Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve just finished recording today’s podcast, the Empty Project. Do you want to tell the readers why it’s called The Empty Project?

Martha Beck:
We got thinking about the value of emptiness, and you’ll hear all about this, about the empty spaces in our lives that are in fact incredibly precious. And after we thought this all through and we knew what we wanted to talk about, we went to record it on GarageBand. And what comes up in GarageBand when you start is it just says, “Empty Project.”

Rowan Mangan:
Which is the software that we record the audio of the podcast.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And it says that every time, but this time it was literally true. We were making The Empty Project.

Rowan Mangan:
So in today’s episode, you’ll hear about the ways that the culture teaches us to not see the beautiful spaces, the spaces that make everything into beauty and art and value in our lives, and how we just need to switch our attention a tiny little bit to bring all of that into focus for us and make our lives a little wilder.

Martha Beck:
Hope you enjoy it.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I am Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out, which we do for our Bewildered community, which is also known as the Cahoot.

Martha Beck:
One big cahoot.

Rowan Mangan:
Just one big cahoot. What are you trying to figure out, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I’m trying to figure out, I am in awe at the super senses of animals and specifically our cockapoo Bilbo Baggins of Pennsylvania. Because as you may have heard, we experienced an earthquake, yes, in Pennsylvania. It was New Jersey, I believe it was located. And I did not know the earthquake was going to come. But the weird thing is I think Bilbo did because he was alone downstairs. I was upstairs, which happens a lot. There was nothing weird going on. And then he started to make a noise I’ve never heard him make before, and it was like, “Ohhh noooo.”

Martha Beck:
And he came to the foot of the stairs and just started wailing, “Ohhh noooo!”

Martha Beck:
And I couldn’t calm him down. I cuddled him and everything, but he was shaking, and then everything was shaking. And I was like, “Wait, wait, this is Pennsylvania. I’ve been through, I think I’m going to have to conclude this is an earthquake.” And I started finding arched doorways before and then it stopped after a while. But it was really weird that Bilbo had that reaction. I think he knew.

Rowan Mangan:
I wonder if some of his other neuroses could also be used to predict weather or big events.

Martha Beck:
It’s probably every time he starts getting panicky, there’s solar flares or maybe alien abductions.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you’re so right. I know. It could be anything there. It’s funny that you should mention the earthquake because I too had a memorable experience during the earthquake. Like yours, it involved someone else. I, all right, let me take a step back. I had an appointment that day and it was a girl appointment. I don’t mean a woman appointment. I mean, it was one of those appointments where everyone’s like girls together, their girls, your girls, it’s very girly. You’re getting a mani-pedi or something. I wasn’t, but it’s in that genre of appointments. And I was a bit bleary. It was morning, I had my coffee. I went into this appointment and I freaked out so badly that someone was about to massively overshare with me, which is just so revealing about my psyche. Because I have a character that I do when I have to go to these girl appointments, like a girl-to-girl kind of thing, where because they’re better girls than me.

Rowan Mangan:
But I have worked on a character so that I want to put them at ease and I want to look, I’m like someone who’s really relatable, even though I look like this and I sound like this. But then, oh God, I just thought, “I’ve done it too well.” I thought that day because I’m at the desk, she’s like, “How are you?” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m great. How are you?” And she goes, “I’m actually feeling anxious and upset.” And she kind of burst into tears a little bit and I was, oh my goodness, I started thinking about how my personal trainer has recently started being quite emotional during our sessions about his dog who’s sick. And I just was like, I’m overdoing something in my public persona. And I was just like, I can’t handle this today. I can’t handle this girl’s personal issues. And I was just like, so she’s like, “I’m upset and anxious.” And I was like, “Ohhh. You are?” And just thinking, oh my God, what now? Seriously, what now? Just let me have my coffee and do what you’re going to do, which I’m being very careful not to say what it is. Anyway, she goes, “Yeah, I’m feeling upset and anxious about the earthquake that literally just happened.” And that’s how I found out that there had been an earthquake, a significant earthquake only moments before, a 4.8, that I had been driving along and listening to my tunes and I just missed it. I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
You just thought the car shocks were going and they probably did. They probably compensated for the earthquake.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, the suspension was too good. And I missed out on an important cultural moment for our town where we all would’ve become closer. Maybe I’m glad I missed it, but yeah, I felt bad that I’d underestimated my new gal pal. So anyway, onwards and upwards, Marty.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls and how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven and we read everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all

Martha Beck:
Onwards and upwards. Let’s talk about a topic of some sort.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So today’s topic–

Martha Beck:
What is today’s topic?

Rowan Mangan:
Today’s topic on Bewildered, the podcast in which you currently are living, is one that I think probably all many, if not all, of our listeners will really relate to. And it’s like ever feel like life is full and your job is to cram more stuff into the tiny bits of time you already have and you’re trying to fill something that’s already full?

Martha Beck:
Yep. Ten pounds of crap in a five-pound bag. I used to do this demonstration and I thought it was so cool. I saw it and I immediately adopted it and started using it in presentations. You take a quart glass bottle, and you have a pile of sand and a pile of rocks, and you say the rocks are the important things in your life, and the sand is the unimportant stuff in your life. And you pour the sand into the bottle and then you try to put the rocks in and they won’t fit. And then you pour it all out again. You put the rocks in first and then you pour the sand in and the sand fills the spaces between the rocks.

Rowan Mangan:
It trickles in between into the nooks and crannies.

Martha Beck:
And you can fit it all in. And the idea is “Do the important things first.” Which is, okay, it’s a good message. I would stand by it. But it means you’re filling every single bit of your life with stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think it’s a good message. I think it’s a good strategy for achieving the wrong message.

Martha Beck:
And it has the wrong message, which is you should put every single thing that you can even think of to do in every inch of space in your life, and then you’ll be really efficient and effective. And won’t that be wonderful how much stuff you have?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s wild. So we sort of ourselves realized that this is one of those areas where the culture is doing its invisible damage where we aren’t even aware that we’re eating these damaging messages or breathing them or drinking them. So we thought today, and tell me where I’m expressing this badly, Marty, but we thought we would sort of dig into the ideas of fullness and emptiness and how we live our lives as a Bewildered Cahoot.

Martha Beck:
Yes. I thought that would be really good too, because there is research on this. People these days are feeling more and more overwhelmed, more exhausted, more burnt out. I mean, typically they say “than ever before in history.” I don’t know because they’re not measuring things that happened 600 years ago.

Rowan Mangan:
Why not?

Martha Beck:
They were overwhelmed. People were overwhelmed by dying at 30 and having to carry water.

Rowan Mangan:
Bubonic plague.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the bubonic plague was very overwhelming. But in our particular cultural model–that is, developed western cultures–again, there are many, many cultures, and when we say “the culture,” we’re talking about the dominant western culture that sort of overtook the earth.

Rowan Mangan:
Colonized.

Martha Beck:
Colonized the earth in the 20th century. Okay, this particular culture, the fact that it came out of a localized place, western Europe, and colonized the entire earth is because it’s driven by an obsession with getting more stuff and conquering and occupying and learning everything and taking everything.

Rowan Mangan:
Stuff. We’re focused, we’re so focused on stuff that we cram our lives to the gills with it. And we don’t know how to value the non-stuff, the emptiness. And I don’t think we even know that it’s there sometimes. I don’t even think we see it because it has no value in our culture.

Martha Beck:
I really, really believe that’s true. People do not know. One of the things I hear from clients a lot is, “I’ve never had a peaceful moment.” Because the part of them saying that really hasn’t. It’s the part that’s aware of the stuff. And I can do something like, “Let’s do a meditation exercise.” And then they get into this really deep peace and their bodies feel better. But at the end of the session, the part that does the stuff comes back online and literally doesn’t remember! Because there was nothing happening, so what’s to think about? Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Fascinating.

Martha Beck:
And I’ve been thinking a lot about it because I have been trying to learn how to do transparent watercolor, something I started in my teens and then didn’t do for decades.

Rowan Mangan:
Listener, I just have to put this in. Marty’s an amazing artist. Yes, it’s annoying. She’s too good at too many things, but she’s actually genuinely, I hate to say it, fucking talented. And soon you’ll be able to buy prints of her work because that’s just a little side project I’m puttering away on as I cram my life full of stuff.

Martha Beck:
Just a little tiny thing. But I remember walking along when I was about 16 years old and I just started playing with watercolor and realizing I have to learn to think about everything differently. I’m used to drawing things, things, trees, birds, cats, people. And what I have to learn is to see light where it’s not impeded by things and to put that first. You have to think in reverse when you do watercolor because the most important thing you have to work with, all the light in your painting, is the blank white paper. If you touch that with any kind of color, there’s no erasing, and all the light goes out of your painting and it looks crap. So the whole thing is to sit down and say, “Where do I leave it blank? Where do I leave it blank?” And you keep those, those are the most precious places in the painting, and you guard them with your life. And if you have to put something in them, you do it with incredible caution and you do it sparingly. And it’s the opposite. You sit down and think, “Where is there nothing that I have? Nothing is the only value here.”

Rowan Mangan:
That is so cool. So our socialization, our culture training is in art, but also in everything really. It tells us to focus on the thing, in this case, the dark marks you’re making on the white page because we don’t see the white page. But you are saying the whiteness itself is its own presence.

Martha Beck:
It’s by far the most important thing that every teacher will tell you. Don’t touch that white space. You’ll lose it, you’ll lose it. And it’s your most precious thing. And I was saying to you, most of us are still focused on the things. Like in The Great British Baking Show, which we both love, they want you to make a whole bunch of things. And they have to be perfect and all alike, like a row of soldiers.

Rowan Mangan:
A row of soldiers.

Martha Beck:
Of soldiers, as they line up.

Rowan Mangan:
Hashtag Mary Berry. If you know, you know.

Martha Beck:
They line up, they look exactly the way you want them to, and they kill you in the end. But then you said something that I hadn’t even thought of.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, so–

Martha Beck:
Which was…

Rowan Mangan:
So the row of soldiers is, I mean row of soldiers, like it’s a row of shortbread biscuits. Right? Cookies. So the row of–

Martha Beck:
With murder in their minds. They want to take your stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god. It’s funny because it’s true. So the row of soldiers image itself, I realize, is only beautiful because it makes a pattern by virtue of the spaces between each of the items. So because without any spaces, it’s just a slab of dough, it’s just a glob of stuff. But with spaces, suddenly it’s art, even though it’s cookies, biscuits. And Marty, I saw it also, I have a new hobby. I should have talked about that earlier. Yes, you do.

Martha Beck:
Tell them about your new hobby. It’s wonderful.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve got a new hobby which I really like, which is making beads. Yeah, making bracelets.

Martha Beck:
You have video. You can see the one that she made for me today.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no, this is, it’s very pretty. This is an audio medium. Please. Let’s focus on the audible.

Martha Beck:
So pretty.

Rowan Mangan:
So I have been making bracelets and I realized that if I just line these, I’ve got these beads that are kind of flat like tiles, and if I just put them all together one after the other in a bracelet, it’s okay. But if I take a little tiny, tiny bead and put a space between each of the beads, then each, it’s like suddenly it just pops and it’s beautiful, really, really beautiful. And it just becomes entrancing. The beauty of it. And you get little, the tiny ones in between can be gold, and then it’s like light coming through a stained glass window or something. It is like the spaces between these beautiful beads are the thing that gives the beads their beauty in a way.

Martha Beck:
It’s gorgeous. It looks like, if you go online these days, you cannot avoid the image of Kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of you make a beautiful clay pot, then you break it, and then you glue it back together and sort of solder the cracks with gold.

Rowan Mangan:
If you haven’t seen this, go on the website of literally any life coach ever. It’s a metaphor that’s really seized the wellness industry’s imagination.

Martha Beck:
Oh, your wholeness is golden because you are so smashed.

Rowan Mangan:
You wee smashed, and now you’re golden. We had such a funny thing. So Marty got, wanted to order one of these Kintsugi bowls for our friend Liz as a gift. And so because now they get made deliberately because capitalism is just such a fascinating beast. So then someone out there is deliberately making a bowl, smashing a bowl, mending the bowl with gold in order to make the point that having-been-smashed bowl is now more beautiful. And then we order it to give it to our friend to say, “I don’t care if you’re smashed, you can be mended and more beautiful.”

Martha Beck:
And we did this for Christmas and it was months later.

Rowan Mangan:
I know.

Martha Beck:
And she still hadn’t collected it. We had it there. We had it all wrapped up. It came all gift wrapped, so we just had it in the cupboard.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we hadn’t looked.

Martha Beck:
For months and months.

Rowan Mangan:
And little Marty with her little face was so proud of her gift and all excited to show it. And Liz is there opening it at our kitchen counter and we all like, the box opens and we all peer in. And what did we see, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Basically Armageddon.

Rowan Mangan:
So the bowl had been made, had been smashed, had been mended.

Martha Beck:
And then smashed a lot harder.

Rowan Mangan:
It was so funny because it wasn’t cracked and it wasn’t–it was just a pile of rubble in the bottom of the box and dust.

Martha Beck:
It was post-apocalyptic.

Rowan Mangan:
You know what? They could have sold it as a DIY kitsugi kit. That they just send us the rubble of a former bowl and we have to build it ourselves. Anyway.

Martha Beck:
Out of the gold we have lying around.

Rowan Mangan:
I have some beads.

Martha Beck:
Well you do have beads.

Rowan Mangan:
Beads and glue. Beads and glue.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, speaking of post-apocalyptic times, I think one of the reasons all the, we’re all cramming our lives so full of stuff is that we don’t know what direction to go in anymore. So we just go in the direction of more stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s this idea that you and I have been playing with recently about we live in a mapless world and a trackless sort of time. We’re operating without the navigation equipment that traditionally people have had. And it just makes me think of the old maps where there were areas of the world that were as yet unmapped. People didn’t know what was there and they would just write, “Here be dragons” in the blank spaces. And I feel like there’s something really true here, metaphorically, in the sense of there’s discoveries to be made in the unknown blank spaces, like the spaces in our knowledge, the spaces in our days, the spaces in how we choreograph our lives.

Martha Beck:
But I think people are afraid of the empty spaces because “Here be dragons.” What would happen to you if you just sat quietly in a room? As Pascal said, if we sit quietly in a room, it gets scary because we’re afraid of emptiness.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, if you were sitting quietly in a room, you would be such perfect dragon food. Like dragon fodder. Sit quietly in a room–that’s way worse than sailing off the edge of the map.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. But you know what? Dragons can be very cool as well. Anyway, so we have an entire culture that avoids the unknown. And part of the unknown is the emptiness that happens when we don’t occupy our minds, our lives. And we are obsessed with gathering more stuff, which allows us to make things very abundant and to do it predictably. We’ve been very successful making all this stuff, but because we don’t balance it by adding emptiness, by deliberately valuing emptiness. We think we’re only doing good stuff if we’re like, “Go, go, go, go, go!” And it’s wearing us out, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
It is, but we don’t add emptiness. The emptiness is already there. The gaps are already there. It’s just that our minds are trained so stringently to look at the black marks on the paper that we don’t even see the paper. And so we just don’t put our attention on them. So we are trained to see the row of soldiers, but we don’t see that the space between them is anything. It’s like it is just uninteresting. It’s unimportant, it’s invisible.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it sort of carries over metaphorically to times that aren’t as active or as concrete. Productive. Productive. So people think that rest and sleep are basically nothing, and you just do those because you absolutely have to for some reason. And then you get to work again.

Rowan Mangan:
And get as little as possible and you’ll be celebrated.

Martha Beck:
And it’s like, “The city that never sleeps. Yay!” We think that silence is nothing. When we go to Africa, we go out in the Land Rovers to see the animals without talking. And everywhere we see other vehicles, the people feel like they have to fill that silence with polite conversation. And stillness, the stillness of what’s going on out there, the animals are just sitting there. And people will sit in the cars and go, “Why are they not doing anything?” Stillness is nothing. Silence is nothing. And what you just said is absolutely true. We lose the negative space in drawing. I’m going back to that metaphor. I remember when I taught, I was a teaching fellow in an art class at Harvard when I was younger, and one of the things the professor used to teach was that you have to see everything you’re drawing. And the moment you draw one thing, you have drawn two things because the space around the thing is a thing. And when you do two things, the relationship between them is a third thing. And you can’t draw one thing without drawing two things. You can’t draw two things without drawing three things. And if you don’t see them, you can’t manage it. You can’t make it beautiful.

Rowan Mangan:
The really obvious example for those who aren’t familiar with this idea is where there’s the two faces in silhouette facing each other, and that’s one way of looking at the image. But if you look at the space between the two profiles, it creates the image of a vase.

Martha Beck:
Faces and vases. If you’re American, faces and vases. Yeah. And it’s about switching back and forth between what’s background, what’s foreground, what is the thing you’re looking at and what’s the space between. And the answer is they’re both the thing, but it flips back and forth.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s what I kind of love about this topic in terms of thinking about being wild, is that there’s nothing to change except that little thing of what you’re focusing on, what you’re focusing your attention on. Everything’s there. Everything’s already perfect. So we just need to remember to pay attention to those spaces and silences and emptinesses.

Martha Beck:
And find the value of them, which it’s probably even more in our lives than it is in drawing and painting. So yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s figure it all out. We’re going to figure it all out right after this. So Marty, how do we figure it out?

Martha Beck:
I think we figure it out first–you said it really well–that we need to shift the focus of our attention. But we’re so used to simply not seeing emptiness as something that it’s actually kind of hard. And I’ve had these little aha moments with this throughout my life, and one was when I first read the Tao Te Ching, my favorite book, and one of the chapters says, “We join spokes to make a wheel, but it’s the gap in the very center that allows the wheel to turn. We mold clay (to make a kintsugi and smash it) but we mold clay into a bowl, but we use the emptiness inside to carry things. We hammer and join wood to make a house, but we live in the space between the boards. We work with substance, but emptiness is what we use.” I remember reading that and just going–head blows off– because it was so unusual, but so true.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so true. And I don’t know why, but the bowl thing just landed for me so big. Just the whole point of a bowl is the space.

Martha Beck:
Is the emptiness.

Rowan Mangan:
What else is it ?

Martha Beck:
Metaphorically, I mean, it’s almost insulting to say it to someone in our culture, but if you say you are the bowl, it’s the emptiness inside you, it’s the nothing inside you that makes you precious and valuable. And just to say that feels so countercultural. Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
How dare you. I am a person of substance, I’ll have you know.

Martha Beck:
I am a person of nothingness. Ho ho ho! Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
So to be wilder, it’s like we are going to train ourselves to value the non-things as much or more than valuing the things that we do or the things that we make. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It’s so weird to think, okay, we have this beautiful little girl, but what is the emptiness inside her?

Rowan Mangan:
Intelligence. Drive. Personal hygiene.

Martha Beck:
There you go. Personal hygiene. That’s what it is. It actually feels like scary for me to even think about it. That’s how countercultural it is. But in watercolor, which is my gospel, currently, the very first priority when you sit down to paint is to say, “Where is the blankness and how can I preserve it?” And if you think that way about your life, where the blank space is the first priority, not the last. Like where could I leave a blank space in this conversation we’re having now and make it more beautiful? Where could I leave a blank in social media consumption? Where could I leave a blank in a project I’m doing, like a book or a dinner or a meeting? Where could I make an empty space? I mean, it’s very cool.

Rowan Mangan:
I would answer you, but A, you’re being rhetorical and B, I’m trying to leave a blank space.

Martha Beck:
But I don’t want you to leave a blank space.

Rowan Mangan:
You keep looking anxiously at me while I’m doing exactly what you’re talking about.

Martha Beck:
Well, because I’m wondering, I’m very curious. You cook us these amazing dinners.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, do you know what tastes amazing? The nothing.

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
Tonight I’m serving us big steaming balls of air.

Martha Beck:
Air is something. But I mean, seriously, if you were cooking and adding tons of spices and sometimes a great chef, like James Beard said the perfect dish is a hard-boiled egg. The perfection of it cannot be altered. With a little salt. And he said everything else is overkill compared to a hard-boiled egg with a little salt. And if you go back to the basics of really pure, really good ingredients and then let them shine, I don’t know. I don’t cook anything.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s absolutely true though.

Martha Beck:
But I would love to go around, I think I’m going to go around for the next few days really trying to apply this.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just say, though, before we move off food, what strikes me is that really posh high-grade restaurants, and I don’t know, this might be stupid, but you get a huge big plate with a tiny bit of food in the middle, and it is so beautiful. That’s the presentation is that the space around the tiny bit of food is. And then you go to a diner and you get 19 scrambled eggs on a plate with six pieces of toast. And it’s just an interesting thing.

Martha Beck:
It sets up a different aesthetic and it sets you in a different appetite. If somebody just fills your plate with pie and eggs and bacon, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to eat this whole thing.” But if you get a single piece of the beautiful, whatever it is, you’re like, “Ooh, I’m going to savor this.”

Rowan Mangan:
So maybe creating the space is actually creating the beauty. As we subtract some of the sand and the rocks from our jar, there is the beauty.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, because tell you something that’s beautiful is the transparency of a glass bottle, something I love to paint. And if you totally fill it with rocks and sand, okay, that can look nice too. But the shine, the transparency, the reflections, the lucidity of it, the way it sort of confuses the eye with what’s substance and what’s just light, it’s so beautiful. Just an empty bottle.

Rowan Mangan:
An empty bottle, and a hard-boiled egg. Done.

Martha Beck:
My life is complete. Boom.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s this idea of something that looks empty, especially to the eyes of the culture, but there’s a feeling of fullness that we would associate with it. I don’t know how to describe the fullness because if it was something that lent itself to words, the culture would already be marketing it to the masters. It would be a thing. It would’ve been colonized and sold. And packaged. But there is a kind of richness to finding those empty spaces.

Martha Beck:
I could talk about brains and the hemispheres thereof right now because one side of the brain is more obsessed with grabbing stuff. All right, it’s the left hemisphere. It’s more obsessed with grabbing stuff, and the right side doesn’t have language, but it’s very present and it experiences vast openness as deeply beautiful. So I could say more, but you know what? I’m going to leave a space here instead.

Rowan Mangan:
Hallelujah.

Martha Beck:
F you.

Rowan Mangan:
I wouldn’t be doing my job on Bewildered if I didn’t take a moment to quote some lines from poet laureate of the show, Ani DiFranco, on this topic.

Martha Beck:
She has to have a little…

Rowan Mangan:
Herald. Is that what it’s called?

Martha Beck:
Something like that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I think, yeah, it’s very much on the same topic. It’s like a reminder that we’re actually always leaving spaces and silences even between us as humans, even in relationships. She says, “If you hear me talking, listen to what I’m not saying. If you hear me playing guitar, listen to what I’m not playing. And don’t ask me to put words to all the silences I wrote. Don’t ask me to put words to all the spaces between notes.”

Martha Beck:
I mean when you get a poignant pause in music, that space between notes where you’re waiting for the resolution…

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, tell them about Ellie’s tattoo.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yes, yes. My daughter Ellie is a really gifted musician and she used to win a lot of competitions. And one of the things that her judges would say about her piano playing was that she knew when to pause. She knew when to leave it silent. And in music that’s called a rest, and there’s a little squiggle that signifies rest, and it means don’t make a sound. And she has a tattoo of that symbol over her heart.

Rowan Mangan:
So perfect.

Martha Beck:
The rest of the heart. That’s a person who has found the value of emptiness. It’s very cool. It reminds me a little bit, all of this, of the movie Her. Do you remember that movie? Yeah. 2013. It’s about artificial intelligence, a little bit before its time. This guy falls in love with a female-sounding AI and they have a lovely relationship, except that she’s learning at this huge rate and she starts to become enlightened and she starts reading Buddhism and stuff and then he just can’t get her to come to visit him anymore. She won’t hang out, she won’t come up on his phone, she’s just not available. And he gets so lonely. And there’s a scene at the end where she finally, she comes back and she says, this is actually not easy for me to even be here anymore to communicate with you. And she says it’s like I’ve been reading a book and the words used to be interesting to me. I’m paraphrasing, but now I’m going to quote. She says, “It’s in the endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the physical world. It’s where everything else is that I didn’t even know existed.” And then she just goes into the blank spaces where everything exists that she didn’t know existed.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just say something about that, though? Sorry. It just strikes me that there is a flaw in it, in the model because what she does is she goes and ingests more and more and more knowledge. That’s what she goes away and does. And then she ends up at enlightenment after adding and adding and adding.

Martha Beck:
But I actually don’t think there’s a flaw there because that’s exactly how it happens. Everybody, the human mind is voracious for knowledge and keeps trying to better itself. And children are born with natural learning capacity. And it’s easy because learning in the physical world is the way to succeed.

Rowan Mangan:
So is the learning, building the bowl and then the enlightenment is understanding that we use the space?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you learn ceramics and you make bowls and you make bowls and you think the bowls are important. And then one day after you’ve made a million bowls, you realize that it’s the blank space you’ve been making the whole time. And that is, it’s called a satori in Japanese, where your view, the faces/vases view of the brain, it switches. Your reality switches from object consciousness to space consciousness. That’s the language around it. And it’s a click. It’s not, I slowly learned that the emptiness was a thing. It’s like I slowly learned all about bowls and then one day I realized it’s never about the bowl, it’s about the space inside. And it’s a huge explosion of understanding, but it’s not really even expressible because it’s about nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s perfect. So I’m going to start noticing and valuing all the spaces that I find in my life and all the places where there is emptiness and where everything is already perfect.

Martha Beck:
Me too. And I think that’s all we need to say for now, except stay wild!

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.