Windward with Joel A. Crichton

A conversation with Lewis Cardinal: communicator, educator, and peace-mongerer. About Indigenous perspectives, Reconciliation, leadership, and coming to consensus.

A conversation with Colin Mochrie, star of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.

How does one maintain an attitude of curiosity toward life's experiences, even (especially) when they are difficult? And how does that attitude translate to relating to current events, particularly in a hyper-partisan, judgmental, and superficial cultural moment?

Lisa Marchiano is a Jungian Analyst practicing in Philadelphia. She co-produces the podcast This Jungian Life, which takes a depth psychological approach in lively conversations about cultural currents, family dynamics, personal issues, and more.

We speak about the challenge of maintaining a psychological stance in the current cultural environment, touching especially on the issues of gender-affirmative therapy for minors, "rapid-onset gender dysphoria", and puberty blockers.

Lisa will be publishing a book in 2020, relating to motherhood as a path of individuation. She has also been published in Quillette, Areo, and Psychological Perspectives.

Her website is lisamarchiano.com, and This Jungian Life podcast can be found at thisjungianlife.com.

Mathematics is the purest of art forms. What does that mean? And why do most of us understand it as the least imaginative and most soul-destroying of all school subjects?

Pure mathematician Dr. Matt Mazowita and I discuss this, and we explore how people today could possibly reconnect with a source of inspiration and wonder that has been known since ancient times: number and shape. We also wrestle with the classic math problem of how to transform a cow into a donut.

Relating to Paul Lockhart's 2002 paper A Mathematician's Lament guides us into the philosophy of education. That paper can be found here.

Jennifer Pielak is an actor, personal coach, and experimental musical theatre artist from Vancouver. In particular, she has led the discipline of improvised musical theatre in the city. She combines this challenging and thrilling art form with her psychology background in the show Inside Voices, which is "all about giving the personas and judges in ourselves space to play (and sing)." 

We discuss about the intimate relationship between the disciplines of psychology and acting, as well as the (in my opinion) under-discussed overlap between therapy and artistic work. Therapy and art can feed one another, but the relationship can become dangerous.

A very open and playful conversation with some arresting and relevant insights about the whole psyche/art constellation.

Recorded at the Edmonton Community Foundation. Special thanks to Tynan Boyd, Ben Stevens, Mareike Friedrich, and Andrew Paul.