MOONLIGHT

Moonlight

As a pale phantom with a lamp

Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,

So glides the moon along the damp

Mysterious chambers of the air.

Now hidden in cloud, and now revealed,

As if this phantom, full of pain,

Were by the crumbling walls concealed,

And at the windows seen again.

Until at last, serene and proud

In all the splendor of her light,

She walks the terraces of cloud,

Supreme as Empress of the Night.

I look, but recognize no more

Objects familiar to my view;

The very pathway to my door

Is an enchanted avenue.

All things are changed. One mass of shade,

The elm-trees drop their curtains down;

By palace, park, and colonnade

I walk as in a foreign town.

The very ground beneath my feet

Is clothed with a diviner air;

While marble paves the silent street

And glimmers in the empty square.

Illusion! Underneath there lies

The common life of every day;

Only the spirit glorifies

With its own tints the sober gray.

In vain we look, in vain uplift

Our eyes to heaven, if we are blind;

We see but what we have the gift

Of seeing; what we bring we find. 

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Beware the Gollums!

Not all news is rosy, not every day filled with sun, not every night a vision of wonderment. Sometimes there are dark times and sometimes they last. I do not fear acknowledging this. I do not believe I summon malicious and evil whispers if I speak of what I see. I do not choose to give it power. I do not choose to lose my reality in fear. There are dark times but even so we can stand.

This time I mention the thing that crossed my path. Not an unusual event, not uncommon and so it began for me...there I was, wallowing in ignorance, when the creature and I met. It was a gollum and that is as good a name as any. It makes sense to use this label and I think it's one long overdue. The gollum did not always look as it did when we met and yet i could still sense the flecks of darkness that exists when one betrays ones destiny... and  I ignored it. I ignored the signs of darkness. I couldn't be sure. Wouldn't you?

There are many creatures that stink of fear and malevolence and this gollum was no different. I helped the gollum and ultimately was misled. The gollum's path leads only to one place. Gollums always appear asking for our willing attention, and our help. It puzzles me, now long after my encounter, looking at the now visible gollums around me how willingly and easily we go to their aid as they call. We see them and somehow recognize them; they were US perhaps at one time and this invokes a deep and penetrating emotion ... pity.

With the rescue notions of the naive and proclaimed allegiances in the struggle for good, we are bound to move at their call and shrieks for aid. That they are weak or strong or deadly or benign matters not when the call is heard. So strong is the emotion of pity in good people that it almost rivals fear and love in potency. It is a gateway into our hearts directly past the warnings of the mind and the objections of wisdom. 

Gollums are our bane as they often wield powerful unsavory swirls of influence accompanied by subtle toxins, sufficient proximity to our souls and uncanny strategic position to alter the course of our intended lives onto a darker path. We struggle with this conflict of awareness, emotions, and ultimate knowledge and find it so difficult to reconcile that our good deeds are not leading to good outcomes but to darkness and our demise.

What to do...what to do. Do we worry? Do we pray? Do we stop being who we are? Do we carry forward? Do we run and shield ourselves? 

Fellow traveler, I would tell you to do what you need to do, follow your nose, carry your cross as you ought to do, honor your destiny, and fulfill your part in the unfolding play. There is a price to pay for all things and a gollum is an expensive one but take comfort in that wisdom will be born from this ...and just like there was a beginning, there will always be a certain end to a gollum's story.