For Frodo
A mythopoetic meditation of the East-West philosophical divide.
I look at the Eastern tradition, and I say: I think you are right about the nature of this existence.
I feel the pull. The quiet release. The surrender of the grasping self into the unfolding that was already happening before I arrived and will keep unfolding after I am gone. I feel how real it is. How beautiful. How available. The contemplative ground is not wrong. The non-grasping is not escapism. The peace that is there when the ego lets go of the fight is a real peace, and the tradition that has been naming it for twenty-five hundred years is not mistaken about what it has named.
I grant it. I feel it. I do not dismiss it.
And then I look out across the field.
I see Sauron’s armies. I see the fortress. I see the ground between me and them. I understand what this moment requires, and I understand that the contemplative release, however beautiful, is not the whole of what is asked of me now.
Because there is a hobbit walking into Mordor with the Ring. Because there is a Shire that would be lost if the fortress holds. Because there is a specific, small, vulnerable, beloved thing that the war is for, and it cannot defend itself, and the pull of peace is real but so is the hobbit, and between the two I have to choose.
I raise my sword.
Not because the tradition was wrong. Not because the release was a lie. Not because the quiet was unavailable. I could have walked into the forest. I could have sat down by the river. I could have let go.
I raise my sword because Frodo is real. Because the Shire is real. Because the armies are real. Because in the field where the armies are massing, consciousness is asked to do something the ontology makes possible but does not perform on its own. It is asked to create. To build. To defend. To bring forth the revolt against the absurd that Camus named — not because the universe demands it, but because I do. Because the making is the thing consciousness does when it chooses to do it, and the choosing is what I am for.
The release is real. And I decline it.
I raise my sword. For Frodo. For the Shire. For the small and vulnerable and beloved thing that would be lost if I walked into the forest instead.
I understand. And I raise the sword anyway.
That is what it means to be here, in this field, with the armies massing, and the Ring on its way to Mordor, and the choice still mine to make.
For Frodo.
Hi Mike,
I really enjoyed "For Frodo". The image is powerful: the warrior who knows peace and chooses battle anyway. But I wonder whether the East-West divide you draw is entirely fair to the Eastern tradition.
The Zen that took root in Europe — from Suzuki to Thich Nhat Hanh — does not propose retreating into the forest. Quite the opposite: it insists that practice has no value unless it is lived in the middle of the marketplace, the family, the conflict. The Mahayana bodhisattva does exactly what you describe: he could enter nirvana, and declines. He chooses to stay. For Frodo, one might say.
Perhaps the real divide is not between East and West, but between two readings of the same tradition: the one that mistakes non-attachment for passivity, and the one that understands you can raise the sword without letting your hand cling to it.
That, after all, is what the Zen warriors do: they act fully, without the ego needing to win in order to survive.
Thanks for the piece.
@Mike Brock. Powerful and beautiful. Here’s a gentle question: is it an either or choice? Perhaps we go into the forest for silence and meditation, not to escape, but to return stronger, ready for not just the battle, but beyond.
Frodo needed the loyalty, courage and love of his friends to remember why the battle was necessary and worthwhile. And that it couldn’t be fought alone. So, for Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, and all the creatures of Middle Earth —hobbits, dwarfs, elves, wizards, and yes, humans, flawed as we are.