Wondering Penelope on Substack
A field journal of essays, collage, and photography tracing the faint signals still pulsing beneath the engine roar of modern civilization — its masculinities and religious figures, ecological ruptures and toxic blooms, fairy tales, animal companions, orphans and widows — all of us paddling together in a hopeful search for the guardian’s return.
Sample of major series and essays in development:
The Ecology of the Fall Myth reveals ecology. When fertility fails, species disappear, and survival grows uncertain, judicial cosmologies emerge. An essay on myth-making as survival strategy under ecological collapse and imperial defeat.
Toxic Bloom A forensic work tracing the stagnant waters of the Terramare collapse to the stagnant waterways of modern civilization. Christians refuse biological divination as Etruscan diviners warn of divine retribution, while Augustus rebrands time itself. Tracking the earth’s voice crying out through ancient refusals and imprints in modern archeology, following the phantom poison that entered my late husband’s body in the swamps of endangered wolf country.
The Predatory Savior This series follows the masculine’s break with relationship to wild power and the subjection of his inner will. Its pelt displayed as proof of dominion and right to rule the best lands, the European lion was hunted to extinction as masculine relief for both peasant and rising ruler alike. After the last of Panthera leo was exterminated in the hunt for glory, Judah’s crucified Lion passed the Kyrios’ universal estate to the Greek-Christian scribes.
Sin An inquiry from inside ecological ruin, one that traces the abstraction of ordinary human error into metaphysical cosmic debt, and the temple obligation, sacrifice and salvation which developed amid the precarity of life under the grain state.
Wolves and Lion-Hearted Men The Garden cannot flourish if the ecological masculine disappears. This essay traces ideals of Western masculinity, which caused men to forsake and forget the honorable nature of their vitalic force and true ecological function. What might men serve when they no longer pull the ox cart of capitalizing contest? Against the old broken model, I turn toward more ancient forms of masculine power: the wolf’s intelligence, before it was eradicated. The lion’s courage, before it was made extinct. And the forest’s bestowal of vitality, before the eons’ groves were felled for the wars and thrones of aristocrats and cosmic kings.
Hellenistic Men, Empire, and Shame This essay argues that Western civilizational masculinity was shaped by a volatile merger. Greek paideia, kleos, agon, and shame conjoined with the guilt, assimilation exhaustion, end-times imagination of Hellenized Hebrews. Together they produced a restless and divided masculinity: ashamed and anxious, self-surveilling, endlessly driven to prove itself and easily metabolized by capitalizing empire.
Valemon and the Wild Third Daughter - An Ecological Reading of a Norwegian Fairytale
.The Cursed Masculine, the Exiled Feminine, and the Glass Mountain of Civilization. In this restorative series we’ll follow the Wild Daughter and her Bear companion out of the enchantment of the Western mind.
Roman Terminus, Roman Rebrand
A study of Rome’s ancient vitalic origins through the wolf and the Terminus stone, this essay asks how the emerging power’s memory of ecological collapse survived, as it shape-shifted to build a civilization capable of overriding endings of every kind.
Mary, the Garden, and the Death of Feminine Moral Authority An investigation into the disappearance of feminine sovereignty within Western religious imagination, this essay traces the death of soils and retreat of fertility powers through the rape of the Moon god’s daughter to Mary’s mute stare.
Freeing Yeshua from the Christ: Recovering a Vitalic Masculine Remnant from the Trophy of the Cross Concerned with the poor, the orphan and the widow, women, mercy, and moral courage, this essay asks whether this Jewish figure of relational repair, human courage, and life-protective ethics can be recovered from the imperial theology of the Hellenistic world.
The Grain State
A harrowing inquiry into the agriculture, imperial enclosure and priestly myth-making, this series asks how grain reorganized time, became currency and rewrote masculinity, to eventually design its god in the image of a man.
Naples and the Saints of Refusal Across more than 3,000 years, Greek abstraction, Roman administration, Christian universalism, and modern state powers all arrived to lay claim on the city, but her local spirit has never surrendered. Seen through the eyes of a returning granddaughter, Naples is not just another place on the map, but an ancient trickster stepping sideways out of enclosure.
The Deification of Maradona Across the city of Naples, local saints, folk figures, and deified humans function as intercessors, with Diego Maradona recently installed to the city’s pantheon. He fends for the city along with Mary and San Gennaro, revealing an order much older than the church still alive in world — our dead are not gone, and ordinary people can still become more than human.