The Ghosts of Hobbits Glen ---- August 2007

Prelude

The Hobbits Glen Tennis Club is in Columbia MD; it’s collocated with a golf club of the same name.  It has six clay courts that hosts many tennis leagues; all summer long there are ongoing competitive matches.  For more than twenty years the surroundings were seldom appreciated, during the day it is hot, dry, and dusty. It is a place of sweating and swearing, and a whole lot of complaining. It has a beauty that nobody noticed, until Sunday.

The Ghosts of Hobbits Glen

There’s a reason it’s called Hobbits. Like the magical little fun loving creatures of folklore this place named Hobbits Glen has a certain magic all its own.

What happened there Sunday night was no accident --- it was nature’s way of restoring the spiritual balance of a place, especially a place named Hobbits.  It was a mystical and holy passage restoring what American Indians know as ‘land spirit’.  Like what happened in the Dust Bowl to over-farmed land without crop rotation, this place lost its spirit and became sterile. Over many years the spirit of Hobbits became only the tortured grunts of competition, the sweaty curses of self centered over focused tennis warriors--- the only focus was the all important tennis score, which has no importance to the place, no importance to nurturing and caring for the land, and its beauty.  This behavior is very un Hobbit like.

Nature had an answer, as it always does. There’s a time when the hot dog days of August have a magical restorative power, it’s when dusk turns to dark and there’s a soft gentle rain. It was Sunday night there when that soothing light rain and primal dusk brought together two languishing lovesick lovers. It enveloped their naked bodies like a Japanese bath love-making ritual, equal parts holy and sensual. Two naked souls twisting, melding, laughing, loving in a primordial mix of misty dusk and soothing gentle rain – something changed, a regenesis, a rebirth. Nature’s power restored the inner child of two lovers and the place – all three now laugh, love, and play --- like Hobbits do.

It was Nature’s answer, Hobbit’s spirit restored. Nature renewed and rebalanced. After an event like this Hobbits is now hallowed ground.

Forever now linger two Hobbit Ghosts on that hallowed ground; they sing and whisper about nature’s restorative sweetness. The ghosts are not the competitive warriors of daylight; their time is late dusk, playing and laughing, like Hobbits laugh and play.

You can see them there.  You need to be there on a hot August night when dusk turns to darkness, and you need a soft gentle rain. You need to let it in – you need to let the rain caress your face and then smile. And then when you feel yourself let go, will appear two pale apparitions swooning in and out of view over the grassy knoll.  They dance, a dance of escape and renewal, laughing and playing and loving --- like Hobbits.

And if you do this it will restore your spirit too.