Penny Wagers

James Hart
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Instead of analyzing myths and folklore, I prefer to help you walk through 'em. There are also essays about perambulations, poetry and other cool stuff. Come on in. The water's nice, so feel free to take your shoes and socks off. pennywagers.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    Saint Collen of Llangollen

    I called these “black sheep stories” when talking to Jon Murphy about them earlier. The religious elements can turn some folks away while the fantastical elements tend to make some Christians uncomfortable. I’m fully aware of this. Other strikes against them: they aren’t the Bible, they offer up something else besides moral takeaways, and their purpose isn’t as clear as a bulleted list. It’s not really my intent with these to be preachy, nor is it to bring wooey superstition through the back doors of belief. I do, however, think that Christianity has become a bit monochromatic out there on the digital wires, and it’s no bad thing to revisit abandoned voices. If our ancestors appreciated such stories, what does it say about us and our sensibilities if we find them threatening or ridiculous? Saint Collen lived in an Ireland divided amongst itself. The country by his time was overwhelmingly Christian in terms of belief, but its folk followed customs that long predated conversion. Priests would remind you regularly of Jesus and His Disciples; grandparents would tell you tales of Cú Chulainn and Manannán mac Lir. This tension is evident in Collen’s story. Speaking of, Collen didn’t get his wish entirely, did he? Despite his strong notions and insistences, it wasn’t for him to decide how rational the world actually was. When trying to conjure up older notions about autumnal holidays, we often say that our ancestors believed in a “thin veil” around the time of Halloween or Samhain. This is new language. To those in Collen’s time, there was no veil at all. Reality itself held a spiritual dimension every bit as real as what could be held in the hand. Our reality is no different if we’re honest about it. When viewing children belly-laughing over pizza and soda at a birthday party, you don’t need a PKE meter to notice that there’s love present in the room. It’s also no mere metaphor to say that there’s grief darkening a house that had just lost a loved one. I recently visited my folks down in their retirement house. After a serious amount of searching, we were able to find a collection of family photos that spanned the years before my birth to the early 2000s. My mom insisted they were physical things that only took up weight and space in the closet. Yet she still kept some, and held some to her heart as she came across them in the pile. To me, those sentiments carried a weight every bit as real as the glossy paper they were printed on. Earlier, when we were home, my daughter was looking at some polaroids she had taken. She didn’t find them particularly interesting and wanted to throw them away. I told her that she’s going to want to hold on to those. “Photographs get funny over time,” I told her. “They become more valuable the older they get. You’re going to wish you had those as an adult.” Nothing in life is unilateral. We never get to decide such things anyway. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Jul 21

    Back on the Wagon

    Sometimes you don’t want to do it: You’re tired and just want to rest; The ideas haven’t come and inertia has won, So you sit there alone and depressed. But that’s when you need to remember: The magic won’t happen by chance; It’s for you to find—and it’s rude to decline When the universe asks you to dance. Every child has known God, Not the God of names, Not the God of don’ts, Not the God who ever does Anything weird, But the God who knows only 4 words. And keeps repeating them, saying: “Come Dance with Me” —Hafiz Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Jul 13

    The Enchanted Quill

    Still down the old dusty trail this week, but technological limitations aside, I wanted to share with you this story. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit as of late—likely due to so many confluences between my current events and those of the story—but I’d be interested to hear what it meant for you. Please let me know, and thanks for bearing with me these couple weeks on the road. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Jul 6

    Saint Sisoes the Great

    Yeah, bush souls. Ever met up with yours? If you have, you’re lucky. Truth is, the modern world has forgotten how. Never mind St. Anthony’s cave; we only get about 20 minutes to ourselves a day if BLS numbers are to be believed. Meanwhile, we spend several hours daily staring at magic rectangles. As a result, ours is a culture full of people who are not quite themselves. Let’s try to define that, then get back to Sisoes. He might be able to help us fix this. Seclusion & Society Steely-eyed Patrick would rise alone before dawn and greet the day “come hail, rain or snow.” His monks would climb mountains barefoot, traipse through old-growth forests and kneel on the moss beneath ancient rowans to recite the psalms. They’d row to the Hebrides and the Faroes and spend hours, days, weeks at a time in total withdrawal. Theirs was a life of constant shifting between the shoulder-tight claustrophobia of communal living and the remote seclusion of the wild. I’d like to make a case for how important this is as a practice. In particular, there are three things we can find out there that are hard to come by in our apartments, houses, offices and coffee shops. Psyche, Spirit and the Bush Soul The first is our psyche. I mean the internal stuff: following the downward path toward memory, shame, identity, grief and regret. Psyche is all about confrontation. I think most of us would rather get a root canal from a rusty knife than make that trip. It’s part of why we reach for our phones at night, turn on the Bluetooth speaker in the shower and fire up our favorite podcasts on our commute—any distraction to keep from “dwelling on things.” Even worse, sometimes we treat what we find down there as embarrassing. The past was the past, we were stupid back then and there’s no point in dragging it back out again. None of that is healthy. It’s very important to hear our psyche out and be brave enough to regularly square up with her. If we don’t, she’s just going to come back later with Mid-Life Crisis, Grief or some other unwanted houseguest, and we’re not going to be able to get rid of them so easily. Far better we set aside time and space outside our routines to give her our due attention. The second thing we can find out there is spirit. In some ways, spirit is psyche’s opposite. While psyche leads us inward and downward, spirit goes up and out. Where psyche brings confrontation, spirit brings connection. The unity you feel staring into early morning dewdrops. The fleeting understanding between you and the doe you meet in a spring forest. We can’t participate in these things just by talking about them. The third, “bush soul,” is a term I’m borrowing from John Moriarty. In American culture, we know who we are in the office (even if some of us don’t like that version of ourselves very much). We also know who we are among our friends, and which part of us comes home to our families. But who shows up after several days of having the trees and the bugs as our only companions? Who are we and what are we like when really, truly, no one is watching? Sisoes the Great knew who exactly who he was. But that came from knowing who he was on the mountain, and on his bed. He spent 72 years getting to know the former; I don’t think we can claim the same level of self-knowledge if we’re investing only 20 minutes a day. That’s not nearly enough time to confront psyche, reconnect with spirit and rekindle our bush souls. For that, we need a lot of space, silence and stillness. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Jun 29

    The Water Nixie

    I escaped from my own nixie just this week. Made moves to, anyway. Gave notice that I would be leaving my well in a few weeks’ time and that neither flax nor bucket nor blunted axe will ever be touched again. I just don’t want to heft those things anymore. And I don’t want to take them with me. What that means for me will be different for you, of course, so let’s not muddle the message with Jungian archetypes, imaginal symbolism or any dry treatment of mature ideas. I’d rather we talk about what it means to climb out of the wells that trap us. Let’s understand this first: The siblings didn’t sign up for their predicament. This wasn’t a dare and they weren’t exploring the well as part of an urbex adventure. They slipped and fell. It was an accident. Or was it? I’m no expert on nixies, but I find it suspicious that this one decided to set up shop in a location ideal for capitalizing on others’ missteps. It’s one of many details in this story I wonder about. No telling how long those two were down there in that well. What we know is that eventually, the kids realized that they had enough. It was time to bust out. Isn’t it weird that this evil, maligned, mythological nixie goes to mass on Sundays? I picture her wet, scaly face covered up in a bonnet, mouth hissing between her jagged teeth as she says, “peaccccccce be with you.” Some aspects of the universe remain constant, it seems, fairy tale or no. What stops me in my tracks, though, is the escape. The nixie chases the kids. It’s not enough to scramble out of the well—the trouble you found there is going to follow you no matter where you go. Unless. Look at what the kids leave behind: a brush, a comb, a mirror. These aren’t traps or roadblocks as we would understand them—they’re tools of appearance. Items to attend to one’s personal and social sense of self. How interesting that these are the things that must be sacrificed to keep past oppressions from catching up with us. The mirror, of course, is the most potent, the one that finally does the job. Reflection can’t be so easily navigated by the shadows that mean to stalk us. There are still plenty of images in the story that elude me. I wonder what it means for the girl to both start and finish the laying of the obstacles. I think it has something to do with the jobs the nixie foisted upon them. That’s the great thing about old stories, though; they’re never fully done counseling you. The key is to not try to think your way through them; they aren’t to be treated as crossword clues or some kind of literary criticism mad libs. How the images spark your imagination is really the thing. What each scene looks and feels like, and what suspiciously sounds like timeless truth whistling through its teeth to get your attention. Anyway, here are a few snapshots I took this past weekend, following along Sister and Brother’s escape route. Who would’ve guessed they’d send me through the Blue Ridge Mountains? Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Jun 23

    St. Ciarán and the Bell

    The various Lives of Ciarán of Saighir share varying degrees of detail and information, but one thing I feel fairly certain about is that Ciarán’s bell was very small. In his time, it would have been relatively easy to keep it handy and wait for its announcement that you have found the Place You Were Meant to Be. So small, it would have been easy to lose. These days, our own bells have to compete with modern equivalents. And the former are terribly overmatched. Modern life moves a million miles a second. We’ve found a way to completely deprive ourselves of the stillness and quiet we need to properly assess any present moment. When I think about this, I’m often reminded of the Ents, and Merry and Pippin’s impatience with Treebeard. We think that scene is funny because Treebeard talks so slowly. The joke, however, is on us. Sit yourself down underneath an old-growth oak or maple and wait for it to speak and you’ll see what I mean. Theirs is the proper pacing. In addition to the bell, I also think about the foundation Ciarán was laying. Ciarán likely didn’t complete any feasibility studies, go through public facilities ordinances or submit any application to a planning board. He went where God sent him and enlisted the help of animals. Aside from the concrete, this lays a very different kind of spiritual and communal foundation that today I think would be very hard to replicate. These stories are sometimes depressing to me, in a way. I wonder the extent to which we’re even capable of navigating the world in this way. To do so would do us a world of good, but our pocket rectangles have done wonders for our myopia and solipsism. At the same time, though, I’m reminded of what Ciarán and his contemporaries did to combat their own distractions. They didn’t live in the monastery, nor did they live in the forest. For them, proper living involved a back-and-forth tension between Severance and Return, never staying too long in one or the other. That’s something I think we can all manage to practice. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jun 15

    Lomna's Head

    (This story may seem tragic or disturbing, but please know everyone involved speaks of it fondly. It’s just one of those things.) A long-distance runner, my dad used to get up at 4:30 every morning to run 17 miles. Then he’d shower, make coffee, eat his two bran muffins and wake me up for school. More than a bit Type A, my dad. His running route would bring him by our new neighbors. He’d pass by their house a few times as he ran his circuit. Never once did he see them stir. During more regular hours, they never came out, never introduced themselves, never so much as waved over the fence. Then my dad makes his coffee one morning, and everything that follows he remembers forever. He sips his cup by the kitchen window, then dazes out onto the street and Aaron North’s woods beyond it. He then sees something come up the hill to his left. It’s someone from the neighbor’s house. A late teen or early twenties kid with no shirt on. Well actually, he’s using an inverted t-shirt as a kind of hair-tie and he’s doing this kind of slow-motion exaggerated run up the hill. Very Chariots of Fire. In his right hand is a samurai sword. The kid runs over to our next-door neighbor’s house. My dad moves over to the living room windows to watch him scale our neighbor’s deck, assess the bay windows, then slash them into glitterdust. He then crosses the threshold of the window, cuts himself quite bad but doesn’t so much as flinch, and then collapses on our neighbor’s living room couch. Our neighbors had a son with Schizophrenia. He was off his meds but no one knew it. The theory was that our neighbors were keeping to themselves out of some combination of fear and shame. They were understandably mortified to learn what happened. My dad and our neighbor were just glad no one got permanently hurt, and the whole thing got our neighbors out of hiding. We never became close, but they started waving to us from their front lawn after that. The language surrounding folks like my neighbor may make it sound as if ours is a culture of compassion, inclusivity and understanding. But I’d politely point to our daytime clubhouses for those with cognitive impairments—always in rusted out industrial parks, never near the center of town. Our nursing homes and their epidemic of neglect and loneliness. Our neighbors, who were so cagey about telling us about their son. It’s all downstream from a modern cultural blind spot. Ours is a society always looking toward Winter North. You’re only as valuable as your output. Non-producers are a bit of a burden, a bit of an eyesore. That’s why I dislike the term “special needs.” It frames people in terms of the liabilities they impose, not their value. In older Celtic folk cultures, they would sometimes use terms that meant something like “touched.” As in touched by The Gentry, the People of the Hill. The connotation was fuller and more complicated than our own. To be touched was mostly a curse to be pitied, but not entirely. After all, things happen during encounters with the Fair Folk. Those involved are never quite the same. They carry a bit of the Otherworld about them, so it’d be to your detriment to dismiss them entirely. The Welsh knew all about Myrddin, the battle-mad Man of the Wood who divulged prophecies to apple trees. Best not dismiss what can’t be immediately understood. Older folklore used terms like “touched” or “away with the fairies.” In Christian Ireland, another euphemism started cropping up: duine le Dia. Person of God. Call them superstitious if you like, but for my druthers, I prefer their starting point to our own. As for Lomna’s story, I have a hard time with parts of it—especially the events at Coirpre’s camp. I can’t say that I know exactly what it means to feed a severed head some of your fish, but to do so would require giving time and attention to something that made me uncomfortable. Something possibly difficult to look at if I wasn’t used to it. Over the weekend, I was lamenting the state of my voice at length to my wife. I mean, c’mon, it’s been four weeks at this point. I’ve never heard of anyone with a permanently altered voice after a minor cold. My wife said that unfortunately, it’s been known to happen. I asked her if this was likely the case with me. She said she didn’t know. I nodded, then stepped outside to take the trash out. The clouds in the west were darkening and coming in fast. My own next-door neighbor caught me looking at them. He was a good kid who’s had to overcome a couple traumatic brain injuries. (I don’t know the nature of them; this is just what he told me the first time we met.) I pointed at the clouds. “Think it’ll rain soon?” He didn’t follow my finger. Just stared straight at me and said, “Momma says it’s on God’s time. Why try to hurry it along? It’ll come when it comes.” It no longer sounded like we were merely talking about the weather. “Your momma’s a smart lady,” I said. “This is just a shot in the dark, but you don’t know the significance of a speckled white-bellied salmon by any chance, do you?” Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Jun 8

    Perceval on Turtle Island

    He galloped toward the forest’s boundand rode in on a path he found,where there were hoofprints, freshly madeby horses passing through the glade.“This is the way the people took,the ones for whom I came to look.”He galloped through the forest fast,not stopping while the trail would last.—Perceval by Chrétican de Troyes There’s nothing for it but to strip down naked and make an assessment. It would have to be fast. Who knows how much time I have before some couple or unsuspecting family happen across me in my birthday suit, writhing around in the sand like some frantic chinchilla. I start laughing as I slap my shirt and turn it inside out. Sitting atop a bed of ticks was absolutely not on today’s bingo card, but games change quickly out here. The plan was just to Go Out again. Venture out past the strip malls to meet back up with Percival and the Fisher King, like I’ve been doing lately. That may have been my company out here, but I’m nowhere near Brocéliande. No, this is Thunderbird country, my friend, Turtle Island is Coyote’s place. He’ll pull the rug out from you every time. I’m glad I’m laughing at this. It’s not something I would have found easy to do just a year ago. Ambling along Wonder Mountain amid all manner of wild and icky weirdness has made me more understanding of nature’s surprises. Black widow babies crawling around your site will do that. Truth be told, I’d still rather be out here, ticks or no ticks. I’ve been having a hard time with the idea of Return as of late. I mean, for goodness’ sake, why? What is there to return to? Watching my third career implode across the globe? Environmental degradation at the hands of linear thinking? A culture so obsessed with maximizing its outcomes that existence itself has become a utility equation? Horchata Frappuccinos? That’s all rather one-sided, of course. People are meeting in person more. Self-checkout lines are withering, vinyl and flip phone sales are up. Humanity seems to be making in-roads. It’s just that I seem to be able to tolerate only so much participation in my own time and place. Percival spent his adulthood searching for the old wisdom necessary to heal the Angler. It wasn’t nostalgic romanticism for him, either. …He also did a ton of dumb crap, too, but I think sitting along a tick-infested shoreline is a blunder unique to me. Clothes back on and just a few steps back up the trail, I pass two women on their way to the shore. See? Look at that, I knew I didn’t have much time. Risking indecent exposure was still the better option over Lyme disease or alpha-gal. Some retired forester who now turns wooden bowls for a living told me we live in the largest alpha-gal hotspot on the coast, perhaps the continent. He told me it wasn’t always like this. I told him that I remember when it wasn’t. We’re both older than Galahad in that way. For him, the land was always blighted. However, he knew it was the Angler’s wound that so scarred the world. To heal the man was to heal the land. That’s something I wish we still understood. Mind retraining. That’s a big part of it. It’s why John Moriarty left his university teaching track. He felt that he could no longer prepare students to thrive in an environment he no longer believed in. He had to retrain his brain, he said, retrain it away from his compartmentalized, productivity-first, outcome-obsessed European education. It starts with the mind, perhaps, but it’s got to reach body, spirit and soul, too. That’s what Moriarty said he wanted, to walk back into the woods and find his bush soul. I find myself trailing just behind him on occasion, following paths away from town and toward everything that was there before it. I can’t stay out here, though, as much as I think I’d want to. Percival never stayed in the forest, nor did he kick up his feet for too long in Camelot. Tarry not idly by the chapel perilous, good sir, the work of the road lies before you. After all, the names of Percival, Vasilisa the Beautiful and Fionn mac Cumhaill come out strange in our mouths today. We’ve forgotten the very sound of the Primum Mobile, the gears that keep the spheres aloft. If all it took to true our cosmic wheels was to share their names a little, wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you do what you could to share them? Stories. That’s what’ll heal our culture’s dolorous stroke, I think. Stories heal the man, stories heal the land. I walk up the hill and head back to the car. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

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About

Instead of analyzing myths and folklore, I prefer to help you walk through 'em. There are also essays about perambulations, poetry and other cool stuff. Come on in. The water's nice, so feel free to take your shoes and socks off. pennywagers.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    James Hart
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    112
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © James Hart
  • Show Website
    Penny Wagers