Martha Beck:
Not ever finishing figuring it out. Not ever.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve always seemed to have new material, don’t we?

Martha Beck:
Yep. It’s an asymptotic relationship with figuring it out.

Rowan Mangan:
Shall we pause while everyone goes and finds their ancient dusty Oxford English Dictionary?

Martha Beck:
An asymptote means you go half the distance to your goal every time. You’re always going half the distance to your goal. Think about it. The crazy thing is you never ever reach your goal because there’s always a remaining distance. You only can go half.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ve been listening to Bewildered. I hope you’ve enjoyed the show. Next week we’ll define another polysyllabic word.

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out, Miss Fancy Pants, no asymptotic anything, what is bothering you? I just wander the world thinking about asymptotes.

Rowan Mangan:
What I’m trying to figure out is how to get a new nickname that’s not Miss Fancy Pants Not Asymptotic Anything. Alright. What I’m trying to figure out this week is the tendency of people to be people-y, no matter where you go. And so I had this experience where, regular listeners will know, I’m trying to be very brave against all my social anxiety and create community in this new place we’ve moved to.

Martha Beck:
Now you’ve told them. Now they’ll fake it.

Rowan Mangan:
Fake what?

Martha Beck:
You can’t let people know you want to be in community. You have to play hard to get. It’s my experience, you move into a community and spend all your time in your bedroom and just hide and wait, because otherwise you look desperate.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s not been my experience so far, but no worries. You do you. And I will continue to go to post-dropoff coffee time at school, which I thought was going to be a get a coffee and “Where are you from? Oh, where are you from?” But no, what I walked into was full-on PTA vibes. And our daughter has just started school, real school.

Martha Beck:
Sorry, I’m having flashbacks of PTA trauma.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, you just let me know when you’re ready.

Martha Beck:
Okay. They were all there together.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s the thing. They were all there together.

Martha Beck:
Yes, exactly. They seem to know. How?

Rowan Mangan:
Initially there was a bit of the, “Hey, how ya doing?” But then everyone sat down and got down to it. And I need to preface this by saying I am as in love with this school that we are sending our daughter to, I’m as in love with it as I am with you and Karen. It is—I love this place. It’s amazing. But people will be people-y. They cannot help it, wherever they are. And so while thinking I was going to make friends, I ended up in a very heated argument about a fun run and a subcommittee. And so where things—I just want to share in case any of our listeners know how to figure this out—I just want to share the topic of this argument, which began, “Hey, so we’re having a fun run.” And most of the room was like, “Yeah, okay, cool. That sounds good. Sounds like fun.”

Martha Beck:
Does that mean you get to run away from them? That would be fun.

Rowan Mangan:
And—Marty doesn’t like people, so that’s established. Anyway, so I was like, “Oh, fun run? Okay. I personally will not be running, but it sounds fun.” And immediately someone was in there like, “Uh, excuse me, if there’s going to be a fun run, what is going to be done by the school to ensure that the big kids don’t win? Because they’ll always win. They’ll always beat the little kids. What are we going to do for the little kids?” And I was like…

Martha Beck:
This is like world history in a nutshell. Go on.

Rowan Mangan:
I was like, “Okay…” And the school, the people, God love them, the school teachers, admin people were like, “Well, it’s a fun run. That said, we will give some thought to this. No one’s going to win. Just saying, it’s not really a winning thing.” And then at that point, someone put up her hand and said, “And what are we doing about the water?”

Martha Beck:
How far is the fun run?

Rowan Mangan:
Everyone did a double take and they said, “You mean water for the fun run? We’ll have coolers and stuff.” She’s like, “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean the water in the school generally. My daughter came home from school yesterday and said the water at school tasted funny. So what are we doing about that?” And then another person puts up their hand and they’re like, “I’m sorry, we haven’t even sorted out who’s going to be on the subcommittee for the fun run?”

Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, there’s a—the fun run…But it’s just a fun run. It’s okay. We’ve got this.

Martha Beck:
No, I think you should, what you should do is every time somebody says something like that, you just scream, “Fun run! Fun run!” and just rush at them and tell them to just run away. Run away.

Rowan Mangan:
Just run away. For fun. Shout, “Fun run!” and then just run out the door.

Martha Beck:
Attack people. Well, you could flee.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re a fighter. I’m a flighter.

Martha Beck:
I think attacking. They seem to be in attack mode, so it’s like make them take the fun run.

Rowan Mangan:
So you could just walk up to them, stand in front of them, point at the door and go, “Fun run. Now.”

Martha Beck:
Yes, exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll count to three.

Martha Beck:
Wow, that—oh boy. I’m glad it wasn’t me.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, people are going to be people-y. It’s okay. I got out of there. I did my own little fun run.

Martha Beck:
Oh. Okay. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I think this is what I was trying to figure out last time, but it’s just gotten deeper. I’m trying to figure out how to function in a house where literally everything is broken. Last time we talked, I think a few times ago we talked about how the former owner painted over an entire mouse. I say that again because every time I say it, even to people here who seem accustomed to some odd things, that just stops them. They’re like, “A whole mouse?” Yes, a whole mouse. Just under the paint roller.

Rowan Mangan:
Not half a mouse because that would be ordinary.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Or a mouse pelt, for example. A mouse pelt that was lying there decoratively like a sheepskin or something. No, no, no. It was just a whole mouse with all its bones intact. Anyway, yeah, the thing is such odd things were done in the house. Okay, you know and I know that for the past few days, we have had not four people, but four teams of people wandering around our house like termites on a mound.

Rowan Mangan:
Four teams and one guy putting together a trampoline.

Martha Beck:
Yes, but I’ve been taking freezing cold baths. Why not showers? Because the shower is broken. Why cold? Because the water heater’s broken. Why broken? Electricity not coming from solar panels, need new solar panels. While they’re up there—oops!—we need a new roof. And I mean, let’s not even talk about the internet. So it’s literally a city in Egypt when they were building the pyramids, people just everywhere carrying stuff. And I keep having to answer for the misdeeds of the previous owner. So yesterday the electrician came to me and he looked at me askance.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you not want to say what happened the night before?

Martha Beck:
Oh, well, I’ll explain.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
So after they’d all been everywhere, I went over to my little room and it was like scalding hot, like touch the walls and burn your hand hot. It was bad. It was about to burst into flames.

Rowan Mangan:
You were not pleased.

Martha Beck:
No, I was not pleased. I also had stomach flu and I was pukey. And you don’t want to be in a boiling hot room that could explode at any moment even when you’re not nauseated. But if you are nauseated, it’s not ideal, I’m just saying. Thank God Karen is more butch than the butchest man ever born because she found a switch on a pile of rocks in something that I will not call a basement. It was just under the house. It wasn’t a crawl space because it was too big, but it definitely wasn’t a basement. It’s just rocks.

Rowan Mangan:
It was like a stoop space.

Martha Beck:
It was like rocks. It was like a rock ledge on which the house had been sort of built. So she turned off something that looked, it said 152 degrees. That’s what we knew. So we turned it off, not knowing what to call it, and just we knew what 152 degrees was like, and it’s almost hot enough to bake your bread. So that worked better. The walls cooled off by morning. And then the electrician came, and he went down there because we asked him to, and he was very friendly until he came back from under there. And then he was like, “Hmm, yeah, I was down there.” And I was like, “What? What’s happening?” And he said, and this is a quote, “Do you just go to appliances and just pluck the wires? Just pluck them like flowers? Not unplug them, but just pluck the wires and then skin them of their little rubber plastic sheathing?” And I was just like…

Rowan Mangan:
Like you’re trying to get the pelt of a mouse?

Martha Beck:
Yes. She didn’t skin the mouse, but she skinned all the wires. So he was like, “Yeah, a bunch of—” and he looked at me and he could see I was aghast. And so his face softened again. He was like, “It wasn’t you.” I was like, “No, it wasn’t me, dude.” He’s like, “Somebody skinned all the wires from the appliances and then twisted them.”

Rowan Mangan:
They braided them in French braids.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, like twisted all the wiry parts together. So if you turn on one thing, everything turns on full blast and there’s nothing to be done about it. And so I told him about the mouse.

Rowan Mangan:
Of course.

Martha Beck:
Always. That stopped him, even after seeing the plucked wires, but he kept doing this little gesture like he was picking flowers.

Rowan Mangan:
It could be a new dance move. Pluck the wires, pluck the wires.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. But you’ve got to sweat profusely. It’s like hot yoga because it’s 152 freaking degrees in there. So yeah, I’m just getting this image. We never met the previous owner, but reading her biography in sculpture as represented in the house is a very weird experience.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I’m not sure she was from this planet.

Rowan Mangan:
I have been encountering her via a book of handwritten recipes that she left in a drawer that also includes strips of photos from those photo machines that I would think, she would probably want those.

Martha Beck:
Did she say, “Knead the bread, let it rise, and then just put it in a room, flip on any switch, and it will bake?”

Rowan Mangan:
Let the rooms be your oven. Indeed.

Martha Beck:
We’ll figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
Life is interesting.

Martha Beck:
We will figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
Or die trying. Right?

Martha Beck:
Definitely.

Rowan Mangan:
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.

But we do have a topic for the podcast today.

Martha Beck:
Which is wonderful.

Rowan Mangan:
Isn’t that amazing?

Martha Beck:
It’s like living in a house with hot water.

Rowan Mangan:
What is that topic, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, it came to me, it sort of blurted out of my mouth when I was walking along in the woods the other day.

Rowan Mangan:
Not worrying anyone.

Martha Beck:
I was walking along and I was thinking about when I lived in Phoenix. For a long time, I lived in Phoenix, and I remember this time in the gym when I was reading a book of Mary Oliver poetry while I was on the bicycle, the stationary bicycle. The stationary bicycle. I no longer read on regular mobile bicycles. I used to.

Rowan Mangan:
Very wise. Learned that one the hard way.

Martha Beck:
Did indeed. Anyway, I remember thinking, because she wrote almost all her poems, at least in this one anthology were about the walks she took in the woods. And I remembered thinking in this scorching hot place in the gym, “I would give anything to be able to go for walks in the woods like Mary Oliver.” And then I looked around and I thought, “So I did, and here I am.”

Rowan Mangan:
I would give anything….

Martha Beck:
….to be able to walk in the woods like Mary Oliver.

Rowan Mangan:
And you had to give everything that you had.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, everything I had then I gave up so that I could walk in the woods with Mary Oliver. And I started to think about the number of times I’ve said or implied, “I would give anything to be able to do that,” but I actually wasn’t willing to give anything. And so it didn’t happen. But when I think—my idea about this is if we are willing to give up things, it’s a quote from the Tao Te Ching that I love: “If you would be given everything, give everything up.” And I started to think about that, about the voluntary giving up of anything. And I realized I don’t think we’re encouraged culturally, socially, in this culture to give things up.

Rowan Mangan:
Give it up that you will receive. Not that everything should be framed that way, but I think to me there’s a cultural way of thinking, which is when I just get through all this stuff, be it things in my schedule or shit on my floor—not shit, mouse corpses—stuff on my floor, dishes in my sink, whatever it is, meetings, then there will be space and time. And so what we were talking about is what if you have to invert that way of thinking? Like you have to give up first in order for that space to appear. And then whatever wants to be born in your life, that’s where it will come from. Is that it?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I’ve spent so much time coaching people who were trying to shove things into their lives that they wanted, but their lives were already crammed full. And when it came down to letting go of something, there’s this sort of, I think it’s actually, I bet some good money that it’s the left hemisphere of the brain that says, in humans at least, “I must clutch everything I’ve got. I can’t let go of anything.” And if you go since we just moved house, it’s interesting how you’ll hold an object in your hands and then try to give it up and then think, “But maybe I’ll need it someday.” Some people like Karen can just throw things away. “I don’t care. I don’t need my nose.” She’s amazing. She never has anything except clean space, which is what we want.

But I think that this cultural tendency to grasp and hold certainly characterizes the sort of colonizing forces that went out. And in many of the societies that they colonized, there was a mentality of sufficiency. And the culture that spread all over the world and ended up sort of guns, germs, and steel winning had a culture of scarcity and hoarding. It’s a little like there’s an Aesop’s fable about, I don’t know if Aesop really said it, but it’s the ant and the grasshopper. There’s an ant who, there are ants who work and work and work and work, and there’s a cricket who makes music. He says, “Don’t you want to make music?” And the answer’s like, “No, we got to save for the winter.” So they work and work and work and work. And then it gets cold and the cricket is hungry and cold. And he comes up and he says, “Please, can you give me some food?” And they were like, “No you didn’t—you just sat around making music when we were making stuff.” And that’s the Pilgrim’s Progress. We’re going to make stuff and hang on to stuff and hoard stuff, and you can’t have our stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
And hold it against others who don’t.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. And I’m not saying that there’s not some validity to you need to, you know, have a savings account by all means, like marshal your forces and keep some kind of supply. But the idea that you always need to be working and hoarding has only really characterized a few societies and the others have gotten by knowing that the nature provides different things in different seasons and learning to figure out how to work in harmony with a supply that goes up and down.

Rowan Mangan:
You get more music that way.

Martha Beck:
That’s the only way you get music. And the implicit assertion in that fable is that the music is worthless.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And it’s so funny, while we’ve been thinking about this topic and then you mentioned Mary Oliver, and I just think so often it comes back to that “Tell me what is it you’re going to do with your one wild precious life.” You’re going to fucking haul whatever it is that ants haul? Crumbs? Dirt? I don’t know what they do. What do they do?

Martha Beck:
It depends on the ant. I mean some of them carry aphids and then they get special leaves to feed the aphids and then they stroke them.

Rowan Mangan:
I should never have asked.

Martha Beck:
And the aphids put out a little drop of honeydew, and that’s what the ants eat. So they literally are keeping livestock. They are.

Rowan Mangan:
What do they do? They stroke the aphids?

Martha Beck:
Yes, they pet them.

Rowan Mangan:
Stroke the aphids. That sounds like it’s got to be a euphemism for something. “Yeah, I’ll be back. Just gotta go stroke the aphids.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but I mean other ants do other things.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
Other ants come to our houses and eat things so that the men can come and say, “That thing is being eaten by ants. We’ll take care of it for you.”

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve got preemptive—This is where it starts getting, I think we may be the problem. We’ve had someone come in and put preemptive termite things. They’re like bait for termites that are like, “Hey termites, you don’t want to go eat that house. Come eat me.” I’m like is that really a—?

Martha Beck:
It just means you’re going to get a lot of termites in the area. And then there’s more of ’em to go after. It’s like us saying, “Well we’ll just put garbage out for the bears and then they won’t in the house.” No, but they’ll come close to the house. We found that out the first day we were here.

Rowan Mangan:
No, we did.

Martha Beck:
Had a bear.

Rowan Mangan:
We had a bear.

Martha Beck:
Right in broad daylight.

Rowan Mangan:
Bit of a bear.

Martha Beck:
Bit of a bear. Okay, so here’s the other thing, though, that I wanted to say about this. When my older kids were little, there was much Sesame Street watching in my house and I remember being just out of my mind, crazy busy. I was in that zone you’re in now where I was the bio mom of small ones and I was trying to work and I was trying to get my degree and I was trying to, and I was sick all that, constantly sick. And I remember the lying there on this king-sized bed where I raised those children because I couldn’t really get up and watching Sesame Street. And there was a brilliant, brilliant song.

Rowan Mangan:
That we could all learn a lot from.

Martha Beck:
That can teach us all.

Rowan Mangan:
In a way, it’s an anthem for our time.

Martha Beck:
It is. And it was sung by an owl who played the jazz saxophone and Ernie of Bert and Ernie, the gay couple, who I didn’t realize were gay until 20 years later.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I know. I had no gay-dar. When you’re born in Mormon, they take it out of you at birth.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, yeah, like circumcision.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah. Or they inocculated—

Rowan Mangan:
It a gaydar-ectomy.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I had a gaydar-ectomy. That’s why I didn’t know I was gay for 30 years. I had no clue. And I was like, wow, that’s a lesbian. And I was like, really? He was?

Rowan Mangan:
A real lesbian? In the wild? Wait, where’d you go? I want to see her. Can I take a photo?

Martha Beck:
Anyway, the song was, and I’m sure everybody’s breath is baited, the song was called—oh, Ernie! Wait, first—I didn’t set the stage enough. Ernie of Bert and Ernie, the gay couple, Ernie wants to learn to play the saxophone, but as you know, if you’re a fan of Ernie, I obviously like Burt better, but Ernie—

Rowan Mangan:
No, Ernie’s my guy.

Martha Beck:
You got to accept Ernie. If you’re going to take Bert. He’s his boyfriend. So Ernie had a duckie, he sang to it a lot. “Rubber duckie, you’re the one. You make my bathtime so much fun.”

Rowan Mangan:
So much fun.

Martha Beck:
“Rubber duckie, I’m awfully fond of you.” That was his song.

Rowan Mangan:
“I’m awfully fond of you.”

Martha Beck:
You know it, see? It’s like it was injected to you. Instead of the Gaydar-ectomy, they just gave you all the Sesame Street songs. But the Owl sings a song to Ernie and it’s called, “You Gotta Put Down the duckie if You Want to Play the Saxophone.”

Rowan Mangan:
Just give that a minute wait.

Martha Beck:
You’ve got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so true.

Martha Beck:
And talk about words to live by. And you’d think that it basically speaks for itself. But in fact, every experience I’ve had in culture says, “No, hold onto the duckie and learn to play the saxophone.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
Like you have to do it all. You have to do all.

Rowan Mangan:
You have to have your cake and eat your cake and your saxophone. Eat the saxophone. Hold onto the duckie.

Martha Beck:
And I thought that Americans were particularly horrible at this, but when I was on a book tour in Germany once, I read that in Germany, every year about three people are killed when their stuff collapses on them in the night and suffocates them.

Rowan Mangan:
Why does it happen in the night?

Martha Beck:
Because they’re asleep, see? And so when the stuff starts to wobble, they’re not watching it, and it collapses on them and suffocates them.

Rowan Mangan:
So you said, alright, I’m not going to interrogate you, but you did say about three.

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
So I’m assuming that some people just their arm and leg got taken off.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I mean I’m rounding up. Okay, so anyway, okay, so we were talking about how we both had, we both had areas where we were socialized to have more stuff than we actually needed, but we’re also afraid to let it go.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. And you never feel this more than when you’re trying to unpack your life’s possessions in a house that’s a lot smaller than your last house. And you’ll pick something up and you’ll hold it and you’ll go, “I’ll just put it…Nope, there’s nowhere for it. I’ll have, it’s going in the thrift pile.” And it’s like Frodo trying to throw the ring into—

Martha Beck:
It is. Are you telling me that when you go to the donate pile, when you go to St. Vincent’s to donate your clothes, you want me there to bite your arm off if you can’t let go?

Rowan Mangan:
A hundred percent.

Martha Beck:
Those of you who don’t know Lord of the Rings, look up that reference.

Rowan Mangan:
Spoiler!

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s true. It’s really, really hard to let go of things and I think that’s probably a biological tendency, but I also think it’s culturally reinforced and reinforced and reinforced.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely.

Martha Beck:
Because I also think there’s a natural instinct that says, “Let go.” And I was thinking about this when I read H Is for Hawk, have you read this book?

Rowan Mangan:
I have.

Martha Beck:
Who wrote it?

Rowan Mangan:
Someone called Susan or something like that.

Martha Beck:
By Susan? Anyone you know named Susan wrote this book.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, Susan…

Martha Beck:
It’s brilliant.

Rowan Mangan:
Might have been Carly.

Martha Beck:
She’s brilliant. I’ll have to put it in the notes or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Julia, please put it in the show notes.

Martha Beck:
Yes, show notes. Look for H Is for Hawk. Or just Google it. It’s a great book. Seriously. A great book. But she talks about, it’s a really literary piece and part of it is about her owning and training a goshawk, which is apparently a very difficult word to train. Please be aware

Rowan Mangan:
That Goshawk is pronounced ‘Goss hawk,” not “gosh-awk” like I assumed when you first read it.

Martha Beck:
“Oh, gosh, awk.” Goshawk, goshawk. Now she describes this hawk as being terrifying. It flies to her and lands on her arm like it’s about to kill her and she’s terrified. It’s fascinating, her relationship with this bird. Anyway, one of the things I learned from this was that falconers know exactly how much their bird weighs at any point during the day in terms of fractions of ounces because it will determine how willing they are to hunt and whether they can fly effectively or not. And I used to think birds never had to think about their weight. Seriously, when I was in high school, when I got obsessed with my weight, I would look at birds and think, “You never have to think about it,” but they do. They think about it way more than we do. And if you feed a hawk too much and it starts to get over its ideal flying weight, the result is that it gets upset. And another spoiler alert, part of the book is about T.H. White, the author who wrote Sword in the Stone, who also had a goshawk and he was terrified of it. And he kept feeding it to make it like him because we humans, we take—”Give me something to eat, give me possessions, give me stuff, give me attention, give me time. I’m ravenous. I’ll take as much of it as I can get.”

Rowan Mangan:
There’s never enough.

Martha Beck:
There’s never enough. But feeding a goshawk to make it like you is not the right idea. Not the right idea.

Rowan Mangan:
Even a gosh awk wouldn’t appreciate that.

Martha Beck:
A goshawk would not like it because as it feels itself getting sluggish and a little too much ballast, it becomes enraged. Maybe because—they think—because it’s not flying around. So it has to get so mad that it will start attacking things violently.

Rowan Mangan:
To burn calories?

Martha Beck:
Burn off the calorie, yes! That’s why they think it does this. And if you’re the only person, the only thing in this hawk’s world, it’s going to attack you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’ll be like you’ll become the hawk’s Peloton for that moment.

Martha Beck:
Yes, and T.H. White, his hawk nearly did away with him because he fed it so much, it just wanted to kill him.

Rowan Mangan:
It tried to pull the sword from the stone out of his body.

Martha Beck:
The beak in the—

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, it’s like his tongue was the sword and the hawk tried to pull it out to see if he was the chosen one.

Martha Beck:
That’s a horrible, horrible image.

Rowan Mangan:
I love it.

Martha Beck:
I’m never going to get rid of it now, but here is my point, and I do have one, I recognize this when I read it that when I have too much of something, when I haven’t left enough space, enough nothing in my life, or I’m taking in more than I can really justifiably need—

Rowan Mangan:
Like accommodate.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, accommodate, include, own, whatever. If when it’s too much for me— and I’m talking at a very subtle, intuitive and psychological level. Because there’s always, I can get more storage space and just put up lots of canned goods or whatever. It never ends. That’s another thing about being raised Mormon, you’re supposed to have a two-year supply of food in your basement.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s also a thing about living through the end of days that I’m participating in.

Martha Beck:
Same, same, Exactly same. Mormons were all about the end of days, and now they’re making it happen. Sorry, sorry, Mormons.

Rowan Mangan:
The Mormons love this podcast. Yeah. It’s got so many listeners.

Martha Beck:
So many gay Mormon listeners. So when you give me more than I can have, like I used to go to fancy shindigs where they would give us swag bags, sometimes really nice swag bags. When I was writing for the Oprah magazine, I would go to these parties and you’d get a swag bag that had all kinds of whippy things in it, but you’d get a certain amount of whippy things that you didn’t really ask for or didn’t really need. And I would start to get uncomfortable and then if I got more, I would start to really feel unhappy and then I’d get out of bed in the morning and look at it and feel really dejected and then irritated and finally completely overwhelmed. Just too much. Like [Tae do doeshi] I used to say.

Rowan Mangan:
She always says this.

Martha Beck:
I say that all the time because that means too many things. And I think so many people have too many things and they think that getting rid of all the things would be a loss, but the real loss is in they never put down the duckie so they never play the saxophone.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Think about it.

Rowan Mangan:
No, you’ve got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone. Yes. You’ve got to.

Martha Beck:
There’s even a song about it.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, let’s go back to the original text. It says right here.

Martha Beck:
But it could be metaphor. It is metaphorical. The point still stands. So you were telling me, we were talking about this, and you told me something I didn’t know about you, which was really, I thought, worth knowing and that is why you quit your job in Australia.

Rowan Mangan:
To join the circus.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Keep talking.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I was trying to think of what was my example of this and I realized that there was a time in my life living in Melbourne, throw back to the Melbourne days. We all love thinking back to the Melbourne days.

Martha Beck:
Waltzing Matilda.

Rowan Mangan:
Waltzing Matilda. And I had a job. I was going for that kind of a life at that point. I had a job, I had a mortgage. I was on those dating apps.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, as a young single woman, you bought a house, which is, it’s not like you were born with a silver spoon. You made that happen.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I wasn’t all that young. The record will show I wasn’t that young.

Martha Beck:
You were in your early thirties.

Rowan Mangan:
All right.

Martha Beck:
You were freaking young.

Rowan Mangan:
All right.

Martha Beck:
You don’t think that’s young?

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Jesus. Settle down

Martha Beck:
Please go on.

Rowan Mangan:
Have you eaten too much? Are you getting cranky?

Martha Beck:
Yes, exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
Alright. And I had to quit that job because I was finding that it was cutting into my meditation time of a morning. I was getting up earlier and earlier in order to meditate before I went to work, and after a while, in fact, the more meditation I did, the less wanting to go to work I did, and eventually the less going to work and then eventually the quitting. The other thing that just used to drive me crazy was that there was a window in my house that at a certain time of day had a really beautiful beam of sunshine that would come through. And when all the little dust motes go in the beam of sunshine and everything’s right with the world, you can, there’s something so peaceful about watching the dust.

Martha Beck:
It’s that Leonard Cohen line.

Rowan Mangan:
All busy.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. “In beams of light, I clearly saw the dust you seldom see out of which the nameless makes a name for ones like me.”

Rowan Mangan:
There you go. Out of which the nameless makes a name for one like—that’s kind of what we’re saying, is that that’s what we are creating when we create nothing, when we make emptiness, when we make space.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Right.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I started getting, it’s almost like the opposite from you is I was wanting to have more…

Martha Beck:
Have more less. That’s what you always say, “I need more less.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I needed more less, and the more of my job was starting to encroach on that, and so it had to go. It had to go, Marty, I needed to. That light—

Martha Beck:
I hear you.

Rowan Mangan:
That light was only visible at like 2:30 PM And I’ll tell you, if you look very carefully at the hours nine to five, you’ll find that 2:30 is right in there.

Martha Beck:
Smack dab in an asymptotic relationship with five. Not really.

Rowan Mangan:
Not at all. Although it does sometimes feel like it at2:30 when you’re working in an office.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. Yeah. It never ends. But you actually did, you quit a really good job to see that sunbeam come through your particular window at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And that would sound insane to most people. But here’s the thing, you didn’t give it up because you didn’t want to do it. You gave it up because you wanted the nameless to make a name. You wanted to encounter the nameless.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think when the nameless is making names, it’s usually not Marketing and Communications Director.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
You know? I think that’s less the kind of name that the nameless makes.

Martha Beck:
It’s a lame substitute. You’re creating something that is seen as something valuable in the culture, but to your soul…

Rowan Mangan:
You’re looking for a name and it gives you a title.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like, who am I? “Marketing and Communications Director.” Oh, why does that not feel good?

Martha Beck:
That fills everything up and so clearly you need more and more. No, no, you actually need to drop things. You need to put down the duckie. And I had the same, sorry, it’s boring. It’s probably why we’re together that we both have this relationship with meditation. But before I really knew you, the craving for total emptiness hit me so hard, and I had been meditating for 20 minutes a day for years, but this was like I was insatiable for nothing. And so first I stopped, like no visualizing, no mantra, no nothing. I went pure zen. I was just no thought, no anything. And then I thought, “I need to do this a lot longer every day because I’m starving for it. I am starving for it.” I would give anything for nothing. So I started sitting out in the forest covered in bird seed, which is, that wasn’t right.

Rowan Mangan:
A little bit off.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I actually realized that was bird watching.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, kind of the duckie,

Martha Beck:
It was the duckie. Yeah. I still couldn’t put down the duckie.

Rowan Mangan:
No. And in this case, the duckie were like chipmunks on your lap.

Martha Beck:
Yes, chipmunks and possibly literal duckies from time to time. Anyway, I remember when I was sitting there and all the animals got disturbed and then this lump rose in the earth.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh god, I was there for this.

Martha Beck:
Then this head popped out and it had these horrible orange teeth and I thought it was a mole, and I had no thought for an hour and a half, and I saw this thing come out of the earth like a zit, and I thought, like something screamed in my head, “That mole is ruining the world!” And I really believed it.

Rowan Mangan:
You were so pissed off that day.

Martha Beck:
I was so angry at that thing. It was a pocket gopher. They’re not pretty. And that’s not their fault. That’s not the problem. The eruption into my meditation was.

Rowan Mangan:
I would argue that maybe your thoughts about the eruption were.

Martha Beck:
My thoughts about it were the problem. So I had to get rid of thought and I would sit out there, or sit inside, and Karen sometimes would come and say, “You’ve got a phone call.” And I would look at her like a goshawk, right? I am going to attack you.

Rowan Mangan:
A fat goshawk.

Martha Beck:
Or even a meaty goshawk.

Rowan Mangan:
A heavy goshawk.

Martha Beck:
She would hold out her phone or my phone and say, “But it’s—” and then name of famous person because sometimes famous people call me. So she wasn’t, I told her no, no interruptions at all. But then somebody would call.

Rowan Mangan:
“But it’s the president! He needs your advice!”

Martha Beck:
Almost. Like some really famous people.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh come on.

Martha Beck:
No, seriously. And she’d say, “But it’s this person.” And I would just stare at her and say, “I’m meditating!” I would get violently angry. Anyway, that’s not good. You don’t want to do that. That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that there are these stages of realizing that you need more less, and the first one is just this discomfiture. And then the second one is like—

Rowan Mangan:
Disagree.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Point of order.

Martha Beck:
Yes. The chair recognizes you.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. Where’s my subcommittee? Anterior. No, not anterior, but before. See, when I try to asymptotic you, I get it wrong.

Martha Beck:
Anterior. I think that works. Anterior to what?

Rowan Mangan:
Chronologically anterior to the discomfiture. I would argue.

Martha Beck:
Wow. That’s a sentence.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? I wanted to call this episode, just for the record, I wanted to call this episode Navigational Discombobulation because we couldn’t find the studio this morning.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
We walked into the wrong room. We didn’t even tell you that topic.

Martha Beck:
That’s a different topic. Okay. We’ve been here a lot. We just couldn’t find it.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s just say before you get the discomfiture, I think there is a really nice spot. And because I’m always extremely kind to myself, unlike you who drives yourself like a—

Martha Beck:
Rented mule.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. I think—I don’t want to, you know, I’m good at putting down the duckie if the duckie is a nine-to-five job. And so I was not even really getting antsy. I just wanted. I had a feeling of pure longing for the not hectic.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
The slow time, the staring into space and that space being full of, and I want you to talk about the stages, but I feel like what we are not saying, and I’m not quite sure how to bring it in because there’s a problematic cultural part of this too, but it’s in that space that the nameless does make a name for you. And so, not to say if you want good stuff like a new home and all of that, you’ve got to do this. But also if you do this, that’s where the stuff comes from, not the stuff—

Martha Beck:
It it comes from the giving up. It doesn’t come from the push to acquire. It comes from sensitivity to the longing for space, openness.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I give an example?

Martha Beck:
Yes, please.

Rowan Mangan:
In our new house, we have the most unbelievable view of mountains. And I didn’t know with any specificity that that’s what I needed in my life, but I did. And there’s a way in which this wide open space that has been crafted by the people who were in this space before us. Not the chick who painted over mice, but before that we had a very special person living in our house and caring for our land. And the view was sort of carefully crafted and it’s surrounded by trees, and then there’s this distance out to these mountains, and I feel like that was created, that is the void that was created from the void, and it is how it feels to be given everything and to give everything up. Is that the space in which I walk into a room and go, “Ahh!” every day.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I think what it mostly feels like, even when I get my irritation, it’s actually just another aspect of your longing because it is the motivation of a seeker and the seeker doesn’t always know what the thing sought is going to look like.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, yeah.

Martha Beck:
But very, very often it looks like openness, which you can’t even really define. So we know the spiritual teacher, Byron Katie, we’re lucky enough to have spent some time with her, and I remember she said to me one day, “People think that they want, they call me enlightened,” which she doesn’t call herself. Then she laughed for five minutes and then she said, “And they say they want enlightenment too.” And then she laughed for about 10 minutes and she said, “They think they’re going to be getting everything they want. And what they don’t know is they’re going to be losing everything.” And then she laughed for about 20 minutes. So it’s so counterintuitive to go seeking nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
To put down all the duckies. And you don’t even know what the saxophone is going to sound like, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. You dunno what it’s going to look like, sound like. Well, you do know what it’s going to feel like. It’s going to feel like, “Ahh!”

Martha Beck:
Yes. Because the seeker is after the experience of awe. So one of the parallels that I sometimes use is something called, I was thinking of something called the “Meta Self.” Meta is like metaphysical. It means “apart from, other than.” Metamorphosis: change into a different shape. So I thought, okay, we have a Meta Self that is always looking for things that are not material, that is always looking for the openness, that’s always looking for the music. And it doesn’t want to just busy itself stroking aphids every day, all day.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Oh my God. Right?

Martha Beck:
I love how I can mix a metaphor. We’ve got Sesame Street, we’ve got the ants with the aphids. It’s amazing.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s incredible.

Martha Beck:
Thank you. I didn’t even know I was looking for it, but—

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve got duckies.

Martha Beck:
So I was talking about Meta Self and I typed it into my computer and it automatically space corrected to meat self. M-E-A-T. The self made of meat. And I think the self made of meat wants to be meatier. It wants more stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
And the culture is going to auto-correct your Meta Self to your meat self every time.

Martha Beck:
Always. There’s a reason that that computer changed it from Meta Self to meat self because the culture says, “She didn’t mean meta, she meant meat.” And that’s what we always think. We’re going to get stuff. And what it really wants to be is other. And for you, it comes as longing. It does for me too. But if I can’t respond to the longing, or I’m not aware of it because I’m paying too much attention to other things, it comes up as irritability with what I’m doing. It makes me want to push away from what I’m doing. Poor Karen, when she brought me the famous people on the phone, I nearly strangled her. I didn’t really. Anyway, this is this whole concept. You quitting your job to go sit in a shaft of light.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Or me not taking calls from famous people so I could sit and think absolutely nothing. We’re not encouraged to do this unless we’re in a meditation class somewhere in some other cultural context. But I think it’s innate and I think we are seeking the awe that you find in that view of the mountains. And may I add, it’s not like you just tripped and fell there. You did a lot of house hunting. You went into a lot of houses and looked at a lot of views.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I said a lot of “Not this.”

Martha Beck:
And when we got this house, it was the only thing that works is that view. Everything else is broken.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. If you want to get everything, which is the view, you’ve got to give up everything, which is heating, cooling, internet, a house that doesn’t smell like animal corpses.

Martha Beck:
Pretty much every physical thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, hot water.

Martha Beck:
We sound so self-congratulatory here. It’s not like I haven’t spent my whole life trying to hold onto things. But I love this idea of letting go.

Rowan Mangan:
I think everyone is aware who’s been listening closely that we are not thrilled with the state of the house.

Martha Beck:
Okay. No, no, no. I’m not self-satisfied about that. But self-satisfied as in, “I gave everything up so I get to have everything.” No, no.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m satisfied.

Martha Beck:
I am satisfied. And the other day, while I was walking in the woods and then I was remembering saying, “I would give anything to walk in the woods like Mary Oliver.” And I realized I’d given up absolutely everything I had in that life. And now I was walking in the woods like Mary Oliver, and I thought, “Well, that’s the whole thing.”

Rowan Mangan:
I was walking along the street with you last week and you were like, “Look at all this amazing stuff that we’ve manifested around us.” All the things that we were talking about, what should we do next? And I had this feeling of I can’t right now because I’m busy going through the sometimes difficult experience of all my dreams coming true. And I don’t have any space for what’s next right now. I just have to sit in the space between me and the mountain and let that be. And then I think it’s out of that space that the nameless makes your name.

Martha Beck:
I love that. And I love sitting in it and soaking it in. I love taking the time to absorb whatever has come, including freedom, including nothingness.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just say something about meditation?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So I feel like, much as the ants and the grasshopper, that our culture has taken, meditation has taken the music and turned it into hauling junk and hoarding food for the winter. Because when I think about how I was spending my time in that point of my life, it feels so different from when I use the word “meditation” with the cultural connotations that it has to me. When I think of the word and I pull in, I open the file in my brain that the culture has installed, in that meditation is a type of hygiene.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Like you don’t want to, but you don’t want to get yelled at by the dentist in six months. so you do your flossing. And that is so not the experience of it. And I was thinking, but where we get stuck, and this is culture, left hemisphere of the brain is what is it then? It’s not work, but it’s not not the feeling of work. And it’s not fun. You would never say fun because fun is popcorn and action movies, and it’s not popcorn and action movies. But it’s still utterly delicious and exquisite and feels like we’re still doing it for pleasure.

Martha Beck:
Well, except that it’s not always. The first four months when I decided to meditate for two hours at a time, which was for me a long stretch then. And for me, nothing really hit the road until I was 55 minutes in. And then everything in my brain would start to quake and change. Like Pascal said, “The reason we live in misery is that we’re unable to sit quietly alone in a room.” Well, I could do it for 55 minutes. And it turned out that when I got to 55 minutes and I still had an hour and five minutes to go, hell was set loose.

Rowan Mangan:
Ants crawling on your skin.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God. It was so hard. My anxiety would just go absolutely sky high. And I would just sit there and sit there. And I was telling you about a friend of ours, Boyd Varty, the animal tracker, who he went on a run with the San people in the Kalahari Desert in like 120-degree heat. And they ran down a kudu. They just hunted it by running after it until it gave up. And sorry, that’s graphic, but it’s an ancient thing. And he was like, he said, his mind was so full of stories about why he could not do this. And they kept coming up, “I don’t have enough water. I I’m going to die. This is too hot. I can’t do this. There’s too much sun. This is not right.” And he said he had to decide on every few steps to commit to it or not. And so a story would come up, “This is too hot.” And he would just think, “Commit.” “I’m going to die.” “Commit.” I’m not saying that everybody should do it, but he felt that deep in his, as you say, Deep in my waters, I felt that I should do it.”

Rowan Mangan:
Boyd doesn’t have waters.

Martha Beck:
No, not anymore. They all went. But the whole thing about meditation is very similar to that. And it was like make space. And I think this when we get to this sort of, how do we break free from the culture and what do we do instead? It’s this make space, make space. So I would sit there, I’d be fine, 55 minutes, and then it was like, “I can’t do this!” “Make space.” “I have got to get up.” “Make space.” “I have to do that thing.” “Make space.” It wasn’t mean. It was just this continuous knowing: “Make space, make space.” And I had panic attacks and the itching nearly killed me because I would create it by fearing it. Oh my God, it was horrible for four months every day for hours. And then something happened.

Rowan Mangan:
Why’d you do it then?

Martha Beck:
Because I longed for it because I couldn’t understand why I was longing for it. But when I couldn’t do it, I would get very agitated like a goshawk. And so I just knew to do it. I had to. It was like I needed to breathe. It was that intense. And after four months of continuous horror, something happened and I went into this stillness. Could I tell a woo-woo story?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So you were in Australia.

Rowan Mangan:
I was not.

Martha Beck:
Yes. No, you were. Originally, you were. You cannot deny that you were, for a period of time, in Australia. I put it to the court.

Rowan Mangan:
For the purposes of the tape, the witness declines to answer.

Martha Beck:
She was born in Australia. She was in Australia. She stayed in Australia.

Rowan Mangan:
She died in Australia.

Martha Beck:
No, she didn’t! Okay. Okay. So you had read my books and I was like, “We can save the world.” Which I still think, but it’s a total pipe dream. But you got into the pipe dream, a master’s in political science that said the world is ending. And then there was me, “We can save it.” Okay, so you got into it.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m like, “Whatever she’s selling, I’m buying.”

Martha Beck:
And you wrote this poem as if it were written from somewhere further on in history about, and I quote, “the time we almost broke the world.” And there’s a part of it that’s about the horrors we’re seeing right now. And everything that’s happening to the climate and everything like that. And then you get toward the end of the poem and you say, “And then came in the time of the great unbuilding when everyone’s name is stillness.”

Well, after my four months of absolute hell, what happened is it was as if I heard someone outside me say, “Your name is stillness.” And I went, Bam! Into a space that was so deep and so generative, it was like I’d found a spring of water that was absolutely pure and I could just— touching it filled me with bliss, let alone drinking it. I could bathe in it. All I wanted to do was, and then every day I would sit down, repeat that: “Your name is stillness.” Boom. In. And then later you showed me that poem, and I’ve been thinking this thought, “Your name is stillness simply because it triggered the bliss.” And then you wrote it in a poem, you showed it to me in a poem that had been written before. That is my woo-woo story.

Rowan Mangan:
And then years later we did a podcast where we premised the whole thing on two songs, one being “You’ve Gotta Put Down the Duckie if You Want to Play the Saxophone.” And the other being a Leonard Cohen song where it says, “Out of which the nameless makes a name for one like me.” Your name is Stillness. That’s your name. It’s not Marketing and Communications Director. It’s Stillness.

Martha Beck:
Wow. Can I tell another story about it?

Rowan Mangan:
No, you may not. Of course you can.

Martha Beck:
So I was sitting in the forest And I was meditating. I had my eyes closed. I opened them and parading past me was a group, a flock of wild turkeys.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you have any turkey facts you’d like to share before we move on?

Martha Beck:
I have so many turkey facts, but I am going to spare you that because I want to tell you the meat of this story.

Rowan Mangan:
Turkey meat.

Martha Beck:
Turkey meat. Absolutely. So I opened my eyes and they were all going past. And I swear to God, Ro, the moment I opened my eyes, they all froze. Like we were playing the game Statue. Like one foot up, their heads off to the side, and they just froze, all of them. And I was like, “That’s so freaking weird.” And then they just stayed that way. And then I said, “I wonder how many there are.” And I started counting them. The moment I started counting, they all came out of their freeze and started walking around again. Well, that’s interesting. But I was so obsessed with meditation, I really didn’t care. So I just went, “Your name is stillness.” In, closed my eyes, opened them up maybe half an hour, 40 minutes later, all 17 of these turkeys—there were 17—were lying on the ground, lying with their heads totally stretched out, which is not even how they sleep. They sleep perched.

Rowan Mangan:
Turkey facts.

Martha Beck:
Turkey facts, turkey facts. They sleep perched. There’s something, there’s a meta thing that wants us to give everything up, not because it wants to rob us of anything, but because it wants us to hear music. That grasshopper was playing a sax.

Rowan Mangan:
You got to put down the aphids if you want to hear the grasshopper.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It feels like—I’ve heard you tell that story about the turkeys before, but not since you wrote Beyond Anxiety where your research and breaking things down to be super easy led me to understand a little bit about the brain. And it now feels kind of very easily explained in terms of a combination of things like energetic fields, which I feel like we’re pretty close to being able to measure with some instrument or whatever.

Martha Beck:
Magnetometers can measure electromagnetic energy like 10 feet away from your body.

Rowan Mangan:
Sure, but I guess what I mean is you were clearly—between the meditative state and the counting—you flipped from your right hemisphere dominated field.

Martha Beck:
From my whole brain to the left hemisphere. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So you were broadcasting right hemisphere, you were broadcasting all that good stuff, the nameless, and then you started counting and that’s like a switchover. And then everyone comes out of their trance. It almost feels less woo-woo than the chipmunks coming in sitting on your lap.

Martha Beck:
To us it does. I think a lot of people will be like, “I don’t know, with the fields and the brain and everything.”

Rowan Mangan:
Look, have you ever seen a mood ring? Okay? The jury is back. The jury is not still out about auras. I rest my case, Your Honor.

Martha Beck:
How many cases are you arguing here today?

Rowan Mangan:
I have many skills.

Martha Beck:
And part of it’s a legislative thing, but part of it’s in the courtroom.

Rowan Mangan:
And part of it is like we are recording in the interrogation room.

Martha Beck:
Yes, yes.

Rowan Mangan:
For the purposes of the tape, is this thing on? Hello? Hello? Testing. Testing.

Martha Beck:
A witness declines to answer. So here’s the thing.

Rowan Mangan:
On the grounds that I may incriminate myself.

Martha Beck:
Always. So here’s the thing that I think we all have these senses that are telling us where to go for the nameless. And I think that deep inside ourselves, we know when we’re too full of the world’s things to fly, too full to hunt for that. I mean the word raptor for hawk is the same as the word rapture. It means to be taken by something away. So we have—

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, that’s a really good hawk fact.

Martha Beck:
That is a good hawk fact, isn’t it? I’m just going to sit with that for a second. Okay. So we feel inside ourselves, just like a goshawk does, when we’re being over-fed stuff, information, jobs, chores, wealth, status, and power, it can all be overdone. And it makes us feel either longing for something else or edginess, and then in my case, real frustration and then panic that I have to go in search of the nameless. But to do that, we have to be countercultural. Quit your job for a beam of sunlight. Quit your life to go walk in the woods. Quit it all.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. If you want everything, be prepared to give up everything.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, that’s a bad—.

Martha Beck:
“If you would be given everything, give everything up.” Thank you, Steven Mitchell’s translation.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you, Steven Mitchell. Yeah, I was going to say, I don’t think, whatever.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that was his. And Lao Tzu’s.

Rowan Mangan:
Obviously.

Martha Beck:
So yeah, that’s a way to be wilder for sure. To listen for the thirst.

Rowan Mangan:
For the thirst to go into the beam of sunlight and dance around with the dust motes.

Martha Beck:
And to remember, you cannot stuff that in. It’s not an item that can be shoved in with what you’ve got. It relies on putting things down. And at first, the culture says, “Don’t put everything down until there’s something to grab.” But what we’re saying is put it down when there is nothing to grab.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Because that, if nothing else, is how we’re going to….

Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan:
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. 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.

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.