She Let Us Go: a hymn to the sea who has carried us for so long
They used to say
that when the sea reached out for a man
we do not interfere with her will.
If it was his time, the day
of the fraying cord, he and his soul
could not be rejoined without a limp.
To deny him his end, to defy
the timing of the sea, was to doom him
to half a life and strip him
of mystery.
So they bowed their heads and let him go.
Our sea
holds the bones of our lands, her waters
fill our maps, edge our sands,
she feasts
on our stories and bloodlines,
swallowing cities and prophets,
spitting some back out,
that is,
if old legends are true, others she takes
without a trace, she is
a healer, curing us
in her salted, sacred vessel, some she carries
in the cradle of her skin,
nursed by the unspeaking angels
of her womb, and through it all
she remains unchanged,
this wind-ravaged, sunset-soaked mother,
her depths forever accepting
the aftermath of our lives and triumphs,
our wars, our blood, our greed,
but some things
she can no longer carry.
On the day we ravage her waters
one time too many, will she surrender,
accepting the day
of her own frayed chord?
Or will she rise once more, as they say
she did before, reclaiming
her unheeded message, engulfing
our teeming wreckage, burying our sacrilege?
Will living lands rise again from her waters,
kinder and wiser, and will they hear whispers of us
in old stories and wonder
if we ever lived at all?
Perhaps they bow their heads
and let us go.
Photo credit: Pixabay
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
I’ve begun revisiting the Lord of the Rings story this past month. It’s something I like to do every fall and winter, but it’s calling me early this year. Perhaps it’s because I missed last year. Revisiting a story of this caliber always brings up new insights. I notice things I missed in previous readings.
It’s the beginnings of Frodo’s journey that are sticking to the edges of my heart right now. The journey calls, and dread fills him, but he comforts himself with the thought of I will only have to take the Ring so far and then another can take it. The Shire will be safe until my return. Yet something seems to tell him he will not return, at least not in the way he longs to, for he sells Bag End. He visits the old places, saying goodbye. A shadow stalks him as he makes his preparations, seeming to whisper that the weight of his journey is a heavy one, and it will leave him unable to resume life as he knew it.
How long until we can no longer resume life as we know it?
I wrote this poem, She Let Us Go, some time ago as a defiant hymn to the waters of our Earth that have taken so much of our carelessness. The waters of our seas have swallowed our wars, our trash, our oil spills, and our nuclear waste. I wondered, as I wrote it, if this Earth of ours will survive the dregs of our harsh and heavy lives. I wondered what life was like on a younger, verdant Earth and I wondered if she can come back.
As I reread the poem today I think of Frodo setting out, willing to risk all for the protection of the Shire and the people he loved. And I see that this poem holds this hope in the midst of fear.
We cannot return and redo our lives.
But life never ends. All life forms from the bones of the past. Within the DNA that forms us lies both the pain and the wisdom of our collective past. Our stories live on, and they are not set in stone. They are alive and moving, and willing to change. The endings are able to be written differently. We can rise again.
My elementary age son knows I love the Lord of the Rings. He wants to watch the movies with me. I told him when he’s read the books I will. He said, Why do I need to read them? We know he’ll destroy the Ring in the end.
I looked at him for a moment, and there were so many things running through my mind that I wanted to say. Finally I said, It’s not about how the stories end. It’s about the toll they take on us. What they take from us. Who they take from us. And how we live through it.
Stories show us how we find good and beauty and hope in the midst of shadow and pain and loss. Stories carry the worst of us, like the sea, but they also carry the best of us.
The best of us always remains, no matter what happens, for wisdom is eternal and untouchable by the dimensions of time. Even in the darkest of times there are good and kind people who kindle a light in the darkness of mere being, in the words of Carl Jung.
Perhaps it will be enough. Perhaps more than enough.
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