Introduction This is a podcast where we explore the intersection of mythology, folklore and modern life. I'm Dimitri and I'll be your companion on this journey of discovery. Each episode we'll follow roots charted in the old stories and let them lead us into forgotten currents and toward new shores. Welcome to the Inward Sea. (The Inward Sea Theme: music by Dimitri Roussopoulos) Hello and thanks for joining me in this, the introductory episode of the Inward Sea. This episode is a bit different from what you'll hear in future. It's a chance for me to tell you a bit about myself and share some background information with you about this podcast and why it’s called The Inward Sea. A bit later, I’ll get into what you can expect from future episodes, as well as why and how these old stories, the myths and folktales I’ll be sharing with you, still matter in a world like ours. A Bit About Me Hopefully we'll be spending a bit of time together, you and I. And in case you can’t tell from the background audio - we’re going to be setting out on a voyage of discovery - A journey of exploration on The Inward Sea. Anyway - since we're just setting out, it's probably best to begin with some introductions. My name is Dimitri. I'm a composer, an artist, and an educator. But more importantly for the purposes of this podcast, I’m a collector of stories. I am going to be the voice that you hear on this podcast, but I don’t want to set myself up as the captain of your voyage. The Inward Sea is an image I came across in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s also a poem written by Howard Thurman - although, I only discovered that after I began jotting down my thoughts for the episodes. You see, although I will be offering you insights I have gained as well as a way for you to explore stories for yourself, I don’t ever want you to ever believe that an interpretation or idea I share here is The Truth. It’s very difficult to say capital letters so I hope the idea is coming across here. When I say that I don’t want you to get the idea that what I share here is The Truth (did you hear those capital letters?) I mean that I don’t want you to believe that my interpretation of these stories is the only one or that any insight I share here is somehow dogma in a mythological, philosophical, or psychological gospel. What I share here is a truth - one of many possible interpretations that I have discovered - things that resonated deeply with me and others with whom I have shared them with in various courses and workshops. I hope that you will feel empowered and courageous enough to embark on your own voyage of exploration and, when you return, share what you find with me, too. So, although I’m going to the one doing most of the talking in this show, think of me more like someone who's collected a sea chest full of old maps. Maps, I would like to share with you in the hope that they inspire you to venture out into the deep to discover great things for, and within, yourself. Over the course of many years now, I've done a lot of wandering and quite a bit of mapmaking, and what I've learned over and over again is that each discovery, each nugget meaning or insight that I've gleaned from these stories, opens into deeper mystery. This podcast will be, in many ways, a journal of those explorations. A Bit About Stories As an educator, I've often found myself asking how we ended up surrounded by so much information and yet so cut off from a sense of meaning. I used to think that we were story-starved, that we had somehow wandered too far from the campfire circle of our ancestral storytellers. But that's not quite right, is it? Today, we're not short on stories. We're drowning in them, caught in a great flood of biblical or Babylonian proportions. Narratives and stories swirl around us constantly, competing for our attention, our emotional investment, and demanding our allegiance. They pour from the screens we carry around in our pockets. They arrive dressed as news or as entertainment, even as self-help manuals. Many of the stories we are fed today aren’t about truth or genuine connection or personal growth—they’re about power. They’re crafted to capture our attention, to sell us something, and dictate who we should be in order to fit in and feel validated by others. In the process, they distract us from what truly matters, encouraging us to trade authentic self-expression and meaningful personal pursuits for superficial behaviours aimed at winning external approval. But that is not what mythology and folklore do: each teller and listener glimpses something different in the same story, a unique reflection shaped by their own inner landscape. And yet, these stories remain shared, communal. The images in them have crossed language and cultural barriers precisely because they speak to the deeper parts of our humanity—the parts we all share. Today, we may find these old stories written on the pages of books or on websites. Perhaps we find them being retold over and over in exactly the same way each time in videos or podcasts like this one. But here’s the secret. These stories were never made to written down or trapped in a single form of telling. They come alive when we tell them. In the opening passages of his book Comparative Mythology professor Jaan Puhvel does a wonderful job of outlining how we ended up with the words “myth” and “mythology” for these old stories. The word is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘muh-’ from which we get such other modern words as matter and mother. Professor Puhvel points out that originally the Greek concept of Mythos was simply speaking (as is communicating between people). You see, when we allow these myths and folktales to live in our mouths rather than on the pages of a book, they begin to breathe and shift. When we lend them our own breath and give them form with our movement and our energy, our life, they begin to change. Each retelling is coloured and shaped by the swell and ebb of unconscious tides in the teller, and as we listen, the images conjured up in our minds spring directly from deep and unrehearsed places within us, places we don't often get to explore. In this podcast, we are going to examine those images through the lens of Jungian thought and cultural symbolism. Not to master them or to pin them to boards like butterflies - because, once you pin a butterfly, it may still look like a butterfly but it does not behave like one. We are going to examine them, hold them lightly, turn them this way and that and get a sense of them, and then let them go again. And one day, when we happen upon them again, we can take the moment to reexamine them to see how they may have grown or changed - or, perhaps, how we have. Over the years, I've shared many tales with my students in classes and workshops. And now and then, someone asks me where I find stories. The truth is, I rarely go looking for them. And even when I do, the ones that speak the loudest are usually the ones I happen upon when I’m looking for something else entirely. Most of the time, stories arrive on their own. I think it was Michael Mead, one of the great storytellers of our time, who said that the story is not something that you choose. The story chooses you. And that really resonates with me. Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies, stories are never late. They arrive precisely when they mean to - and in my experience, they often arrive a little early. Just early enough to make you wonder what they're all about. To carry them around in your pocket like a stone. Until life happens. And then, quite suddenly, the story seems to spring into action. And it delivers an offering of strange, unexpected wisdom that you didn't know you needed. In the rational paradigm we're so accustomed to, it's easy to dismiss these moments as mere coincidence. But others, like psychologist Carl Jung, called this synchronicity. A meaningful coincidence. An a-causal connecting principle that appears when two distinct signifiers of meaning come into proximity in the crucible of conscious experience. The Japanese philosopher, and I hope I'm saying his name correctly, Yasuo Yuasa (湯浅 泰雄), once suggested that when body and mind are aligned, the world itself begins to speak. I believe that sometimes, stories are the shape that voice takes. Caught by a Story Before we dive into the bigger myths and folktales, I want to begin with a moment. A personal one. This is not a moment in which I found a story - but one in which a story caught me, and something in me began to shift, which ultimately led to the creation of this podcast. Long ago, I had just left my home country and flown halfway around the world to teach English. I had cast off from everything familiar and stepped into the unknown. This was long before smartphones, before Google Maps conveniently lived in your pocket. A new friend, another English teacher living in the small Korean town where I had just arrived, lent me a CD audiobook of Moby Dick, and it became a kind of lifeline: one of the only English voices I heard each day. I still remember the night I first heard this passage. I had just gotten home after getting completely lost on a walk through my new neighborhood, a place with no familiar landmarks and no natural compass to guide me. Back home, Table Mountain towered over the city where I'd lived my whole life. It anchored everything. You always knew where you were in relation to its shape. But here, there was no such anchor. The sun had set while I was out walking, and I found myself in a snarl of narrow streets. The street lamps perched like fat, luminous birds amid an aerial jungle of tangled electric and telephone wires. The wires… the streets… It was as if the old maxim, As above, so below, had taken on a literal, physical form. I passed the same doorway at least th
