergent strategy.