Josh Mortensen (00:00.458)

Leigh Melander, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Leigh Melander

Thank you, I am truly delighted to be here. I’m looking forward to this.

Josh Mortensen

Yeah, absolutely. As mentioned before, I’ve talked to a few of, I guess, your colleagues or people that you run in a similar circle with through the Joseph Campbell Foundation. I found they’ve been a lot of really great conversations.

Leugh Melander

Yeah, they’re good bunch. They’re a good bunch. I sat on the board of of JCF for a number of years and it’s been a few years away now and there’s a whole new crop of mythologists that are emerging that are came to the study of myths, many of them kind of midlife, so had all sorts of other things that they had done and they’re it’s a really interesting group and there’s a lot of energy at the foundation right now which is very exciting.

Josh Mortensen

Seems like that. yeah. I mean, I’ve had great conversations with them and we talk about what, least what I consider to be very interesting stuff. But for you, you also seem very interested in myth and you seem pulled toward this. I like to start conversations by asking people where this kind of curiosity comes from or this passion. Where were you in your life when you started to see story and myth as something interesting or something that was that had a bigger consequence than maybe most people recognize.

Leigh Melander

Yeah, yeah. So the in some ways it I started early as a myth nerd as a little kid my I grew up as a faculty member faculty brat at Penn State and My parents bought us a book of myths as a little kid and we spent a lot of hours playing various characters in Greek myth but I as I sort of moved into being something of a grown-up which is debatable if it’s ever gonna hit but the

I’ve been a performer, I’ve been a writer, and I’ve been a composer and a creator of performing arts work. And I’ve always sort of been drawn by the idea of story and also metaphor. And I think for me, myth, a lot of the power in myth sits in metaphor rather than necessarily specifically stories. And so I thought about graduate work. I got a completely weird degree from Penn State in, it was my own degree program in,

performing arts and history and writing. And I was looking at a group of women that were writing troubadour poetry for about 50 years at the end of the last crusades, which was one of those, it was a great experience and I loved it. And I graduated from college and had been a little baby actor and went, have no idea what to do with this. So I spent a lot of years trying to synthesize that. And as I looked at graduate programs, I…

dug around a lot of things and went to Pacifica, which is where a number of the folks from JCF have also gone. And what drew me there, I think, as much as anything, was a sense of the action of myth as being a way to see through and to see into things in a different way. And so I really went not knowing if it was gonna be the right fit and had this great, wonderful, unique experience of going, God, here’s a tribe here that I actually…

Leigh Melander (03:14.008)

They’re as weird as I am. They’re interested in the same stuff. Because I think it sits everywhere. And I think people are sitting in myth all the time, even if that’s not what they’re calling it.

Yeah, I would completely agree. In fact, I think that what I’ve kind of seen more and more as I read and as I explore my own mind and my own experiences, the way that I interpret the world, and then as I have conversations with people like you, it’s almost completely apparent to me. I don’t think most people experience it this way, but it seems to me that myth and maybe story in general.

is actually how our brains organize information and how we process the world that’s around us, how we come to understand it. And so when I think about story and myth, I actually, the only separation I have between them is that everybody’s aware of stories and everybody reads stories, everybody reads books, they watch movies, people can pick out stories in songs and in poems. But the

thing that I think a lot of people don’t often recognize is that stories are actually how their own psyche is orienting itself in the world. And when we have a story that we’re not fully conscious of, being the playbook that we’re actually living by, I think that’s what I would call myth.

Yeah, I think that’s a great definition. And I think that the, I have ongoing conversations with people about whether or not myth can be personal. And I don’t think it can be. I think actually myth is this big thing that surrounds us. And I think we can key into it and kind of dive into that current. But I think we are.

Leigh Melander (04:55.434)

always sitting in story and I did for a number of years a radio show that I’m at some point reconvening as a podcast called Myth America because I like bad puns. And the way I framed that was these are the stories that we tell and the stories that tell us. And so we are being as told by the narratives that we’re being caught by and that we’re repeating, we’re being made by those stories as much as they are

are as we’re making them, as we’re telling them. And I think that mythic stories sit in that place where we’re often not necessarily overly conscious that that’s what we’re doing. And there’s a wonderful kind of connectivity to that, I think. to me, what’s, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking, why study myth? You know, like, and there’s a lot of conversation about myth being a lie, myth being irrelevant, myth being the thing we don’t want to do in a rational,

or at least self-perceived rational culture. And I think it’s because that’s sort of what pulls me into the metaphor piece, because I think it’s a way of opening up our, what feel like really specific experiences and beginning to understand what can open and what can happen when you actually start to see those as being things that are, there’s commonality there and there are ways into working metaphor and story that can.

than shift your understanding of stuff. And so for me, myth is very much about learning how to ask good questions rather than find an answer. I have a basic feeling that the minute we go, oh, we’re done, we found the answer, that’s it. Then we stop thinking and we’re not in the process anymore. So for me, it’s this kind of never ending story, literally. So it’s fun, yeah, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it’s, actually a lot of fun. And once you can see it, it’s actually, makes everything a little bit more interesting. To be honest, you could watch a bad movie, a boring movie and see the myth in it. And that alone can, can help you, I don’t know, enjoy it more. There’s like a little bit more analysis. You can see the metaphor, but, I would agree with you that I don’t think, I don’t think most people are conscious of the fact that they’re thinking in stories.

Josh Mortensen (07:13.74)

And don’t think that most people, I don’t think that anybody can actually choose the story that they’re gonna play or live out. And I think that in a weird way, I would say that we don’t even invent stories. You I’m a writer and so I write stories, but I don’t think that those are my stories. I think that these are motifs as Joseph Campbell would call them. These motifs are, I would almost guess that they’re so,

ingrained in us. They’re such a part of us that there’s somewhere on a genetic level where the the stories are implanted in us deep down inside and and we just play them out both as individuals and as societies and I think that you see that over time you see the the stories change as society changes as culture changes but the underlying narrative is actually the same. It almost seems like it’s just the context of the story that’s changing or getting kind of a new facelift.

based on the environment.

Yeah, think you’re right. Carl Jung would agree with you, I think in lot of ways, particularly about the process of writing. He was really, some interesting thoughts about how it was something coming through you rather than something you’re originating. And I think as also a writer, I’m always aware of sort of where am I putting my little…

know, Tabasco sauce on stuff, but I’m aware that I’m not telling a story that anybody else hasn’t ever told before. And so the yeah, so that context becomes really interesting. And it’s also making me think about one of Jim, Hellman’s, is a called himself an imaginative psychologist, which I love is somebody who’s really fascinated with how imagination works. he had a line about stick with the image, like you stay with it. And so that and I think sticking with the image, sticking with the story invites you in to just keep

Leigh Melander (09:01.966)

keep working it and going deeper and finding whatever that specific constellation is of that iteration of the story. And I think part of what’s interesting to me about this is that for thousands of years, human beings told each other stories or orally. And so each time they got told, they were different. And then as printing presses emerged, stories got sort of solidified in a particular way. And I think you can make a really good argument that each time you read, there are books, there are stories that I’ve read

so often I can kind of quote chunks from. And each time you read it, it’s a different relationship in some way because you’re a different person reading it. the storytelling itself is somewhat frozen. And I think while there are some amazing things that happened with being able to solidify that and how we could kind of collectively work concepts in some nuanced ways, I think that happened out of that. I think one of the things that gets lost in that is

the kind of jazz riff of oral storytelling, which I think matches the jazz riff of the stories that we’re telling ourselves and that we’re telling people around us. I’m very aware that every time I tell a story, it’s a little bit different.

You know, and part of that is I’m seeing how the person that I’m telling the story is responding to, and so I’m playing off that energy. Part of it is whatever I’m walking in the door with and things will pop up and go, I hadn’t even really thought about that as being something that I was actually really interested in this story. So it’s always different, it’s very alive. And I think the myth stuff, I think you’re right in that, you know, and Jung would talk about.

This is a sort of very archetypal energy kind of image that he was working that there are these, whether they’re motifs or they’re tropes, or they’re sort of big ways in which human beings tend to sort meaning. And many of them are, you can see them across really any culture. There are so many kind of continuum points. It’s one of the things I think that Campbell did brilliantly.

Leigh Melander (11:13.102)

was he was, because he was really first and foremost a conflict guy, so he was always looking where are the comparisons, where are the connections, and I think there’s been some good critique of some places where he went probably broader in those connections than he should have, and yet I think part of that was he was a function of who he was in the moment that he was, but I think

What’s powerful about that is that again, it’s like it’s that connection, you know, it’s the the I think we’re always from a from a psyche standpoint as somebody who looks at myth both in terms of story, but also sort of what is working psychologically that the the ongoing in some ways, one of the big cruxes of being human is that dance between being me an individual and being me in in a collective and community and

I could say an incredible way to just keep opening that up, reminding us that we’re not sitting here all alone in our little universe.

Yeah, agreed. The interesting thing about Joseph Campbell is that people who really enjoy Joseph Campbell, they also seem to know a lot about Carl Jung and his writings. And there’s just so much of a crossover, like you were saying, the stories, but then also the psychology. And I think in both cases, this idea of keeping the story alive, keeping it open, what you were saying about staying with the symbol, know, yeah, staying with the image.

There’s Campbell talks a lot about the literalizing of myth. And I think that’s what we do when we stop exploring, when we stop sitting with the image. We try to, we try to fix a meaning to it. And as soon as we fix a meaning to it, we’ve actually stopped being curious and we’ve stopped following that curiosity. We stopped exploring. It’s a big challenge because there is a part of us as humans that really want stories to be concrete. want them to be literal. We want them to be tangible.

Josh Mortensen (13:15.15)

But anytime we do that, we actually fall into a trap of like an ideology or we get trapped by an institution that’s using that story. And I found this even interesting when it comes to dreams, because for a long time, when I first started reading Jung, was really examining my dreams a lot and I was trying to put meaning to them. And I actually read a James Hollis book and he was talking about not…

fixing a meaning to the dream, but just sitting with the images and the potential meanings, but allowing it to stay open, allowing it to continue to flow through you. And I think it’s really critical. Yeah, both from like a, an individual perspective, but also from a larger kind of group perspective or even society level perspective that we don’t literalize the dreams, that we don’t lock them into meaning, that we keep them as metaphor and keep them open so that we can keep exploring them. Cause they’re going to the-

Yeah, the unconscious is limitless and the information that’s down there is limitless, but as soon as we stop exploring it then we’ve reached an endpoint.

Yeah, no, man, Josh, totally there with you. Yeah, and I think that the, get the tug of it, because you’re right, like we want certainty, know, uncertainty is uncomfortable. And we’re living in a culture right now that has glorified comfort in a really particular way. And against the tension of living in a cultural construct that is bigger than human beings have lived in for most of their lives. You know, we are,

We are in a global conversation at this point. And I think that’s overwhelming to people. I think we’re also in a moment when there are all sorts of things shifting that were coming out of the industrial age and out of the fossil fuel age and out of Western European domination of the world. And I think, you know, when we get nervous, our instinct is to kind of clamp onto the things that make sense to us and calcify them as being identity and meaning and the right words.

Leigh Melander (15:20.148)

and the right way to be, then it becomes instantly binary and tribal and all that kind of stuff. And I think we’re seeing that play out in real time right now. And I think it’s scary and it’s frustrating and it’s also, I get the instinct. And at the same time, if you can stay open, anything might happen. And that the things that you haven’t even thought of before can start emerging if you don’t get yourself

going from ideas to ideology and from archetypal energy to stereotype and that desire to just cook it down. It’s really, really seductive and it’s think made even more seductive because we’re in this place right now where we’re dominated by fast little media bites of one sound bite after another. So everybody’s trying to cook it down to the fastest, quickest way to get their message out and nuance is really hard in that setting.

You know, it’s like what grabs you, what grabs you emotionally, what grabs you fast. And the image can be really powerful. And in fact, I think people that do this well often are doing really powerful images, but they aren’t then inviting you to go in and stay with it and to stay in the metaphor of it. know, the idea of metaphor is about movement and it’s always about this sort of space in between things. And if we can find our way there, I think it can…

open up a very different awareness of how we are in community with each other and how our stories actually do intertwine, rather than feeling like they’re, you know, this thing never the twain shall meet, that we are, here, you’re there, and it’s never gonna connect. Which is scary when you’ve got a whole global people that are all sort of their own versions of that.

Yeah, yeah, when everybody has their own little version of the story or, you know, if you think about, if you think about story in general, the stories that kind of underpin the cultures that exist all around the world, it’s almost like an evolutionary tree where they’ve branched off in different directions. And so everybody’s sitting with these different understandings of reality based on these stories. And the instinct, like you’re saying, is to get very serious about your story and to treat it like it’s very

Josh Mortensen (17:36.992)

important and critical and we shouldn’t turn away from it. But this brings to mind some of the work that you do and some of the writing that you’ve done. You like to focus on this word frivolity. That’s a hard one for me to say. Frivolity. Frivolity. Frivolity. And it’s almost like the opposite of seriousness. yeah, it almost seems like

of all of these.

Josh Mortensen (18:00.472)

When the world gets dark and scary and there’s big transitions and shifts and we want to become more more locked into our seriousness, frivolity may very well be the path out.

I think it’s one of them. I think I actually went back and I wrote a book that actually came out of my doctoral dissertation because I was doing this frivolous degree in mythology and thought, I’m going to take it. I’m going to take it to its obvious reductive conclusion and write about frivolity. But I see frivolity as a way of being.

A couple things. So it’s a way of opening into imagination. If you, if you let go of outcomes and you allow yourself to sort of flow in the moment, I think part of it is about scale. It is about the smallness that you’re talking about, that the allowing ourselves to not, you know, we’re again, sort of cultural, at least in Western culture where we’re sitting right now is that we’re all supposed to be big. We’re all supposed to be scaling, right? Everybody’s supposed to be the big, the big thing. And I think that the, there’s power in that obviously.

huge power, but there’s also an enormous amount of power in staying small. And then I think the other really important part of frivolity for me is, comes actually out of the root of the word. Etymologically, the words frivol and revel and rebel are all, they all come from the same root, which I really love. So there’s this, there’s an, I sit within that a lot when I’m thinking about frivolity, that it’s a small rebellion and it can be rebellion against any of the things that feel like they’re

overwhelming you. doesn’t have to be a political or social rebellion, it can be an internal one. And there’s something incredibly powerful about allowing yourself to just do something light and small and pointless. One of the ideas that I worked in my dissertation was a Kantian idea about the purposefulness of purposelessness. And as we said in the mythic underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution and of

Leigh Melander (19:55.566)

Puritanical culture and even of Judeo-Christian culture where it’s all about going for that big, the big reward at the end. There’s a whole lot of story and narrative and pressure sitting on us to be outcome driven and doing things that are productive and like always looking out at that horizon. One of my grad school buddies, Victor Fassold had a wonderful line in his dissertation about the tyranny of the horizon.

which I love because it’s always gonna be out there, always. It doesn’t matter how fast you run, the whole point of the horizon is you’re never gonna get there. And so to me, frivolity is being frivolous and allowing yourself that is a way into allowing yourself to find pleasure and to find delight and to be a little irresponsible and not get so caught in the…

the got-a-do’s of what every single moment of every single day is. And I think as the pace of our lives speed up, that becomes really, I think, particularly important because I think we have harder and harder time finding it. we tend to, at least I do, and I think a lot of people do, find it in our phones, which isn’t actually a creative act, generally. We’re just in that kind of consuming, because we’re

Yeah, consumption rather than production and yeah, it’s frivolous but not in a creative way.

No, and it’s not, think in part because the scale is wrong too. I think if something gets too big, it’s no longer frivolous. It gets too powerful. There’s something about allowing it to stay small. One of the images that often sits in my head is the mythic story of David and Goliath and this little David whipping a rock at Goliath, only a frivolous David would have a clown nose on. That just allowing that.

Leigh Melander (21:46.262)

instead of marching forward, and this is the other image I use a lot, is sort of marching forward in the way that you think you’re supposed to, literally or metaphorically, turning left and skip. And it’s just those little, think, I think it’s a way in, thinking about what we’re talking about in terms of where story sits enough, it’s a way of pulling ourselves out of the story enough to start to see the structure of the story a little bit. Because I think if we’re really embedded in something,

We’re not seeing it. There is no forest for the trees. are in whatever that reality is that we’ve constructed. And I think little moments of creative rebellion can break that open in some really powerful ways that can open all sorts of stuff. One of the things I suggest to people, and this is something neurologists do, is if you’re stuck, literally turn left and look at what you’re seeing. Just…

just in that different viewpoint and different things can open with that, which is a tiny little thing. So it’s keys into the whole butterfly wing flapping thing, Like tiny little things can change everything, which is pretty cool. And I think for me, in terms of the frivolous thing, part of it is not having the goal of wanting to change everything. It’s trusting that whatever’s gonna emerge is gonna emerge, and that’ll be the right thing.

Yeah, it’s almost as if we all get growing up in whatever culture we grow up in, the family we grow up in, the socio-economic structure that we grew up in, we inherit stories and then it’s almost as if we try to live those out, we try to play those out and for a lot of people that just becomes reality, they don’t ever even…

have a window into what’s one side or the other and they just kind of stay on that same path. But so many people have already tried to walk that path. It’s like you’re in a deep rut. You’re like just following along what everybody else is doing. It’s interesting when you talk about this, you mentioned turning left several times, like turn left and go left or look left. Is there a reason that you pick left over right? Is that symbolic?

Leigh Melander (23:54.91)

only insofar as I think we are so right dominated. I don’t necessarily mean it in a political way, but I think that the, you know, being right handed dominates most doing the right thing. And there’s something I think innately rebellious about turning left rather than right. And I also think that there’s even just looking at the word left and, and what sits in that being, being, leaving something being left behind. There’s just.

I like the uncertainty of it. If turn the right way, I’m into whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing. If I turn the left way, I can make it something else.

Yeah.

Josh Mortensen (24:36.418)

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve read a lot of Joseph Campbell and he’s got this, everybody knows him for his hero with a thousand faces. It’s kind of his big, his big famous book. But I think one of his best works is the masks of God, which is a four part series. And yes, I’ve read the whole thing and I really enjoyed it. It’s all fascinating to me, but there is a portion of that series where he talks about the right-handed path versus the left-handed path. And it’s very much a symbolic

you know, to go the right-handed path is the path of the given culture, it’s the path of the religion that’s been handed to you, it’s the path of other people’s stories, but to take the left-handed path is to step off the known path, kind of a little bit like Robert Frost, take the path less traveled. so I bring it up because I already have this idea in my head, but it’s curious to me that you use the left-handed

Yeah, and I had forgotten, I had actually forgotten that that was a massive God. And that, one of his wonderful lines is, you’re on a path, if you find yourself on a path, it’s not the right one because you need to be making your own. And I think that is the work of, that’s the creative work, that’s the work of the artist in all of us is, and again, it’s a way to push back against…

myth can be such a strengthening and uplifting and opening thing, but it also can be the thing that can consume us and oppress us too. One of the things that I really love about sort of understanding of how myth works in cultures and psyches from a lot of places, but the Greeks talked about it really well, is that like it’s the thing that is most and least true simultaneously. And so it’s sitting in a non-duality driven place. It’s asking us to challenge

binary thinking, is something that in this moment in time, we tend to do culturally and psychologically a lot. You know, from Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other, onward. And part of that is sitting in a culture that’s been very shaped by the binarism of Judeo-Christian culture, of a monotheistic culture. And whether we actually believe in those, as Campbell would say, somebody else’s religious.

Leigh Melander (26:49.822)

my religion is my religion and somebody else’s religion is their myth, which is an interesting like because their story is not the true story. But I think that the allowing, allowing ourselves to challenge that sense of duality is, I think that can be incredibly mind opening too. And it’s part of what’s powerful about how Jung talked about archetypes is they always contain their opposites, you know, they contain all the things.

And it’s one of the reasons why I think that often people can get caught in flattening and stereotyping archetypal thinking, cause they’ll go, you know, pick a big one. The mother, the mother is all of these things. Well, the mother is, you know, devouring the mother, like mother, the mother as an archetype is enormous and holds all of, all of the things, you know? And I think that remembering that as part of, think what, what Hellman was talking about was stay with the image is that allowing yourself to kind of go down that rabbit hole.

of continuing to work all the nuance and the complexity and all the layers that might be in an archetypal image or an archetypal sense of movement keeps us moving. It doesn’t get to that, okay, I’ve solved this place where we then start to get smaller and tighter.

Yeah, absolutely. Since you talk about the Western myth, you’ve mentioned the Western world and myth several times and bringing up monotheism and I think about it constantly. think that,

The ordering of psyche in the Western world versus the Eastern world is pretty fascinating. And you could see it building off of the original myth from the very beginning, for the first story, say in the Garden of Eden. And this idea that in the Garden of Eden, we partake of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And so our entire Western world is, it hinges on this idea that we know what’s good and we know what’s bad. Now people constantly disagree about what all that is, but it has led us to this space of…

Josh Mortensen (28:43.962)

being very sure that what we’re doing is right, that our myth is true and that other people’s myths are just you know fantasy or they’ve they’ve been misled in some way. lies.

Yeah, or toxic or just wrong in every way. Yeah, yeah. No, that binary sits. That’s one of the big things that we sit in, living in the US and much of Western culture. And if you look at, in a sort of pulling back and looking even at what sat prior to the advent of Christianity, the Greek and Roman.

mythic stories in pantheon they were they were all over the place like none of them were one thing or the other and none of them were you know all good or all bad that the you they all and if you look at norse mythology like many many mythologies around the world have actually hold this nuance more than christian mythology tends to and there tends to be a lot more gray area

which is, and that’s what I’m always intrigued with, because that’s where the movement is, that’s where the imagination is, that’s where the life force is for me, is that when you’re in the soup and you’re not quite sure where you’re gonna land, and that sort of edge of thinking and edge of certainty is, to me, that’s an addiction for sure.

Yeah, yeah, I think I also think of it as an identification with the ego. And it’s something that’s, and to look at the East, they obviously they did, they went the opposite where they tried to obliterate the ego. So it’s very fascinating to me to just observe the whole planet as, as these two courses, it’s, it’s, you know, one side is very masculine, one side is very feminine from a symbolic perspective. But also this, I mean, I just have these interesting situations, because of this, where

Josh Mortensen (30:38.808)

For example, had read a couple years back, I had just finished reading The Odyssey. And then I saw this meetup group where it was like a book club and they were going to get together and talk about The Odyssey. And The Odyssey is so full of crazy stories that from our modern kind of moralistic perspective, the hero of The Odyssey can come across as just a terrible, villainous person. And so I went to this meetup group.

And the whole conversation was about how these people really didn’t like Odysseus and how they saw him as such a bad person. And how could you ever learn anything from this book? And I just sat there, just dumbfounded. I thought this is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. I’m looking at it from a, it’s, it’s, of all, it’s ancient myth. It’s coming from a different culture. It’s not our culture, but also I’m looking at it from like a Joseph Campbell story perspective and a Carl Jung archetypal archetypal perspective where

I’m looking at these characters inside myself as I’ve gone through a journey of coming back from a place I didn’t want to be and coming to realize that the home that I am returning to may not be psychologically the home that I want to be in. There was just so much value to me and as I tried to share this with the group I was pretty shut down because people just couldn’t see past the moralistic interpretation of it and they just looked at…

They just looked at Odysseus as if he was the bad guy. I found it fascinating.

That’s really fascinating because, you know, I’m thinking about the Walt Whitman line, I contain multitudes. Like we all are capable of being the good guy or the bad guy or something in between and moment by moment, you know, and I think part of what people struggle when they get caught by that is like they can’t even see that in themselves. If they acknowledge that in themselves, they have failed. And…

Leigh Melander (32:34.574)

I think as somebody who’s sort of lends into psychology is through myths and through depth psychology, the, More talks really eloquently about the more you repress something, the bigger it’s going to blow when it blows. So if we look at ourselves and we cannot see our own crappiness and our own wile-iness when it’s not appropriate and our own smallness and mean-spiritedness, all of which we’re fully capable of doing, and we deny that.

then when it comes out, it’s enormous. And I think that’s one of the things that we’re struggling with. We’re in a very particular moment with it, think, right now, because there is a multiplicity in people and experiences right now. also because of how we’re engaging and exchanging information, the whole kind of front of being in the social media world and

presenting the perfectness and the I’m giggling at myself because I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get the light to look great, you know on my Not 20 year old face anymore and then went why am I worrying about this? But we’re there right and so if we get caught there and in the background It’s the I cannot be anything less than perfect and if I even begin to acknowledge that I’m not that I Implode

And so, and that both makes me incredibly non-compassionate for myself, but also then allows me to be incredibly non-compassionate for everybody else around me and just break those tendrils of connection over and over and over again, because nobody’s going to measure up.

Yeah, nobody. Well, yeah, because we really do have this idea of good versus evil. And as you mentioned, in the past, the Greeks, the Norse, the Romans, the Egyptians, all of the African every group aside from post the Judeo-Christian Muslim world, all of them worshiped a pantheon of gods, which to me, I see religion as a reflection of the internal psyche or the group psyche.

Leigh Melander (34:31.757)

African cultures, Asian cultures.

Josh Mortensen (34:46.988)

So by worshipping a pantheon of gods, it indicates that you’re aware that there are multitudes within you. And, you know, when our mythological parents partook of the fruit in the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, what they did was they chose to identify with one of their archetypes, that being the ego or like the organizing kind of…

function of interacting with other people. And it really did push a lot of those other characters into the background. And from a Jungian perspective, we would say then that they are in our shadow, we’re unaware of them, and we’re unconscious of them. when people think of themselves as being moralistic, or being right, doing the right thing,

based on a story that they’ve interpreted and are completely unaware of their shadow, they can wreak havoc on the people around them. They can wreak havoc on their relationships and in the group. And then as groups formulate this way, we’ve seen this a lot in the last 120 years, that can lead to just horrible violence on a mass scale.

Yeah, yeah, because you’ve so you so othered anybody that doesn’t align with you 100 % and and you know what the tribe is can shift even depending on the day, but if yeah, if somebody’s outside of your.

this is the right thing that I’m holding onto with dear life and I can’t, nor can I ever admit that I was wrong about something even in this context. It’s like it’s this gigantic catfishing experience, right? The further in we get, the harder it is for us to go, maybe I got sold something of a bill of goods or maybe I interpreted that way in a way that wasn’t necessarily helpful for me. And we hold onto it tighter and tighter and tighter.

Leigh Melander (36:44.622)

until we’re literally squeezing the life force out of it. And it’s an awful place to live. I think this is one of the places where I feel for people because I so get the instinct. I wanna know what the ending is gonna look like too, big time. And there are days when I’m so driven by that. And at the same time, it’s like, we’re not gonna know. And so…

with being in this place where we’re not ever allowed to look at anything beyond the thing that we’ve defined as the thing. Like it’s a miserable place to live. I think it’s, and it’s so seductive, it feels like it’s gonna make it easier and it doesn’t. Because it doesn’t actually solve anything, it doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t open anything, it just gets harder and tighter and tighter. And I think…

that this way of thinking about myth and looking about myth and metaphor, I think that is its ongoing sort of handout is to, an invitation is to say, come with me into uncertainty, come with me into being in this journey, being in this path that you’re whacking the shrubbery down, trying to figure it out as you go, because actually that’s kind of the point and stuff’s gonna emerge with that and you will understand and…

find your way forward with things or backwards or sideways if you want to be fearless, that won’t ever emerge for you if you’re frozen. And that’s part of, can go on and rant ad nauseum about how I think this idea of comfort and health and safety, all lovely, fabulous, fabulous concepts. But if that becomes the thing that we’re all trying to focus on more than anything else, like there’s no movement in that.

know, it’s Hestia sitting at her hearth. There are no stories about her doing anything. There’s no artwork about her other than sitting. And that is a wonderful image and a thing to go to when we need it for sure. But that’s not a life. That’s just sitting there, you know? And so that’s…

Leigh Melander (38:51.822)

So in my way of trying to poke at people about it is through this slightly tongue in cheek, slightly wry, slightly smart assed, rebellious way of going, why don’t you come be a little frivolous? One of the places that came out of actually was years ago, I used to be a harpist and I worked on a project where with a friend of mine that we were creating kind of a relaxation system, which in retrospect was pretty silly, but it was an earnest effort.

And I was trying to talk with people about, it was in a moment where there’s all sorts of data emerging from the World Health Organization about how stress was killing us and we’re all so overextended and this was 30 years ago. So it was like, it has not gotten better. And as I’m talking to people and I’m saying, so, you know, what would you like a little relax and relaxation thing for it? They immediately would go to this guilt place of like, I know I don’t do it enough. You know, like I don’t, do it. I’m like, God, this is not, this is not the emotion that I was trying to.

evoking people. And so I started playing with language and I landed on this word frivolous one day and I said, well, you know, what happens if you’re a little frivolous? And suddenly people are like,

And their whole energy changed. And so for me, part of it is it’s that there’s a little fun, there’s a little spice, there’s a little being bad, there’s a little, and not in a big enough way that you can blow stuff up, but I think it’s a way of kind of prying the door open for people to allow ourselves to go, yeah, I’m gonna have the ice cream tonight instead of eating my Wheaties. It’s like, it’s that. And there’s pleasure in that.

Yeah, there’s a lot of pleasure in ice cream. agree. But yeah, yeah, it’s interesting the way that you talk about the language, the shift in language, because I think that part of myth or part of story is the actual language that’s used. You hear it from other people in your group or you read it in the writings of your group and then you might, you know, cycle through it in your own head using that same language.

Josh Mortensen (40:52.45)

But oftentimes what I found in reading a lot of stories is that actually a lot of stories, even when they seem to be opposed to each other, they’re saying the same thing. And just by simply shifting the language you’re using, you can take people out of this space of defensiveness or avoidance, resistance. And that’s just fascinating that you change the word to frivolity and then they’re like, yeah, that sounds awesome.

Because it’s an invitation rather than a, you yet another thing to get whacked by that I’m not doing well. And I spent a number of years doing community work when I was living in California and was working in some really kind of cool models around the sort of sociology, social worker terminology was community asset based building. And the basic structure was rather than going into a community that was struggling and going, you guys are broken and you’re doing it wrong.

which is a really power over move. There was this whole momentum about going into communities and recognizing that actually communities have everything they need. They just haven’t necessarily figured out how to see that and connect it. So I spent a lot of time listening to people and.

Trying to learn from that. And one of the things that I learned from that is 99.9 % of the time an invitation is going to get you an opening that a demand or insistence isn’t right. You back somebody into a corner, they’ve got nowhere to go. And so that’s part of the reason why I keep swirling back to this idea of play and frivolity and imagination in that way is that because I do it myself. I get, you know, I’m perfectly capable of.

clamping down on myself to the point where I don’t know where to turn. And when I get really stuck, I’ll go, I guess I need to do that thing again, right? I need to invite myself to go do something that’s just not in the flow of the things I’m supposed to be doing. And all sorts of stuff can open up. And sometimes it’s really little stuff. And sometimes it’s just, I got to goof off for an afternoon and just rest my brain. And sometimes it’s like, here’s this

Leigh Melander (43:01.652)

or problem or idea or thought or frustration I’ve had that I’ve been chewing on and worrying about and haven’t, know, just keep bang, bang, bang, hitting your head against the wall. And suddenly some other little thing will sort of zip in and go, there’s this whole other way of understanding this. And so for me, it’s a great way to also hold the, I have an instinctive ingrained.

resistance to things that take themselves too seriously and get too ponderous because I think that that can calcify really quickly. And so there’s something about the smallness, the lightness, the irreverence of it, that the reverence is for the moment rather than what other people are going to think about you or what you’re going to gain out of this or how the world is going to be different. So in that way, it’s kind of an oddly, I think, Buddhist move of being in the present in a very particular way, being in the now in a particular way.

And it also to me, it’s a way where I sort of part ways with that way of thinking is the how I’m wired and how I think about the world is that then what gets opened by that? What can I then imagine differently than where I am because I’ve landed in that now?

Yeah. The word, the word that you used irreverence really struck me because I grew up in a very religious family, LDS or Mormon and reverence is like a really big deal. Like you’re supposed to be quiet and sit still the reverence. idea of reverence is that you invite the Holy Spirit or you invite what they call the Holy ghost to be with you. And it’s just fascinating to me because, there are

So I actually just saw this quote from Carl Jung the other day and I can’t, I don’t know it exactly, but he was basically talking about the paradox of irreverence because the using the metaphor of the Holy Spirit or the symbol of the Holy Spirit, this is like a messenger. It’s somebody who brings information to you. brings, you know, a revelation or inspiration or what I like to call

Josh Mortensen (45:11.254)

just synthesis, the synthesis of ideas that you feel or you experience when you’ve read this book and that book and then you’re on a walk and suddenly it comes to you. But there’s another part of it that Jung was talking about where it’s actually irreverent people. It’s people who are doing things that they’re not supposed to be doing that get this spark often from what we would consider this Holy Spirit. Because, because it’s, I think it’s akin to a lot of what you’re saying. You step outside of the main path, you

have a little bit of fun, a little bit of play, you make some jokes, you laugh, and in in so doing, you come to see that it’s not all that serious. Like it’s just stories that we’ve accepted. And the funny thing about the funny thing about the way that the that adult humans or like hashtag or whatever quote marks adults in the real world do is that

What I think most of what the world is, whether it’s the economy or governance, the education systems, jobs, all of this stuff is actually just games that we’ve invented. when we were kids, to play a game was actually very serious because you, in a way, you are, I think doing two things. One is you’re practicing for future potential situations that you could potentially be a part of.

deciding whether or not that’s something you would actually be interested in. Another thing that I’ve read a lot recently is that play is a way for kids to reenact their trauma that they’ve experienced and to work through it. so play has this very effective healing, you know, orientation for us. But what we don’t realize as adults is that, you know, if you’re going to go be a doctor, if you’re going to go be an accountant, if you’re going to be an attorney, if you’re to go work at any job,

what you’re actually doing is choosing to play a game that somebody else has designed. And so you’re kind of just jumping into this game and hoping that you can play the part. And oftentimes people find traditional employment, traditional kind of career paths completely unfulfilling. And the reason is, is because it’s a game that somebody else invented and you think it’s really serious and you have to do it and that the money is so important, but you’re actually-

Leigh Melander (47:33.962)

are important and that yeah.

Yeah, exactly, but you’re not actually playing the game that your heart wants to play that, you know, you’re you’re you’re it’s as if you’re on a playground as a child. And there are some kids over here playing this game that you’re not interested in, but you have to play it you have to take it seriously. And that’s pretty demoralizing, I think, for the spirit or for the, you know, the soul, the psyche, it wants to play its own game.

Yeah, I yes, yes, yes, yes. it and frivolity and play are are so intertwined. And I think I think we I think you’re right. And I think we tend to as adults when we think about play, we think about games, we think about the structure of the games, we think about them being competitive. Right. And I grew up as a, you know, an artsy little dance music writer kid, as opposed to an athlete. So the

that I did was in those fields, which at that point wasn’t generally competitive with the way that I was doing it as a kid versus, you know, no shade on athletics for kids at all, because I think there’s all sorts of amazing stuff that can emerge out of that play. But I think if that’s the construct that you’re used to, and then you move into a place where I think it’s a fabulous metaphor, Josh, of, they’re all games that have rules that were,

stepping into. And if you’re, if you’ve been trained to play by the rules, and the if you play by the rules, then you win. That’s a whole different way of understanding how we how we can engage. So that’s one thought. Another thought is, one of the images that I love about play is that there’s a wonderful book, Homo Ludens. So rather than Homo sapiens, it is that humans are beings of play.

Leigh Melander (49:24.75)

and I’m going to blank on the author’s name right at the moment, but it’s a great book. he’s sort of looking at this sense of humans are creatures of story, humans are creatures of play. And if we lose that, that’s another sort of flattening. And one of the definitions that I love about play is not thinking about it as playing something, although we play an instrument, right? Like there’s all sorts of stuff. But the other way is the idea of play as a place of movement.

So if you are, if you’re a bicyclist and you tighten lug bolts too tightly down on the wheel of your bike, there will be no play in the wheel and the wheel won’t rotate. So there’s something about that space that I think we often as adults lose. And I think little kids find it, know, little kids left on their own devices will, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll make up the rules as they go, you know, that, that becomes a part of the creative process. And the,

there’s actually another Linda Sexton book that you might really like called Ordinarily Sacred. And she’s playing with that as an idea of play and creativity. And she’s got some wonderful stories of her kids and the neighbor’s kids and how they’re creating as they go. a really lovely book. again, it’s about that opening, right? It’s about allowing ourselves to breathe and to try different things. the

When we moved to the Catskills 15 years ago or so now, we opened a center that we do events and stuff. We’re doing a lot of weddings there, which I sort of fell into sideways. And it’s been an interesting way of sort of going deep into how that’s making meaning and how that’s play and reveling and celebrating and symbol and ritual in the same way. It’s actually become really intriguing. as we were getting this started, it was…

trying to figure out how to define this place to play in. And I had this really clear idea of what I wanted to do and no idea of how I could do it or if it was possible. And I think that’s where I really started to genuinely understand the power of that place of that kind of play and that kind of movement and not knowing what the outcome was gonna be.

Leigh Melander (51:43.702)

And as I said, sort of getting addicted to that. Because once you do it and you start, if you look at folks that are thinking in creative ways, either as artists or as starters of things as kind of entrepreneurial in their thinking, whether that’s in the business community or whatever their playground is, whatever the set of games that they’re choosing to play, it’s always about kind of how do I tweak that going back to your sense of how myth and story sit in people’s psyches. Like it’s that.

It’s how do I make it, how do I breathe life into it in a way that’s relevant in this context? And that’s that play of the movement, I think, in the wheel of a bicycle. And that’s where the fun stuff happens to me.

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a good metaphor. mean, you’re full of all these great metaphors. But it’s like, yeah, the seriousness itself, taking life too seriously, taking the games too seriously is a constricting factor. It tightens it down and then there is that lack of movement. Yeah.

become stress puppies, you know, and it’s that’s, that’s, you know, we work longer, harder than serfs did in medieval England, you know, it’s like, wait, what? How did we get there? That wasn’t the point. We got all this stuff that’s supposed to make our life easier. And it’s, and in some ways it adds enormously in another ways, it just made it faster. And so part of this is just a, and I think any kind of, any kind of introspective practice, you know, whether it’s

looking at story or meditating or goofing around or whatever, think that those provide openings into that sense of play and into that space and into somebody who is going deep into the ideas, through the structures of incredibly.

Leigh Melander (53:37.326)

carefully thought ways of being. don’t want to be flippant about religious constructs and mythologies and imagery and understandings of the world because they’re not stupid, they’re not pointless, they’re not unthought through, but I think that it’s that moment of where we intersect with them rather than going, here’s the thing we’re supposed to do and we’re going to go through. And we see that a lot with weddings. Like one of the things that we work

I do a fair amount of officiating for people and I spend a lot of time sort of trying to help tease out with couples, invite out a sense of what the rituals are that they want to make happen and that my sense is that rituals that really have meaning have some connection into, know, what’s larger than us, whether it’s historic or it’s family or it’s

subconscious or any of that kind of stuff. But it also has to have something to do with you. And so if we’re just going through the motions, saying the words that we’ve been told we’re supposed to say, I saw a great line, wish I’d come up with it, that tradition is peer pressure from dead people, which I love. if it’s tradition that we’ve not internalized and played with and made ours, that is kind of what it is. And so I spend a lot of time with people really sort of trying to help them see where…

where those intersections are, where those spaces are, where those edges are, and what can come through when people are willing to go there with me and everybody is. Some people are like, nope, just I want the words, hear the words, do the words, want to get it done, all I really want to do is go dance, and that’s fine. But I think they’ve missed out on something. But the people that go into it, like, all of a sudden are seeing themselves and their relationships and how they’re stepping forward into this next chapter of their relationship together.

in a really different, really cool way because they’ve played with it. And I’m often saying, know, go get a cup of coffee, have a glass of water, like go and just play. Here’s some, here’s here’s some sand tray toys, right, for you to play with as you’re putting this together. What are the images? I had a couple that was totally stuck at one time about how they wanted to frame this. And they finally sort of kind of,

Leigh Melander (55:57.87)

And often people will be like, well, here’s this sort of weird thing. It’s like, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, we’re into something. When I get that emotion from people, it’s like, yeah, okay, there’s some truth here. And they went, so the number 12 has shown up in our lives in all sorts of weird ways. And then they started and they were both really shy and they’d like really been struggling and they started telling me the stories of the number 12. And so their whole ceremony became…

this sort of weaving of these stories of the number 12 and what that meant to them and how that was moving them forward. Never in a million years would have guessed that that’s where we were gonna end up. And it was so cool. It’s one of my favorite ceremonies we’ve ever done. Cause it was so, there was so much depth there and it helped them see that depth and go in and sort of go, oh my God, here are these things that are connecting that we hadn’t ever actually put those glasses on and looked at. And there’s this symbiosis here with us that we…

sort of intuitively new, but we’re actually seeing it and feeling it in this very different way, which is going to change how we live together for the rest of our lives.

That is a cool story. They were able to weave kind of that tradition into their own story, make their own meaning of it. It reminds me of, I had another guy from the Joseph Campbell Foundation on Scott Neumeister and he had this great quote where he said, you have to figure out where you are in the story, but also where the story is in you. And by kind of coming at it from those two angles, you orient yourself in such a way that things become much more meaningful.

Yeah, that’s great. Scott’s great. That’s a great thought and it’s actually came me back to your comment about Jung and dream work and I think my favorite and I’ve dabbled a little bit in it. I’m one of those people that tend to remember my dreams. I’m very jealous, very envious of people that are like, I have a thing I can write it down. like but the image that I love that he was working was what happens if you pose the question?

Leigh Melander (57:59.49)

Like we assume that we’re doing the dreaming, it’s our dream. And his question was, well, what happens if you’re actually being dreamt by what’s in the dream? And again, God, a movement that opens up the place to space to play there. It’s really cool.

And then you get out of the, you dream of a snake, means this. if you dream of a witch, you know, whatever, you know, it’s like bad English poetry classes in eighth grade. Teachers went, is what the symbolism means. Like, uh, yeah, talk to the poet. Did you know the poet?

Yeah, that’s a funny thing about poetry and music in general. If you actually talk to the poet, if you actually talk to the musician, you see this all the time with musicians where people say, is this what your song means? Is that what your song means? And they’re like, yeah, that was on the back of a cereal box. it’s.

Yeah, I find often, particularly when I’m writing poetry, will find stuff that comes out that I had no idea was cooking in it. even, actually was a poem about sort of imagining stuff into being and it was sitting next to, my husband was decorating the Christmas tree at our house a number of years ago and he used to be a lighting designer for the theater. So it is a multiple hour process. find the lights and I’m like, bored.

So I’m trying to write this paper on imagination. And as I’m watching it and I had this sense of, sort of mythic sense of the tree and the symbolism of the tree and the sort of Dionysian connections into the Jesus stories and had a line about the crucifixion of this being. And I wrote it not the way crucifixion is spelled with an X, but I wrote it as crucifixion, as fictionalizing.

Leigh Melander (59:43.608)

didn’t even know it in the moment. Like, and honestly went back, read the poem multiple times and didn’t even see it. And then the faculty member that I was writing the paper for was like, that’s, that was an interesting move. And I’m like, yes, it was.

It just came out of your unconscious. You didn’t even know it was there.

And that’s that, Like that’s that stuff is coming through as I had no idea. I claimed it, of course. I said, yes, that was very calculated on my part. But that’s the fun part is like when you go back and you see that stuff and go, like this was working in me in ways that I didn’t even think about, which is pretty cool.

is very cool. Yeah, I think all this this frivolity, that’s still a tough one for me say. Frivolity. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Frivolity, play, the left handed path, stepping away from the story. Yeah, just living in a creative way, being weird, you know, making the myth your own or the ritual, the tradition your own.

For volatility. For volatility, yep. The quality, yeah.

Josh Mortensen (01:00:47.328)

I think that, yeah, every time you see people do that, they almost to a person turn around and try to encourage other people to do it as well.

It’s an incredibly freeing thing, I think. And once you’ve discovered it, it’s like, A, you want playmates, you want sort of fellow bad kids to go out and smoke the metaphoric cigarette with you behind the school, because there’s nothing more fun than when you’re being slightly bad to have playmates doing it with you. But I also think it’s so…

when you kind of allow yourself to fall into that, it’s really delightful. And I think we’re often missing that kind of delight in our lives. And so, yeah, it’s like sprinkling frivolous fairy dust wherever you go in somewhere or another. And I think a lot of people that do it would never characterize it that way. I was watching a John Batiste, just short little video of, and part of what I saw, I he’s a brilliant musician.

But what I love most about him is that he is in delight about this and sharing that delight in such a just, just like pours off of him. And I think as we think about the people that maybe this is actually really interesting. I haven’t had this thought before, but as we look at who’s attracting us, who’s scattering that, right? Versus who’s scattering the dark stuff or the heavy stuff or you must do this or you’re right or you’re wrong or you’re in or you’re out.

And I think that there’s something kind of wonderful about actually, I’m gonna do that actually tonight as I sit down and think about the people that I’m drawn to right now and why and what their energy is carrying and whether that feels like it’s generative energy in that way or not. That’s another, I think, way to go into it. Because I think often we can get pulled by both. And again, it’s the…

Leigh Melander (01:02:46.926)

depending on where we are in the moment and the speed at which we’re processing.

Leigh Melander (01:02:59.158)

So much information is coming to us so fast that and so much emotional hits like I’m really aware of I spend way too much time on Facebook and like I’ll go from rage to despair to laughing and a stupid joke to you know boom boom boom boom boom like just in moments and that’s pretty wacky.

Yeah, I think we’re all doing that. We all have our different channel for doing it, but yeah, we’re all kind of tied into that, which for me is one of the reasons why I really enjoy doing this podcast, even though it’s small, is just I have conversations with people like you and we went into it not knowing where we were going to get and intentionally.

That’s my favorite part. Yeah. don’t like knowing what the end is going to be. Why do it if you know where you’re going to land?

Yeah, exactly. So in a big way, feels like what for me what this is is a version of play and it’s my way of finding other people out there who can who can do it with me. So yeah, I really enjoy it. we are over our time. So maybe that’s a good place to end. But yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time. This was a lot of fun for me. There was a lot of kind of new synthesis for me as well. So I appreciate it.

Excellent. Well, a delight and thank you so much for having me on. It’s been been I’ve had my head down working on other stuff. So this has been a really delightful chance to to play to play with you and thanks for being my playmate.

Josh Mortensen (01:04:19.022)

That’s been cool. Yeah, thank you. So you have this kind of resort spillion that you have where people can come and do this imaginative play. I think you call it Imaginarium. You also have some writings. You have a book, Psyche’s Choice. If people want to find you and find the things that you’re doing, where would they go to look?

So a couple of places, the first and foremost place is our website for our place, which is called Spillion, S-P-I-L-L-I-A-N. They can find it at spillion.com. And the word spillion means to play, to jest, or to revel in Old English. It’s spiel in German. So I’m in the flow. I also have a website, lemolander.com, which I actually desperately need to update at the moment. I’ve got some old stuff on it, but the…

feeling the sort of the heart of it right at the moment. And yeah, come play with us and check out. We’re in the process actually of, we’ve been doing events for 11 years now, and I’m in the process right now of looking at different ways that we can make some of the ways in which we’re playing with the world accessible beyond having to be on site with us. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s gonna be launching in the next six months or so, which I’m excited about. So new writings and some.

online experiences and silly things like food and flavors. So I’m thinking about it as like tools and toys and fuel to be able to quest after your life in this kind of reveling way.

Okay, well awesome. Best of luck with that. if you ever want to come on and chat about what you’re, I don’t know what you’ve done recently, just let me know. I’d love to have you.

Leigh Melander (01:05:58.038)

I would love to come back and…