Martha Beck:
Enjoy.

Hi, I’m Martha Beck.
Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people who are trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Figuring it out, trying.

Rowan Mangan:
Trying. Keyword.

Martha Beck:
Sometimes feeling like it’s going well, mostly not.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but it’s the trying that’s the point, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
That really is the point. And what are you trying to figure out these days?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m glad you asked. Not just because it’s part of the contrivance of this show that we always ask each other this at the beginning.

Martha Beck:
No, it was totally spontaneous. Never even would’ve thought of it.

Rowan Mangan:
What I’m trying to figure out is how to get comfortable with the absolute unforeseeable nature of the next catastrophe in parenting. You can never predict. I mean, you can predict a lot of the catastrophes minute to minute. I can watch our 4-year-old and watch her brain dreaming up mischief in real time. But then there’s the things that you would never think of. And I had a really interesting one about a week ago. So as regular listeners might know, I have a little happy place that I go when things get hard, and it’s a farm. It’s a farm where I like to, I grow crops, I keep animals. It lives in my little Nintendo Switch, it’s called Stodgy Valley.

Martha Beck:
“Stodgy Valley.” That’s how Australians say “Stardew Valley.”

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway, I promised myself I wasn’t going to say the name of it until they decided to become sponsors, but anyway, there it is. Stardew Valley.

Martha Beck:
They have not. They have not decided to become sponsors.

Rowan Mangan:
Alas. And Lila doesn’t want her own. Well, she has her own farm, right? She has her own farm. But she’s four, so her farm sucks, and I’m 44, so my farm is amazing. Look, I’m just going to say it. The time for false humility has passed.

Martha Beck:
A good parent never misses a chance to rub the child’s nose in how much better the adult can do with the things, right?

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t need to because she’s perfectly aware that my farm rocks. So sometimes she’s like, “Can I play your farm?” And sometimes if I really just want to get a little bit more sleep in the morning or I just can’t, for whatever reason, I’ll go, “All right, yeah, you can play my farm.” Okay. Never thinking that this scenario could come up. And this really did happen, but I really want our listeners to understand it’s also such a metaphor for life. Okay. So I go to my farm one day.

Martha Beck:
Metaphorically.

Rowan Mangan:
Metaphor— No, I go, I literally went there.

Martha Beck:
Digitally.

Rowan Mangan:
Digitally, okay. Yeah. Went there digitally. And I was surprised to find I had woken up in my house with my lovely wife, four new cats that I hadn’t had before. All right? But okay. I couldn’t get out my front door to farm my farm, Marty, because there were 18 scarecrows in my living room and one of them was directly in front of the front door, so I couldn’t get out. No biggie. This is why we have axes.

Martha Beck:
This is why we have 9-1-1, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, I’m afraid there’s no telephones in Stardew Valley.

Martha Beck:
Oh god. So a conundrum.

Rowan Mangan:
Look, it was beyond a conundrum. It was an impossible situation. No worries. This is why we have axes. Guess what? My axe wasn’t in the house. My axe had been disappeared and—

Martha Beck:
She took it.

Rowan Mangan:
There was literally no way out because of scarecrows in the living room.

Martha Beck:
This is very metaphorical. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve coached who are finding scarecrows in their living rooms. Anyway, go on. Metaphor.

Rowan Mangan:
Metaphorically, right? You would just never think it and I never thought it. And I’ve had to enlist the help of so many people as I try to get back to my— I mean, think of my cows!

Martha Beck:
Stodgy Valley 9-1-1! Cows suffering!

Rowan Mangan:
Cow’s suffering because there are 18 scarecrows in the house.

Martha Beck:
Terrifying.

Rowan Mangan:
Did not see that coming.

Martha Beck:
A horror movie.

Rowan Mangan:
Hashtag did not see that coming. Yeah. So I don’t think I need to unpack that metaphor any further except to say: Did not see that coming.

Martha Beck:
But the suspense is unbearable. And you told me what you eventually did.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, yeah. It was pretty cool.

Martha Beck:
You became your own farmhand.

Rowan Mangan:
I cloned myself as a multiplayer and set myself up as a farmhand, a simple farmhand living in a cabin on the southwestern side of the farm. He’d been a big city boy, but he’d left to be in a Hallmark movie. Anyway.

Martha Beck:
I smell romance.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, unfortunately, I’m already married to a woman and I have three cats, so I don’t think he’s going to have any luck there. So listen, as my clone, I axed my way into the house and dealt with those scarecrows, and then I retired my clone. Bye!

Martha Beck:
The ethics are very complex here.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a lot of ethical complexity. Marty, what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Well, you, as it happens. You and your continuous digital presence playing game after game after game, and this is on the New York Times game app that we both do, and one of our friends got us onto it and now we’re like crack addicts. We can’t stop doing the New York Times puzzles every day. And one of them is called Wordle. A lot of our listeners know.

Rowan Mangan:
Everyone knows what Wordle is at this point in time.

Martha Beck:
Everyone knows Wordle. There are, you have five chances to guess a word.

Rowan Mangan:
Every day there’s a new one. Everyone gets the same word.

Martha Beck:
And it’s a secret word and you type in a five-letter word, and if a letter is not in the word, it goes gray.

Rowan Mangan:
This is so boring.

Martha Beck:
You can’t use it anymore. Then, okay, but if it’s in the right place, it goes green. But if it’s in the word but in the wrong place, it’s sort of orangey olive. So this morning I got up and I did the Wordle and it was a really hard one and I was like, “Wow, that one was, that was a tough sled.” And Ro said, “I got it in two.” Now for those Wordlers out there, I usually get it in three or four guesses, but almost never in two. You have to be either lucky or psychic to get it in two. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Right. I just want to say this was the morning, but because the Wordle comes out in the middle of the night and I’d been up late, I had solved it in the night, which sometimes happens.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, she was up till like 2:00 AM and she Wordled sometime after midnight.

Rowan Mangan:
Wordle, Wordle.

Martha Beck:
And she goes, “It was a hard one and I got it in two. I rocked. I crushed it.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
She was so proud,

Rowan Mangan:
Best feeling ever.

Martha Beck:
She had to go off and get her phone and bring up the Wordle and show it to me. And it was just almost all gray letters with a couple of orange ones. Now it’s true there were two attempts, but it was nowhere near the solution. And she had fallen asleep doing the Wordle and dreamed that she got it in two.

Rowan Mangan:
Imagine being so lame. Imagine being a human that is so lame that your happy place is an imaginary farm where you just work all the time, and then—

Martha Beck:
A dream version.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you go and you sleep and you dream that you won the Wordle. Oh my God, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, we’re pathetic. So pathetic.

Rowan Mangan:
No, you’re fine. You come out of all this just fine.

Martha Beck:
Well, I mean humans, basically.

Rowan Mangan:
Humans, yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because I do those every day without fail. And I feel genuine pride when I get these ridiculous puzzles right. We are such funny little monkeys.

Rowan Mangan:
We are.

Martha Beck:
There are so many problems that we do need to solve, and we’re like, “No, I think I’m going to look at this word puzzle and then go milk some fake cows for 25 hours.” We need to grow up. Or not!

Rowan Mangan:
Karen’s really funny, our beloved, because she, there’s this kind of casual thing that often happens late afternoon. We start to gather for the evening, the family, and someone without fail will just casually throw out, “So did you get the Wordle today?”

Martha Beck:
“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I’m on the last square.” We’re like, and two of us will have gotten it. We’re like, “Mm-hm. You want a hint?” “No! Yes.”

Rowan Mangan:
And then the other one is connections, and it’s like you have to guess the connection between the words. Everyone knows. Go play it. It’s not, you know.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, go play it.

Rowan Mangan:
But Karen will never understand why people are anti-spoiler in anything. She just wants to know what happens, even in a sitcom. She’s like, “It’s all right, I read about it. I don’t need to watch the episode. I know what happens.”

Martha Beck:
“Have you read Moby Dick? Oh, he gets the whale in the end. The whale gets him. Whatever. I’m done.”

Rowan Mangan:
There was a whale. So without fail, we’ll go, “Did you get the Wordle? Yeah, I got it in three. Yeah. Must be pretty cool.” And then Karen, and then someone will go, “Oh yeah, how about the connections?” And Karen will always say, “Did you get the one that’s about football? Did you get the one that’s about golf? Did you get the one that’s about forties movie stars?” Ugh! Secretly it’s nice because I’m like, “Oh, I see.”

Martha Beck:
I know. It’s one of the things that’s sort of the glue that holds us together. Irrational obsession with fictional games and the uneven and frankly hypocritical way in which we both love and hate each other’s peccadilloes on digital platforms.

Rowan Mangan:
The games aren’t fictional, the games are real.

Martha Beck:
Is it peccadillae? The plural of peccadillo?

Rowan Mangan:
Why does peccadillo sound like the dirtiest word?

Martha Beck:
Like pecker dildo?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, dillo! Yeah, that’s it. It’s not very mysterious.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I got that Wordle in one. Could you see the connections? If Freud did a connections game, every single game would be about penises.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny because pecker also means penis, right?

Martha Beck:
I know, I know that. That’s why I said pecker because it’s peccadillo. But you Australians hear “pecca” and that’s a pecker to you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s the same thing.

Martha Beck:
Because of your language problems.

Rowan Mangan:
Cultural dyslexia.

Hi there, I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered, so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join. And y’all have a great day now.
So why don’t we move on to our topic of the day, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Oh, sure, a topic? Why not? Let’s do it.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s just do it. We always get comments from people going, “Could you please get to the point?” No, we’ll not be getting to the point. Now we’ll get to the point. Okay. So like many of the topics on this podcast, it is inspired by—yeah, you guessed it—our literal lives that we’re living right now.

Martha Beck:
Our total self-obsession.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
But everybody does that.

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t have to listen. It’s all right. Yeah. So we’re on the verge of a big change, fair to say?

Martha Beck:
Definitely fair.

Rowan Mangan:
Not a—

Martha Beck:
Not the biological kind, but—

Rowan Mangan:
Speak for yourself.

Martha Beck:
The way we’re running our lives right now is dominated by something that looks very strange from the perspective of the dominant culture that we’re always talking about. Because when we do things, including making massive upheavals and changes in our physical lives, it’s never for logical reasons.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s completely stupid.

Martha Beck:
It’s completely stupid. And it’s because we have a weird hunch we should do it. And what we always say to each other as a kind of motto is “Never by logic, always by magic” because that’s how our life has worked.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We could also say, never by things making sense, only by things just not making sense is how we—

Martha Beck:
But making a different kind of sense.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe it makes a different kind of sense. That’s what we’re trying to figure out, I guess. Yeah. So right now, as a very unusual, neurodivergent, creative family, we are about to move house and move into a sort of different style of living as well. Move to a different part of the country. Not a hugely different part, but a bit of a different part. And let’s just say some of my farming skills may come in handy.

Martha Beck:
It’s true. She’s like drooling over garden porn. She’s looking at raised beds in ways of—

Rowan Mangan:
Not literal garden porn.

Martha Beck:
No. Is there literal garden porn?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m sure there is.

Martha Beck:
Pictures of people growing incredible, beautiful, abundant gardens and eating the squash thereof. And she’s like abruptly fantasizing about gardening. And we also, we have a new podcasting studio.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Oh my God. Let me tell you.

Martha Beck:
So cool.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the coolest. Everything works.

Martha Beck:
Why are we not in it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because we don’t know where it is, what it looks like, or whether we will actually have to physically build it before it exists.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
But damn, do we love it.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, it’s the best. It’s so good.

Martha Beck:
It’s a good studio.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s weird. It’s this uncomfortable thing of like, we know we have to do this, why hasn’t it happened yet? What’s going on? I see my angel numbers. So angels, could you?

Martha Beck:
I got the Wordle in two. That explains it.

Rowan Mangan:
That explains it? Wait. Yeah. So I was reminded of this weird limbo feeling that we’re in at the moment. I remember when I thought I needed a dog to complete me.

Martha Beck:
You did.

Rowan Mangan:
And this is many years ago when we lived in California, and there was this weird sense at the time of, where’s my dog? You sort of look around the room, where’s my dog? I can’t see him anywhere.

Martha Beck:
Do you know what? I had that same feeling about you for a couple of years.

Rowan Mangan:
Where’s my dog?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah. I kept trying to scratch your ears. No, it was like, where is she? Where is she? And then I think, what? Who? But it was really, really, it would be a flicker on the periphery of my attention, but it wouldn’t stop. It was very, and I was like, what the hell? But we felt the same way about the dog.

Rowan Mangan:
When there were only one set of footprints. It was then that I was internet stalking you. It doesn’t even make any sense.

Martha Beck:
Jesus was my copilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. I’m so sorry, Christians.

Martha Beck:
If you love Jesus, I love you. You’re wonderful. Anyway, there’s this weird feeling. And it’s very strange in the liminal times when you feel like there’s an intense need to go into a new stage, but it’s not actually come to fruition yet physically. And we were like that when we moved here from the ranch in California, which was so magical and felt so predestined. And then we’re like, time to go. Now we’re going to move to the Eastern seaboard. We don’t know why. And we got together with Liz when we came out here.

Rowan Mangan:
We didn’t get together with Liz in a carnal way.

Martha Beck:
No, we didn’t get together with Liz in that way. We had a get-together.

Rowan Mangan:
We had coffee.

Martha Beck:
With dinner. Yeah, we had coffee. And we were like, “We feel bad because we sold our ranch and we don’t have any place to live. We don’t know what we’re doing, where we’re going.” And she’s like, “So? That’s what we do. We jump off cliffs. Also, we buy high and sell low. Big deal.” And we reminded each other that this is like if you follow the tarot deck, which you will do, even if you have three Harvard degrees—drink—when you are in the middle of a liminal state and there’s no external evidence showing you you’re doing the right thing, but you just feel like you have to do it, you will start getting tarot card readings. I’ve seen it happen to many people. And the sort of spiritual version of the tarot deck starts with a character called The Fool, who is actually the most blessed of all the beings. He’s so innocent. He’s like moving forward and he’s guarded by angels and he is going right off the edge of a cliff while a black cat runs in front of him and windows break on either side and mirrors break, and he’s walking under a ladder and he’s like Mr. Magoo. He just happily goes along.

Rowan Mangan:
Hello, just going to jump off this cliff.

Martha Beck:
And he just, he’s so culturally ignorant, innocent. And because of that, the angels are helping him go on his journey. But his evolution through the stages of the numbered cards show the hero’s saga from the innocence of ignorance to the innocence of wisdom and the hellish path between them.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And it’s this weird recognition that we seem to be in some sort of karmic destiny to live like this, to be the fool, to jump off the cliff again and again. Why are you doing that? I dunno. Just felt like it, I guess? So once again, here we find ourselves, and what we were thinking about the other day when we were talking about this podcast is pilgrims. What if we just are pilgrims in our nature? And what if you are as well? And what if being this is a way of being rather than a fixed identity, what if it’s an attitude? What if it’s a vibe? What if it’s how we live?

Martha Beck:
And by the way, as we’re talking about this, just for the Americans in the audience who may have heard things about “the pilgrims” in elementary school, as if there were only one group of pilgrims, this is not the puritanical group that sailed in from England or the Netherlands and proceeded to donate smallpox-infected blankets to the indigenous people. Those are not the pilgrims of which we speak. “Pilgrim” is a much older concept and a much broader concept. So on one hand it’s someone who journeys in a foreign land, so stranger in a strange land. You’re always going into new places that you have to go, but you don’t know anything there. So you’re in a constant state of bewilderment and fear, or faith and commitment, or all of the above. And then it’s also someone who is walking for reasons of holiness to a place that is holy, to places that are holy, sacred, because of the search for the sacred that is in the pilgrim’s deepest DNA. So it’s a kind of devotee of the path to awakening.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I mean when pilgrims traditionally are kind of defined by the pilgrimage, like the destination that they’re heading to, and we’re kind of trying to tweak the idea of this a little bit. So what if being a pilgrim isn’t a one-off identity during your time on this one-off path? What if our whole lives could be the pilgrimage and each step could be the sacred place or the holy land or whatever?

Martha Beck:
Right. And if we live this way, what we see, it’s kind of a bromide almost. It’s not about arriving at the destination, it’s about walking the path. But the reason you walk the path is that it changes you. You are changed by the path itself. Not by the holy destination, not by sacred titles bestowed upon you by an organization. The path itself, your own difficulty. In Buddhism, they say, “Obstacles do not block the path. The obstacles are the path.” So when you encounter them, it changes you. And that’s why you walk.

Rowan Mangan:
That is so cool. That’s really cool. So this idea of walking into the unknown. So for us, this sense right now of looking for a house, there’s this spiritual call to land itself, and it’s all wildly uncertain.

Martha Beck:
But that is something that defines the pilgrimage. It is never certain. And you don’t even get to demand clarity. The one thing that’s clear is: Walk, go, travel, move. Aim vaguely for this space. Well where exactly? You don’t get to know that yet.

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t know that yet.

Martha Beck:
I mean, you drove across the country, you and Karen drove across the country. I flew with Adam and our arms are killing us. Sorry. But they did. They drove across the country and we did not have a place to live at all. We like—

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we were couch surfing.

Martha Beck:
We descended on Liz like a plague of locusts. And yeah, it’s not, no matter how many times you do it, it is not fear-free.

Rowan Mangan:
No,

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So here are some of the things we’ve been thinking about in terms of living as pilgrims. It’s not just right now, but going forward in general.

Martha Beck:
Like forever.

Rowan Mangan:
Why is this a way of—this could be a way of looking at life that’s more natural, but even more practical, even within this culture. It could actually be a more practical way to approach life. This thing we call life.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and our culture doesn’t acknowledge that to walk into the unknown is advantageous. And in fact, even when I do something like setting up seminars in Africa, because it is completely unknown and there is no system and I have no idea whether it’ll work or not, and then it works, people say, “Oh, obviously you did that thing. You knew this because blah, blah, blah.” And no, I did not know it because blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah happened because I didn’t know what I was doing and I kept going anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, you stepped into the unknown.

Martha Beck:
The not knowing is the perpetual state of being changed by the path. Never knowing. And in our culture, you’re supposed to know.

Rowan Mangan:
So just that willingness to walk into the unknown is a pilgrim quality. And I think another one that really resonates for me is this idea of kind of traveling light, like unburdened or intentionally light. Pilgrims can only carry, they have to be able to carry everything they need. And so there’s literalism there that appeals to me. But also the metaphor, of course, is that you’re shedding ego and roles as well as possessions as you move on this path to the unknown.

Martha Beck:
And yet when your axe is gone, when you’ve shed that possession and you can’t hack your way through the scarecrows in your kitchen, your front door, it’s still very troubling for you as we’ve just heard.

Rowan Mangan:
But you know what, if I was on the path, I could just step around the scarecrow. My problem was the house. I needed to unburden myself of the house, the wife, the three cats, the tortoise, which I didn’t even tell you about earlier.

Martha Beck:
You were hoping to spare me the horror.

Rowan Mangan:
Of a pet tortoise on my farm.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God. I remember when I was packing to go on my long walk in England. We walked, I joined a group of 10 people, we walked through the Cotswolds in England for about a week on an 85-mile path. I didn’t walk one day, but I walked almost the whole way.

Rowan Mangan:
How many miles did you walk, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I walked 75 miles in six days according to my watch, which went by the way, it was missing power one day and didn’t even count it. So there, just add that. Sorry, but I’m getting my backpack ready, and you just carry a daypack. And I’m packing this pack.

Rowan Mangan:
Before she left.

Martha Beck:
Before I left. And Ro comes in and she’s like, “Why are you carrying a whole toothbrush? That thing is heavy.” And I’m like, “It’s toothbrush. How heavy can it be?” And she starts going through my stuff: “Okay, this journal can’t go with you. See this? No, you absolutely cannot have a flashlight. Umbrella? Why would you bother?” She was just, she was ruthlessly parsing my possessions because she has traveled with a backpack for weeks on end.

Rowan Mangan:
Months.

Martha Beck:
Months and knows what it’s like. And I was so grateful because the only day I was tired was when I took too much in my daypack, and oof.

Rowan Mangan:
Dude, I was in India for more than three months with a backpack and it’s like, it’s India as well, and you are 25 and you’re broke—and “you” in this story is me. And so you have to have the randomest stuff. And all my prep for this trip was what to pack. And it was all like gaffer tape wrapped around a pencil because you need to be able to keep your mosquito net up,

Martha Beck:
But you can’t take a whole roll of gaffer tape because it’s too heavy.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s too heavy, and it’s too, yeah, it’s more than you need, but it’s also bulky and makes it very hard for you to pack. It’s got to be right. So yes, I do, I fancy myself a bit of a backpacking.

Martha Beck:
You did me proud. I’ll tell you. And for the journey to teach you, you have to denude yourself of your navigational equipment, even. You don’t carry a lot of maps and charts and compasses and everything. I mean, I had a little compass in my phone. I had a lot of things in my phone.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve heard certain people say that there’s such a thing as an “inner compass.” Have you ever heard that?

Martha Beck:
Oh no, that’s bullshit.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s just, sorry.

Martha Beck:
It’s just my whole career, people. Read up on it. But what happens is you start noticing things that are not by logic, but by magic. You start to feel drawn to a certain place on the path. You start to feel a kind of itch to stop and look around. And you realize you’ve lost the path. And we had to find our way through England by one guy who was always looking at his phone. Thank God for Craig. But there were these tiny little signs like the size of a playing card, like tacked to some of the trees and fences, and they’d be miles apart! And that’s how we were supposed to find our way. And so you start paying attention to the wind, to the animals, to the strangers. What is guiding you? What is it telling you to go there? Where do you feel a kind of warmth going down a path? And where does it feel like, no, no, I need to check? Because you start getting very subtle messages and you start to realize they’re real. And that’s part of the holiness of it is you start to realize the guidance you’re getting in very woo-woo ways is real.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. It’s like there’s a willingness to be led. Like I’m going to be in a state in which I can be led by my own intuition.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and you can get much more woo-woo than our culture does. But I have, when I’ve been out with people tracking in the North American forests or even more in South Africa, I’ve watched what looks like magic: people stopping suddenly, doubling back half a mile, turning left, and finding exactly the animal they’re looking for. And not really, like when we—at that ranch in California, there was a day when Karen had to chase her horrifying golden retriever Bjorn, the worst golden retriever ever made. He would always run off.

Rowan Mangan:
The only golden retriever in the history of the world who was not a perfect angel.

Martha Beck:
He was not an affectionate dog. He was not a dog who cared. And he went huffing and puffing up this hill and she was like, “Bjorn! He’ll get eaten by coyotes!” So she drove this little tractor thing up a tree, I mean up a hill. She drove it up a hill, ran over the main water line, severed it,and sent this geyser of water just squirting like 80 feet in the air. And she came driving back once she found Bjorn, who was still headed for the high country, she came back screaming, “Water, water! What have I done? Water!” So I had to run up the hill, which was a very steep one, and turn off the water on the main water tank. And then we came back and we had to get someone to fix the leak. Now the line was six feet under the ground, the pipe that had broken.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I know where this story’s going now. Got it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You were like, why? Well, this wonderful neighbor that we had, just absolute salt of the earth, beloved friend, the most pragmatic farmer dude you could ever find outside of Stodgy Valley itself. He came over, and he found the break in the pipe. How? He dowsed it. He took two sticks, or one stick that is forked, and he walked over the earth until the tip of the branch bent down. He found it by magic, not by logic, but it worked. It freaking worked.

Rowan Mangan:
Magic’s only not logical because we decide it’s not logical.

Martha Beck:
We don’t give it a chance. Even when people do give it a chance, there’s this great evidence for a lot of so-called psi phenomena that are not materially explicable. And scientists just go, “Oh, pay no attention. Turn away. Turn away. It never happened.” But a pilgrim is willing to have that idea. That things should be logical? That idea will be changed by the path itself.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, and that’s the thing is it’s not a metaphor to say we are changed by the path itself.

Martha Beck:
Not at all.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, that’s obvious. Every step we take through life changes us unavoidably. But I think there’s this thing of insisting on being on a path of some kind. And it doesn’t have to be geographical. Although I have to say as someone who’s pretty passionate about travel, and I’ve been privileged enough to do a lot of it, I do feel like going somewhere different really accelerates a lot of transformation. But not everyone can do that. And it’s not the only path there is. So there’s all kinds of internal pathways itself, but I think it’s all about willingness and attitude. And it’s like, here I am, I’m on this path and I’m willing to be changed by it. I’m not looking to hold some crusty old self as I cross border after border.

Martha Beck:
And you can do that just by going a different way to work one day. There are ways that you can experience that newness, that shock, that remaking. But let’s sum it up. Where does our current dominant culture stand on this whole complex of dynamics and factors? What is the culture telling us?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think for regular listeners, I think this is going to be a fairly redundant, no, not redundant, but I think it’s always good to sort of, because some of these cultural messages are so invisible to us, it’s always good to go over them again. But insofar as what this random idea that we’ve got about “Let’s live it’s pilgrims,” the culture is like, have a clear destination, obviously. And then when you reach it, put your stake in it, claim it, it’s yours, it belongs to you.

Martha Beck:
“Plant a flag. This is ours. We have a flag.” Eddie Izzard’s brilliant line.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yeah. So then you’ve got your thing, you’ve got your flag. You own everything that is on the land denoted by the flag. “Do you have a flag?” You exploit those things, much as I do my cows on my farm if I can get to them.

Martha Beck:
The things and the people.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry?

Martha Beck:
You exploit the things and you exploit the people. You exploit everything.

Rowan Mangan:
I personally only exploit the cows. So you’re using “you” in the general sense.

Martha Beck:
You’re calling that extra farmhand and non-exploitative experience? You cloned yourself, made that man hack through the scarecrows, and then you exed him.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, he’s just sleeping.

Martha Beck:
Oh, okay. Proceed. He went to a farm upstate.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s literally true. Okay. Yeah. Exploit everything that’s on that land. Start accruing shit, and then die. I mean, right? That’s the story of the culture.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Prevent dying as long as possible. Gather your shit, gather more and more and more, and then have your head frozen so you’ll never die. And it’s interesting, we think of this, it’s the water we swim in. It’s so familiar, it’s like breathing. We don’t have to think it through. But it’s not normal. There are more people holding this perspective than have ever existed before because we’re such a huge population, but if you look at all the different cultures in the past, put ’em on an equal—like what does this culture believe? What does this culture believe?—the evidence suggests that only a minority of cultures have ever believed this. One of my favorite books is The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber, the brilliant—

Rowan Mangan:
The Davids.

Martha Beck:
The Davids, I call them. And it’s a brilliant scholarly look at why are we so fucked up as a culture? Why are we killing everything and destroying people and the earth? And interestingly, they kind of trace it to the dawn of modern culture in the Roman, the Imperial Roman culture’s tradition of something called the pater familias. The male head of a property owned everything and everyone on it. Had family, animals, slaves, enslaved people, and he owned it all. All the stuff, all the people. And he would punish and hurt them, but they had to call it love. And this weird contortion of combining “I own you, I will hurt you” with “I love you” did not exist in the other cultures that the Davids looked at, but they passed it down very effectively because it’s an aggressive model that is easily perpetuated by the strong, the vengeful, and the greedy.

Rowan Mangan:
I need you to say all that, say that again. So it’s like the first time that a family structure had this, “I love you, therefore I hurt you” dynamic, is that what you mean?

Martha Beck:
There’s one individual male who owns everyone, and his will must be imposed and followed and obeyed, and he will beat or kill or punish whomever violates his desires. And it’s because—he does this because he loves them. Like the crusaders, “We torture you.”

Rowan Mangan:
This hurts me more than it hurts you.

Martha Beck:
Or the Inquisition. Yeah, sorry, this is going on too long, but “We are going to torture you to death on the rack because of the love of Jesus.” They combined the idea that you are loved with the idea that you are owned and you are controlled and you are hurt. And this fundamentally messed up the nature inside the human, which says, I mean a lot of the indigenous American cultures who were looking at the early white settlers, their cultures would say the David’s fine documents that said, “We would never hurt a child. Sure, we go to war on other tribes, but you hurt your children? You hit your own children?” They were like, “What? And who says one dude gets to make the rules for a certain group of people? What? How does that even make sense? What about the other people?” It was not intuitive to most cultures. This is a virus that is, or maybe a birth defect or something that got started in the gene pool back then, or the meme pool and spread because violence and ownership became really, really convenient ways of seeing our mission in life instead of the pilgrimage message.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, and so I guess the key thing here is ownership really, isn’t it? Because it’s sort of part of the shift that we’re going through, we will hopefully be owning quote-unquote land, but the way that we will be viewing it is much more through a lens of stewardship than conquering.

Martha Beck:
Absolutely.

Rowan Mangan:
Or owning. And so yeah, I can really see how, again, we always find these cultural messages. They’re insidious, man, and you can’t see them until you see them. And then you have to keep reminding yourself.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. When I bought that ranch in California, I felt overwhelmingly compelled to go do that, which is what we’re feeling now about moving somewhere else. But it became a mythic thing among my friends and everything. I had seen it before I bought it. It was magical. The whole place was very magical. And so there I was, and I remember walking out onto the land and thinking, “I’ll tell it that I own it, and I’ll be good to it.” And I couldn’t get the words out. I didn’t own that. And so there was a herd of deer going past me, and I said, “Hey, kids. Humans believe that I own this place so we can use that to help keep you safe.” But I could not, it was obvious to me I did not own that land. Nothing on it was mine. I was one of the pilgrims on the soil, and so were the deer, and so were plants, and so was the soil itself. Everything was on a journey to something higher and more beautiful and better, but no destination was involved. Everything was moving, everything was fluid. So when I left and people were like, “But that was your place.” I was like, “Yes. And now it isn’t.” I mean, the culture said it was, I didn’t believe that. And now the culture says it was, and I have to say, sorry, that’s not my experience.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. It’s that willingness to be led.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny, so for me, I’ve always felt like within the culture, my pilgrim impulses have always kind of felt like personal failings to me. And attempting to do the cultural things has always been a pretty good recipe to make me really, really unhappy.

Martha Beck:
I’ve seen you do that, get on a plane and say, “No, it’s going the wrong direction.” And then get on another plane and come straight back. Oh my goodness. How do we come to our senses then, Ro, as we’re mired in this cultural matrix? How do we get back to our nature?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s talk about it in just a sec.

So to come to our senses, we’re going to look at what this kind of pilgrim idea, what living as a pilgrim, what that means to us. So let’s kick it off, Marty.

Martha Beck:
First of all, I think it’s much more natural to consider ourselves and our lives processes rather than fixed positions of any kind. I mean, if you try to say, “No, I’m not a pilgrim. I stay where I am, and I don’t let anything shift in any way,” you are defying entropy. Everything’s always changing. That is the one thing we know for sure. So letting go of, “I am on this place and I am this person, and that is what I’m going to hang on to,” volunteering that worldview and saying everything is in process, nothing is certain, and not only is the journey itself the point, not the arrival, but the becoming something different is the point. Not even the journey is the point. How it changes you, changed by the path itself, is the point. And your body knows that, and it will take you in the right rhythms. It will give you energy when you’re going towards something you’re meant to experience. It will pull back. Settling into the body and trusting its wisdom will take you on the pilgrimage you’re meant to follow.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we forget that there’s this wisdom, and we get so caught up in the culture of productivity and schedules and everything. But I think the other thing that I love about this is the idea of our psyches evolve through narrative and challenge and reflection and that are aspects of narrative. And if you think about it, a walk, literal or metaphorical, a walk is the same as a narrative. What could be more of a narrative than someone putting one foot in front of another and being changed by the path itself?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Oh my goodness. My favorite brilliant philosopher, neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist says that the pattern of syntax in language, in the brain matches the cadence of movements in a running animal.

Rowan Mangan:
Perfect. That is just a perfect fact.

Martha Beck:
What a fabulous thing that is to say. And our nervous systems aren’t built to carry all these different things and places and positions that we think we are. If you try to plant a flag everywhere, it’s like trying to have 500 tabs open and active on your computer. If you abandon all fixed points and give yourself to the path, then you just flow with it. If you’re trying constantly to hold them, keep them, make them yours, the way we take pictures of everything with our phones—which I love, by the way—but we’re trying to grab it and hold it, and there are so many photos on my phone that I can’t even look at them all. And in the blizzard of trying to, of fixed points, I reject the process of the pilgrimage. I stop letting go. I stop being willing to be led.

Rowan Mangan:
And remembering that being willing to be led is listening to signals that might not trusted or accepted by the culture. So we choose to accept, and if you want to join us on your own little pilgrim quest, we invite you to believe the following, which can be a little bit of a mind-fuck at first. But what if, let’s just say what if everything is alive and communicating in some way, and so your willingness to be led happens in the context of everything is alive and communicating.

Martha Beck:
The biggest shock for me was when I suddenly one day switched perceiving everything as being inert to everything, including space, is alive. When suddenly, and it did not come as maybe that, I mean, don’t hold it as gospel. I don’t have to believe it. It just hit me and it smashed open the doors of some gorgeous cathedral to think space itself is alive and communicating with me. I can’t be lost if space loves me. And then everything that is made of matter too is responsive. And as you walk a pilgrim path, you see it. You have weird interactions with animals and with objects and with overheard words.

Rowan Mangan:
And dreams.

Martha Beck:
Dreams, yes. Like the dream that you got the Wordle in two.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, the Wordle is alive and communicating with me.

Martha Beck:
You’re being led. But I mean, in all seriousness, since we decided—so we sort of hunkered in our little house in Pennsylvania. We had our places in New York and stuff, and then we said, “No, we have to go and grow gardens somewhere.” And it’s such an irrational thing to do. People are like, “Why?” We’re like, “Um. Because.”

Rowan Mangan:
Why do you always have to ask us that? Jesus.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, why? We don’t want to tell you.

Rowan Mangan:
We don’t know. You tell me why.

Martha Beck:
What happens is it makes you so raw and open, and then things start to happen that are so far beyond coincidental, and there are tons of them. I mean, there’s far too many magic stories for us to go into right here, but they come thick and fast when you’re in the liminal, pilgrim place, the whole pilgrimage is liminal. And so you get to make a meaning out of that, that you can make it your culture and say, “A miracle happened, therefore I will start my own cult” or whatever, the whole, “And I own you all, and you will give me your money and I will punish you, and it’s love.” I mean, it just forms itself again around the magic so fast. So you have to give up all certainty as you make a sacred meaning out of the experiences you have. You exchange certainty for wonder, and there’s grief and there’s danger and there’s alarm. But there is this awe that you can experience and an overwhelming beneficence to everything around you and everything you’re doing when you least expect it. And you kind of have to throw it all away and jump off a cliff a few times before you start to see how clear that is. It’s like you have to look through the telescope before you see the details of Jupiter’s moons or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, right. No, it’s funny because I’ve had this interesting sort of experience with, we’ve had this place in New York that we bought when I finally cut my tether to Australia and sold my house that I’d had in Australia. And so it became—and talk about meaning making right—in my mind I made this little apartment in Gramercy be my new little hidey hole or whatever.

Martha Beck:
Your destination.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yeah, that’s right. I made it my destination. And so the last few weeks I’ve had such a strange, paradoxical, surreal sort of experience of packing up that apartment and the opposite feelings of “This is the right thing to do” and “This is breaking my heart” and “I love it here” and “It’s time to go.” And it is so countercultural, I mean to be leaving something you love for no very solid culturally explicable reason, but also to just be in those paradoxical feelings of heartbreak and acceptance at the same time. And I feel like there’s a part of that process where you are feeling the past, the future, and the present all in one moment is part of that paradoxical thing that we’re trying to hold at the moment. And I wonder when you move, when you’re in movement, however you define that movement, if time becomes less fixed as well? You know how a walk is like a narrative or whatever, it’s sort of like, I don’t know, there’s something about time changes once you step into this pilgrim mentality.

Martha Beck:
I may get this wrong, but it’s worth just blurting out because I actually think I have a fair grip on this. There are two words for time in Greek, and one is chronos and one is kairos, and chronos is clock time. It’s what marches ahead. But kairos is soul time, and it moves in these bursts of becoming and realizing and transformation. Time is different in that it doesn’t go in an orderly way the way chronological time goes, it bends and folds and goes back on itself and jumps forward. The ancient Greeks said that, and then all the way into the 20th century, and then finally Einstein figured out that time is a much more malleable and bendable and strange thing than we ever knew. Most of us don’t experience it that way, but when you start pilgriming, you do.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and so there’s all these things that feel like they’re just physics that start to warp and change. And so you think of time, okay, then there’s the pain of letting go of something, sort of comes up as something, a sacred unburdening of the pilgrim on the path.

Martha Beck:
And when that happens, as you just drop all these identities, every sacred object that you owned in your little pater familias way, as you let go of those cultural definitions of attachment, you come home, you unite. All the parts of you that let go are united into a Self that is your true nature. And when you become that, I said, the journey of the fool becomes the journey of the wise. And the last place he gets to is he becomes everything—it’s the world. And at that point, he’s not moving by himself deliberately as a human. He is moved as nature, in nature, nothing separate. And occasionally the body will get up and go do things, but it’s not an individual human consciousness doing it. It’s the universe doing it in one perspective of one small body. That is the subjective experience that he will have.

Rowan Mangan:
And what a phenomenal way of imagining the ways that the journey can change us in terms of that kind of, I don’t know, spiritual reunification or something. That’s the way that, that we’re being changed by our journey, ideally. And for us, I think we are definitely being changed by this particular phase of the journey that we’re on our family.

Martha Beck:
Big time.

Rowan Mangan:
Becoming this idea of becoming a steward of land, a community builder, like a homestead of these kinds of ideas, new creativity outlets. And I guess the reframe for me is that if we accept all these perspectives that we’ve just been talking about, the journey begins writing the story. You are not writing the story of your journey. The journey is writing your story.

Martha Beck:
The story of you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that reminds me of John o’ Donahue’s poem. I think it’s called For the Traveler, and part of it goes, “A journey can become a sacred thing. Make sure before you go to take the time to bless your going forth, to free your heart of ballast so that the compass of your soul might direct you toward the territories of spirit where you’ll discover more of your hidden life and the urgencies that deserve to claim you.”

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. “The urgencies that deserve to claim you,” that’s so freaking transgressive to the culture.

Martha Beck:
Thank you, John O’ Donahue.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. John O’ Donahue. Wow. We talk about him a lot in Wilder, in our online community. John O’ Donahue and his beautiful words come up quite a lot. So to the Cahoot, I guess, Marty, our beautiful Bewildered listeners, here’s the invitation, or the question is like, are you willing to take a step towards the territories of spirit where you’ll discover more of your hidden life as he put it?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the urgencies that deserve to claim you. Yeah. So consider this an invitation, not from us, but from your own journey. We are a weigh station or somebody you see going by as you go on the journey. So we’re part of your journey saying, “Why not take a chance and jump off a cliff into the guidance of your true nature?” Because that is how we…stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild.

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. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review 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.