Martha Beck:
Today’s episode is called “Your Money or Your Life” because those two things are very, very different. But in our culture, they tend to get blended together.

Rowan Mangan:
That is right. And we will be looking at what fills the void in our attention if we take money and jobs out of the middle. So I hope you enjoy it. It’s a good listen. See you on the other side.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m 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.

Martha Beck:
Trying so hard, trying all the time. Ro, what are you trying to figure out in your life right now?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, very many things. As always. It’s a learning curve, life. Isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s almost a curlicue of learning.

Rowan Mangan:
But the thing that I bring to you today to discuss with our Bewildered Cahoot, is: hair. That’s the thing. Hair is a thing that’s about identity, and one of the things that you talk about in your Wayfinder Life Coach Training, that we talked about even when we did our Four Squares of Change Bewildered episodes, is that when we start to go through a transformation as we do many times in our lives, and we’ve gone through the melting down of the old identity, and we start to feel the little tiny bits of the new identity coming forth, often at such times people change their hair. Am I correct or am I correct?

Martha Beck:
They do in fact change their hair. And when I was coaching people personally, one at a time, they’d come in with different hair and be—your life is changing buddy.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I realized that I wanted to change my hair. And I wanted to change my hair, and I wanted it to be dramatic because I feel like there’s a dramatic new me coming out. And I went to my beloved hairdresser, Bianca, with a vision that I had had for my hair.

Martha Beck:
Do tell.

Rowan Mangan:
So I went to my hairdresser with this vision in my mind of the new identity that I was going to curate.

Martha Beck:
Did it come to you as a vision vision?

Rowan Mangan:
Sort of, yeah. It sort of did, but you know, it didn’t end well.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
So I went to Bianca and I said, “Bianca, I see myself with this same stupid haircut, but instead of it just being short at the back, imagine a thick braid, long, going right down my back, a lovely thick braid that I could shake my head and it would flop like a tail.”

Martha Beck:
I think we need to explain to folks who only listen to this, Ro’s—

Rowan Mangan:
That I have stupid hair.

Martha Beck:
Ro’s hairstyle which I call the gracious badger, is almost shaved on the sides and prematurely a lovely silver-white color. Then in the middle is a kind of mohawk that is black and lustrous.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a fauxhawk.

Martha Beck:
It is gracious badger. It actually looks more like a capuchin monkey, but I love the phrase gracious badger. So just imagine that dark streak down the center of her head now becoming a thick and luscious braid.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so everything, it’s still the same weird situation at the front, but just behind me there’s this thick, thick emphasis on the thick long braid. And I was like, I know some things about girl stuff, not many, but I know one or two. And I went in and I was like, “So let’s talk hair extensions.”

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, that’s a thing.

Rowan Mangan:
And I had an awkward conversation with her about the fact that hair extensions aren’t as much of a thing as I thought they were. I thought it was a magic trick that made your hair go long.

Martha Beck:
Are you saying it isn’t?

Rowan Mangan:
I think they’re uncomfortable.

Martha Beck:
Uncomfortable?!

Rowan Mangan:
And they’re not for you. I think it’s mostly for people who want their long hair to look a bit longer and a bit thicker.

Martha Beck:
Oh.

Rowan Mangan:
So I could be wrong about that, though, because I don’t really do girl stuff, so that didn’t work. So I’m like, all right, I’ll grow it. That’s fine. I’ll grow it. How long can it take? And she was like, at this point, looking at me in the mirror the way a hairdresser will, and I could see her swallowing the throw-up that was in her mouth.

Martha Beck:
“Have you gone mad?”

Rowan Mangan:
And she’s like, look—she’s a really nice lady. Everyone who’s a regular listener knows Bianca the hairdresser, one of the three people I see in my life. Lovely woman. She says, “Maybe in a year you would have a tiny little rat’s tail.” And she’s like, “But it would just be, it wouldn’t all be as long because it’s short, so it wouldn’t even be caught up. So it would really just be like a little rabbit tail.”

Martha Beck:
Very shaggy rat tail?

Rowan Mangan:
She’s like, “In three years, it’s just going to be a longer rat’s tail.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, you know what’s in my mind? There were a family of squirrels born near my bird feeder and one of them showed up one day. They were little babies. We saw them grow up and they had thick and luscious tails. And one day one of them, and I know exactly what happened, it got chomped by some kind of—

Rowan Mangan:
You think you know what happened.

Martha Beck:
I would bet my life on this because no squirrel would do this to its own hairstyle. It got chomped by a predator—a fox, a weasel, maybe even an owl—but it got chomped by the tail. And it ran so hard that it got away, but basically peeled its own tail. So yeah, it looked sad with a few wispy hairs on it. And that’s what I see when I picture this thing that Bianca said.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think it’s about right. Yeah, I think that’s about right. It’s not good. She was really trying to be merciful to me, and I do appreciate that and I see it, but I was still in my personal transformation of identity. I was like, “But Bianca, I’m in a personal transformation of identity, and if I can’t change my hair, what can I do?” Well, actually I was like, “If I can’t get my long lustrous thing, what can I do? What can I do from this very specific hair situation?” I went on my knees before her metaphorically and just said, “Tell me what I can do.” And she looked at me and she looked at my hair, and she touched it a little bit, thoughtfully. And then she said, “You could get some new glasses.” And I was like, “Oh man.” But if anyone’s watching this on video, you might notice it’s actually very slightly longer on the side.

Martha Beck:
Shocking. What a change!

Rowan Mangan:
I guess in our forties we just have slightly more—

Martha Beck:
Things happen.

Rowan Mangan:
They feel momentous, but they only express in centimeters.

Martha Beck:
It’s probably true. There’s a psychological principle called the spotlight theory, which says that everyone thinks that everybody else’s attention is on them a hundred percent more than their attention actually is on them. So I think we have extreme spotlight syndrome when it comes to hair. We think that everyone in the room is looking straight at our hair and going, “Where is a garbage, a waste bin in which I can puke?” Yeah, I know this well, because as you started, when you started and you said “hair”—when we do this, we don’t talk to each other about this beforehand. We want to be surprised. Yes. So it just so happens that what I had put as my thing was hair.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what she was trying to figure out too. I mean in a way, if you think about it, we’re all just trying to figure out hair. That’s the perennial.

Martha Beck:
It’s so true.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s your thing?

Martha Beck:
Well, anyone listening to this episode is going to know how shallow we truly are. I would put my hair trauma—I use that jocularly—up against yours anytime because you know the trifecta of rot that is fine, thin, or limp? Hello! That’s Marty’s hair! Fine, thin, or limp? Yes. And it’s been that way my whole damn life. And then I’ve always managed to sort of smush it into shapes that are 19th-century gentlemen’s hairstyles. If you look at people around the Civil War, the soldiers and everything, they would have, you could tell they’d been wearing a cowboy hat, so their hair was really plastered, but then it would stick out straight above each ear, but it would curl kind of. And then one little thing would sproing! up in back, but you could see it was coated with bear grease. And I have in my life never managed to get past looking like I have an a 19th -century gentlemen’s hairstyle, but I went to the same, the self-same hair salon to which you did go.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, because we have a very small life.

Martha Beck:
And my stylist’s name David, and he is magical and he’s wonderful. And I do everything he says. And he played with my hair for a minute and said, “Well, you have all this curl.” And I said, “Only when it’s wet, then it goes dry.” And he said, “Oh, put some of this in it.” And he gave me a paste such as I have sought for my entire life on this earth. He put this stuff in my hair and all of a sudden, boing! It was curly.

Rowan Mangan:
Curly hair.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. So I came home and I started smacking that stuff into it and doing the things David had said. And it was a freaking disaster. I mean, I’ve always thought people say, “Oh, curly hair, what? It’s so hard to deal with.” And I was like, “You shut your wet mouth. You don’t know what it’s like to be fine, thin, and limp.” I thought that fine was a good thing. Thin or limp? Yes, that’s fine.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m thin and I’m limp, but I’m fine.

Martha Beck:
That is kind of the definition of fine for women in this culture. Anyway, all of this just would’ve been a sad tale that goes down like a bad day for Emily Dickinson or something that no one would’ve known of except for maybe a poem if it were not for the Guardian, a newspaper I deeply respect, sending a photographer, a person whose artistry I do not doubt, to take a picture of me for my book that was recently published. We did a photo shoot and that day I got up and I said, “I’m going to kill it with these hair products.” And I did. I killed it badly. It was like I had destroyed a 19th-century gentleman and then put him on my head like a mask or something. Roey, this is what I did. Because David does this thing, he says, “You curl your hair like this, then you attach it to another part of the hair and you push upward and it stays.” And it always does when David does it, but I can’t do it. And every time he tells me to do this—

Rowan Mangan:
That’s part of their dark magic, the like hairstylist—

Martha Beck:
They’re like, yeah, they’re like people who say, “It’s just nutrition,” but actually they’re getting tons of plastic surgery. They have a dark hairstyling magic and they tell you, “Oh, it’s just that I twist it like this and then it stays.”

Rowan Mangan:
No, they taunt us with their magic. It’s not kind.

Martha Beck:
It was bad. I mean you were there that day, but you did not see the foremath. If there’s an aftermath, there has to be a beforemath. And the beforemath was bad. This is what I did, Ro. Because I paint a lot, I know that if something is basically the same color as something else, it disappears very easily. You can put something—like our black dog who sits in the black blanket, it disappears. So what I did—

Rowan Mangan:
This is why you tried to clean up a stain on the carpet with paint by mixing paint in the same color as the carpet.

Martha Beck:
I’ve got my feet on it right now.

Rowan Mangan:
You painted over the paint that was on the carpet.

Martha Beck:
I spilled this horrible acid green acrylic paint onto the white rug, and it would not come out after an hour scrubbing. So I mixed a color the same color as the rug and painted it over. It’s classic. It looks like a 19th-century gentleman’s hairstyle is what it looks like. Okay. What I did, Ro. So I went to get the barrettes that you use for our lustrously be-haired daughter. I mean that child has more hair at four than I’ve ever had in my born life. Is she sharing it? Not at all. Not to mention Karen, who’s got enough hair.

Rowan Mangan:
What do you want her to do with it?

Martha Beck:
Karen’s so much hair, why can’t she give me some?

Rowan Mangan:
And just like, tape it to your head or something? That’s gross.

Martha Beck:
Like an extension. I mean you’ve harbored these dark thoughts. Anyway, what I did, I went and got these sweet little pink and blue and purple barrettes, and I mixed up a little pile of acrylic paint in exactly the same shade as my hair, and I started barretting the shit out of my head. I was putting all these curls in and holding them in place. Did you know I was covered with barrettes that day?

Rowan Mangan:
No. And you painted them?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And you didn’t see them. That’s my point. But my hair looked, I mean, ughhh. And I tried taking them out, and it was horrifying. I can’t even describe, you’d have to hire Werner Herzog somebody to show what the horror of my hair was that day. And I thought, okay, I believe in the barrettes, and I’m going to try to overcome it with personality. And the photographer came, and this photographer, who is wonderful, would not let me smile.

Rowan Mangan:
She wanted a thoughtful Martha Beck.

Martha Beck:
She wanted a thoughtful, relaxed face, and she said, “It’s all in the eyes. It’s all in the eyes.” Which it is, of course, this is an artist. How am I getting, I’m stomping on this artist’s great work, but just first of all, my face looks like a meat pie when it’s not moving. If I ever stop moving, people would just automatically assume that it is a baked product of some kind with little beady raisins for eyes. Sorry, I get—all right, so here’s the long and short of it. What I have to do is deal with the humiliation of the fact that I was photographed on that day with poo-poo hair. Poo-poo hair, poo-poo face in a major news organization. And I have to deal with that somehow.

Rowan Mangan:
You were like, as I picture it, like a little hedgehog with little painted brown acrylic. What sort of paints did you use? Acrylics?

Martha Beck:
Acrylics, yes. I didn’t have time for oils to dry.

Rowan Mangan:
Little sticking out everywhere. I mean, no wonder she wouldn’t let you smile.

Martha Beck:
No, they were more flat to my head. But with little curls like sticking out of them randomly. I did look a bit hedgehog-like. You’re laughing because you were there and you remember it.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t remember.

Martha Beck:
It looked so bad. And you kept saying, “People barely remember.”

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think I said that. I was really focusing on holding the blind, the string of the blind at the right angle to the right level. It was a very, very—and I didn’t know about your little bristly, little barrette situation.

Martha Beck:
Well, she was a real photographer. She was grabbing plastic wrapping and holding it over the lens. Stuff she just found on the floor because we never do housework. It was a nightmare scene and now it’s on film and we have to deal with that. Let’s go on. Let’s move on.

Rowan Mangan:
Dear. Oh dear. So I think—

Martha Beck:
What’s our topic, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think it matters because I think our deep cosmetic insecurities have made everyone switch off.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it does matter because this is our chance at redemption.
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Imagine, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
If you will. If your addiction and the culture around you, the culture’s religion, were the same thing. Imagine how hard it would be to try and kick your addiction if everywhere everyone was telling you that it was the only way and the right way and the true way.

Martha Beck:
That would be a hard addiction to break.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
And that is what we are suggesting today about putting money in the center of your life. The system we’re in, this culture, is a money-driven culture. Money is in all things, about and all things, and through all things. And the idea is you need to get money, you need to get money, you need to get money. And somebody can be absolutely crazed to get more money, even if they have billions of dollars. And we don’t say, “Go to rehab, you’re clearly mentally ill.” We say, “Whoa, I could be like that someday! It’s good to put money in the middle of your life. Yeah!” So.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, your worth, you can count your worth as a human being or something. So this idea that we put money in the middle of our lives and that is there’s a compulsiveness to it, to the feeling of hoarding money and of making money. This abstract extrapolation of the barter system and turning that into something that you can hoard when you actually really can’t, and you can’t in any meaningful way. It doesn’t mean anything. And so I heard this quote that was in the context of addiction that said, “You can never get enough of something that almost works.” And that being the kind of engine that drives the addictive thing and that makes you want more and more and more and more because you’re trying to fill a differently shaped hole. So yeah.

Martha Beck:
I recently read the book Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein, really interesting book. And he says that our culture is completely addicted to money precisely because it is considered something that can meet our needs, our basic needs. And yes, in our system, you need money to get the things to fill your needs. But money itself he says can’t meet the needs. Like if you’re sitting in a room full of money, and you don’t have food or clothing or access to those things and you can’t buy anything with it, money is useless. But it’s put in the place of being the ultimate useful thing. The thing that should be your driving focus in life. And of course, and we’ve said this in other episodes, money can’t meet your genuine needs because—so, trying to meet those needs with money always turns it into addiction. There is no such thing as enough when you’re working with something that almost works.

Rowan Mangan:
Now to just put that into real-world context, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t be able to afford to eat and house yourself and meet all your basic necessities. Obviously, in the day-to-day life, we all interact with money. And it’s criminal that there are people who, because of an absence of this hypothetical thing—

Martha Beck:
Hypothetical. The bizarreness of that, that you could keep people from their needs with something imaginary.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So we’re specifically talking about money as the thing that you want, that you keep hunting, even when you’re not hungry. This is the strange thing of the human predator is hunting when you’re not hungry. And it’s—sorry, I just totally lost my train of though.

Martha Beck:
No, it’s elevated. This hunting when you’re not hungry is not considered bizarre. I remember when some lions at Londolozi Game Reserve where we love to go, started hunting when they weren’t hungry. And the whole place there was like, I don’t even know why it happened. There was this group of a few young male lions and they started hunting more than they needed, and the whole place felt disturbed. And then one of them got killed and the others ran away and it stopped. But I remember talking to the rangers and the trackers and just going, “There’s a crazy lion out there because it’s killing things it doesn’t want to eat.” And yet, when we get more and more and more and more money than we possibly need, people go, “Yeah, that’s it. He’s doing it right. That’s really good.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. “That’s admirable.”

Martha Beck:
It does become, it has become such a deep story that it is at the level of a religion, a life/world religion, sociologists would call it, that influences every thought we think, every relationship, every act.

Rowan Mangan:
And so everything that’s not feeding the money system is sort of scorned, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s not the prevailing religion, so it is spurned. And we’ve all had the experience of doing something we love and having people say, “But does it earn money? Are you going to earn money with it?” Or doing something for money and saying we don’t love it and going, “But we do live in this money-based economy and I have to keep doing this because this is the way we live.” So at the high end it’s people hunting when they aren’t hungry and at the low end, it’s a cultural system that enforces the idea that you mustn’t put your own desires, thoughts, and preferences in the middle of your life. You must always and only put the pursuit of money in the middle of your life.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So there is this wonderful artist that we love called Amie McNee that I think we’ve mentioned her on this podcast before. And she recently wrote a very cool essay on her Substack called, can’t remember what it was called, but it was about not wanting a job. And she was sort of saying that if you don’t want to have a conventional job in this society that you will be seen as weak or lazy. And she was saying that for her, it’s a very different sort of thing, is that it’s about not having a high tolerance for suffering and not wanting to suffer. But she said this brilliant thing that I wanted to read out loud from this essay. She said, “We live in a culture that venerates toiling and drudgery.” And she said, “Because I have an intolerance for a life that doesn’t sparkle, I created a life that was filled with meaning and purpose. Ironically, to do so, I worked harder than I ever have before, but it was work that absolutely glittered. Now I write, talk, paint, connect. I do it to make money, I do it because it lights me up, I do it because that is why I’m here on this earth. Life sparkles, yet I still feel like I’m getting away with something.” And this is the power of the culture. She says, “Like, I’ve snuck around a compulsory part of being a human being, which is doing work that sucks.”

Martha Beck:
Wow. Yeah. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t feel a chime of resonance when you hear her put it that way? Every single day in ways that we cannot count, we get this message: Put money in the middle, put money in the middle, put it in the middle of everything, put it in the middle of your day, put it in the middle.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Put it in the middle of your priorities or your schedule. I mean I think, and again—

Martha Beck:
You have to, I get that we’re not saying that that’s—

Rowan Mangan:
So what we want to talk about is in terms of your attention. What about— the thing that they can’t take from you is where your mind goes while you’re doing the thing. Where your daydreaming happens, where your little glimpses of fun to come. So we wanted to talk about it as instead of money at the center of your attention, what would it be like if we were putting creativity and community in the middle of our attentional field, even while we meet the needs we need to meet with our jobs or our side hustles or whatever it is?

Martha Beck:
Or both. I mean it is really true—and even Eisenstein, who’s quite radical, says this—we’re in a money economy. We do have to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. We’ve got to play the money game. But where you center your attention, what you put in the middle of your mind is what we want to talk about. And the culture says put money in the middle of your mind. And we started talking about this and thinking, “What else?” That’s the story, that money should be in the middle of our minds. And I come from a religious background where they literally said, “You have to control your thinking and we want you to—here’s what you are allowed to think.” And I really tried to do that. So I think I have this overly socialized part of myself that when we were talking about this, I realized it’s actually frightening, even after everything I’ve said and done, for me to think, “What would become of my life if I truly put art and community in the center, the middle of my attention?” It is so alluring and inside myself, I go, “Don’t steer down that road. Everything will go to hell in a handbasket because money is God, and not working for money is blasphemy, and you will be smitten!”

Lila the other day said, “I will smite you.” She learned it from a movie. Yeah. Money is God and not working for money is blasphemy and not putting money in the middle of our minds is blasphemy. So Roey, let us blaspheme.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s a nice, religious sounding phrase to chew on. “Let us blaspheme, let us go forth and blaspheme upon the soil.”

Martha Beck:
Now you know what’s on the inside of all those barrettes.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, it’s just as spiky in there. Yeah. Okay, so that’s the culture’s story. So the blasphemy is, let’s reframe the story. Is there a story that we can tell that could feel truer than money must always be at the center of our attention? Because even Amie McNee, who is as close to living it as most of us will ever get, is still walking around with this sense of “I’ve gotten away with something. I might get caught not having the shitty job.” That is like the tax we pay for being adults or whatever, however we are framing it. Let’s tell a different story and try that on and see if that feels less horrifying to our spirit.

Martha Beck:
And then what comes from your true nature? What she gets to is a sort of wall that she can’t go beyond, and so she starts to frame it up in terms of “I reject that.” I used to be in group therapy and my therapist, if a woman was in a bad relationship—that was pretty much everyone—she’d make them pretend that the other person was, say it was with their parents or something. She’d have them imagine their parents and instead of arguing back, she’d have them agree with that. “Absolutely, Mom and Dad, I believe that I should live this way. I believe that I should do exactly what you want, I believe.” And after she’d had them say that three or four sentences in, they would just go, “No!” And that’s where you hit your own edge. Your true nature is saying don’t go down that story. And McNee says, she says, “I must have magic. I demand a life that I love. These demands are reasonable.”

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I think that that’s the truly seditious part of it is saying these demands are reasonable. You can say “I demand things,” but everyone can see, everyone knows that these are unreasonable demands. She’s like, “No, these demands are reasonable.” And I think you get to have them as well. And imagine that. Imagine the sheer, unadulterated, brass-plated balls it takes to say, “I demand a life that I love.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Isn’t it weird?

Martha Beck:
“I must have magic.” She’s going to get smitten for sure.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s going to get proper smote.

Martha Beck:
She’ll get smote right down.

Rowan Mangan:
So how can you reframe it, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, it was interesting because I was thinking probably if we took out, “Put money in the middle,” that’s the right thing to do. If we remove that story from our minds and we just went with the story that feels truest to us, what my story would be is, it’s funny, I’ve been reading also a book on artificial intelligence and what it would be like if an alien intelligence was running the world and not human intelligence. And I keep thinking, “You actually think human intelligence is running nature?” There is a non-human intelligence that is moving through the earth, the oceans, the floor of the ocean, and it’s been at work for hundreds of billions of years. And for me, it’s a real thing. I thought, “That is what I want at the middle of my attention is the mystery.” And it made me think about how ironic it is that we have this almost religious commitment to money as the godlike thing that is in, about, and through all things, even when religious people used to specifically go away from money and not earn money so that it wouldn’t pull their attention off the mystery.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, could you just go back and just explain, you just said there’s this non-human intelligence running everything, but you didn’t, beyond saying the mystery, you didn’t—so say someone’s never listened to this podcast before or whatever. Could you be a bit clearer about what you are talking about?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I think that says it all. Okay, I’ll try. Think of the power of a magnet close to another magnet. My whole life it has felt like my mind is a magnet and there is another magnet out there. And rather than being human, it is the innate infinite intelligence of the universe. My earliest memory is of running away from church on a day when in Provo, Utah, literally everyone was in church and the neighborhood was empty. And I got out of church in a red lace dress. And I walked and it was this, it must’ve been Easter because there were flowers and decorations everywhere and there was not a soul there. And I went and floated my shoes, my little patent leather shoes for Sunday school down this little rivulet and just thought, “Take it, take it.” And for the first time I remember thinking, “I’m with something that can take care of me.” And it was extreme and intense and I lost it and then found it and lost it and found it a million times in my life, and I do not know how to define it.

Rowan Mangan:
So you’re talking about a spiritual sensibility?

Martha Beck:
Yes, but not religion and not God as most people experience it. And the way it comes into humanity for me is through art and community. In particular, the combination. I just stumbled across this thing that I’m going to plug online is Jacob Collier and his two sisters whose names are Dodie and Laufey, I think. Anyway, they’re singing this song in front of a large audience and Jacob Collier is this brilliant young musician and he does something that invites the audience into his art. That’s all I’m going to say about it. Look it up. Jacob Collier and his sisters.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll put it in the show notes.

Martha Beck:
We’ll put it in the show notes. And what he does when he invites the entire audience into his art, there is an energy that to me is the same energy that keeps us spinning through space on this blue rock. It is, he embodies that energy. It is just complete joy and absolutely shared consciousness. And it has nothing to do with anything financial or even material. It is pure human community engaged in the creation of beauty. And that energy is what I want at the middle of my attention. That’s my story. What’s yours?

Rowan Mangan:
So I wonder if in the process of like, say, here’s our attention, it’s this big field in front of us, and right at the bullseye there is going to be something. So if we pull money and work and that out of our attentional field, and we still put it there, but we put it away from the bullseye and over in the edge, that’s where with Pilates and organic and all of that. And right at the center there’s a lacuna there, a black hole of “There must be something at the center.” And so you’ve just described maybe what rushes in.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You relax into that black hole and you shoot out the other side as a big bang.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Wow. That is a complicated metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Not if you think about it all day like I do.

Rowan Mangan:
No, trust me, it’s complicated.

Martha Beck:
Also, Adam, my son, told me that he thinks that way too.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, so I’m struggling to define the steps that we’re taking here. And I want to say when you remove money from the center of your attention, you’re going to notice that something else is going to want to fill it. And so…

Martha Beck:
Good point.

Rowan Mangan:
I think it’s going to need to, there’s a level of being deliberate about what it is that feels, like we’re trying to talk about what feels like the opposite of that kind of dogmatic money, work, drudgery, taxes, and all of that as that is a reasonable demand to make.

Martha Beck:
I love that because it’s about what arises. It’s not even an act of the mind, it’s an act of surrender to the true nature. So what pops into the bowls after you?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I think you need to be careful there because I think if you’re too surrendered, another cultural story could very easily slide in and fill that space.

Martha Beck:
So how do you find your way to the new story?

Rowan Mangan:
So I do it in terms of how it feels. So for me, I think if I take money out of the center, assuming my basic needs are being met, the thing that I want to put at the center of my attention for my one wild and precious life is making shit.

Martha Beck:
Haha, I love it!

Rowan Mangan:
Making beauty, however you define that. But it’s funny because I don’t think I’m talking about anything that different from what you were talking about, but I have a completely different vocabulary.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Because everyone’s so—

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s so much more—sorry?

Martha Beck:
Everyone’s different. We get to fill it in ourselves.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so I think that the experience for me, the felt physical somatic experience of deep creativity—making something and especially making something with other people—that that is genuinely to the point earlier of you can never get enough of something that almost works. I think creativity and so making shit and making shit with friends in an ideal scenario—that fills me.

Martha Beck:
I’ve seen that happen. And it crisscrosses for you because you create things with people. You are always, when we first got together, you were always talking to me about dinner parties, which I thought were like cocktail parties because I’m an idiot. And then I saw you actually bring people together and I’m like, “Oh, this is Ro’s creativity. Her magnet is drawing other people in, and the way she makes them feel comfortable and welcome is part of the creative soup. And then you make the soup, which is actual soup or whatever else you’re making, but before you even make the soup, you make the group that makes the soup. I’m talking like Dr. Seuss.

Rowan Mangan:
This is one of those moments for those of us who heard the episode where I said to Marty, “The metaphor cannot hold.” We are getting dangerously close to that today in a number of different areas.

Martha Beck:
I know, but talk to us a bit because I’ve been watching over the last weeks and months creating something that we call Wilder, which is a community, and it is a creation. And it’s a creation of a community that is about creation and community. And I’ve watched your wild mind come out, and I mean that with no irony at all. I’ve watched it.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny when you get into a state of pure creativity, which doesn’t feel quite the right word to me, but I dunno what would be, I was so intense. And I can remember one day as I was putting together all the pieces of software stuff and community management stuff and all the things that would become the Wilder online community and just had a day of being very drenched in it. And I remember without a clear sense of what I was doing, getting up and marching towards you in the bathroom, you were getting ready for something and I just walked into you and in the bathroom and I said, “Marty, there will be a thing called the Arty Friday Hang.” And it had come into my mind fully formed like that, the name, and it was just like, “It has been written that there will be an Arty Friday Hang.”

Martha Beck:
That is crazy. I thought, I mean that you got up and marched down the hall without a clear idea. I thought you’d been thinking it through for many hours, but now you’re saying it was one of those things that was just delivered to you. I love it when that happens. A clear thought just appearing in your head like a dewdrop.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so wild. And I think that’s where the bit that is creativity and the bit that is divine—that’s why they’re a Venn diagram at worst and a fucking complete, total eclipse at best because it’s like when we’re open to that, anything can happen. And what’s so wild is that the Arty Friday Hang has become the physical embodiment of the process of creativity plus community, like this perfect holding space, this encapsulation of a time where we sit together weaving baskets metaphorically, although no doubt, some of them are literally doing it, and we chat and we talk to each other and we shoot the shit while we make stuff. And it’s honestly heaven.

Martha Beck:
I love it when everyone logs on and they settle in with whatever they’re making. They’ve got their hands busy. You can see ’em looking at the stuff and there’s a feeling of being comfortable and happy, instead of sitting there in a zoom meeting looking pensive and stuck and staring at the screen because the boss is looking at you. There’s just so much sweetness in the group because we know we all get to be creative for a while. It’s like getting back a sense of childlike hope. And it hits me like that every single time.

Rowan Mangan:
For me, it’s the moment when we say, “Admit all into the Zoom room,” and the faces all come in and there’s this wave of energy as everyone comes in and all these beautiful faces and names and it’s like, “Yes!”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I’ve had so many Zoom meetings in my life, and when people are—and it’s usually focused around the money culture, money’s at the middle. It’s all very serious. It’s all deadly dull. I mean, of course there are people who really enjoy doing something like that on Zoom. I mean, some meetings could be fun.

Rowan Mangan:
Like doing this podcast. But yeah, so that kind of very abstract ideas of basically numbers made of pixels and then the exact opposite, which is the flooding of oxytocin in my body while I work with my hands. And I don’t care if it’s Zoom and we are not sitting around the well or in the clearing at the village or around the campfire, we are linked in that moment. And what it is, is it’s the moment and the fact that we’re doing stuff with our hands is wonderful and probably in an evolutionary way it’s really important. But I think the main thing is that it is—it utterly is the present moment. And even though we are making things, they’re precious, pointless things. And it’s not about the artifact, it’s the making. And you are just so present with your friends making shit in a circle.

Martha Beck:
And it’s the change that comes over us that floods up inside us. When we allow that childlike focus of attention that says, “I’m here to learn things. I’m here to create things. And no one’s looking over my shoulder, no one’s going to judge me. I don’t have to sell this. I’m just putting creativity front and center because I like it.” I think we all love having stuff like that in the center of our minds. Not at the fringes. In the center.

Rowan Mangan:
The middle of our attention, yeah. So even if it is an hour a week, we want to encourage you to experiment with taking money and working in drudgery out of the center of your attention and just see what else wants to be there and make sure it’s not more culture.

Martha Beck:
Get your hands moving, play, make something, and….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.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

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.