Morgan
Guest
00:01
I don't think that darkness is talked about enough. You know there's always a family secret swept under the rug and forgotten about and, you know, only brought up in hushed conversations. But I do think we're all better off if we bring those out into the light. Only recently have I been able to remember my dad as a good guy, which he was, to see him as a three-dimensional person rather than just that dark side. And this goes to seeing the shadows. I saw for so long his shadow because of the way he left the world and this comes from. I recently got his journal and my mom sent it to me and it goes right up to a few days before he passed and it's all very lighthearted and very, very funny and loving, you know. 

Ali
Host
00:59
Hello and welcome to The Ally Show. I'm Ali Eslamifar and I'm your host for the show. We are in our episode number five, where we are chatting with my dear friend, Morgan Condict. Morgan and I met about eight years ago where we both used to live in San Luis Obispo. At the time, our friendship started around a very interesting, creative, poetic conversation. I'm not going to spoil it. Hopefully, you will listen to it throughout the show and because of that I think it was a very special bond. And a few weeks ago, when I asked Morgan to have this conversation, he had so many great ideas which had it for a couple of times, and I'm really excited for you all to listen to this conversation. 

01:50
In this episode, we are talking about stories of someone's suicide. Also some stories of addiction. If this is a sensitive topic to you, please skip this episode and we hope that we see you in our future episodes. Also, if you or somebody that you know is suffering from any mental health issues, we highly encourage you to contact your mental health and or medical experts. 

02:23
Morgan's Accountability Campaign is about a three-week creative activity around embracing symbolism. Please stay tuned through the end of the episode to hear his amazing details around this campaign. Also, refer to the show notes if you want to join him on this campaign. One last thing before we start this great conversation if you want to support this podcast, the best way to support us is to follow us on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you can rate us up to a 5-star review. This would definitely help us to reach a broader audience who may benefit from this content. Now, without further ado, let's start our episode 5 with Morgan Condict. 

I am interviewing and chatting here with a very old friend, and this is interesting timing because it's also your birthday. Happy birthday, bud. 

Morgan
Guest
03:35
That's right. Yeah, thank you, man. It was a great day on Thursday. 

Ali
Host
03:39
Yeah, how was it? 

Morgan
Guest
03:42
It was good we had some friends from out of town, from Chicago, visiting. I don't get to see very often and it was just a few local friends. We all gathered and had a very nice time. I had a very low key, how I prefer it, and that's kind of how we did it. 

Ali
Host
03:57
How does it feel like to be 40? I know it's a very classic question, but I want to know. 

Morgan
Guest
04:04
Yeah, man, I don't know. I'm definitely of the mind that those numbers are insignificant. I know 60-year-olds who act younger than I do and I know 30-year-olds who seem like they're 70. I've seen enough of that to not put too much weight in those things. But you can't avoid it. I'm a 40-year-old man now. I remember my parents turning 40 as a kid and thinking like they are old. So that's really the one thought that came to me. I guess I am old. I mean, of course an older person would laugh at me, but I think in my reaching back to my young mind, I can confirm I am an old guy. 

Ali
Host
04:49
Just a little bit of a background for our amazing listeners. I know Morgan back from San Luis Obispo. I used to work and live in San Luis Obispo for two years at a company called Expert Exchange. That's where Morgan and I met for the first time as we were on the pre-recording. Morgan said an interesting story that why didn't you actually tell everyone how did we meet and how did we get to start chatting about like deep stuff? 

Morgan
Guest
05:18
As a college kid, which I was then at like in my early 30s. I had an untraditional trajectory in that regard. As a college man, I was working at Expert Exchange doing various things, mostly QA work. I had worked in video game testing and that was sort of my next step. So I was doing that work and, if I am being honest, my days were pretty dull there. I always looked forward to going to classes, I liked the people a lot and it was a good place to work for. That really fit nicely with that time of my life. But you know the job, my duties were very sort of dry, so I looked forward to anybody coming by to distract me. 

06:06
And pretty early on in your time there you stopped by my desk and we just started like just randomly talking and the way you do when you are trying to avoid getting back to work. And I am an English major and I was really into poetry at the time and had really like been taking up a lot of my attention. So when you told me you were from Iran, I brought up Rumi or maybe you did, and because we had been talking about poetry, and you started talking about how great Rumi is in Farsi and the original Farsi. And you I don't remember if you read some off like computer or if you just recited some from memory, but you recited some Rumi in Farsi and I heard the musicality of it and I was like wow, mind-blowing, because you know, translated poetry can be clunky. And then, of course, you are presented with a bunch of different translations and you are comparing them and trying to wondering what is closest to the original. So to hear the original from you was a very cool moment. 

Ali
Host
07:13
I, and when you were sharing that story for your recording, I was like, yes, and now I know why we clicked so well back then Because honestly, like Rumi has a big place in my heart. But I think, just beyond that, poetry has always been something that even as a kid I was like. In my own personal time I was like writing poetry and nobody knew about it. Actually, maybe my mom is going to be shocked about it. She's. She actually knows a little bit of it, but a lot of people don't know this because it was my one thing that I only had for myself, and Rumi has been a very interesting sort of like point of connection for me with a lot of good people in my life and I appreciate it. So that was a fun story you shared. 

08:01
I also want to share a little bit about how I felt about it, because for me I was at the time I was a product designer and, of course, like just graduated from my master at ASU. I really like missed that sort of like creative conversations and at a very dry tech company you don't get much of it, but I think with you and a couple of other folks during my time in San Luis Obispo, I was really able to kind of like get that creative side of my mind happy and I remember also like we were going out with friends, with a bunch of other folks from the company or even outside of the company. What a great time, what a great city and what a great place and what great human beings there. To be honest, like is there? Is there anything from your experience in San Luis Obispo you want to share with the audience? 

Morgan
Guest
08:56
I grew up in past Robles, which is 30 minutes sort of north and inland from San Luis Obispo, and that was like the city for us, even though it's a fairly small town. But I only knew it in these like brief weekend visits growing up. So to work there and be immersed in it was like a real kind of realizing once that's what I'd been missing. I think being able to go on a lunch break, on a walk through the nature there, up into the hills, over overlooking the ocean, it's really one of the most beautiful places on earth. Los Arroz is a funny place because it's sort of it's divided into these two pretty different cultures. More so recently it's got the wine industry with which of course attracts a lot of high society yuppie types who come out to get hammered and go spend their money downtown. So you have this, this funny dichotomy between them and the locals who, many of whom are the farmers that grow the grapes or related in some way to the ag industry or just various other small-town industries. Yeah, you got a lot of lower income. You know small town country folk like myself though I sort of am a, I can camouflage and move into that wine world. Now I've learned how to do that. Anyway, I grew up in a peculiar situation out there. I grew up in a ghost town on the outskirts of Pasarobles, so I've only recently accepted that terminology ghost town. But it was a plot of land with 13 homes on it and only five or six of them were occupied, and sometimes fewer and sometimes more. Most of them are in various states of disrepair, and this plot of land was owned by my grandpa. It was a real estate venture he took on in the 60s. This is a lot of detail but I think it's key to my psyche. I'm realizing is growing up in this place that was in decay and was an immense privilege to be in in a lot of respects. You know, it's this quiet, beautiful plot of land on the outskirts and it's a free place to live. Our family didn't pay rent because it's, you know, family-owned. But there's this decay around us, there's like, and the homes are not in great shape. I grew up out there and it was a beautiful. 

11:43
Early childhood, like most of my childhood, was pretty terrific. It got darker. There was a much darker stretch toward my teenage years where addiction and mental illness and mental health issues were prevalent, not just in my immediate family, but in the houses around me which were occupied only by family. So it was a very strange, very strange upbringing. Yeah, so I grew up, you know, drawing, I spent, I spent a lot of time on my own as a young kid, but my brother and I lived alone. 

12:21
When I was in sixth grade, we moved into a house on our own, so my brother, just a few years older than me, and myself were living next door to my parents, close enough that we were. We still felt kind of as a unit. But yeah, we had a lot, a lot of freedom over there and it became the place where our friends would come. Everyone would want to go there because there's no parents in the house with us and so, again, that's an immense privilege. In some respects we, we, we did whatever the heck we wanted and we had all this space to ourselves. It was like a lost boys clubhouse in a lot of ways, but you know, lack the structure that the traditional, you know three bedroom house or whatever would accommodate a kid. 

13:06
But yeah, growing up I I wasn't doing, didn't do great in school. In high school things got really tough. I might be going into too much detail right here. But again, this is like at the core of me. The more I realize, the more I explore who I am, the more I realize this ghost town is sort of a, the single symbol I would point to to explain myself, because it's a bunch of opposites. It's a bunch of a lot of comfort and a lot of pain and a lot of conflict and a lot of peace, and this ghost town, kind of, you know, embodies all of that. So I'll spray all the gritty details of living out there. 

13:52
Shortly after high school I moved to Santa Cruz with a friend of mine. Enrique actually worked at Extra Exchange with us and I was there just for a couple months before I learned that my father committed suicide, which was the big event of my life really, but certainly of my young adult life. That was the shift. That was like a switch being flipped where the fun and games and the levity and the lightheartedness and the free feeling of being out on my own and all that sort of was suddenly flipped on. You know, I hadn't, despite the things I experienced growing up, I hadn't thought of the world as like an incredibly painful, difficult place. I haven't thought of existence as a trial, with that introduced that idea and it's something I've dealt with since. So that happened. I remained in Santa Cruz and I had friends around who really supported me through that and we managed to have a pretty great time. You know, like when I think back there's a PTSD element that wipes your memory when these things happen, because so much of your subconscious is occupied with coping and processing with this trauma that you're not recording what is happening around you. So it's a very blurry time in my life. 

15:23
Not long after that I ended up in San Francisco, just stumbled into the tech industry like literally walked into a door on a whim and because I saw some sign for interviews and ended up testing video games at Sega you know the Sonic the Hedgehog company, tested video games for four years and kind of climbed the ladder as much as I could in that, worked at a couple companies, couple startups, and then I mean that was stage two of my 20s, which was even more magical than the first possible, just a full awakening. At that time I had learned to cope more. I had really kind of developed some skills in coping which allowed me to live more presently and actively and be involved in the city and life up there and develop friend groups and things like that, and that was wonderful. Quite a lot happened since then. I moved two years ago to Richmond, virginia, between San Francisco and today. 

16:35
I got my English degree focusing a lot on poetry, with the intent of teaching, and have worked in support roles in education for the past few years. I tried my hand at traditional teaching and I don't have the hurting skills. I'm not a great controller of the chaos of the classroom. I just don't have that intense presence that's required to do that. So I've done a lot of kind of tutoring and I've substituted top for a while. In English, though, I like talking with students about reading and writing, and that's sort of what I've done these past few years. 

Ali
Host
17:18
I have a couple of reactions and also follow-up questions. I think it's interesting to start how you keep going back to the ghost town. That kind of resonates with me, the way I also think about parts of my childhood and also my hometown as kind of like a place that carries a lot of those traumas. It became a spot that I can point the stories to. It's like things that happened there, things that happened in the ghost town, I think for you as a creative person. I would wonder how you picture that goes down in your drawings, because I've seen a lot of. You know I'm a big fan of your drawings. I've seen a lot of very interesting things in your drawing. That's kind of like one area that I have some reactions but also questions, follow-up questions. Two, I think, the story about losing your father. I think at the same time that it's very painful I relate to it personally, but also just hearing one of your parents committing suicide, I'm curious what you went through your head around that experience and, of course, how you coped also. 

18:47
I think, is very interesting, as a creative person, that numbness. You turn that numbness to something a lot more meaningful. There are three or four areas where you want to start. 

Morgan
Guest
19:00
Yeah, I'll start with the first thing you mentioned the creativity in the ghost town and sort of being shaped by that experience. So my artwork has been criticized by mostly by my mother as being too dark, too dark when I was younger, violent and kind of angsty. I grew up into heavy metal and punk and stuff like that and really that stuff resonated with me because it allowed me to play with the ugliness that was around me. I think for a lot of people that punk and metal music and horror films you see a lot of kids with kind of troubled upbringings are into horror and I think it's because it's a playfulness. It's the same elements, it's fear and it's anger and it's sadness, but it's an element of play as brought in and that's what drawing for me was. I was toying with the scary imagery. I love the monsters and as I grew up the monsters became symbolic of things like I would have a sarcasm monster that as me, expressing my frustration with a lack of frankness in conversation with people, and one of the scenes or motifs of my childhood there that can't be avoided when talking about this stuff. 

20:32
I had two uncles who lived there, one of whom I was very close to as a kid and they got into heavy drugs, amphetamines and things like that and became more distant. We lived in the same town so we solved these guys and became these guys who I connected with their families fall apart and then lose contact with their children. And one of my uncles developed schizophrenia, or rather that manifested from his drug use, or maybe it's always unclear what came first. There was this interplay between his schizophrenia and his intense drug use and he was a neighbor and he would scream in his house at night and have these intense mental health crises that I would fall asleep hearing them, hearing him howling about various things. That was one of those things where I was like only recently have I realized that may have been a trauma, because I always looked at the one event in my life, my father's suit. There's my trauma. I have the trauma and I realized other people have helped point this out to me like, wow, man, that's a bit intense, so that sort of stuff was going on and many I mean there are many, many incidences. I can point to violence and you know despair that I witnessed outside of my immediate family and within and yeah, I always creativity. Thank God came to me or I came to it maybe, and I used it like, sometimes obsessively, and sometimes I forgot about it. I should also mention that this is an interesting fact that both of these uncles were incredible artists better than I'll ever be, I suspect. I have their paintings on my walls and I admired them so much as a kid and it's such a odd thing to have maybe inherited that from them or seen that practice in their lives and loved it and clung to it. 

22:52
And in fact, maybe a relevant story is my uncle, who was a schizophrenic and for a good decade of my life he was just somebody I would see like a shadow. You'd see him move into his house and he'd sneak out and walk into town and you'd see a light on at night and you'd hear him yelling in there and occasionally there would be some sort of drama with him and another family member. But he was this kind of scary figure for myself and my friends. You know, another component of this is the whole town, a small town. The whole town knows this guy. He walks around town and you'll see him planting in the street. You know and people knew, oh, that's one of Morgan's relatives. So it became tied to me in this way and he became this intimidating, scary figure, this symbol of like what I might become as a conduct myself, and it scared me away from grub use. 

23:55
Eventually, in my early 20s, I came back to our town I think I was living in Santa Cruz at the time and I decided I didn't want him to be this boogeyman and I'm just going to go talk to him and see how he responds to that, because I loved his artwork and I hadn't seen it in years. It was all pulled up in this house with him, you know. So I walk over there and I just knock on the door and he answers and he's startled to see anybody and I say, hey, I'm interested in seeing your artwork. I remember really loving it as a kid and he lit up and was perfectly coherent and brought me in and showed me his paintings and explained them in a not so coherent way. But he walked me through his years of artwork and he hadn't created any artwork in a long time. But that one little moment turned him from, you know, rehumanized him and took the power this like traumatic power of his away and made him a human again. 

25:00
From that point on I could see him and say hi, how are you doing? I'd run into him in town and, instead of hiding from him and pretending he's not you know, I don't know who this guy is I'd go up and say how are you doing? You need a ride home. You know he was. Yeah, I got to see him as a decent, very troubled person who, in many ways, was just a symbol of our culture's failure addressing mental health. Yeah, so that stuff informs my creativity. Still, I think it always, always, will have a darkness and a creepiness and a weirdness to it which is just, you know, in my bones and I resonate with that a lot. 

Ali
Host
25:44
I think we talked about it even in the past few times. 

25:48
For me, I totally get this, because there is always like this shadow in our lives, and life is not always like good music. 

26:03
There's also like, sometimes, harsh music, and it's that combination and that balance between realizing the dark sides and the shadows, of course, realizing those and knowing where we are now and having an appreciation for what we have, not to be too positive, but actually understanding what, what happened in the past and what's the reality today. 

26:30
So until we don't see and until we don't meet our shadows, I don't think we have a path to understanding ourselves. And that's why I always like connect so much with people who understand that darkness very well and appreciate it in a creative way. That's why, like I personally, like techno music does the same thing as like trash metal probably did to you, and really accepting that shadow, meeting that shadow and really feeling comfortable with it, and that's that's where your self awareness just starts. I find it hard to find a fine line between the dark side and the bright side, which is like what we are trying to build. Finding that fine line to me is life, finding a balance between meeting your shadow and being okay with it and taking the next steps, but knowing that there is a fine line to always go to that dark side. That awareness, I think, is something unique very well said. 

Morgan
Guest
27:44
I want to say real quick that makes me think of it some way out grateful I was to have a varied experience. I'm not thankful that my family members were suffering in these ways, but I am thankful that suffering could have some positive reverberating effects and I think that in the long term it manifested in, I think, something very useful, which is exactly that I became, and I think a lot of children of addicts were people with that addiction in their family. They are given this opportunity to see. This might be what happens to me if I am a. This looks a lot like how I might look if I get involved in the family and show each other Our flaws and our strengths in ways that, yeah, it gives us access to our darkness and our lightness. I don't think that darkness is talked about enough. You know there's always a family secret swept under the rug and forgotten about and, you know, only brought up in hushed conversations. But I do think we're all better off if we bring those out into the light. 

Ali
Host
29:04
You mentioned the story about losing your father. However much you want to go into the details, I'm kind of like curious personally, because I lost my father right before actually joining Expert Exchange, like a year before that, and I know some of what happens when you lose a parent. I think there's some sort of a trauma, as you called out, the trauma of, like the suicide. I'm curious to know a little bit more about that and what went through your mind and the numbness after it was also like something interesting I want to dive in. 

Morgan
Guest
29:39
Yeah, I mean a lot of this pain. You're very familiar with that and I know you've had other guests speak about losing friends and family members, so I guess I'll speak specifically to maybe the suicide component of that, which is special to use a maybe strange word for that but it's unique in that it feels like a betrayal. You know there's this when somebody you love commits suicide. There's a sense that, well, there's a very, you know, immediate like what the hell? Like why didn't they say anything? Did I even know them? There's a lot of this. And then there's, of course, like how dare they inflict this pain on the family? And it's a pain that had very material, it could be measured very directly. It created further addiction and trauma and caused harm Well, like a really, really apparent harm. So, yeah, I think that's something that only recently have I been able to remember my dad as a good guy, which he was, you know, like to see him as a three dimensional person rather than just that dark side. And this goes to seeing the shadows, like you mentioned it's. I saw for so long his shadow because of the way he left the world, and this comes from. 

31:24
I recently got his journal, or like a. He was doing typing practice on our home computer, and this was in the early 2000s, around 2004,. He was doing this daily journal in order to practice typing and my mom sent it to me and it goes right up to a few days before he passed, and it's all very lighthearted and very, very funny and loving. You know, and it's a tragedy that suicide hides this loving dimension of people. And you know, there's so much more to his story. 

32:31
He had suffered from depression and had been on antidepressants, and he was also an alcoholic, an addict of some sort. I don't know. You know the details, I don't know fully, but he was an alcoholic at the very least, and so there's these different components that really, in a lot of ways, are outside of him. I mean, he missed a refill on his antidepressant medication the day before he died, and so there was this. Our family was actually part of a class action lawsuit. I do think he would probably still be here if it weren't for that. But there are so many other factors. I mean the depression itself. His physical body was failing him. He was out of work due to severe pain, back issues and things I don't know. Being able to see in hindsight, the complexity of him as a person, the complexity of his death and his life. That's been the most useful when it comes to moving on and coping and being happy. It's not seeing him or his death as any one thing, but this massive mixture. 

Ali
Host
33:56
I think you very beautifully started this part by saying that you've been able to see him more as a 3D, 3 dimension and I think, as you were just going on and going on, I could see the dimensions. I really want to express this. You hear someone did this or someone committed suicide, or someone is depressed Any of the mental health stories that we talk about. You hear one thing that's the outside story we're seeing, but I think inside it's really important to also see the story from inside, the more empathetic view, and also in your story, for example, missing a prescription by a day or two when you see that from inside, things start becoming a lot more easier not to accept but to be pictured. When we are able to picture stories like this, it's just allowing us to cope better with them, because we also start understanding that we have that 3D view in ourselves. Then you start paying more attention to that part. In your case, and sometimes in my case, it comes as a creative outcome Because we pay attention to that 3D-ness. It's not just always external, there's also insight that we have to pay attention to in ourselves. That was beautifully said. I think you very nicely walked us through that experience. Thank you very much for that. 

35:46
In my experience, one thing that recently helped is to admit that in my experience with my father that was also multi-dimension. It wasn't always like Because for a very long time I was missing my father because, oh yeah, he was this good man, he had all these good impacts in my life. But frankly, as I'm going through therapy and so many other things not that it was his fault, but he was also the reason of a lot of my traumas in my life and I think realizing multi-dimensional impacts that family members, parents they can have in our lives not to hold them accountable for it, it's just life but realizing those aspects it also really helps you to finally figure out I was not able to cope in the past nine years. Now I'm actually finally able to cope with losing him after nine years because, I was able to figure out the multi-dimensional aspect of my relationship with him. 

Morgan
Guest
36:58
When I think of coping with moving on with life after that incident. After that I didn't go to therapy until well over, I think, ten years after that happened well over ten years and I only went very briefly. I didn't find it super helpful because I think I didn't take the time to find the right therapist for me. It was useful, but only for a short time. I stopped going. I highly encourage therapy. I've seen it work magic on everybody, pretty much everybody I know that's done. It has benefited tremendously. But I was doing my own things and a lot of it had to do with just living it with that combined light and darkness in my mind and wrestling with grief, really writing about it and talking about it. 

38:00
I met my wife right after my dad died. Actually we'd known each other, we'd been sort of in the same friend group, but she had experienced immense grief prior to meeting me. She had lost her mother at eleven, at eleven years old, to cancer and had been engaged to a friend of mine. He died from marocancer leukemia and she'd lost him. So she had just gone through so much. We were talking, we were already connecting, and then that happened with my father Right as our relationship was sort of taking off. Having her there was like somebody to show me the ropes. I really lucked out and in some ways I had it easier than a lot of people do. I had a partner who had been through it really intensely to talk with, yeah, and I think that was huge for me, talking with her and talking with friends. I'm thankful to have friends who you know a lot of people you meet kind of shut down when serious stuff is brought up and they don't want to go there. That's too heavy for them or this is getting weird. I've got some friends who are really great. Not only will they humor me when my conversation veers into the dark, but they'll actually check in on me and bring stuff up and ask me about it. So that's been huge, just keeping that stuff from getting too dusty and letting it fester my subconscious and turn into whatever negative behavior it might turn into. 

40:04
I did struggle. We had a time, a few years shortly after I was working at Experts Exchange, my wife's father died in a fairly traumatic situation when my father and I were in a house fire and that pushed us to our brink because we had both been there and kind of nurtured each other out of grief and helped each other along, and that happened. We kind of weren't taking very good care of ourselves at the time. We were going out and drinking with friends and self-medicating in certain ways and just not being very good to our bodies, not exercising, and this would, looking back, I would call these like the dark days of my life which, to be honest, weren't. 

40:53
You know. This wasn't like a requiem for a dream or a transpotting situation, it was just a dark time and this was a big blow to us. But we're focusing on how we got out of this stuff and again, this situation. We transcended it by holding each other accountable and recognizing when one of us was going too far into our heads, retreating. I think we both have the tendency to do that. I certainly do. I think suffering for me looks like cutting, like going dark to my family. I no longer talking a lot. 

Ali
Host
41:40
So I'm kind of like curious as far as like your coping mechanism. You talked about a few things you moved around from Santa Cruz back to Paso and San Luis Obispo area and then even now you moved away from West Coast, now in Richmond. It feels like you've been on a journey, kind of like want to understand how's your coping mechanism been throughout this process and things you've used to kind of like get yourself into a mental health state that you love to have. 

Morgan
Guest
42:18
I've been in Richmond, virginia, now. I've been here for two years and that was a huge shakeup in my life. I've only ever lived in California, so we kind of picked this place at random, like we'd never visited Richmond before we moved here. We'd passed through Virginia before and thought it was a beautiful place that we would consider living in. But really moving out here was sort of one of those like late pandemic, like screw this, let's go try something new. Anyway, yeah, that's been a huge, wonderfully positive change. Honestly, we were in something of a dark patch before moving out here. A lot of that just had to do with where the world was, you know, 2021. Just like sort of in that waning end of the pandemic, and we were in a dark space and coming out suddenly, being surrounded, like I can go in any direction and everything is brand new to me, hugely stimulating, hugely inspiring and even still I mean two years in I'm like I could drive now it's 15 minutes in any direction and find something new with a bunch of history and meet new people. So that's been and I highly recommend it anybody who's thinking of picking up and relocating Go somewhere that you know very little about. You know, do some research to make sure it resonates with you, your interests will be Fed in that area. But man, is it a revitalizing experience? But Going back to my, my coping mechanisms, one of my most valued coping mechanisms is reading and writing and I've always read novels and short stories. 

44:12
I love those growing up. But going back to school in my early 30s, going to college, introduced me to poetry. I had a couple professors who are incredibly well versed in poetry and very patiently presented it to our classes and and we had conversations around, you know, classic poems and, and something that was a real revelation to me, even though, of course, I've been exposed to poetry and like writing it and everything growing up. But as an adult who had been taking in narratives, just just stories have a beginning and an end and are designed and have lessons and To suddenly find these small morsels, a single page that is packed with meaning, that relies as much on the reader as it does the author, you know it was huge for me. So I went to Cal Poly. 

45:15
I ended up taking a bunch of poetry classes and getting really involved in it. I entered contests. I won the Academy of American Poets contest, which, which was a big moment for me, and and my poems were always kind of goofy, like I, I guess, sort of like my drawings I brought some silliness and some darkness Into it, like one of my. One of the poems I won the contest for was about going into a sunglass hut that doesn't have a bathroom and the and the sunglass hut. You look outside and it's it's taken off from her and it's floating up toward the sun, and now you're trapped in the sunglass without a bathroom and you're moving closer to the sun. Very, very stupid and not deserving of any sort of award, but I managed. I think there was just enough irony in there. 

Ali
Host
46:13
Anyway, yeah, good or any good or bad PR for sunglass hut, I guess they take it. 

Morgan
Guest
46:21
They're back on the map because of me. But yeah, poetry it it. I mean, can you kind of read you a short, very short poem that? 

Ali
Host
46:32
express yes, please. I was actually just gonna ask. 

Morgan
Guest
46:36
I had suspected this would come up, and there was. There's an Emily Dickinson poem called I Dwell in Possibility. That is specifically about why poetry is so great and more freeing than the narrative literature, prose. So here's the poem I dwell in possibility. A fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows, superior for doors of chambers, as the cedars impregnable of eye and for an everlasting roof, the gambrels of the sky Of visitors, the fairest for occupation, this the spreading wide my narrow hands to gather paradise. So it's a. It's a dense poem, by Emily Dickinson. 

47:28
She packs a lot into very little and that was beautiful and what are the lines I love in that is the of chambers as the cedars, impregnable of eye and for an everlasting roof, the gambrels of the sky, this idea that this house of of poetry she calls it, I dwell in possibility. She's talking about poetry compared to a finer house or fairer house than prose and she's saying these rooms are Impregnable like the chambers of cedars you're seeing inside, like a cedar bush house, just complex, web of branches and, and you know, I think there's berries in there just a mess. You know that you can't. You can't pierce with your gaze. That's what I love about poetry is there's no solving it. You can read a novel I mean a lot of novels. You can read and feel like you've really gotten everything out of it, but a little discussion of the metaphors and you know some kind of reading about context and things like that poetry. 

48:39
To me, I suppose it reflects my own life, like my own life is one that Is not a traditional trajectory. Here I am at 40 years old and I I'm still on the periphery of a real career. I'm in a support role. I support roles and I have been for a while. You know I've dabbled in Real career trajectories these past and I can't quite settle on one. I and in so many other ways my life is not on the typical course of a life. 

49:16
Then you know, I know you're a fan of Joseph Campbell, Ali, yeah, and I have to. I love it and I think it's incredibly useful to think of narrative structure in relation to our lives and to look at the way in which these narratives, the heroes, journey. They're so similar across all cultures and times. Like we think of ourselves as the heroes in our stories, going out into the world, overcoming obstacles. You know, we have a mentor and we, we conquer the beast and we return to our known world with our lesson or licks or whatever that symbolically represented, and I think that there's a heck of a lot of truth to that. 

50:01
You can apply that on anybody's life and sort of form their life into that narrative and tell that story that way. But so often, especially in the short term, our lives don't fit that. I think we are. Everyone is the hero in their story, but they're often also the villain and they're everything else. They're the whole spectrum of characters and mentors aren't exactly mentors always. I mean, there is no neatness of a narrative arc does not apply to our lives in a lot of ways and I think so much of social media kind of amplifies this need to narrativize your life, to build a story of yourself, to build a consistent brand. And poetry helps me come to terms with the fact that I am inconsistent, I'm a bundle of contradictions, and poetry in all its forms has been hugely beneficial to me. 

Ali
Host
51:09
The poem that you read for us, by the way, reminded me of some of the poems that we have a very famous Iranian, Persian poet, Sohrab Sepehri. For my Farsi listeners, for my Iranian listeners, they know about him very well that he also does the same thing. There's so much packed visualization back to back and it's up to you where you want to take the story that you're listening to, and I think what you just read reminded me of that and gave me this hint of how much a poem can dimensionalize how we are thinking about life. With some simple word, you can be taken to this 3D VR experience in a way that you can just use those words to define your word the way you want it, and I think that's so powerful as a tool to have in our toolkit. 

52:08
Following that, I was reminded of another conversation we had about me going to Burning Man. 

52:18
Before going to Burning Man, I called you, and we had a very good, deep conversation. You called out something very important there that really helped me throughout my experience there, which helped me to be so much more present. A lot of time, to your point, like social media or just like the new way of living, is putting a lot of pressure on us to have this perfect life and to always have a story for something, to always record something, to always be productive, but sometimes, honestly, we just have to drop it. We just have to accept the moments as they are. Throughout my Burning Man experience our conversation because you told me, just try to also see and observe and don't think that much about creation while you are there. And it was super helpful, your advice. I remembered our conversation, I can tell you, over 20 times while I was there, because it just became a really good reminder for me that you're not here to create, you're here to absorb, you're here to understand, you're here to just get lost. 

Morgan
Guest
53:21
My uncle who's the painter with schizophrenia. He has these incredibly elaborate ink drawings that are pointillistic and you can go in at a square inch and find a bunch of stuff going on. He said don't get lost in ink. He said be careful because when you're crouched into the paper with this tiny.005 pen and doing this little detail like, you lose so much, like it's too small of a space to exist within. 

53:53
And yeah, like going to Burning Man or any of the concerts or these experiences, like putting your phone away and enjoying the little bits of it, the smells and the, and poetry. I mean the main reason I love poetry is because, selfishly, it just I live more aware, like when I'm, especially when I'm writing poetry, when I'm thinking of, which I haven't done it much of in these last couple years, but I've done a little and my brain is in this observational state of like taking things in. I'm just noticing more and I'm picking up little bits and patterns and motifs. And I'll make the segue into birdwatching, which is sort of a natural sister activity of poetry. Almost any poet whose book you pick up is going to have some mention of birds in there, and some some more than others. But my wife and I, like a lot of you know, 30, 40 year olds, got pulled into birdwatching A couple years before the pandemic and through the pandemic it was a huge help setting out a bird feeder and acknowledging, you know, identifying the species that are coming to your feeder and writing down and things like that. But, more importantly, going out into the world and hiking and suddenly having these new symbols, like a, which is which a bird, can become a powerful symbol. Of course you want to see it as the animal it is and that's the goal of birdwatching is to see it for what it really is, if that's possible. But by doing so you you're inviting new symbols into your life, and I mean we have countless stories of a specific birds that show up at weird times and sometimes it's in an ugly parking lot and you see an owl species you've never seen before standing on this crappy, broken tree above you, like it can be in this really unexpected areas. 

55:55
One example is a roadrunner, which is a bird I had seen once in my life and it was coming home from the beach and waking up. The Californians know this experience well as a kid you go to the beach and you wear yourself out playing in the waves and you wear yourself out and you come home in this like coma of a sleep in the backseat and when you get to your house, I will, I will come to my parents being like whoa, road runner. Right in front of our house and we pulled up and you see a road runner which is a large, fairly tall bird, I don't know, a good foot and a half tall and they're you know, they run on their feet and they look peculiar and they have these crazy eyes and I just remember it left a big impression on me. They ran off and we were like, wow, road runner, and I knew by my parents reaction that that was a special bird. I never saw one again until 25 years later, 30 years later. 

56:51
At 25 years later, my wife and I are out looking for birds and I'd start telling her about this road, the road runner story. I tell that exact story to her and we turned around. We're walking back to the car and our road runners in the road and it's the second road runner I've ever seen. I haven't seen one since and you know, oh, a tree brought me there indirectly, but it put me in the space of noticing details and inviting symbolism and synchronicities into my life. I'd say the magic of that has been the single most powerful positive force mentally in terms of mental health for me. 

Ali
Host
57:47
Is there any open conversation from like anything that we talked about that you want to close before I go to my final closing questions? 

Morgan
Guest
57:55
I just want to reiterate the importance of disconnecting from the idea of expectation or over-expectation. I don't think it's good for us to be constantly looking for something to happen and bringing things into fruition, and I do believe in this the idea of manifesting, which has become very popular the idea of thinking something into reality. 

58:23
I do think there's a lot of truth to that and power to that practice, but on the other hand, I've prayed and beat my head into a wall at times, thinking, wishing upon something to happen and doing what I can to bring it about. And it doesn't happen. I think we need to be aware of that as a possibility and not be destroyed when that doesn't happen and not let that failure though it's not a failure, I would argue not let that, but disappointment define us. I think it's important to just keep a broad perspective of things and be aware of the contradictions in ourselves and in the world around us. Invite complexity, invite weirdness, yeah, and play around a bit. 

Ali
Host
59:23
Man. This resonates a lot and I'm recalling the advice you gave me before going to Burning Man. It really helped me to have zero expectations. 

Morgan
Guest
59:38
It calmed me down. 

Ali
Host
59:39
It also helped me to have zero expectations and great things happen. I think there's also a very interesting thing about what you said about not having that much expectation or not having any expectation, because when you don't expect something, when you avoid too much planning, then you have that capability to flow and to maneuver. Back to a surfing conversation we had. I got a really great advice. As I surfed for the first time in my life, I got a really good advice from this teacher. That was yes, your body is ready and good, but your stiff, try to maneuver, try to lay with the waves instead of trying to understand it. You don't have to understand it, just maneuver, just go wherever it takes you. And when I took that advice, I could easily jump on the wave and go. And I think life can become like that if we avoid having expectations and too many of these planning. Some of it might be good I don't know. Example by example it's different. Context by context it is different but having that capability to see things and experience things without expectation and maneuvering through it. 

01:01:09
I think that's what makes life more interesting and more real, and that's why I love that advice you gave me and I keep going back to it, to be honest. 

Morgan
Guest
01:01:19
So thank you. What better teacher of that lesson is there than grief? I mean, when you lose somebody and they're no longer in existence with you, you're kind of given a sporking path, and one way is to fight against it and to rage against it and to numb yourself, and another is to follow, like, feel the feelings and move with it and adapt and let it change you completely, which I think is ultimately what grief does, is it's just changes you into something completely different, and if you're trying to stay the person you were before all that happened, then you're going to be it's going to be a torture fest. 

Ali
Host
01:02:18
That resistance. You're right, I think a lot of time we get stuck because we want to be stuck. We want to be stuck in the past. We get stuck because we are like, oh no, I don't want my current situation to change, but no, you have to accept that. 

Morgan
Guest
01:02:42
I don't know Like. 

Ali
Host
01:02:43
does that resonate with you? 

Morgan
Guest
01:02:45
Big time. I disconnected from who I thought I should be and I just let who I was guide the way, and that I can point to a lot of specific decisions. Going back to college was one of those where I was like I'm 30. I missed the boat. I'm done Like college. Nobody in my family goes to college. I don't want to be the old guy in class, this and that, but that was one of those things where I was like screw it, I want to do this and I think it will benefit me greatly. I'm interested in this stuff here. I am not working in some impressive role with my English degree. I'm not an author or anything like that, not making a bunch of money. But man, I wouldn't change it for the world. I set aside the expectation of becoming the next RL Stein. 

Ali
Host
01:03:49
As we always ask from all of our friends and guests who show up on the show. I'm kind of curious if there are any activities that you would like to do or you would like to recommend to our audience to do for a month, to do it with you, to do it with themselves, so that it's something that helps them with their mental health, as an activity that you would recommend. 

Morgan
Guest
01:04:14
Sure, yeah, I've listened to your past episodes. I saw this coming, maybe over-prepared for it, so I'll keep it very simple. I came up with maybe a three-week challenge and go with the flow. Do it however you want. The three things that I think are very helpful in accessing this headspace that I'm always trying to access, often failing, by the way. I think an important part of this challenge and everything else is knowing that you're probably going to be failing more than you succeeding, and be okay with that Three-week challenge. 

01:04:52
One week engage in some sort of divination practice. That's sort of where you do some sort of ritual to invite symbolism into your life, and I think the best one, the ones that people are most familiar with, are like the tarot cards or the Yi Qing, the Chinese Yi Qing, which both of those you can look up online. You can even do it online if you want. Look up the rules. They can be done very quickly or you can build your whole life around them. I mean, these are incredibly deep, complex rituals and practices. Do a divination ritual of your own design. Use some structure like the Yi Qing or the tarot or whatever you want. You can freestyle it. That's week one. 

01:05:37
Week two, similarly, is focused around inviting spontaneity and symbolism into your life through observing nature with some intent. So, going out on your daily walk, maybe bring a notebook and write down any little peculiar things you see. The other day I took a picture of a in the alley near my house, in someone's yard they had a wheelbarrow with a small wheelbarrow inside of it. That would be a perfect example of something you might. You could do this through bird watching as well. Sit down, maybe set up a bird feeder, or just go to where a creek or a pond is, some area that might have a high bird activity, and there are great apps out there for identifying birds and identifying plants and insects. Bring those into it. There's one called Seek for plants and insects and there's one called Merlin and that allows you to enter in the details of a bird you saw and it'll tell you the species. 

01:06:40
Week three is writing a poem, and I think if you want to write, I don't think about writing a poem that's good or like that anybody else has to read; just write a poem that comes to mind and maybe use those previous two weeks, the symbols and ideas you've brought into your life, to inform it. Again, the internet is a good starting point for this. You can look up poetic forms and use this established poetic form a sonnet or a villanelle or a terza rima or whatever and go that route, have some bones to start with, or go completely free and don't worry about rhyme, don't worry about anything, and just condense some big ideas into some small sentences, small stanzas. 

Ali
Host
01:07:32
That is amazing. I am going to try this. I kind of feel like I am doing this sometimes, but I love that you gave us a structure here. First, try to familiarize yourself with some sort of symbolism in general, things that exist, and then go out and try to see it outside and you generate your own, in a way, in your hand and also bring it to your paper when you get home. And then, third, try to actually give it a meaning, try to give it life by creating something out of this process. This is such a solid, creative process you're introducing to us and you want to practice with you. 

Morgan
Guest
01:08:21
Thank you. I think it's important to note that I'm not like a cultist, a magic guy. I don't believe. I'm thinking that whatever the force is behind, I don't have any belief here, that in fact I'm mostly free of all belief. But that doesn't. These are, In fact, one of the points of this ritual is to let these powers into your life. Me again, this is a contradiction invite a power in and let it do its work, despite maybe being a rational, modern person who believes in science or whatever. We let those contradictions play here and don't feel obligated to be on any one side. 

Ali
Host
01:09:17
Thank you so much for bringing this much preparation into the show. I really appreciate it, and this means a lot. This was a great conversation. I'm going to miss it, so who knows, maybe we'll come back. I'm excited, honestly, for what you have ahead of you and I'm excited to continue staying in touch with you and just keep learning from you. I want to. I think I told you a couple of times I really wanted to make this conversation in person. I was just bummed that I couldn't make it to so many other travels that I have, but I'm hoping that we can meet in person sometime soon. 

Morgan
Guest
01:09:57
Yeah, thanks for having me on. Your perspective is incredibly valuable to me, and all this has been so cool to be able to mingle our minds, always, always. 

Ali
Host
01:10:10
Thank you so much again, and have a wonderful day 

Morgan
Guest
01:10:15
you too, thanks, Ali. 

Ali
Host
01:10:23
That was our conversation with Morgan Condict. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to join his accountability campaign for three weeks of creative activities around symbolism, you can use the link on the show notes and sign up to join his campaign. This show is completely non-profit, so please remember that the best way to support us is to go to Spotify and or Apple Podcasts, and you may rate us up to a five-star review. This would help us to be seen by those who may benefit from this content. Thanks again and see you on the next episode of the Ally Show.