My daughter’s got this chart in her classroom.It’s a two-column thing that teaches kids the difference between fiction and non-fiction. According to the chart, fiction is anything that isn’t factual. It’s made up, and its purpose is entertainment. Non-fiction, on the other hand, is truthful.Look, you gotta start somewhere, I get that. But there’s a reason that my daughter at second grade feels far more confident discussing “author intent” than she does whether or not she even likes a story. I’m doing my best to help her learn to have fun with what she reads, though, so let’s get back to that chart for a moment.One place I might start updating the material is to add another column and label it “myth.” Then, I’d start to write down some bullet points that would definitely get me in front of a school board, were I a teacher in our district:We’d be here all day if I started going off on every point made here, so maybe we’ll just chip away at it a little. Let’s focus on the last one. (We can do the others later on if there seems to be enough interest.)For my money, one of the best voices to listen to regarding external imagination is the Mariner’s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And the man to help us understand Coleridge’s place in our world today is Rev. Dr. Malcom Guite. We’ll start with what Coleridge calls “primary imagination” at the end of his Biographia Literaria. He calls it “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM,” which is about as wild a claim as you can make before someone might lock you up. Malcolm has spoken and written several times and at length on this topic, so I can only hope to respond to his scholarship on this. Nonetheless, let’s unpack a few implications here.For starters, this means that imagination is not fantasy. Despite what my daughter’s classroom chart might have you believe, imagination is not about making stuff up. It’s the very tool we use to perceive reality itself. It’s not that we miss out on understanding the world meaningfully or in a fun way without an imagination—it’s that we can’t understand it at all.Wanna know something fun? Cognitive science proves this out rather nicely. Simons and Chabris’s famous gorilla experiment will give you proof enough. We think that we see objectively with our eyes. We don’t. In a physical sense, our eyes fetch what our imagination tells them to.Anyway, if you aren’t a Coleridge fan, Blake was on the same page when he said that “Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” And according to Owen Barfield, “Figuration is not a mental process… but a participation in the world’s meaning.” Coleridge wasn’t an island regarding this idea.As a practical example, there are several ways you can look at a fox in the forest. You can see a sack of meat, sinew and bones roaming atop dead plant cells, I suppose. Or you can see the fox as a wild animal, a possible threat to your dog and a reason to call animal control. But you could also see glow-eyed Cunning, once again taking his careful steps along the moonlight. The ocean is a jostling mix of H2O molecules with a little bit of Na+ and Cl- thrown in, sure. It’s also a calm place to get a tan or get away from it all, or a place to meet the warrior, the mysterious stranger or the old man, depending on the conditions. As Malcolm put it, the sea can be something you understand personally. Perception doesn’t just foster knowledge. It can foster relationships, too.What this means for myth—if you ask me, anyway—is that there’s a difference between a myth and fiction. I like watching Lord of the Rings as much as the next dad of a certain age. And at regular intervals, I will say stuff like, “A day may come when the courage of this kettle fails, when it forsakes its duty and no longer provides temperature control—but it is not this day!” (I’m a dad, after all, and this sort of thing is outlined in the manual.) But I can spot Perceval among a crowd of other dads during a school trip. It’s possible to hear Daireann’s whispers when a certain kind of trouble darkens a friendly barbeque. And Mars can easily be found lurking behind today’s headlines.There’s much more to say on this, but I wouldn’t want to keep you. Go and give Malcolm’s talk a watch if you haven’t already; his investigations are a lot more thorough. Take it seriously enough, though, and you may just see the moon a little differently the next time you’re out at night. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

To commemorate the feast day of the Shamrock Saint, I figured I’d share this story with you. Please do send it to the poets you know if they haven’t heard it already (and may it also serve as a reminder to be nice to people during job interviews). Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

It was a bad line from the start, that much was obvious. We had been good about setting the raft square into the rapids, but this approach looked bad, this looked dangerous. Expletives started rising.There’s a huge gap in my memory. But I do remember that at the bottom, our raft started taking in hundreds of gallons per second from the falls. Everyone was gone and my side rising up, up, up, out of the water. I slid backwards, head-first, into the drink.I swirled around down there for a good long time. My life jacket finally brought me up, but that’s when I learned we had only just started. I managed to be nearest to the raft, which had now flipped entirely upside down.Our guide stood on top of it now. He unwrapped the cable from his waist, clipped it to the base of the boat, then looked at me. “Help me pull in the others,” he said. Help you pull in the others? The raft is flipped and no one’s in it! He jumped off the raft while tethered to it, using his weight to flip the raft and right it.He climbed that same cable to log-roll himself in and then didn’t so much pull as threw me in behind him. It was now just the two of us in a raft that seats eight, and we were leaving the rapids for greater falls that he warned us would probably take us out if we couldn’t get to the cove in time. There was no swimming for it; we needed the oars. So, there was work we had to do.Pro tip: don’t ever pull anyone into a raft with your arms. The angle is awkward and they’re entirely too heavy. What you do instead is grab on to their life vest, set your elbows into your chest and then do your best to fall backwards. Your leverage is what will pull them out. I did this with Mike first. He floundered in the boat a bit, so I raised myself and saw my roommate on the other side of the raft. I got him in, too. Then I got Jared, then Stephen.We were way late getting to the shore, but proved to be safe enough.On the beach, no one said anything. We pulled the raft up and out of the water but kept silent. On the portage trip down, Jared started screaming at Stephen, his little brother. It was his way of letting Stephen know he was terrified for him.Our guide finally broke the ice. “Y’all look a little gun-shy, eh? But you ain’t gun-shy, are ye?” He was smiling. He did it on purpose, y’see. And we all knew he did it on purpose because he told us he was going to, right before we approached the rapids. When he did, he was smiling like Gornemant.This was not an initiation, although I suppose it could have been. It remained demoted as an orchestrated crisis because I didn’t know the steps to initiation. No one told me the steps. Not my parents, not my grandparents. Almost none of us know the steps anymore.In School of Lost Borders parlance, the first step is what they call Severance. There’s something that nudges you off the well-trod road into town and gets you bushwhackin’ it through the wilds. This could be a formalized thing with a vision quest group, or someone could simply walk into your living room and quietly say, “I’m pregnant.” Either way, you’ve left the road.Next comes crossing the Threshold. You’re going to do or experience something that brings the whole of you—body, psyche, mind, spirit, soul, whatever you’ve got—out into some kind of in-between. You’re no longer with the revelers at Tara anymore; you’re out there in the lone dark, cooly holding that spear tip up to your forehead. Prepare as you might, remember what Iron Mike said: “everyone’s got a plan until they’ve been hit.” You’re going to be in over your head, you won’t know for how long and it’s going to be gnarly.If initiation or rites of passage are talked about at all, these two tend to monopolize the conversation. A lot of bragging goes on about Severance and Thresholds via dry fasts and pilgrimages, or retreats and missionary work if that’s more your crowd. But believe it or not, these two are the easy part.I must admit that the rafting trip went differently for me after the rapids disaster. Before the trip, before I started college and before I even left high school, I was the group screw-up. Well, that’s not the right terminology. “You were a screw-off,” my high school physics teacher told my parents and me. “You were all, ‘hey, man, I’m here I guess, I don’t have to take any of this seriously.’” He was exactly right. I wasn’t a great athlete, I did decent on exams, but who cares about those? In social settings, I never had much to offer, except it seemed I could come up with jokes better than most. This fit, because it happened to be all I wanted to do. So, before my physics teacher laid into me, I had already considered “screw-off” my professional title.Some of the laughter was at my expense, but so what? I never took it seriously; it was all in service to the joke, whatever it was. But the folks around me sure took it seriously. No one really respected me much.I saw a change in this after the raft flipped over. Screw-off or no, I single-handedly pulled half our group back in the boat and everyone knew it. This wrapped a kind of Teflon around me. Some who were blind to it started to use me as collateral for jokes again, but the blows didn’t land, either with me or anyone else.Unfortunately, it ended there. What I didn’t do was Reintegrate. I didn’t take the lesson home with me, and I didn’t share it with anyone. After the rafting trip, things went back to how they were.Used to be, the hardest step in an initiation was the doing of the thing. Now, it’s figuring out how to share what you’ve learned with a culture that doesn’t want to hear it. Words of soul and spirit fall on deaf ears in a culture obsessed with work and entertainment.But they need to hear it, and you need to share it. It’s part of the great exchange: that which has value should never be withheld or hoarded. When they are, both sides wither. If you don’t figure out how to share, your initiation remains a temporary crisis. You’ll stay in exactly in the same pit you thought your hardship pulled you out of.On the other hand, an interesting thing happens if you do reintegrate. People start to believe you.It’s all well and good to be impressed by culture’s bad boys, but we’ll listen to Danny Trejo ten times out of ten because he lived what Joni Mitchell called “Both Sides Now.” The same is true of Jocko Willink, Oprah Winfrey, Louis Zamperini, Aretha Franklin and countless others. What the gurus and thought leaders don’t understand is that charisma comes from walking the road you’re describing for far longer than would be considered decent or necessary. Everything else is persona.Fionn teaches us a lot here about returning gracefully; what matters and what’s worth discarding. But let me for a moment share another example; one I think Fionn would well understand.It’s been nearly a thousand years since St. Francis walked among us, and he still remains the most popular saint after Mary. Not a bad position to maintain, considering the ten thousand others we have to choose from. His religious order enjoys hundreds of thousands of followers, and with a population of about 28 thousand, Assisi receives millions of visitors per year. (I’m sure the Pizzeria da Andrea is amazing, but I’m pretty sure the crowd is mostly gathered around the basilica.)Ever wonder about his persistence? It ain’t his marketing. He doesn’t really do that.As a kid, Francis was a rich kid who joined a local war with knightly delusions leading him to his destiny. That’s right, the Brown-Robed Monk is also a war veteran. After the fighting, he had capture, captivity and illness to look forward to. He also kissed lepers, publicly renounced his father and took up the wandering beggar lifestyle, stirring his begged-for food into a paste to choke it down. He lived off scraps, wore scraps, and committed himself to hanging with birds and repairing abandoned churches. He was the living embodiment of Joni’s folk ballad.After all of these experiences, what was his leadership seminar takeaway, his “one big idea” for his TED talk? It wasn’t to find your Why, adopt a growth mindset, prioritize slow living or take up Deep Work. Not because those are bad advice, but because they’re implicit in what he states in his writings a dozen times: “Blessed is the servant.”Say what you want about Father Francis, but he got the exchange absolutely right. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

I knew two twins growing up: Hank and Mr. Weatherby.Mr. Weatherby was my high school Computer Applications teacher. He always wore a bowtie, a pocket protector and what can only be described as NASA glasses. He also founded and ran the school’s Robotics & A/V club. I’m sure Mr. Weatherby had a first name, but by his students, his family and everyone who ever knew him, he was always and forever known as Mr. Weatherby.Hank was his twin brother. He lived in the apartment complex owned by my uncle. Hank wore cowboy boots, a handlebar mustache and kept a softpack of Marlboro Reds rolled up in his sleeve. On the weekends, he shot pistols and worked on his motorcycle in the apartment parking lot. No one called him anything but Hank.In school, Mr. Weatherby taught me how to code in BASIC. In his apartment, Hank taught me how to check the specific gravity of a saltwater tank. Mr. Weatherby got us to understand the principles of robotics. Hank and my uncle taught me how to draw a bead with a revolver. Mr. Weatherby gave seminars on logging in to the internet. Hank shared stories about his MC in the 70s.The two never spoke as far I was aware.If we’re lucky, we get a mix of chthonic and ouranic teachers in our lives. We surely need both. As well-meaning as our chaplains, guidance counselors and track coaches are, they can’t teach you what you can learn from the ex-con who works your late shift, the subsistence fisherman at the end of town or the street mechanic who takes cash only for PDR.I was the kind of kid who tended to side-eye society. Sure, I understood that the ship more or less stayed the course, but all those cracks in the yardarms bothered me. Not the problems themselves, but the handwaving most adults would perform when I’d ask about them. The denial they were even there. So, I tended to believe the chthonic types more than I would any straight society leadership. They knew about the cracks because they lived in them.In order to have a chthonic education, however, one has to have the freedom required to be found by its mentors. Fionn learned from The Tooth because his aunties maintained a loose hand on his upbringing. Gawain learned exactly who he was in the Green Chapel because Arthur intuited that Camelot would never provide that for him. Jim Hawkins wizened up with Long John Silver in ways he never would had he stayed an innkeeper’s son. And Harry’s most profound lessons came after class, when the Hogwarts candles went out and he was supposed to be in bed.This is getting harder to do in the days of Ring cameras, child tracking apps and organized play dates. Americans trust each other less now than at any time in the past half century. It’s getting so bad that there are now festivals devoted to educating adults on the very concept of public trust.About a decade ago, had you seen me out in the world, chances were none that you and I would have had a conversation. I would have had my headphones on, I would have used self-checkout and I would have ordered via app wherever and whenever possible. I do none of these things now. Charity was easier to come by in the Middle Ages for the simple reason that most feared not that a wandering beggar might hold them up, but that he could be Jesus in disguise. Courage is knowing what you ought to fear.We all want a little peace and quiet, a little safety. Of course we do. But only sometimes is safety what we need. These days, more often than not, it’s just another way we deprive ourselves the opportunity to meet the mentor we need the most. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods,” C.S. Lewis told us. “Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”We may read that today as Lewis being cute with hyperbole. But that’s because we aren’t talking about the same things anymore.Friendship today sets rather low and shallow bar. We feel called to join our compatriots on the couch for game day and maybe even part-take in their recent barbecue experiments. We take on the responsibility of sharing memes back and forth, talking about old times and attending milestones. When it comes time to do the hard work of lending an ear, we do so by agreeing with everything being said and reminding our friend that yes of course, they’re once again right in all things.It’s no wonder we feel so unfulfilled in our relationships.I don’t know if we’ve forgotten how to be good friends, or if we’ve constructed a society in which good friendship seldom has opportunity to be exercised. But modern practices barely scratch the surface.We once defended our friends not just socially but physically, and happily threw ourselves once more into the breach. (Forgive me if you already knew this, but I hear it the other way around so many times that I can’t help but bring it up: the phrase “blood is thicker than water” isn’t a defense of family ties. How could it? Water isn’t defined when reading it in that way; the whole thing becomes half a metaphor. The cliché only makes sense in its full version: “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” It places what we’ve chosen to stand for ahead of our birth circumstances.)It once meant that we shared resources without keeping score. One of my favorite historical figures is Earnest Shackleton—not just because of his Antarctica story but because of the other parts of his life that are so impossible to reconcile. He repeatedly left his family teetering on the financial brink. He had an extended affair with Rosalind Chetwynd. While raising funds for his expeditions, he was a serial liar and confidence man.And yet he also knew to do things like this:During his ill-fated Antarctica expedition, Shackleton took some of his men on a last-ditch, do-or-die rescue mission in a repurposed boat to try to find help for the remaining crew still stuck on Elephant Island. The conditions surpassed dangerous and moved well within the realm of the strange. (The wind was so cold for example that it would freeze the water on their oars like beeswax sticking to a wick when making candles. They constantly had to work to break the ice off of every surface.) But whenever he saw someone—anyone—faltering a bit, he’d issue one of his famous “Hoosh!” orders: without exception, every member of the crew was commanded to drink from their improvised mixture of seal meat, fat and biscuits. This allowed the cold or tired comrade to save face, the breaks held their morale up and the camaraderie kept everyone working together.It’s not all fun stuff, though. We also used to know how to have difficult conversations with our friends. We get this incredible piece of advice from the Hagakure:“To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. One must become close with him and make sure that he continually trusts one’s word. Approaching subjects that are dear to him, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood. Judge the occasion, and determine whether it is better by letter or at the time of leavetaking. Praise his good points and use every device to encourage him, perhaps by talking about one’s own faults without touching on his, but so that they will occur to him. Have him receive this in the way that a man would drink water when his throat is dry, and it will be an opinion that will correct faults.”Know many people today that possess this level of tact and awareness? I’m afraid that I do not, and I can also hardly count myself.Above all else, friendship means forgiveness. We have a bit of a cognitive dissonance going on between our insistence on choice and our desire for depth. What that means when it comes to friendship is that we don’t get to have enriching relationships when we ghost people for challenging our worldview. Yes, toxicity exists and yes, social vampires do prowl among the living, but not every heated discussion is proof of narcissism. And even when our friends take that one step too far, when they cross the line that cannot be crossed and we walk away with the intention of doing so forever, it’s to our own benefit that we leave the door open for awhile. Maybe even return to the place of separation when the time is right. We may be surprised by what’s waiting there. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

Y’know, I wasn’t going to start this. The plan wasn’t to record and put these on Substack; I was just going to share ‘em at in-person venues here and there. But three things have been nagging on me and got me to change my mind.* It would be dishonest, in a way. These stories continue to take up a great deal of my time and attention. I can’t treat this here Substack as some kind of curated persona in which I only share what would scale well; I don’t have the energy for that. This is what I’m into, so this is what I’m sharing.* The difficulty presented a problem. I pride myself on what I’ve been able to track down in terms of old and new recordings of these stories. I’m not half bad at finding pre-modern texts, either. But I was looking past the obvious here: recordings and older texts are hard to track down because there aren’t that many. That’s a bit of a tragedy. But it’s also one I can try to do something about.* I keep thinking about a piece of advice from Gary Snyder, who in turn got his from old myths and fables: never be stingy.So okay, let’s get into it then. Let’s dip our toes into the Fenian Cycle.But let’s do it with some care and consideration, eh?We can do better than CEOs, can’t we?Unlike the fine fiction and historical writing here on Substack, it’s my opinion that these stories aren’t best suited as reading material. In the context of myth, I see books as temporal transports; a kind of train across the centuries. Sure, they’re quite handy for taking a story from the sixth century to our time and place, but it’d be ludicrous to expect them to live on the thing that brought them here.So, oral storytelling it is, and while source material is paramount to what we’re going to be up to, this isn’t going to be recitation. We have some further work to do.Oral storytelling is in a strange place today. There are few venues in which it’s still done, and I have to say, most aren’t too flattering. God bless the librarians who gather the kids around for Story Time at the library, but as important as that is, I think that’s a separate activity. Outside of folk festivals and story swaps, I can only think of a few places in which live, unscripted storytelling is likely to be experienced in our daily routines.You’ll see it sometimes at weddings, but you’re also just as likely to watch the best man reading from note cards. Ever think about why he’s reading from note cards? Because he wants to do his buddy a solid, yet he’s terrified at screwing up. He’s terrified because like the rest of us, he hates what he’d refer to as “public speaking.” Like the rest of us, he doesn’t swap jokes or family stories around the dinner table anymore. He doesn’t shoot the breeze with the guys in the factory because there is no factory and just as likely today, there are no guys; phones and remote work have seen to that. Outside of that wedding, he may never speak in public again. It’s another tragedy that doesn’t have to happen. Everybody can participate in this.On the other hand, there’s another group who practices this sort of thing all the time. They have no inhibitions whatsoever, despite being terrible at it. I’m talking of course about CEOs and, if you’ll allow me the double misnomer, “thought leaders.” They have the benefit of speaking to a captive audience in a literal sense. I once watched a CEO spend twenty minutes explain the plot of Frozen to a group of adults who, unlike the CEO, had kids of their own and could (and did) act out entire scenes of the movie during every morning carpool. He was using his patronizing summary as a metaphor for open and honest communication, and the need for employee feedback. Some of the folks who gave it were subsequently laid off. Management had to restructure, you know how it is.Aside from weddings, retirement parties and CEO absurdist performance art, you also have icebreakers at workshop retreats, unplanned digressions behind the lectern in Business 101, open mic nights and folk festivals. That’s about it. That’s where you’re most likely to encounter oral storytelling today. An ancient technology to bring us together and orient ourselves to the land, our ancestry and each other has been downgraded to begrudged social custom, entertainment or corporate allegory.Now is no time to wait for ideal conditions.We need stories like this now. I’m crazy enough to think that some great things would happen for ourselves and for the stories if we started getting reacquainted again. Myths, fables and folklore shared through a community of oral telling allow you to sit with ideas at a depth that description and mere “talking it out” can’t do. The practice reinforces cultural identity while at the same time keeps it alive in the present. It anchors stories to a community instead of keeping them stuck within a text. And they get us to use our imagination in the service of navigating the world instead of providing mere entertainment.This isn’t an ideal format because you aren’t here in the room with me, but we’re not going to let that stop us. Maybe we’ll pretend that after sunset, we have a fire going in the back yard. We’re circling around the big red glow like we used to at camp, but unlike before, we’re preparing to do something very old, occasionally profound and always terribly good fun.Silver stags and hazel wandsThe Fenian Cycle is one of four great mythological cycles of Ireland. The other three are the Invasion Tales, the Ulster Cycle and the Cycle of Kings. The Fenian Cycle is about Fionn mac Cumhaill and his captaincy of the Fianna, the fighting men of Ireland. The events trace as far back as the third century and unlike the Ulster Cycle, the stories of Fionn have always been more vernacular than that of Cú Chulainn. And unlike Greek mythology, Fenian stories have a much more tangled timeline to them. They’re tied to their place, but the stories were shared and preserved by different tellers and communities, never fully consolidating into anything resembling an official canon. Each town, region or area had their own versions.Fionn wasn’t a king as we might understand it. He led his group of warrior-hunter volunteers who’d hunt, move camp to follow the seasons, and work as needed in service to Conn the Hundred Fighter, the high king of Ireland. Joining the Fianna was no easy business. You had to be able to leap over a branch as tall as your forehead and pass under one as low as your knee—without breaking your stride. You had to know the twelve books of poetry. They’d stick you waist-deep in a pit, and you had to be able to defend yourself against nine warriors with only a shield and a hazel staff. The deer and the wolf were both symbols they would self-apply.And once you were in, buddy, you were in. Your previous status outside in the broader world was put on hold for awhile. None of the baggage or obligation you brought with you mattered; you had to show who you were through your skills and conduct.Fionn’s rules were very clear. Among other requirements, the Fianna were expected at all times to defend women. Protect children. Shield poets and non-combatants. Share and be always generous, especially to those who have less. And never, ever refuse anyone hospitality. (Not even wily granddaughters of the Gentry.)Make no mistake: they’re strange, these stories. There’s no Ragnarok to work against, no Mount Olympus calling the shots, no chasing of the Grail. They were some of Yeats’s all-time favorite tales, and I can understand why. He was inclined to put it this way: “Whatever they do, whether they listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement; and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen and be worthy of the songs of poets.”It’s part of the circular and wheeling nature of the Fenian Cycle that each story relates to all of the others, so the more we go through these, the clearer their picture is going to be. Let’s see how far we get, eh? We’ll start right in the middle of things. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

My dad started running just a few years before I did. Living 45 miles away from his job at the planetarium, he was inclined to wake up around 7 o’clock to get me and him out the door by 8.But then he started waking up a little earlier.I heard the front door slam around 6:15, but after that I didn’t hear the snowblower like I thought I would. Okay, so if it wasn’t the snow, what was he doing out there?He’d go out every day, earlier and earlier. It was just a couple miles at first. Then he started eating more, and at weird times of the day. Still earlier he’d go out. He started going to sleep at 6:30 so he could wake up in time.By the time he shattered his foot, he was running 17 miles on the daily. Recovery took over a year. After that, he knew he had to take it easy. He still ran but reined it in to a modest 11 miles before breakfast.I started running because my friends abducted me. I mean literally. Jack and Jacob drove up to my house, pulled me into the car and said, “we’re all going to run Cross Country this year. We’ve got your shoes.”This might have been a bigger deal than may be obvious. There were team banners hanging inside our school’s gymnasium like any high school’s, but ours weren’t football banners; they were for Cross Country. We had the hardest course in the entire state, and we won championships every year. We never checked the posted times to see if we got first, because of course we did. We checked to see how many other divisions we would have won, too, had they let us compete in them. Cross Country was a big deal.I never contributed too much myself. My first 5k time was an abysmal 29 minutes. By the end of the season, I was able to shave it down to a fairly respectable 18.I didn’t run in college, nor anytime afterward, but speaking of times, I hit my first serious relationship crisis right on schedule in my mid-20s. That’s when I picked up my running shoes again. I went out just like my dad did—only nights, not mornings. (I’m more of a third shift runner; I seldom did dawn patrol.)I went out in 100-degree heat. I went out in February, when the entire state was sealed in icy blister-wrap. I’ve seen rain slow its descent and felt the stick under my feet as it turned into snow.Then, just like the Tom Hanks movie, I just stopped one day. I was halfway through a run and decided to walk home.I wanted to continue, but I didn’t understand what my fuel was. Anger, frustration and sadness sure got the boiler going, but of course it couldn’t last. When it wasn’t there anymore, it was difficult to motivate myself.I never touched my shoes again until around 2020. That lasted for about two years, and then once again I tucked them back into the closet.I find myself running again now. I couldn’t tell you why, it just seemed like a good idea. I don’t time my runs, don’t map them out and I’m not into wearables. I have no idea how fast or far I go, but I’m gone for about two hours if that tells you anything. I’m not burning anything off this time, but I do meet up with a few enemies, friends and advisors.Worry is usually the first one to stop by, the eager b*****d. Hey, James, did you see the news today? Please tell me you did. If not, I’m more than happy to catch you up!There’s no point in running away from him; he always knows where to find me. So, I’m polite. I hear him out, and I wait for him to have nothing new to say.Usually up next is Guilt and Grief. Buncha downright nostalgic softies, those two. They’re downright sentimental.Hey, James, remember your drinking days? Remember how terribly you handled your first couple of relationships? Lost in a sea of your own inexperience is how I like to explain it to people!Hey, that’s nothing, my man here is spectacular at disappointing his parents. Remember his wedding?You can’t outrun Guilt or Grief, either, so I’ve worked out a deal with them. I don’t like it when they come in and scuff up the carpet with my muddy memories, so they can hang out with me as much as they like while I’m on a run.I stick with it. Keep running, keep breathing, keep the pace. Those two eventually drift away, too, once they’ve had their say. Then, if I’m lucky and circumstances allow it, some very different visitors might begin to show up.“Hey, Tristan. What a mess of things I’ve made in the past. My experiences sure don’t measure up to yours, do they?”Look more closely. See that not all adventures mature well.He’s a great sport at being patient with me. But look who else we have here, Fionn’s here on the trail, too!Think you’d make the Fianna, running like this?“I don’t know, but braid my hair, son of Cumhaill, and let’s see if any of you can catch me.”Well, if it’s a race, then you’ve got to run against Caoilte.“Caoilte mac Rónáin! What are you doing here? What’s with the wet feet?”Well, it’s soggy business, running across the ocean.“Tell me about the sand, Caoilte.”No, I’m not telling you about the sand, you’ve heard that a hundred—“C’mon, it’s a great story.”Okay, okay, so Conn had a few of us Fianna up at Tara, along with some of his own people. He brought us together and wanted to know how long it’d take each of us to fill a skin bag with sand from every shore of Ireland. He asked one of his men—“And he said it’d take him—“Hey, look, you want to hear this or not? He said it’d take him about a month. He turned to Sciathbreac of the Speckled Shield and he said there’s not a single fighting man in all the Fianna who couldn’t do it in under a week. Conn turned to me, and I held up my sock.“Why’d you hold up your sock, Caoilte?”Well, I told Conn, ‘I got the sand while you all were talkin’. But you didn’t give me a skin bag, so I had to improvise.’Every now and then, when I’m clearest, I can also hear from the Still, Small Voice. There’s often so much noise in my head that it drowns out such transmissions, but running sometimes helps. Often times I’m directed toward a reminder I think should be tattooed on my forehead: don’t judge and stop worrying so much.So, I try my best not to. I try to focus on my breathing, on my stride and I let my visitors drift in and out as they may. They talk, and I patiently hear them out. Just as well I do. It’s hard to talk while you’re running. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.—Robert Frost, “The Pasture”The Easterlings are passing through the wallThe Land of Golden Domes is falling inThe Cradle of the East is soon to fallBy mutual destruction from within.The Dragon, too, may open up its doorsAnd come to claim Formosa as a prizeThe Black Foe creeps across our quiet shoresRevenge the growing shimmer in its eyes.The Western world is unprepared to actWhen wraiths and balrogs, thought to be their guides,Reward offense while kindness is attackedAnd peace becomes an outrage that divides.We stand to join a darkness seldom knownIf Angband’s king is given back his throne.This poem isn’t really about Middle Earth.And to some degree, neither is Lord of the Rings.Tolkien’s praised for his world-building, but I don’t think he’d place that much stock in the term himself. He’d also scoff at placing his story within the context of the 20th century’s post-war years.During Martin Shaw’s talk at the Beatrice Institute this past Saturday, there was a question as to whether Lord of the Rings was itself a myth. I’m with Martin in suggesting that as wonderful as the stories are, they’re more mythic than myth itself. A distinction I’d bet Tolkien would be fine with.The Professor was very explicit about his intention not to write an allegory. But neither was he out to build a magic system or write a myth for his time and place. He was trying to get an audience who recently turned its back on the mythopoetic in favor of modernity to perceive the former again.“Recovery,” he said in On Fairy Stories, “is a regaining … though I might venture to say, ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.’” We need to “clean our windows,” he says, “so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—of possessiveness.”There’s a big difference between writing lore for a pasture spring, using a pasture spring as a metaphor for English reconstruction, and inviting you to witness the thing for yourself.If The Professor would allow me this slight suggestion, I would put it as seeing vividly, not just clearly. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s story is “The Ice Giants,” recorded by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. This cold snap is really something else, man, I’m telling you. Cailleach Beara ever tightens her icy grip on the long-shadowed land.I ventured out for a bit of social severance in the midst of this icy nonsense, but I didn’t stay out for long. The Old Hag plastered the forest in rimy sheets of cellophane; no surface was spared for miles. Walking down the Old Valley Trail, I saw hoof marks made before the ice was laid—along with depressions near the unsteady sections adjacent to the fallen trees. The frozen concavities marked where the deer lost their footing and collapsed on the ice. I’m not even half as graceful as any woodland animal, so if they were slipping and sliding on the ice, how much chance did I have to stay upright?It turns out I had none at all. I didn’t so much slip and fall as I had the world violently wrenched away from me on more than a handful of occasions. I slammed onto the ice, cutting up my hand and doing a number on my legs. There was just nothing for it, I couldn’t get any handle on the ice without crampons. So, I slid down the hillsides with no way to steer my descent, the palm part of my gloves cut to ribbons.I did spend some time at the inlet and enjoyed the isolation and the company of birds, but I didn’t stay long. On my way back, I had to use branches to smash the ice just enough to give my feet somewhere to be while I chipped away at making stairs out of the valley. It was just far too dangerous to stay out there.Sometimes, warm blankets and fireside activities are not just the most but the only sensible thing.Sitting at home is when I noticed it, though.A missing half.I wondered if I might be able to show it to you, too.When we’re snowed in like this, my wife and I will often watch a movie or a TV show. (Currently, we’re rewatching Northern Exposure.) We’ll also read or listen to a podcast. My daughter’s best friend is in a dance group, and she’s often talking about joining. My wife suggested maybe we get her piano lessons, too, like she had done.Okay then. Let’s start with those piano lessons and dance group.Despite the difference in activity, they’re run pretty much the same. The kids practice the sheet music or the choreography to such a level that they can then put on a recital. At that recital, they play their music or dance their dances in the way their teacher taught them, with parents looking on from the gymnasium wall, or the folded chairs provided by the venue.That’s it, that’s what we think “music lessons” are. That’s what “learning dance” is.Except it isn’t always.When kids learn music, they could learn to read sheet music and play “hot cross buns” by rote, or they could hang out with grandpa and his banjo. Grandpa might give ‘em some spoons or a sack of marbles and say, “alright, boys and girls, follow me.” First they learn the beat, then simple rhythms, then in a few months, maybe they’ll take on a string instrument themselves. When they do, they learn an entirely different musical ethos than that of piano recitals. They learn that songs need their interpretation, their voice, and their unique way of laying down the melody. They learn that it’s not only alright but expected to participate in the lyrics, not just regurgitate them. That part of the etiquette of playing a song is to tell people it was grandpa who first taught it to you.As for dance, you can join a dance group, sure, and learn specific choreography to compete against other groups at competitions. Or you could hit up the Friday night dance in town and learn to improvise with a partner. Practice getting your steps in sync with the band—because of course there’s a live band—and so when they change it up, you’re ready to follow them and the caller. There are no competitions there, only communities whose only goal is participation, social inclusion and a knee-slappin’ good time.It’s an ethos that we’ve lost in lieu of something else. For lack of better terminology, let’s call it a “folk” versus “commercial” approach to art and expression. As a rough litmus, here’s how I see them in contrast:Folk is mutable. Commercial is fixed. Folk music, storytelling and dance are different with each performance. Folk variation is expected and valued. Nothing commercial ever changes; in fact, it’s not supposed to. There’s one true correct version, and repetition and consistency are the expectation.Folk is learned in the moment, from person to person. Commercial is learned asynchronously through products. You learn one by hanging out and following grandpa on his banjo. You learn the other by songbooks and taking quizzes on music theory.Folk is participatory. Commercial is presentational. You’re supposed to get up and dance at a town dance. You’re supposed to stay quiet, sit along the edges of the gymnasium and record your kids on your phone at a dance competition.Folk serves a social function. Commercial serves consumption. Folk dances, stories and songs exist to bring people together in the moment. Movies, books and albums are treated by artists, publishers and consumers as scalable commodities.Folk is process-driven. Commercial is product-driven. A successful folk song has everyone participating. A successful commercial song goes viral and sells copies.It’s at this point that I should make it clear that I’m not judging commercial art. These two have helped each other throughout the past several centuries, and thank goodness for that. It’s precisely because of the recorded nature of books that many oral traditions have even survived. And I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that I don’t like novels, movies or Pink Floyd. This isn’t some high horse thing.There is an issue, though, in how lopsided these two have become. Going back to my family’s stay-at-home activities, how many of those are folk versus commercial endeavors? How many are yours?And look, there are no easy answers to difficult problems. But I do think it’s more than coincidence that adult loneliness, isolation and depression have gone up as town dances, family music-making and oral storytelling have all gone down in participation.This loss is felt on Substack, too. I’ve seen a number of writers lament the fact that their list isn’t scaling, that monetization isn’t going the way they were hoping and that the platform doesn’t incentivize certain genres. Those are indeed frustrating, and the stats the platform pushes in front of us only encourage those kinds of reactions.But there is that other side of things, isn’t there? Just because it’s not on your dashboard doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.I hit a pretty heavy depression nearing the end of my master’s program. I saw academia or literary presses as my only way forward with it. So, naturally I thought I was frustrated with the masses for turning their backs on poetry. But of course, that wasn’t truly the case. More accurately, poetry enjoyed a brief era of commercial relevance—to its detriment. Financial incentives bring stakeholders, after all, and stakeholders, committees. But poetry and storytelling are very old things. Older than books old. Older than alphabets old. Most of their history lies outside the concept of everything we take for granted.The kids would call this a hot take, so prepare yourself, but I believe it’s to the health of poetry and storytelling that they are scarce among the land of the commercial. It’s good they don’t scale. All the better, so that their communal rewards may continue unexploited. 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Take care you find it's not inside the house where winter hits hardest. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe