The Battle For Middle Earth

It occurs to me now, that a tale familiar to us all, penned by a linguistics professor who was born in South Africa, but lived in Oxford, and put on worldwide screens by a New Zealander, that we too will live to see these tales come to life.
The Lord of the Rings is about the triumph of humanity, of qualities like loyalty, friendship, truth, and common good. But it is also about the power of the Dark, the growing darkness and evil that consumes all. Unless it is resisted, we will see Ultimate Doom. We need to resist these forces with our consciousness, with alert actions and not with a little strength. With all our strength. We need to awaken our spirits, and bring our beings, the very force of life that is in us, into the world, and let the Light of Life set the tone for life on Earth.

If you are reading this, it means that in your and my lifetime, in fact in the following decade, the Battle For Middle Earth will be well underway. It is already, but in the years to come, you will be called to support it, or avoid it, or resist it. You have yet to see things no one will believe.
Each person will carry their own ring of power. And each person will be called to cast it away. The ring has been forged by the blood and toil of a million men over a hundred years. It carries the names of giant corporations, who seem benign, who seem to benefit and be in our service, but we have been enslaved to them, and with all the resources taken from us, this will become all the more obvious.
The Middle Earth is the home of peasants and cottage industries. Dotted on the highest peaks are the castles and mansions of the feudal Landlords.
In real terms, it means the ordinary people only own homes. We have little land, beyond tiny plots, or balconies, we have no resources of our own to feed ourselves, clothes ourselves or powe rour machines. Without work we are free to die, or free to live, and reclaim our Middle Earth.



This will mean, inevitably, casting our greedy aspirations, our desire for comforts like easy motiring, and beautiful and shiny decorations and devices that mean nothing, or cheap foods that have expensive long term costs to our health and remaining environmental resources.
We will have to choose between caring and sharing, or squabbling and fighting. We will have to choose between kindness or resentment. We will, at last, choose between a great awakening and its nightmare, or a sweet slumbering destruction and deepening of our enslavement and ultimate slaughter.

We might think, in those days of dust and mobs and gnashing teeth, that we are fighting over vegetables or fields or streams or citadels or churches.
But we will really be at war with ourselves.



It is about each person's choice to wear the gold ring. It is what binds our hearts, our minds, our souls, to things, instead of each other.
It's antidote is a feeling of community, of not seeking to take or dominate another. Those who stand for these things will become our enemies, unless we can embrace each other as a flower embraces soil. Those who try to dominate will have to change in a world where there was always enough for everyone, until we made it a world of our own making: a world running out of everything...or a world overfilled with selfishness, and all of this selfishness competing and fighting for the least important things.

The Battle For Middle Earth depends, as it does in the fairy tale, on the smallest person in us, oft ignored, taking simple but difficult steps. Steps towards a different life. A life of self limitation. A life of sacrifice and hard work. A life of gardening and scribbling recipes and formulas and other things we have learned. A life of quality and meaning, building bricks with our own homes, and reservoirs for water. We will fish and hunt and farm. We will weld and burn and push steam and sizzle back into trains.



We will look to horses and dogs and hawks again. Our hands will reach out for the fruits of trees, not the swinging breasts that only offer more desire...but none of the nourishment or milk we need.

And while we wander the long road with sore feet, the clouds will gather, the mobs will shout. Will we join the mob, or even fight the mob?
Will the mob be overcome by their own sickness?

In the end the smallest spirit in us will have to find a way up a dark and difficult mountainside, up to the hot and sulphurous molten peak. And in this hellish place, we will have the opportunity to cast away what's most precious to us. Our deceits and illusions.
Do not let these words darken your spirit.
Although multinationals, and their government pawns, may seem like giants, and the rich seem to weild a great sword of power, they are but shadows and dust compared to those who have been in service to them. We are the giants, in our numbers, and in our resources. Put together, we are the goliaths, and come together we have to face their terrible weapons.

If you do not find a way, no one will.
If you do not find your way, you will not find your way.

It is our beliefs, in who we are, and that this is a world worth saving, that will save it. Our beliefs stand with us on a cliff at the edge of the world. Behind us are snarling beasts and hot smoke. They have a name. The name is Consequence. They bring with them violent winds and pestilence and woe. Before us is the ring that glistens on our fingers. When will we cast it into the fire? Will we delay until the flames lick at our toes? The world is waiting for an answer.