Call Me Love: Currencies
Thursday April 3 – Saturday April 5, 2025
Facilitated by Leigh Melander, Ph.D.
Spillian Co-Founder
A private workshop for Regenerative Nexus and 7Group co-conspirators.
Call Me Love began three years ago as a gathering to explore how we might re-imagine a non-binary way of understanding gender, power, and the planet. Click here for a short article that catches some of our starting points for that conversation that Leigh wrote for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Its title came from a clip from Sir Ian McKellen, talking on a podcast about what opens into possibility when we call each other ‘love’ in casual conversation, when love becomes our chosen currency. You can watch that here.
From there, in our second year, we dove into challenging many of the stories we carry about power in the United States: what happens when we begin to understand the infinite connections between beings and places as currencies that flow and spread and empower?
This year, in a moment of profound shattering, we are reaching out to some of the people we each know who do deep work in the world with curiosity and generosity, in the hopes that we can perhaps find ways to flow and spread and empower one another in our imaginings and actions.
These gatherings are a form of improv, an invitation into not-knowing, reveling in being on the edges of our knowledge and understanding as we explore what might come beyond them. As John, Max, and Leigh were talking about how we might frame this conversation, John shared a story of Miles Davis creating Kind of Blue with a set of chord charts and thoughts about modalities and an invitation to his co-creators to come and make jazz from that loosely held place. While we were quick to agree that none of us are Miles Davis, we loved this as a way to begin to describe what we’re reaching for together.
Some of the modalities we’ll be starting from include ideas on edges | agency & authority | belonging | openings.
We would love for you to join us, and bring your jazz to the party!
Register Here•••Schedule
Thursday, April 3
- 3 PM: Room Check-In | Hang Out By Fire
- 5 PM: Casual Dinner, Cocktails, and Greetings
- 6 PM: Evening Opening Session
- 8 PM: Free Fireside Time Until You’re Tired
Friday, April 4
- 9 AM: Breakfast
- 10 AM – 1 PM: Morning Session
- 1 PM: Lunch
- 1 PM – 5: PM Afternoon Session
- 5 PM: Cocktails or By-Yourself Time
- 6 PM: Dinner
- 7 PM: TBD – Evening Session or Free Fireside Time
Saturday, April 5
- 9 AM: Breakfast
- 10-11 AM: Final Session
- 11 AM: Check Out
•••Lodging
Spillian has eight bedrooms and nine permanent beds, plus two rollaways that can be tucked into a couple of the rooms if folks would like to share lodging but not a bed and don’t have a back that will complain too loudly. The Jules Verne Room has two double beds, and the rollaways can fit into any rooms except The Secret Garden Room and the Camelot Room.
If you are sharing a room with someone, please note the name of the person you’re sharing with on the registration form.
Click here for more information on the rooms!
•••Pricing
We know that in an upside-down capitalistic society, those who do good in the world are often doing so without endless dollars.
In the spirit of the currencies of shared knowledge, creativity, and community, one of the ways that we’d like to honor everyone who joins us is by sharing a bit of money currency. 7Group, John Boecker, and Spillian would all like to share some money flow such that we can offset costs for everyone. (7Group has offered to cover the cost of Leigh’s facilitation and Spillian has put that into the kitty, and John has offered an additional sum to help bring it to a number that we hope can make it accessible for everyone.)
As such, we are delighted to be able to offer a sliding scale for the weekend, which includes lodging and really good food from our chef, Christian.
You can enter what level of currency feels right for you in the following range:
Supported: $250/person
Full weekend, including all programming, meals, lodging, and tax.
Single or double room occupancy.
Partial Support: $350-$550/person (your call!)
Full weekend, including all programming, meals, lodging, and tax.
Single or double room occupancy.
Full Freight Single $900/person
Full weekend, including all programming, meals, lodging, and tax.
Single room occupancy.
Full Freight Double $1350/couple
Full weekend, including all programming, meals, lodging, and tax.
Double room occupancy.
We are honored to have you join us, at whatever number in there works for you.
Please Note: This event is by invitation only.
Register HereAbout Leigh Melander, Ph.D.
Leigh has an eclectic background in the arts as well as consulting in strategic planning, community outreach & marketing, and event planning for over 20 years. She has performed, and taught and facilitated explorations of imagination and creativity internationally, working with individuals and groups to help them find their way to bringing their wild ideas to life. She spent 13 years working in asset-based community building in communities across California, and with students, faculty and a wide range of artists and activists at the University of California Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center.
Her undergraduate degree is in performance, literature, and history from Penn State, and she studied writing by invitation with Nobel Poet Laureate Derek Walcott at Boston University.
She has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and wrote her dissertation on frivolity as an entry into imagination. She has has appeared at various conferences and on media outlets, including the History Channel, as a mythology expert, and has published articles in Spring Journal, The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies, The Mythology CD-ROM. She hosted Myth America®, a weekly radio show about how myth shapes our sense of identity on an NPR affiliate for three years and is transitioning to a podcast, and served as the Vice President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the editor of their MythBlast series for four years. She is the author of Psyche’s Choice: The Frivolous Revolution, and the upcoming Just This Side of Crazy: Dream Your Wild Idea to Life.
Eleven years ago, she and her husband opened Spillian, located on the National Register of Historic Places former estate of the Fleischmanns Yeast family in the Catskills as a place to revel in imagination and possibility.
