Imbolc and the waning Megillah Moon
Tuesday gratefuls: Easy Entrees. Kate on the vaccine hunt. Vaccines. Covid. Diane. Mary. Mark. Changing Kate’s bandage. Psalms. Poetry. Writing. Leaning into Kate’s changes. The Sun. The Blue. Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. The road. The Creeks.
Sparks of Joy: Kep eager to eat. Rigel throwing herself on the bed, back next to mine. Vaccines and the vaccinated.
Forgot this. So back at it today, Wednesday. Gratefuls and joys will stand.
Kate had a better day yesterday.
I told her I don’t know what to say when folks ask me how she’s doing. “She’s holding her own,” she replied. There you have it. True.
We spent a long time talking about death. It’s our turn, soon enough. What do we want? How will we live if the other dies first? What do we need in that case? We’re not finished with the conversation. Perhaps we never will be.
Next to me right now I have a stack of books. No surprise. On the bottom of the stack is my yellow Westminster commentary on the Psalms. A gift from Bethlehem-Stewart Presbyterian church where I interned for a year. Above it is Emerson’s Etudes by Cavill. Above Cavill is the Murmuring Deep by Avivah Zornberg, a brilliant Jewish commentator on the Torah. Above that, the Tanakh. On the Tanakh, the Viking Spirit, a new book on Norse Mythology, and a very good one.
I mention them to illustrate what keeps pulling me back in, what is never far from my consciousness. The Other World. That place where the human mind goes when it tires, grieves, no longer knows any answers. Or, when it feels buoyant and joyful. A place that can seem hidden and faraway. At other times so close.
Next to these books are two small collections I purchased recently. Both of JRR Tolkien’s work. One is familiar: The Hobbit. The Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers. The Return of the King. The other less so: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wooton Manor, and Roverandom.
See what I mean? My heart swings toward the fantastic, the religious, stories of the sacred, of gods and men and women and boys and kings and faeries. Where I live when not doing other things like cooking and taking the trash out.
Guess I’m not gonna get on with adulthood. Too late. Somehow though. I’m glad.
These places are not escape for me. That Other World gives us all, has given me, so much. What justice is and why it’s important. What love and loyalty and duty are and why they matter. What adventure and risk and danger offer. How humans transform into creatures and creatures into angels.
They even explain 45 and all his bullshit. Why he’s so unimportant, yet so damned troublesome. Think Sauron. The one ring. There will always be a Bilbo and a Gandalf, a Frodo and a Samson. A Joshua and Jesus. A Thor and an Odin. So much more than the darkness that always threatens to engulf us.
In my own way I write about and inhabit that Other World as much as possible. Not because of its metaphysics, not because of its promise about what we cannot see. No, not that. But because of its impact on the heart, my heart and yours.
