What happens when the thing holding you back isn't a lack of luck, but a forgotten promise? In this episode, Jim and Maria explore two hauntingly beautiful tales—one from the Hassidic tradition and one born from the imagination of German youth—that reveal how unaddressed grief and broken vows can darken our world until we find the courage to face them.

Introductory Summary

Join Maria Gillen in Cork and Jim Brulé in Fayetteville as they share two powerful stories centered on the theme of restoration. Whether it is a man seeking forgiveness for a broken promise from years ago or a magical being discovering the source of a spreading darkness, this episode examines the difficult "earning" of peace and the transformative power of facing our history with an open heart.

In this Episode

1. The Seer of Lublin’s Challenge: Jim tells a classic Jewish story about a couple seeking a child, only to discover that a forgotten betrayal from the husband’s youth is the root of their struggle.
2. The Path to Forgiveness: The journey of a man who must fast, walk for miles, and eventually confront a ghost to atone for a broken vow.
3. The Myth of Rosemary: Maria shares a story created by 14-year-old students in Germany about a girl named Rosemary and the "Toxic Time Traveler" who has leached the life out of her homeland, Mythica.
4. The Roots of Bitterness: A deep dive into how grief, when left to fester, can turn a person into a source of darkness for everyone around them.
5. Wicked and the Complexity of Good: Jim reflects on the film Wicked and why audiences sometimes struggle with stories that choose "heartfelt challenges" over "sickly sweet" endings.

Key Themes and Takeaways

1. The Weight of Forgotten Vows: We often suppress the things we aren't proud of, but those "forgotten" debts can act as a spiritual blockage in our present lives.
2. Grief as a "Toxic Traveler": If we cannot move through our grief, it can transform into a bitterness that darkens not just our own lives, but the entire "Mythica" of our community.
3. Forgiveness Must Be Earned: Both stories emphasize that peace isn't a gift given freely; it is a transformation earned through sacrifice, action, and the courage to look backward.
4. Embracing the Darkness: True storytelling—and true healing—requires us to embrace the challenges and the "darker" parts of the narrative rather than wrapping them in "pink ribbons."

Chapters

1. 00:00 – Welcome to the Story Road.
2. 00:42 – Jim’s Tale: The high cost of a broken promise.
3. 14:33 – Maria’s Tale: A battle for the soul of Mythica.
4. 21:55 – The Deep Dive: Why forgotten losses haunt our present.
5. 26:12 – Reflections on Wicked: Confronting the "sickly sweet" vs. the truth.

"True story power comes from confronting the hardest challenges, not avoiding them."

Hello from Cork.

Hello from New York.

Is mise Máire, an Seanchaí Corcaí.

It's Maria the Cork-based storyteller.

It's me, Jim, here in Fayetteville, New York.

We can't wait to tell you a few stories,

Jim.

I can't wait to hear your story this time.

I have a, a story, set in Eastern Europe.

It's another one of my Jewish stories, but it's one of my favorites.

There was this young man and he and his wife had been married for several

years, and as is often the case in these stories, they didn't have any

children, and they really wanted children.

And the man was a devotee, a hassid, of this famous fellow, the Maggid of Koznitz.

And he was known to make potions that would cure any problem.

The hassid's wife kept saying to him, Ask your teacher, you

know, get a potion for us.

And he was just too embarrassed.

He didn't wanna bring it up.

And she pushed and she pushed and she pushed, and finally

she said, You know what?

I'll ask him myself.

So she made her way to the Maggid of Koznitz, and he was of course ready to

help until he heard what the problem was.

And he said, You know, this is not a problem that can be solved with a potion.

You need to bring your husband in here and we need to have a talk.

So she brought her husband in who was just embarrassed beyond words, and the

Maggid told the two of them, I don't know exactly what your problem is or what the

solution for it is, but I know who knows.

And I know this much: that for you to do whatever it is that he's

going to ask you to do, you are gonna have to make a huge sacrifice.

And the couple looked at each other.

He said, You're going to have to sell everything you own.

And you, he looked at the wife, he said, You're gonna have to go live with

your parents as if you were divorced.

And you, he said to the hassid, You're gonna have to take all the money that

you make from selling everything you own.

You can't spend a penny of it, and you're gonna have to take it to

this great man, the Seer of Lublin, who lives a week's walk away.

You'll have to get there without paying for food or transportation.

You're just gonna have to walk and fast the whole way.

And he said to the couple, Now you go talk about it and you decide

if this is something you wanna do.

And

the two of them went home and they had probably the most difficult

conversation they've ever had.

They decided this was worth it.

So they sold everything they had, she went to live with her parents, and he

made his way off with a bag of 300 rubles.

That's all they could get.

And he made his way to the Seer of Lublin.

He begged for food along the way, but he didn't spend a kopek of it.

Finally, he gets to the Seer of Lublin's door, and he goes up to knock

at his door, and the door opens as he's walking up and Seer looks out

and he says, Ah, you're finally here.

And he says, What do you mean?

He says, I know why you're here.

Come on in.

He comes in and he sits down

and the Seer looks at him and he says, You know, this is all about Miriam.

Now the hassid was confused because his wife's name was Chava.

So how could this be about Miriam?

He didn't know anyone named Miriam.

And the Seer looked at him and said, You don't even remember her name, do you?

And all of a sudden his heart started pounding and he remembered: Miriam.

He had been betrothed to Miriam as a young boy.

And when they grew up and it was time for them to get married, he didn't

wanna marry her, and he left her.

And he abandoned her.

And the vow that was made for their wedding was broken.

He had forgotten.

Somehow he had forgotten.

You know how that happens?

Sometimes we do something we're not proud of and we forget about it.

Well, that's what happened to this man.

And so he, you know, he is looking at the Seer of Lublin and he says, well, what?

So this is why we don't have children.

What do I do about it?

And he said, Well, you have to go find Miriam and you have to get her

forgiveness for breaking your vow.

Well, I don't, that was years and years and years ago.

How will I ever find her?

And the Seer said, it's not my problem.

You have to find her.

The man stood up,

and with a heavy heart he started to leave and then he said,

Oh, I've got these 300 rubles.

And he put them down on the Seer's desk, you know, in payment for his help.

And the Seer looked at him, he said, no, those aren't for me.

You are gonna need those.

And be sure you don't spend any.

And so now, the hassid leaves and he doesn't know where to look.

But he knows there's a fair coming a few days away and it's coming the next week.

It's one of those summer fairs that people come and they spend a whole week at, and

he thought, surely she'll come there.

So he starts to head off to this fair.

And just like before he's walking, he's begging for food.

He'll find occasionally someone will give him a place to spend the

night, and he makes it to the fair.

Now he has no idea what Miriam looks like, so he is just asking

everyone, does anyone know this?

Miriam?

And nobody knows who she is.

And day passes after day.

And nights are getting harder and harder.

And here he is surrounded by all these people and all this delicious smelling

food and he can't spend a kopek.

And finally, it's the last day of the fair.

And wouldn't you know, it's raining like mad.

He's standing under an awning.

There's hardly anyone around 'cause it's a miserable day.

And he looks across the way, and there under another

awning is this amazing woman.

She's dressed all in white.

She has a servant who's holding an umbrella over her head, and

he thinks maybe she'll know.

She looks like she knows everybody.

So he starts to make his way over to her.

And as he gets close, she turns to her servant, and she says, There he is.

I'll bet he doesn't remember my name.

And he realizes this is Miriam.

Now, all this time has gone by.

He's been fasting, he's been regretting, he's really, his heart is broken

over what he did and forgot about.

And so when he finally reaches her, he drops down to the ground

and he says, Miriam, Miriam, I'm so sorry for what I did to you.

I'm, I there's no excuse.

Can you ever forgive me?

Because you see, he didn't even care about the child now.

He was consumed with the regret that he had for the vow he had broken.

And she looks down at him and she can see that he's serious,

but she's still injured.

And she says, You know what?

I'll tell you what, you seem to be serious, but I'll give you a test.

My brother lives two towns from here, and he is very poor, and his

daughter wants to marry the man she loves, but he can't afford the dowry.

If you'll go pay the dowry for her, then I'll know you're

serious and then I'll forgive you.

And he says, Of course, of course.

I'll do whatever I can.

And she tells him where to look for her brother

and he falls, his head hits the ground.

He is so grateful that she has given him this path.

And when he finally looks up, rain and the tears streaming down

his face, she's already left.

So he starts his path to find her brother.

And he goes and he has to walk another couple of days.

And there, as he enters the town, he sees this man sitting by the edge of the road,

his head lowered, he's clearly upset.

And he said, would you be Miriam's brother?

He said, Yes, I am.

Why do you ask?

And he says, I understand that your daughter wants to be married, but you

don't have the money for the dowry.

And the brother says, Yes.

Everybody knows that.

Why are you saying that?

Are you trying to hurt me more?

And the hassid says, No, no, no, no.

I was speaking to your sister and she asked me to help.

And here I have 300 rubles for you.

And the brother looks at him.

He says, Well, that, that's exactly the amount of the dowry,

but what took you so long?

And the hassid says, well, I just saw her two days ago.

I couldn't have come here any faster.

And that brother says, Now I know you're lying.

She's been dead 10 years.

And

in that moment, they both heard a voice and the voice said, I forgive you.

And it was her voice.

And so the hassid went to the wedding of Miriam's niece,

and from there the story continues.

Oh, Jim, what a beautiful story.

So rich, you know?

Yeah.

How old is that story, Jim?

This version of it is probably, oh, a couple hundred years old, maybe 250.

Yeah.

Um, it's a variation of a lot of different ghost stories, of course, but this one

is tied to some particular individuals.

So we'd say about 250 years old.

Yeah.

250 years old.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of wisdom in it.

You know,

A lot of wisdom.

We need.

Yeah.

We need the wise stories now.

We do.

We do.

Yeah.

You know, so, you know, some of my own work is that, uh, we make stories.

I was recently in Germany and I was working with a lot of kids from the age of

eight years old, uh, up to the age of 14.

And this was the last story that I made in Germany.

We made two or three stories a day.

This is the last one that I made just before I came home.

And it was with the 14 year olds.

And we did a deep dive, you know, so sometimes you're kind of

lightly looking at maybe the, um, the character, the environment,

the mission, that kind of thing.

But we spent a lot of time looking at the characters and the environment,

and I noticed the timbre of the story was different and it kind of made me,

you know, it made me have, a gra for looking at stories in that way, you

know, for, for diving deep into stories.

So I thought I would share that story with you today.

Please do, please do.

Yeah.

So there was once a girl and her name was Rosemary.

She was born in a place called Mythica.

Mythica, like its name, was a very mythical place.

It was full of high mountains, some of them dark, some of them light, and

there was loads of mist around the place giving it like a magical air.

She remembered in her youth that the castles were all different

colors and all different glows.

So sometimes they would glow very bright and sometimes they

would be darker in themselves.

Like people, some people like to be very extroverted and some

people like to look inwards.

But when she was very young, her mother passed away, and then

everything started to be different.

Everything was darker and it seemed to get darker every year, and it seemed that all

of the life began to leach out of Mythica.

Now, she was quite old when this story was told.

She was 140 years old, but she was one of these magical beings, one of

these magical beings who can transform themselves into any way they want to look.

And she would take on the look of a 16-year-old maiden with long red hair.

She'd a ready smile.

And when she was out in the world, Jim, people loved to be her friend.

She was caring, she was funny, she was adventurous.

And no matter where she went, she made friends easily.

But she always stayed around that age because that was the

age that she had lost her mother.

And it was very rare that she would go back to Mythica; maybe twice in a century.

At the time of the story, she's 140 years old and she's going back to Mythica for

her third ever visit since she's left.

And she's absolutely distraught at what she sees.

The mountains look as if they are in permanent night.

The dark castles have become darker still.

There's no light at all, like a black hole that you would see in space.

And even the big black castle that she had been born in with all of the love

and light of her mother, well, that seemed to be one of the darkest of all.

She stayed there one night and it was so sorrowful to her that it was so

changed, that she went for a walk down the mountains until she saw that there

was a little stone cottage, a tiny bit lit up, as if at twilight, because the

sun was able to make its way through the dense sleeves, a dappled light.

And there she saw a smiling woman and the woman told her that things

were different in Mythica now, that there was a Toxic Time Traveler.

And every time he came, the world got a little bit darker, a little

bit danker, a little bit colder.

And that he was here at the moment, so they were all being very careful.

And she advised her to be careful too, and she said, Why don't you stay with me in

this little storm cottage with my family?

And she said, Why do the animals glow?

And she said, We don't know.

But they, they started to glow when the world got darker.

And at first all of the animals had this beautiful violet glow, but

over time it dimmed to a kind of a blue color, almost like night.

And she said, Those animals you don't want to call into because it seems they

are being infected by the darkness, and the coldness, and the boldness of what

is happening that we can't explain.

And she said, Oh, that's awful sorrowful.

And then she put her hands out, palms first, and her hands lit up and

there were kind of a golden color.

And it reminded her of the light of her mother.

And she started to laugh out loud and she said, Oh look, I'm bringing

a little bit of light to this place.

And as she said it, the animals began to gather around.

And they lent their light to her light, and the light became like a globe,

and it began to get bigger and larger, and the people started to smile again.

At that moment, the Toxic Time Traveler came out to the front door of her

castle and took a step forward, and she looked at him, and he looked at her.

And the way he walked looked familiar, and she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

And then he stood out into her light, the light that she had made with the palms

of her hand and the globe of the animals, and she saw that it was her father.

Oh my goodness.

The Toxic Time Traveler was her father.

You see, when her mother had passed, he had lost all of his light, all of his

heart, and he could only look backwards.

And he could only be bitter.

And he gave himself over to the bitterness.

And as he watched his daughter, she dropped her hands with the shock, and

she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

And the old woman said, Please, please don't leave the darkness

come back into the world again.

Will you help us?

And she came over to the little girl.

And as she put her hand on her shoulder, a kind of ghost of her mother came into a

globe, and floated down from the tree and stood near her daughter and put her hand

on the shoulder of her daughter who felt 16 now even though she was 140 years old.

For we are all young in the face of our parents.

And they looked at the father and his heart began to melt, and the

darkness began to leave him, but as it did so did his life force.

And this blue spirit rose from where he had fallen and came down

the mountain to join the mother.

And their golden light lit up that world just like the sun before they floated off.

And now in Mythica, Rosemary lives in that castle in remembrance of this important

lesson, and everybody tells her story.

And that is the story of Nine A from Thomas Moore gymnasium in Daun in Germany.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

A wise story from 14 years old.

A wise story.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

And many stories within it really.

Absolutely.

You know, I mean, I gathered many stories over the week, but I remember that one.

I just felt very connected to that story.

I loved it so much.

Yeah.

And it was, it was lovely to witness it being born from our ancient ways of

making stories together, the threading and the weaving, you know, which

is a real honor to be in this work.

It is.

And there's a special beauty that young souls bring to this work.

They see things and they say them in ways that are both clear and deep at times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and it feels also that it's kind of archetypal that

before we get too defended by the worlds that we're open to these stories

and lessons and messages, you know?

Yeah.

So I really liked that one.

I'd love to just explore it for a moment.

This group that you were working with.

What exposure had they had to this kind of work before?

Was this their first time?

Was it something they had been doing for a while?

I've been working with them now for five years, and they're 14 now, so

I suppose I would've gotten them first when they were nine, you know, and um,

when I first came to the school, they hadn't really gathered their stories

in a very long time in the village.

So I was like, what are the stories of this area?

And they had no sense of that.

But then they went out and they began asking the elder population.

And there's amazing stories of cities under local lakes and you

know how red wine was made from a goat and this kind of thing.

So there's a real richness there, you know?

And of course the Grimm's tales come from Germany, you know.

Sure, sure.

You know, so, um, but for these young people, I think they really get a lot

out of making stories as well as telling, and they're bilingual, so this is not,

English is not their first language.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so, uh, there's something special about that as well.

You know, and I'm, I'm just thinking about how those two stories

come together, and it has to do with a, a loss that had been forgotten but not

forgotten, and it had to find its way out.

So in mine it was the father, and also the, you know, the

liminal space of being connected to the death space: the dark worlds.

Because in the story that nine A made, until things were resolved, there

couldn't be any border between the dark worlds and this world, you know?

And it was the same in your story, you know?

Yes.

Yeah.

And in each case, the darkness has to be embraced.

Not accepted in the sense of yeah, not Oh, this is what we're stuck with for the rest

of our lives, but we have to embrace it.

We can't just deny it.

Yeah.

And you know, the melting of the bitterness had to be earned.

It wasn't a case of you could, you know, kind of, Pfft!

There was a whole process to that happening, and I think we

could learn from that, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, even in my own country here in I, in Ireland, uh, in our peace process

that happened in my lifetime, you know?

Mm-hmm.

That wasn't something that could happen in a day.

It had to be talked through.

It had to be worked on, you know?

You couldn't just tell the story of a happy ending.

Exactly.

That wouldn't work.

Yeah.

Wouldn't be true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's something about these stories that are very connecting

and you know, something that is, uh, very satisfying that a journey

happened and that an earning happened.

The melting was earned.

Yeah.

You know, that makes me think, at this time in this country,

there's a, a big film event.

And that is the release of the second part of the Wicked story, which is a

retooling of The Wizard of Oz. And what's interesting to me is they took this

revised story of The Wizard of Oz, which was very successful on Broadway, and they

turned it into over six hours of a movie.

It was so long they had to break it into two parts.

And the story itself is about confronting both the ambiguities of what's right

and wrong, but also realizing what's really right and wrong and how does

one stand up for what's truly right.

Yeah.

The first movie was the first half of the story, and it's all light,

and sweet, and it's lots of I'll just call 'em pink ribbons and bows.

So anyway, the first half of the story was all this sweetness and light and

beautiful music and happy stuff going on, and only kind of hinting at the challenges

that the second half was gonna undertake.

And the movie was just, oh, people loved it.

It was so wonderful.

And then the second movie came out, and it's full of challenges.

It's full of how do people confront these difficult topics?

And the critics said, oh, it's not nearly as good as a movie as the first.

Well, I will tell you, we decided we really wanted to see the second movie,

so we watched the first movie over again.

Mm-hmm.

And I looked at my wife and I said, this is just so sickly sweet.

Why would we wanna watch another three hours of the same thing that

people say isn't even as good.

Mm-hmm.

But we watched it.

It was wonderful because it wasn't sweet.

Yeah.

It was heartfelt, it was challenging.

It was, what is it that really propels us to the good, to the true good.

So these two stories remind me of that because the story comes when we face our

challenges, not when we wrap them up in a bow and think that everything's beautiful.

Yeah.

And you know, the world is a bit like that.

Um, little battles that we won, that we've taken for granted for a number of

years are now being called into question again, and people are thinking about that.

So there seems to be a zeitgeist, and I think the stories are, the

stories are a little anchor in that.

You know, and a lovely way of discussing those challenges, you know?

That's right.

Because we can talk about the stories and we don't have to

take sides, and we can say, Ooh, this is an interesting challenge.

Yeah.

Makes them safe.

Will we say goodbye from Cork?

And goodbye from New York, but only for a while because we'll be

back again with another episode.

Absolutely.

We can't wait to see you on the Story Road one more time, and from this

time till that be safe on the Story Road.