Cleansing
And the chapter after that
JFK once said, less than a month before his assassination, “Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
Speaking about the almost immediate release of the JFK Files once Trump is back in office (if you will), the President said on the Rogan podcast, "It’s a cleansing, it’s really a cleansing.”
Growing up, for me, The Lord of the Rings was more influential than the standard Bible. The Lord of the Rings is literature yes, and it is filled with poetry.
I felt I could understand and relate to the characters, in particular, my favorite, and many people’s favorite, Samwise Gamgee, the gardener who comes to cut the grass and ends up walking with Frodo on foot all the way to Mordor, and back.
When they return, the hobbits find their home, the Shire, in need of a cleansing, as despite some resistance, corruption has spread in their absence. Even so, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry, with their elevated experience, skills, and awareness are able to clean things up rather quickly.
It strikes me that the cleansing phase is about to come into the open.
In many areas and domains which seem to center around one theme…
Will we tolerate crimes against children? How will those responsible be held accountable? Where does looking in the mirror and personal responsibility come in? Forgiveness, grace?
What will our governmental structures look like? Restoring the republic that was lost in the second half of the 1800s? Something else?
Now that we’ve come this far, become new people, as it were, or in some ways remembered who we are, how will we integrate what was learned to arise to the next occasion?
The Scouring of the Shire was only the second to last chapter in The Lord of the Rings, which careful readers will remember was internally named by its fictional author Bilbo as, The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King.
What will happen in the next chapter? Is it the last? Or are there many more chapters?
That I think is largely up to all of us. How we help one another. How we heal. How we use our attention, what we want to build. Can we submit to the Divine and allow the Universe to teach? And what will we choose to do with that which is learned?
